Artifacts and Moments
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“Los Angeles may have a reputation for being superficial,” writes David L. Ulin in the New York Times, “but it is in fact a territory that might, at any moment, upend (or even end) your life. I consider it the most elemental city in which I’ve ever lived.” Ulin, who teaches at USC and has written several books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, continues: “I know more than one family that has lost everything this week—home, cars, photos, documents, personal effects. I know more than one family that will have to start over from scratch. It’s enough to break your heart, all this loss, so fast and irrevocable.”
As of this writing, the fires tearing through the metropolitan area and surrounding regions have taken ten lives, displaced more than 130,000 people, consumed tens of thousands of acres, and destroyed more than nine thousand homes. In LA County alone, around 100,000 people work in the film industry, and the fires have put productions on hold and—as frivolous as it may at first seem to mention—disrupted the current awards season. At Vulture, Rebecca Alter notes that in online discussions, many have pointed out that “these awards ceremonies and broadcasts employ hundreds of below-the-line workers in production and event staffing.”
The Academy has bumped its big Oscar nominations announcement from next Friday to the following Monday, and the Producers Guild, the Writers Guild, and the American Society of Cinematographers have all postponed their announcements as well. The Screen Actors Guild’s announcement was to have been a live event, but the SAG opted to simply send out a press release. In the meantime, many of the Directors Guild’s nominees can be seen in recent roundtable discussions conducted by the Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times.
On Thursday, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association postponed its awards banquet originally scheduled for this weekend. The announcement came the day after the New York Film Critics Circle held their dinner, where Brady Corbet recalled that he and his wife, Mona Fastvold—with whom he wrote The Brutalist—lost their home in LA when it burned down eight years ago. “We are all worried about our friends in LA,” said Jim Jarmusch before presenting a screenwriting award to Sean Baker (Anora). “Climate crisis is brought to you by climate deniers. They are telling us that woke is a negative thing, and I would just like to say it’s time we wake the fuck up!”
Here are a few notes on what else has been going on this week:
- “It’s settled,” wrote Sergei Eisenstein in 1927, “we’ll make Capital according to the script of K. Marx.” The quote opens the first sample fragment at e-flux from “The Capital Diaries: A New Selection,” which appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of October—fifty years after the journal published Eisenstein's “Notes for a Film of Capital.” The fragments draw from over five hundred pages of notes, images, press clippings, drawings, and diagrams in which Eisenstein wrestles with Marx’s foundational text and brainstorms over possible approaches to a project that was ultimately never realized. On January 21, Elena Vogman, who selected the diary entries, and Michael Kunichika, who translated them, will give a talk and screen scenes from Eisenstein’s October (1927) and The General Line (1929).
- Alongside a series of films by Jean-Luc Godard, the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira in Porto, Portugal, is presenting Keeping Tale of Current Times, an exhibition of JLG’s still imagery—paintings, drawings, notebooks, and digital images as well as family photographs taken by Godard’s mother, Odile Monod. “What we show here is a multifaceted Godard, a complete artist who was not only a filmmaker but also a visual artist,” Casa director António Preto tells Tereixa Constenla, who notes in El Pais that the show has been “curated by the Ô Contraire! collective, which consists of producer Fabrice Aragno, screenwriter Jean-Paul Battaggia, film historian and critic Nicole Brenez, and Paul Grivas, Godard’s nephew and the director of photography on his film Film Socialisme (2010). The exhibition in Porto serves, in many ways, as a precursor to the kind of activities that the Godard Foundation aims to promote in the future.”
- For more than fifty years, Mike Leigh has been codeveloping characters and storylines with his actors, workshopping his films into existence. These sixteen features and a handful of shorts “showcase a stunning variance of tone, embracing the operatic and leaning into a tonally heightened register that many less imaginative directors would deem unbecoming of such serious art,” writes Sam Bodrojan in the Notebook. “Yet they all nurture the viewer’s humanist streak, pushing our response beyond condescending scorn or protective adoration. Leigh’s unusual process is in service of a uniquely political formal rhetoric, approximating the collective and the institutional in a character’s most intimate moments.”
- The BFI has announced forthcoming seasons dedicated to Chantal Akerman and Edward Yang, and it’s currently spotlighting the work of Luchino Visconti and Sidney Poitier, who was celebrated as a trailblazer when he passed away in 2022. “Yet for a younger generation,” writes Alex Ramon, “our first exposure to Poitier wasn’t in his great, groundbreaking films of the 1950s and 1960s but rather in those less reputable thrillers he made in the 1980s and 1990s.” Ramon fondly recalls renting Deadly Pursuit (1988) and Little Nikita (1988) on VHS and catching Sneakers (1992) the day it opened in the UK. “There’s a nostalgic attachment to these films due to such associations,” writes Ramon, “but looking back at them now, they’re also intriguing for the aspects they share, and the ways in which they draw on elements of Poitier’s established star persona while also adapting it to accommodate his appearance as a sleekly aging icon.”
- In Santosh, Sandhya Suri’s first fictional feature, Shahana Goswami plays a Hindu widow who inherits her husband’s job on the police force. Introducing his interview with Suri for Metrograph Journal, Inney Prakash observes that she “crafts a measured portrait of India’s persistent ills—Islamophobia, casteism, codified patriarchy, and corruption—with scrupulous specificity, perhaps a vestige of her origins in nonfiction.” Suri recalls the moment she realized Santosh had to be a fictional narrative. “I got struck by an image that I saw in 2012 after the horrible gang rape on the bus in Delhi,” she says. “There was an image of female protestors facing an Indian female cop who had such an interesting expression, faced with their hatred and anger, that I just instinctively knew, ‘Okay, that’s the starting point I was looking for.’ It’s about her. And it’s about examining what it means to have the power of that uniform, but to also have this shared sense of injustice or be a victim and a perpetrator. It’s about her because she’s both things.”
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