Jordan Cronk

  • Rodrigo Moreno, The Delinquents, color, sound, 180 minutes. Morán and Norma (Daniel Elías and Margarita Molfino).
    film June 01, 2023

    Hard Time

    AS PORTENDED by the announcement of the premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, it was the year of the long movie at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. Indeed, as the full list of titles and running times were confirmed in the lead-up to the festivities, sifting through the selection began to feel like staring down the barrel of a (very long) shotgun: In addition to Scorsese’s 206-minute opus, there would be new features from the typically long-winded likes of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (About Dry Grasses, 197 min) and Wang Bing (Youth [Spring], 212 min), an epic-length essay film by Steve

  • Albert Serra, Pacifiction, 2022, TK, color, sound, 165 minutes. High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel).
    film June 01, 2022

    Tristes Tropiques

    FOR ITS DIAMOND JUBILEE, the Cannes Film Festival marked the occasion the same way it does every year: by celebrating itself. Indeed, only at Cannes could an opening night video introduction by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, quoting at one point from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, double as a tribute to a medium—and, by extension, a festival—finally returning to relative normality after two years of pandemic-related setbacks. (“We are Cannes,” festival director Thierry Frémaux reportedly said when asked how he managed to arrange Zelenskyy’s cameo.) With none of the health

  • Julia Ducournau, Titane, 2021, DCP, color, sound, 108 minutes. Alexia (Agathe Rousselle).
    film July 21, 2021

    Test Drives

    JUST AS, FOR MANY, the pandemic’s repercussions on the movie industry weren’t fully accepted as fact until the Cannes Film Festival canceled their 2020 edition, so too were international film events in physical space not considered a reality until director Thierry Frémaux announced the festival’s return earlier this year. And return it did, belatedly and somehow bigger than ever, with new dates (July instead of the customary May), a new section (Cannes Premiere), new health protocols (mandatory Covid tests every forty-eight hours for non-Europeans), and a handful of films (most notably Wes

  • C.W. Winter and Anders Edström, The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), 2020, 2.5K video, color, sound, 480 minutes.
    film July 15, 2021

    Time Regained

    WRITTEN CIRCA 700 BC, the Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days is an 828-line poem that doubles as a sort of farmers’ almanac in which the author instructs his brother on the physical and moral imperatives of agrarian living. Less didactic but equally epic, C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) takes up the title and major themes of Hesiod’s verse for its own comprehensive look at a vanishing way of life in a small mountain village of forty-seven people in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. Running 480 minutes, the film is structured by the cadences

  • Production still of Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance, 2020. Photo: Mick Bello.
    interviews September 16, 2020

    Ephraim Asili

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    In The Inheritance, director Ephraim Asili presents a dramatic narrative based on his years in a West Philadelphia Black radical collective. The New York–based filmmaker’s first feature following a run of celebrated short films focused on the African diaspora, The Inheritance centers Black artists and activists in its fictionalized portrait of a young man who turns his late grandmother’s house into a shared space for socialist thought and creativity. Alternating comedic vignettes of collective living with scripted interviews, poetry readings, and archival footage—including images of the 1985

  • Sky Hopinka, maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, 2020, HD video, color, sound, 80 minutes 21 seconds.
    interviews January 28, 2020

    Sky Hopinka

    Following a decade of increasingly refined digital shorts focused on Indigenous languages and culture, the Ho-Chunk artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka debuted his first feature-length work on January 26, 2020, at the Sundance Film Festival. Set in the Columbia River Basin and spoken largely in the nearly extinct Chinuk Wawa tongue, maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020) follows Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier, two Pacific Northwest natives whose Chinook identities steer their conceptions of life, death, and rebirth. Lensed with an intimacy informed by Hopinka’s rapport with the

  • Charlotte Pryce, The Tears of a Mudlark (detail), 2018, hand-made magic lantern slide.
    interviews February 04, 2019

    Charlotte Pryce

    For over three decades, the London-born, Los Angeles–based artist and filmmaker Charlotte Pryce has been making what she calls “observational reveries,” delicate, handcrafted celluloid miniatures that capture the beauty of nature and science through discreet cinematic techniques. A parallel interest in early alchemical processes recently led her to the magic lantern, a pre-cinematic projector that utilizes transparent slides (often painted, printed, or photographed) and a single light source to illuminate still-image tableaux. Following her recent shows in Los Angeles, Rotterdam, and Brussels,