James Quandt, Senior Programmer at TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto, is the editor of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Austrian Film Museum, 2009) and Robert Bresson (Revised) (Indiana University Press, 2012).
1
LUC TUYMANS (Palazzo Grassi, Venice) and THE WHITE ALBUM (Arthur Jafa)
Tuymans’s glorious retrospective of paintings dense with references to the cinematic and Jafa’s justly consecrated video in the Arsenale provided the high points of this year’s Venice Biennale.
2
VITALINA VARELA (Pedro Costa)
Darkness visible. Abandoned by her husband’s death, the eponymous Cape Verdean woman, who returns from Costa’s previous film, Horse Money (2014), discovers her spouse’s many deceptions as she sifts through the scant traces of his life in Lisbon. The idyllic flashbacks are redundant, but the film, set in the catacombs of memory, achieves a pitch of grief all the more moving for
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