Perceptive Splits
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Cannes won’t announce its full 2022 lineup until April 14, but trade publications have spent this week giving us a few sneak peeks. Variety’s Elsa Keslassy reports that George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba as a scholar and a djinn who meet in a hotel room in Istanbul, and Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, with Austin Butler and Tom Hanks as the rock icon and Colonel Tom Parker, will both premiere at the festival in May. According to Deadline’s Mike Fleming. Jr., Cannes’s launch of Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick will be accompanied by a career tribute to Tom Cruise.
This year’s SXSW will wrap this weekend, and on Tuesday, the juries presented their awards. Topping the narrative competition was I Love My Dad, in which Patton Oswalt plays a father who catfishes his son—played by writer and director James Morosini—in order to stay in touch. So far, critics have been struggling with this one. Rosa Ruth Boesten’s Master of Light won the documentary competition. George Anthony Morton, formerly a convicted drug dealer, now paints portraits in the style of the old masters. “Patiently and non-invasively,” writes Lauren Wissot at the top of her interview with the director for Filmmaker, “Boesten trails the unconventional painter from his small studio to the vast Rijksmuseum, and from calm visits with a therapist to the chaotic streets of Kansas City.”
Locarno in Los Angeles is on through the weekend, and you’ll find seven recommendations at the Film Stage. And the Essay Film Festival, opening tomorrow and running through April 23 in London and online, will focus on “politically engaged and collectively authored essayistic film practices.” There’s an undeclared emphasis on women filmmakers this year, with programs showcasing work by María Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado, Paige Taul, and Rosine Mbakam.
Here’s a sampling of what else has caught our eyes and ears this week:
- On the latest Film Comment Podcast, Clinton Krute and Devika Girish talk with Anastasiya Osipova, the founder and editor of Cicada Press, and Lukas Brasiskis, a curator at e-flux, about the cinema and culture of Ukraine. Beginning with the current crisis and the work of contemporary artists Piotr Armianovski and Mykola Ridnyi, the conversation steers toward the legacies of such figures as Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko and Georgian-born Armenian director Sergei Parajanov. Naturally, Sergei Loznitsa comes up as well. On the page for this episode, you’ll find links to further reading and viewing.
- Kira Muratova, born to a Romanian-Jewish mother and a Russian father, spent much of her filmmaking career in Odessa. “Though her films are in the Russian language, Ukrainian locations, music, and actors abound,” writes Lina Žigelytė for Another Gaze. “Muratova’s resistance to ground herself in one culture and the rapid transformation of the former Soviet bloc provided a setting for her cinema as a world in which social and economic order is in a constant state of disarray. This social disintegration is accompanied by minor episodes of queerness that draw attention to social power hierarchies in order to break them apart . . . Muratova’s minor queer interludes often lead to a broader interrogation and dismantling of power dynamics.”
- “For some years,” begins David Bordwell in his latest entry at Observations on Film Art, “I’ve been arguing that the martial arts cinema of East Asia constitutes as distinctive a contribution to film artistry as did more widely recognized ‘schools and movements’ of European cinema like Soviet montage and Italian neorealism.” One of the major hubs of creativity in martial arts cinema, particularly during the years between the mid-1960s and mid-’80s, was the Shaw Brothers’ Movietown studio in Hong Kong. Utilizing screen grabs and clips, Bordwell illustrates and analyzes four innovations that choreographer and director Lau Kar-leung brought to the Shaws’ style.
- Artist Andrew Hahn, too, draws on a series of screenshots in his piece for Bright Lights Film Journal, in which he juxtaposes two films from 1960, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. You may or may not end up agreeing with his argument, but as the saying goes, the journey is the reward. “Where Hitchcock creates suspense,” writes Hahn, “Franju structures dread, the former concealing information from the characters, the latter concealing information from the audience. It’s not only what Franju leaves us to piece together, it’s his orchestra of camera techniques that entrances, particularly his unnerving use of the POV shot.”
- In her new column in Orion Magazine, Moeko Fujii writes about the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul: “If synesthesia collapses the line between the visual and the auditory—if the sound of a bell makes me see lines of gold—then Weerasethakul’s films do the opposite. Our perceptions follow separate threads; we look at a barely moving image while the sound gives us access to another time, perhaps another world . . . With these perceptive splits, Weerasethakul’s environments transform from views into visions. A view is meant to be taken in, to be accessible to everybody in a space. A vision—whether it be a trance, a dream, a miracle, an epiphany—cannot be shared with others, now or perhaps never.”
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