Music with Pictures
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The week began with news from Sundance, Rotterdam, and Berlin, and it’s wrapping with Slamdance’s announcement of the full lineup for its thirty-first edition (February 20 through 26). This will be the first Slamdance to take place in Los Angeles as well as the first that won’t be running parallel to Sundance (January 23 through February 2).
The festival has played a crucial role in the early careers of Christopher Nolan, Rian Johnson, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Sean Baker, and Bong Joon Ho. When Slamdance announced its big move out of Park City earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh—who first attended the festival in 1996 as a producer on Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers and premiered his High Flying Bird at Slamdance in 2019—told the Los Angeles Times’s Mark Olsen that he’s stuck with the event all these years because “it made total sense to me that somebody would spring up in the shadow of the large Sundance oak tree to provide opportunities for more filmmakers.”
In other news, the great Spanish actor Marisa Paredes, who worked with Arturo Ripstein (Deep Crimson) and Guillermo del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone) but is best known for her many collaborations with Pedro Almodóvar (Dark Habits, High Heels, The Flower of My Secret, All About My Mother, and The Skin I Live In), passed away on Tuesday at the age of seventy-eight. And for Sight and Sound, William Fowler remembers Malcolm Le Grice, an “erudite thinker and writer, and a painter, but ultimately a filmmaker.” Le Grice was eighty-four.
This week’s highlights:
- This Long Century has been publishing personal reflections from artists, filmmakers, and writers since 2008 and is currently presenting twelve short films by contributors—including Kelly Reichardt, Albert Serra, and Deborah Stratman—on the Criterion Channel as well as two features by Jem Cohen, Museum Hours (2012) and Counting (2015), on Metrograph at Home. TLC founder Jason Evans and Cohen will be at Metrograph this evening to screen and discuss several of Cohen’s short works, most of them connected in one way or another with music. Sasha Frere-Jones talks with Cohen about his work with Fugazi, R.E.M., Vic Chesnutt, Jonathan Richman, Elliott Smith, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. “Editing is making music with pictures,” says Cohen.
- Introducing his interview with Johnnie To for the Notebook, Matthew Thrift observes that To’s “crime films—often made with only the barest bones of a script in place—combine virtuosic set pieces with multivalent psychological complexity, anatomizing the dynamics of group ecologies while playing fast and loose with genre expectations.” And “his romantic comedies—particularly those made with frequent collaborator Wai Ka-fai—are invariably hotbeds of formal and generic experimentation.” Sparrow (2008) is a “masterclass in expressionist melancholy” and “a work wholly indebted to the bittersweet romanticism of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).” To says he saw Sparrow “as a chance to play,” and there are “a lot of emotions invested in this film with regard to Hong Kong . . . I set out to capture the Hong Kong of the past one hundred years.”
- In 1953, Ingmar Bergman directed his thirteenth feature, Sawdust and Tinsel, “which despite its title, is most definitely not a Christmas movie,” writes Sean Burns at Crooked Marquee. Bergman considered it his first “good film,” and it’s “a tough picture,” writes Burns, “brutal in ways that presage the sexual humiliations and emotional violence that would come to define his later work, with the main couple locked in a masochistic dance of mutual self-loathing.” Circus ringmaster Albert (Åke Grönberg) is “a sweaty, corpulent wreck having paint-peeling, Strindbergian arguments with the voluptuous bareback rider Anne (Harriet Andersson) with whom he fled from his wife and children. Bergman was having an affair with Andersson at the time and his camera is positively in thrall to her fleshy sensuality and Bettie Page bangs.”
- The New Yorker’s Justin Chang tops his list of the eleven best films of 2024 with Close Your Eyes, the first feature in more than a few years from Víctor Erice, who turned eighty-four this summer. In the Baffler, John Semley riffs on what’s turned out to be quite a year for octogenarian directors. Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis was the “cinematic event of the year,” even though it’s “not very good.” Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths “can feel punishing, verging on cruel,” Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada is “of classically Schraderian stock,” and David Cronenberg’s “exploration of his own grief” in The Shrouds “is particularly frank.” Jean-Luc Godard is seen in Scénarios on the day before he died, and Semley “found the image extremely moving.” None of these films are “terminal, funerary statements—or the death rattle of the medium itself. They are new movies. And their newness suggests that, even as a class of hyper-prolific and canon-defining artists fade into the twilight, cinema may still offer fresh possibilities.”
- There’s considerable overlap between the lists of the year’s best films still seeking distribution from Film Comment and the Film Stage but next to none between either of those lists and Vadim Rizov’s selections at Filmmaker. Spotlighting the “unaccounted for,” Rizov includes Virgil Vernier’s 100,000,000,000,000, which captures “the inherently tremendous oddity of Christmas in Monaco”; Martín Rejtman’s “determinedly strange” Riders; and Di Wang’s The Vessel’s Isle, which “iterates slow cinema structures to new ends the same way Ed Ruscha painted gas stations: to find unexpected majesty in the decrepit and banal, and to use those unexpectedly generative places for perspective and color studies.”
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