Critical Returns
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The New York Film Festival opens this evening with Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel about the friendship between two teens attending an abusive reform school in Jim Crow–era Florida. Talking to Ross for Metrograph Journal, Nick Pinkerton asks if he feels he’s been able to “keep a steady course” between his first feature, the widely lauded and fiercely independent production Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), and this studio-backed project.
“Yeah,” says Ross, “because, you know, it’s my sensibility. If someone wants to know who I am, they should just watch Hale County—that’s how I look at the world, that’s how I think. And the producers gave me the leeway to embed the way I think into Colson’s narrative; I think I maybe even surprised them a bit about what happens when you give someone a carte blanche imaginative-scape.”
A retrospective occasioned by the recent publication of Rebekah Rutkoff’s monograph Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers is on at Anthology Film Archives through the weekend. Beavers tells Max Levin at Screen Slate that the book is “the culmination of a long conversation; it is an imaginative work in the best sense . . . Speculative, attentive, and intelligent about setting our voices in a context.”
James Duval will be in Berkeley this weekend for screenings of Gregg Araki’s Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997)—the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy—at BAMPFA. “Distinguished by his guileless charm, affable melancholy, and boyish, pansexual appeal,” writes Nathan Lee, Duval is “the perfect avatar for the mix of cynicism and sincerity that characterizes the trilogy.” Araki, in the meantime, has been discussing these “deliriously profane films” with Walter Chaw (Decider), Joshua Encinias (MovieMaker), Gary M. Kramer (Salon), and Marshall Shaffer (Slant).
Early on Friday morning, Maggie Smith’s two sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, announced that she had “passed away peacefully.” She was eighty-nine. Smith launched her phenomenal career in the theater in the early 1950s, later appearing in plays by Noël Coward and Tom Stoppard, a 1970 production of Hedda Gabler directed by Ingmar Bergman, as well as in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage, for which she won a Tony Award in 1990. She also found success on the big screen and, in 1969, won an Oscar for her turn in the title role of Ronald Neame’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Years later, she was introduced to a new generation of moviegoers as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies. Her irrepressible Violet Crawley in Downton Abbey won her three Emmys. We’ll take a closer look at Maggie Smith’s life and work next week.
“Movies are a physical experience, and are remembered as such, stored up in bodily synapses that evade the thinking mind,” wrote Fredric Jameson in the introduction to his 1990 book on cinema, Signatures of the Visible. In the Nation, Kate Wagner remembers Jameson, who passed away on Sunday at the age of ninety, as “an intellectual titan and one of the torchbearers of Marxist thought through the tenebrous night of neoliberalism.” Critical Inquiry has made several of Jameson’s essays freely available through the end of October, including “On Magic Realism in Film” from 1986 and a 2006 essay on Alexander Sokurov.
Cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn died on Tuesday at the age of eighty. Glenn worked on more than seventy films with such directors as François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Maurice Pialat, Bertrand Tavernier, André Téchiné, Costa-Gavras, Samuel Fuller, and Euzhan Palcy. And Eikoh Hosoe passed away last week. He was ninety-one. Better known for his photography than his filmmaking, Hosoe was nonetheless one of the cofounders of the Jazz Film Laboratory in 1960 with Shuji Terayama, Shintaro Ishihara, and several other Japanese artists.
This week’s highlights:
- With Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) screening at the NYFF, Lancelot du Lac (1974) and The Devil, Probably (1977) at Film Forum, and Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) presenting A Man Escaped (1956) at Beyond Fest, there’s something of an informal Bresson revival going on. Sight and Sound has just republished a piece by John Pym from its Autumn 1983 issue on L’argent (1983), “a modern, rigorous, predetermined moral tale, which uses as its starting point a Tolstoy story, ‘The False Note,’ proceeds with a surety of footing which, right from the credit sequence (Parisian street noises, the hissing closure of the stainless steel lid of an outdoor cash-dispenser), belies the seventy-odd years of its maker, Robert Bresson. Although, as one would expect, the theme is other-worldly, the manner in which Bresson develops it reveals no flight from present-day realities or, indeed, from the course which down the years he has set himself.”
- Critic, historian, and video essayist Tag Gallagher, the author of books on Roberto Rossellini and John Ford, has just spent a week at the Cinemateca Portuguesa presenting five of Ford’s films. The Searchers (1956)—which screens on 70 mm in Berlin on October 17—was not one of them, but at Kino Slang, Andy Rector has posted Gallagher’s essay for the September 1993 issue of Film Comment in which he wrote that “evil in Ford is always good intention gone astray; and tradition, which sustains us, is always the humus where evil has its roots. Thus to the whites, in The Searchers, the violence done by Indians is too terrifying even to be imagined, but also it has the allure of archetypal fire, of the raw reality that ideology expels from our consciousness.” What interests Ford are “the traditions and community values that render otherwise decent individuals into willing agents of imperialism and genocide.”
- A newly restored 35 mm print of Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill (1994)—at WBUR, Sean Burns calls it a “woefully underseen anarchist eco-satire”—is currently touring theaters in the U.S. Joshua Minsoo Kim talks with Cheang about growing up as a budding cinephile in Taiwan, rooming with (and organizing a wedding for) Ang Lee in New York in the 1980s, working with the team behind the public access program Paper Tiger TV, setting up her first solo show at the Whitney, getting Vernon Reid to lay down a soundtrack for Fresh Kill, and audiences’ responses to the film thirty years on. “A lot of the post-screening conversations have been about us living in a corporatized world,” says Cheang. “I always recommend fighting within the system; my film is a way to make that resistance known.”
- Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) is “gory, violent, sexy, stylized, ridiculous, an extremely suspenseful picture that is somehow impossible to take too seriously,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “It also happens to be a masterpiece.” Ebiri talks with De Palma—who, by the way, is working on a new project—about casting Melanie Griffith, Hitchcock, and the resurgence of Body Double’s reputation. “I think why my type of movies last so long is they’re very cinematic,” says De Palma. “Cinema kind of died with celluloid, because you don’t have the same cinematographers anymore. You don’t have film anymore. It is now completely dominated by the writers and showrunners, and the movies and shows are basically radio plays, full of people talking to each other . . . That’s why I think people look fondly upon these movies, because they’re quite stunning visually, and you don’t see that anymore.”
- In a deeply felt appreciation of Robert Towne, who passed away this summer, Michael Sragow burrows into key passages in Towne’s screenplays for Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974); scenes Towne rewrote or added to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972); and the films Towne directed himself, including Personal Best (1982) and Tequila Sunrise (1988). Writing for Critics at Large, Sragow observes that Towne “used sly indirection, canny repetition, unexpected counterpoint, and even a unique poetic vulgarity to stretch a scene—or an entire script—to its utmost emotional capacity.” And he quotes Towne’s frequent collaborator Warren Beatty: “I’ve known writers like Tennessee Williams, Bill Inge, Paddy Chayefsky, Noel Coward. And if I had the opportunity to reincarnate any of them, I’d still take Bob Towne.”
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