Screens Aglow
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The Berlinale, Cannes, and Venice don’t have the option Sundance is currently considering, namely, to pick up and move. Slamdance has already announced that it’s leaving Park City for Los Angeles, and starting next year, it’s also shifting itself further down the calendar to late February, giving up the position it’s held for nearly thirty years as a little festival of counter-programming running under Sundance’s nose each January.
- The largest Hiroshi Shimizu retrospective ever put together in North America opens tomorrow in New York. Part I: The Shochiku Years runs at the Museum of the Moving Image through May 19, and Japan Society will present Part II: The Postwar and Independent Years from May 16 through June 1. Shimizu made films “about transients and transience, punctuated by soft dissolves and ellipses,” writes Imogen Sara Smith at Reverse Shot. “Sometimes people fade out of the frame like smoke, or vanish and reappear further away. Shimizu’s formalism and his humanism go hand in hand.” Shimizu was also “truly one of the great directors of children,” writes Marya E. Gates at RogerEbert.com. “The children in Shimizu’s films are jubilant, bratty, strange, and complex little weirdos who move through the world with just as much full-fledged humanity as his grown-up characters.” Children “are natural,” Shimizu once said. “They breathe the air. Films must have humans who breathe the air.”
- The weeklong Oscar Micheaux retrospective opening today at Film Forum is the most complete yet with seventeen films, including seven new restorations. Within Our Gates (1920), the oldest known surviving feature by a Black director, “blends romance, crime, and social commentary,” writes Carole V. Bell at IndieWire, and DJ Spooky’s “evocative score is appropriately haunting and exciting.” Appreciation of Micheaux’s work doesn’t always come easy, and some “context is necessary,” suggests Robert Daniels at RogerEbert.com. “The disquieting racial politics at play, especially the philosophical conversations Micheaux engages with through his filmmaking—the stark difference between being aligned with the teachings of Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois—are mostly lost on contemporary audiences. So is the complex subject matter, the unique scenes of Black life, the looming fears of lynching, and the limited opportunities of the time that he so furiously captures. He is, simply put, a messy, complicated artist.”
- Opening today, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow begins in 1996, when Owen (Ian Foreman, and then later, Justice Smith) is drawn into the world of the late-night show The Pink Opaque. TV Glow is “pleasurably confounding, with jagged ellipses, unreliable narration, and sudden torrents of verbal and visual information that resist quick processing,” writes Ed Halter at 4Columns. “Like the work of David Cronenberg or Richard Kelly, two pioneering genre-subverters evoked by TV Glow, Schoenbrun’s film—constructed like a puzzle for its own future fan base to pore over—rewards a rewatch.” Adam Piron asks Schoenbrun about the films they’ve selected to screen at Metrograph this weekend, Willard Huyck’s Messiah of Evil (1974) and Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead (1981), and at the Film Stage, Jordan Raup gets Schoenbrun going—magnificently, too—about a filmmaker they admire, Olivier Assayas.
- For the Brooklyn Rail, Will Epstein talks with Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, whose films will soon screen at MoMA (May 9 through 16) and Anthology Film Archives (May 17 through 19). Dorsky’s Arboretum Cycle is on view now at Peter Blum Gallery through May 18. The new BR issue also features Dante A. Ciampaglia on Ken Loach, who has “has elevated the humanity and everyday courage of, in his words, society’s ‘nonpersons,’” and Lauren Carroll Harris on a recent viewing of Agnès Varda’s L’opéra-mouffe (1958), which “convinced me that the experience of pregnancy is an under-examined aspect of her contribution to cinema.”
- Speaking of Varda, for the BFI, Rachel Pronger talks with cinematographer Hélène Louvart about working with her on The Beaches of Agnès (2008), and specifically, the scene in which Varda moves her office out onto the streets of Paris—which she’s turned into a sandy beach. “It appears very easy, but in fact it was so complicated,” says Louvart. “Agnès preps a lot but at the same time she has this humor, she likes to make a joke.” The conversation then turns to Louvart’s first film in 3D, Wim Wenders’s Pina (2011), for which she practically had to dance along with the company; a dark scene in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats (2017); “a kind of divine light” in Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro (2018); and “an explosion of light” in Soudade Kaadan’s Nezouh (2023).