James Quandt

• 

  film May 2009

  Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City

  BABIES DEAD FROM MELAMINE in their milk, Rem Koolhaas’s Beijing hotel up in flames, earthquake victims protesting lax construction standards, workers rioting as the tiger economy tanks: Chinese officials may have pulled off the vast, falsifying spectacle of last year’s Olympics, but the corruption and sheer haplessness of their regime now leaves the country uneasy and teetering. Jia Zhang-ke, chronicler and bard of the new China with his densely poetic films about the dislocation and anxiety caused by Deng Xiaoping’s market “reforms,” had already captured the arrogating power of spectacle in a

• 

  print December 2008

  James Quandt

  JAMES QUANDT

  1 and 2 Itinéraire de Jean Bricard (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet) and Le Genou d’Artémide (Jean-Marie Straub) The high point of Cannes and of the year, Jean-Marie Straub’s twin farewells—to a past in which political resistance was a matter of life and death, to his beloved partner and codirector Danièle Huillet—employ exquisite images of nature (the Loire shot in precise black-and-white, a sunlit Italian grove in refulgent color), and, more daringly, in the case of Le Genou, a dark screen accompanied by Mahler’s Abschied, to achieve rending nobility.

  3 The Headless

• 

  print November 2008

  RIDE LONESOME: THE FILMS OF LISANDRO ALONSO

  I’m interested in the world of prisoners. —Lisandro Alonso

  SINCE DEBATES OVER AUTEURISM now seem as distant as Madame de Staël, it was hardly noticed at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival, even as the Directors’ Fortnight celebrated its fortieth birthday, that the politique’s monism had created a small crisis. Through caprice, impatience, or sheer fatigue, critics experienced collective irritation with the staunch constancy of several celebrated auteurs. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, even while extending his muted narrative into once unimaginable modes of suspense and melodrama in Three Monkeys

• 

  film Summer 2008

  Jacques Nolot

  IN THE FILMS OF JACQUES NOLOT, weakness of the flesh implies bodily decline as much as unbidden desire. Nolot’s unflinching camera looks with equal asperity and tenderness on the corpse of an old woman with its hairless vagina, spreading breasts, and wizened skin; aging drag queens in erratic mascara and tortuously extruded bosoms prowling the periphery of a porn theater; and the filmmaker’s own naked corpulence, its mottled sag blue-lit and afflicted in a nighttime kitchen. While Nolot’s protagonists, acted by the handsome director as obvious versions of himself, gloat that “other people’s

• 

  film May 26, 2008

  Elegy to the Chechen Republic

  New York

  ALEXANDER SOKUROV'S SINGLE-TAKE Russian Ark (2002) ends when the seemingly exhausted camera comes to rest on a slate-gray waterscape, one of the director's many apparitional images of the lost Russian soul. In his latest work, Alexandra, Sokurov again broods on his nation's anguished being, but with a new simplicity and directness. Like the babushka after whom the film is named, Alexandra is purposeful and forthright, occasionally prone to obviousness in its striving for clarity. Suppressed are the sfumato effects, the murmuring obscurity, the trancelike attenuations and abeyances of time, the

• 

  film March 2008

  Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra

  ALEXANDER SOKUROV’S single-take Russian Ark (2002) ends when the seemingly exhausted camera comes to rest on a slate-gray waterscape, one of the director’s many apparitional images of the lost Russian soul. In his latest work, Alexandra, Sokurov again broods on his nation’s anguished being, but with a new simplicity and directness. Like the babushka after whom the film is named, Alexandra is purposeful and forthright, occasionally prone to obviousness in its striving for clarity. Suppressed are the sfumato effects, the murmuring obscurity, the trancelike attenuations and abeyances of time, the

• 

  print December 2007

  James Quandt

  JAMES QUANDT

  1 These Encounters of Theirs (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet) Straub-Huillet’s final feature, a declamatory pastoral about gods and mortals, has a grandeur and passion that make Huillet’s death last year all the more grievous.

  2 Pour vos beaux yeux (Henri Storck) The eyes have it in Storck’s 1929 ocular minimasterpiece, lost for four decades and now beautifully restored by the Cinémathèque Française.

  3 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu) Already the subject of critical backlash, Mungiu’s grim Palme d’Or winner at Cannes treats abortion less as an issue than as a

• 

  print Summer 2007

  TWICE-TOLD TALES: THE FILMS OF HONG SANG-SOO

  I don’t think you really understood the film.
  —Yong-sil, in Tale of Cinema (2005)
  

  YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO HANG OUT with Hong Sang-soo. So cringe-making is the Korean director’s acuity about social relations—the petty vexations, vanities, and evasions that constitute most so-called alliances—that one can only infer that he spends much of his time noting others’ foibles for use in his films. Hong never exempts himself from this inquisition; indeed, his seven features can be read, if reductively, as a project of autoexcoriation. His work teems with Hong look-alikes, alter egos, and surrogates, most of

• 

  film Summer 2007

  12:08 East of Bucharest

  HAILING FROM the land of Urmuz and Ionesco, Corneliu Porumboiu, the director of 12:08 East of Bucharest, boasts that “we Romanians have, in a way, invented absurdity . . . or least we’ve made an art of it.” The tone of Porumboiu’s wry little satire, which won the Camera d’Or for best first film at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, shares enough with compatriot Cristi Puiu’s quasi-absurdist masterpiece of 2005, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu—world-weary humanism, dark humor, stylized verism, the unassuming capaciousness of a down-home comédie humaine—that the two directors have been enlisted as the

• 

  film April 2007

  Apichatpong Weerasethakul

  What’s given bears fruit as pleasure.
  —From the Aditta Sutta
  

  THERE IS NO MORE generous vision in contemporary cinema than that of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. So rapturous is his desire to share everyday delight in sun streaming through wind-whipped trees, a mass aerobics dance in a Bangkok park, a dentist in a glittery green jacket crooning a Thai country tune, a wild orchid riding in the backseat of a car like a petulant child, that even the cynical critic resistant to bliss finds himself yielding to nothing less than sheer, unaccountable joy. The precredit sequence of Apichatpong’s latest serene

• 

  print December 2006

  James Quandt

  JAMES QUANDT

  1 Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa) An arte povera epic, the final film in Costa’s “Vanda” trilogy portrays the abandoned inhabitants of Lisbon’s suburban slums, achieving grandeur with minimal means.

  2 Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Another serene enigma from the master of Thai tales of transmutation. The film’s title, combining the somatic and the temporal, reflects the director’s twin preoccupations.

  3 Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke) Jia, poet of displacement in the new China, returns to the tone of his early feature Xiao Wu (The Pickpocket, 1997) in this melancholy portrait

• 

  print November 2006

  Tacita Dean

  DESCENDING TO THE BASEMENT of the Schaulager—Herzog & de Meuron’s sand-encrusted bunker with its slashing gash of a window—one was beset by a sound that seemed oddly antique, like that of typewriter keys or rotary phone dials: the whir and clatter of a film projector. It was apparent in that sound, now threatened with obsolescence, that Tacita Dean’s retrospective (organized by Theodora Vischer) was called “Analogue” for both polemical and nostalgic reasons. “Analogue, it seems, is a description,” the artist writes in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “a description, in