Wild Gals and White Zombies
There’s a lot of great reading to catch up with this week, but also too many losses to mourn. Two weeks ago, Anne Heche, whose offscreen life frequently threatened to overshadow her singular on-screen presence, suffered severe injuries in a pair of car crashes. A week later, she was pronounced brain-dead, and on Sunday, she was taken off life support. She was fifty-three.
- A new 4K restoration of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) opens today at the IFC Center, and in the New York Times, J. Hoberman recommends it as “an anarchic conspiracy featuring an insolent pair of wild and crazy gals, determined to be as ‘spoiled’ as the world . . . The spectacle they make of themselves disrupting the corny floor show and harassing the uptight patrons at a Prague nightclub with their desultory, drunken antics, is as funny as anything in A Night at the Opera. Funnier, actually.”
- On Monday, IndieWire launched a ’90s Week special feature with a ranked and annotated list of the best hundred films from that decade, setting off all the usual huzzahs and grumblings about what did and didn’t make the cut. But the week has since been packed with features and interviews. Revisit 1992 with Gregg Araki (The Living End), Bill Duke (Deep Cover), and Spike Lee (Malcolm X). There are also chats with Heather Matarazzo, who was fourteen when she appeared in Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), and Paul W. S. Anderson, whose Event Horizon (1997) flopped before it became a cult favorite. For more on that one, see Bilge Ebiri’s conversation with Anderson at Vulture.
- In Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane (2004), Damian Lewis plays a mentally unstable loner frantically looking for his lost daughter. The film’s “raw hopelessness is its universality,” wrote Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice. “If Keane’s life is a hurricane of delusions and terrifying mistakes, it’s nothing we can’t easily imagine for ourselves.” Newly restored, Keane opens today in New York before heading to Los Angeles and Cambridge. At the Film Stage, Ethan Vestby asks Kerrigan about the inclusion of executive producer Steven Soderbergh’s re-edit on the first DVD release. “We thought it’d be interesting to other filmmakers and cinephiles to see how editing can really change the film and change the intent,” he says. And talking to Isaac Feldberg at RogerEbert.com, Kerrigan emphasizes: “At no point were we trying to make Keane look beautiful . . . Beauty is such a political term already, and I really reject that.”
- From today through September 11, the Museum of the Moving Image will present White Zombies: Nightmares of Empire, a series exploring the origins of the genre. “The zombie is minstrelsy incarnate,” writes guest curator Kelli Weston. “In part, the zombie functions so well as a racialized bogeyman because usually they preserve little, if any claim, on human compassion. Unlike their dead, equally hybrid kin—the ghost, the vampire—the zombie’s particular transmutation severs them from personhood, characterized by their lifeless gaze. They are automatons and thus summarily vanquished, with or without remorse from our heroes.”
- In the Notebook, Kat Sachs takes us on a tour of The Third Life of Agnès Varda, an exhibition accompanied by screenings and talks this summer in Berlin: “As Varda is often referred to as the godmother of the French New Wave—a somewhat reductive epithet that diminishes her contributions to its genesis—it’s nevertheless apropos that, like such a figure, her work invites viewers into its embrace, whether it’s being projected onto the big screen or even closer in proximity, as with displays of her photographs and installations. But when it’s the latter, physical experience, there’s a materiality involved that more fully realizes a key tenet of her work—to turn spectators into participants.”