A Genius for Flourish
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While many spent the week trying to wash off the schmutz of last weekend’s Academy Awards, that sorry affair did at least give us Pedro Almodóvar’s Oscar diary. The director of Parallel Mothers was in Los Angeles to cheer on Penélope Cruz and composer Alberto Iglesias and to talk with actors he might consider casting in his first English-language feature. Starring Cate Blanchett, the film will draw from five stories in Lucia Berlin’s collection A Manual for Cleaning Women.
Almodóvar writes at IndieWire about meeting everyone from Al Pacino to Zendaya, noting that he “can’t get used to people saying to me ‘I grew up with your films.’” He also checks out an installation devoted to his work at the Academy Museum, admires the beauty of the city at night, shivers in the ice-cold Dolby Theatre, and of course, experiences, “barely four meters from where it happened,” the “violent episode.”
Moving on and looking ahead, Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art have announced the lineup for this year’s New Directors/New Films. Twenty-six features and eleven shorts will screen from April 20 through May 1. Meantime, the programmers putting together the thirty-sixth edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato have given us a first preview. Strands dedicated to Sophia Loren and Peter Lorre, directors Hugo Fregonese and Kenji Misumi, and to German musical comedies and Yugoslav cinema will unreel in Bologna from June 25 through July 3.
A few of the many items that caught our eye this week:
- The new Cinema Scope features Adam Nayman’s conversation with Ashley McKenzie, whose Queens of the Qing Dynasty centers on the relationship between a troubled eighteen-year-old, Star (Sarah Walker), and a Chinese immigrant, An (Ziyin Zheng). “These characters feel unique to Canadian cinema, contemporary, micro-budget, or otherwise,” writes Nayman, “and the actors inhabit them to the point where they don’t really seem to be acting at all.” Also online from this issue: Darren Hughes’s interview with Ruth Beckermann, Lawrence Garcia on Mikhaël Hers, Angelo Muredda on Adam McKay, Andréa Picard on Derek Jarman, and Will Sloan on the late Peter Bogdanovich.
- New York’s Metrograph is screening an eight-film Robert Siodmak sampler through April 15. Nick Pinkerton—who, by the way, has launched a new column, City Dudes, at his own Employee Picks by going good and long on Alain Corneau—notes that Siodmak “routinely orchestrated set pieces so stunning that they towered over the movie around them. This genius for flourish is perhaps a minor genius, but it tends to leave a lingering impression when irreproachable ‘tonal consistency’ may leave none at all.” Fabian Wolff, also writing for Metrograph’s Journal, delves into a “frustrating and enthralling” Siodmak film from 1957. “Many people,” writes Wolff, “from the British writer Philip Kerr with his hardboiled detective novels to Tom Tykwer, with his Netflix TV series Berlin Babylon, have tried to make a Nazi noir. The Devil Strikes at Night gets closer than most.”
- Reenactment in nonfiction cinema was shunned throughout most of the latter half of the twentieth century when direct cinema held what Girish Shambu, writing for Film Comment, calls its “powerful, hegemonic sway.” Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) was “pivotal in beginning the process of rehabilitating reenactment,” and recent examples of films that put it to powerful use include Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (2010), Robert Greene’s Procession (2021), and Chase Joynt’s Framing Agnes (2022). Shambu argues that the current “renewal of reenactment brings into the foreground two aspects central to nonfiction that were historically sidelined in discussions of direct cinema: performance and authorship.” Not entirely unrelatedly, Jordan Cronk talks with James Benning for FC about The United States of America (2022), which screens on Sunday at the Courtisane Festival.
- Theodore Witcher’s love jones (1997) “cleared space for the Black romances and ensemble dramas streaming today,” writes Danielle Amir Jackson here in the Current. For RogerEbert.com, Robert Daniels talks with Witcher about the Super-8 movies he made as a kid, why love jones just had to be set in Chicago, and the chemistry between his lead actors, Nina Long and Larenz Tate, who play a photographer and a poet who fall in love. “It’s a little bit of a mystery,” says Witcher. “If you could totally quantify it, then you could repeat it ad infinitum . . . But something has to happen off screen between people so when you put it in the context of performing the drama, it reads as some kind of electricity that goes back and forth. And I don’t know what it is, but the two of them definitely had it.”
- Just hours before Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, won six Oscars on Sunday—more than any other film—the Los Angeles Review of Books published nine short essays by scholars of science and technology studies, or STS. “The complicated interplay of knowledge and power, the blurred lines dividing science and religion, the vexed relationship between humans and their tools, and the way Herbert put flesh (and sand) on these classic dilemmas resonate with a lot of work in STS,” write Haris A. Durrani and Henry M. Cowles in their introduction to the symposium. “The human dimensions of science in the world of Dune make it an ideal mirror with which to view the troubled relationship between science and society in our own world.”
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