Soulful and Defiant
Just hours after we wrapped the week last Friday, Le Monde reported that French director Jean-Jacques Beineix had passed away. He was seventy-five. “Cited as the ‘first French postmodern film’ by American theorist Fredric Jameson, Beineix’s 1981 feature debut, Diva, would prove to be one of the formative films of the cinéma du look, embodying the movement’s media-conscious, visually driven approach,” writes Chelsea Phillips-Carr in the essay for our 2019 release of Beineix’s third feature, Betty Blue (1986). In that film, the “saturation of the colors, the intensity of the lighting, the propulsiveness with which the characters are moved from one idiosyncratic setting or situation to another—all of these suit the narrative world Beineix is creating, a place that accommodates the implausible and even the fantastic.”
- With the Criterion Channel program Sundance Class of ’92: The Year Indie Exploded, we’re celebrating a watershed year for both the festival and American independent cinema. At the Reveal, Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias discuss three of the twenty-five films, Tom Kalin’s Swoon, Christopher Munch’s The Hours and Times, and Gregg Araki’s The Living End. In the New York Times, Erik Piepenburg looks back thirty years to the “Barbed-Wire Kisses” panel moderated by B. Ruby Rich, who coined the term New Queer Cinema that year and went on to become the editor of Film Quarterly. “What happened that day was a flash point in the genesis of New Queer Cinema,” writes Piepenburg, “a call to arms of angry and unapologetic independent films that were made during the ’90s by, and arguably for, a community in crisis.”
- Alana Haim is on the cover of the new Cinema Scope, and inside, Adam Nayman talks with Paul Thomas Anderson about Licorice Pizza, growing up in the 1970s, and the parallels between directing and parenting. Also online are features on Paul Verhoeven, Joanna Hogg, Jane Campion—and Vadim Kostrov, whom Christopher Small describes as “a young Russian filmmaker with an entire body of work waiting in deep freeze.” Chuck Stephens files his final Exploded View column in this issue, writing about Ken Jacobs’s Blonde Cobra (1963), “the greatest nunsploitation film of the American avant-garde.”
- The Austin Film Society, the Visual Arts Center, and Bass Concert Hall are staging a spectacular Bill Morrison retrospective, and for the Austin Chronicle, Joe Gross talks with the artist and filmmaker best known for his 2002 collage of decomposed footage, Decasia. “Encounters with the work of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate, and the thunderous a-ha! moment that was Chris Marker’s La Jetée turned him toward using aging footage as it was, neither pristine nor artificially distressed,” writes Gross. “‘These messy frames can speak to the materiality of film,’ he explained. The films he’s working with may have been shot decades ago but they are modern because ‘they took exactly this long for them to look this way.’”
- However seriously recent threats to the long-term survival of the BBC are to be taken, now is an excellent time to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Ways of Seeing, a four-episode miniseries on art, media, and advertising written and presented by John Berger and directed by Mike Dibb. “From the very first scene, in which Berger takes a knife to a Botticelli, it was clear that Ways of Seeing was an assault on thoughtless reverence,” writes Olivia Laing for the Guardian. “One of the reasons the series is so lastingly influential is that Berger empowers the viewer, transforming them from passive consumer of high culture to detective, stalking venerated artifacts in search of the master key to patriarchal capitalism.”