Various Transgressions
Share
Last year’s Locarno retrospective, The Lady with the Torch, an homage to Columbia Pictures, is still touring the globe, and it’s currently playing in Berlin through the end of the month. Locarno has now announced that curator Ehsan Khoshbakht has put together the retrospective for this year’s seventy-eighth edition (August 6 through 16). Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945–1960 aims “to tell the story of a nation in search of its identity,” says Khoshbakht, “sometimes dark and brooding, and at other times, as in the finest tradition of British comedies, hilarious and biting. This is a national portrait in more than forty films.”
In other festival news, lineups are set for New Directors/New Films (April 2 through 13); the Los Angeles Festival of Movies and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, both running from April 3 through 6; Visions du Réel (April 4 through 13); and Cinema Reborn (April 30 through May 6). On Thursday, Picture Lock 2025, a celebration of films supported in postproduction by the Wexner Center for the Arts, will open with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), which Mark Asch has called “a lovely, elusive film about an intriguing, elusive figure.”
Many critics are mourning the loss of a colleague, David Ehrenstein, who died on Tuesday at the age of seventy-eight. The author of Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928–1998, Ehrenstein wrote for Film Culture, the Village Voice, Film Quarterly, the Advocate, Film Comment, and several other publications, including this one. He forged countless virtual but meaningful friendships during the pre–social media heyday of film blogging.
“I seldom managed to write anything about a movie David hadn’t seen,” notes Farran Smith Nehme. “He had such far-reaching taste; he loved French films of any era, Japanese cinema, almost anything romantic or witty or gorgeous or campy. He’d spin stories of the many, many film people he’d known, and refer tartly to the difficulties of growing up Black and Jewish and gay.”
Before blogs, there were email lists and discussion groups, and that was the era in which David Cairns got to know Ehrenstein. “I think we were drawn to each other because we both took things seriously without seeming to take them seriously, maybe as a way of not taking ourselves too seriously,” writes Cairns. “And we were both devoted to the pleasure principle in cinema and in writing about cinema—some kind of good time ought to be involved, somewhere.”
Before turning to this week’s highlights, let’s point to two interviews running at Reverse Shot that can, in a way, serve as updates to earlier Daily entries: Chris Shields’s with Philippe Lesage (Who by Fire) and Marya E. Gates’s with Heiny Srour (Leila and the Wolves).
- “A blasphemous black comedy, part noir, part case history, Luis Buñuel’s 1953 Mexican melodrama Él amply justifies its inadvertently self-reflexive American release title, This Strange Passion,” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times. A new restoration begins its theatrical run today at New York’s Film Forum. Arturo de Córdova, a lauded star popular throughout Latin America and Spain, plays Francisco, a well-to-do bachelor who falls helplessly, obsessively, even violently in love with Gloria, played by Delia Garcés, a leading figure of the Golden Age of Argentine cinema. “Él has been taken as a parody of machismo,” writes Hoberman, “but it is more pointedly an attack on social class, male privilege and the notion of bourgeois respectability.” Buñuel’s film “is so blandly outrageous that it is easy to pass over its affronts.”
- Last month, the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough and Patrick Brzeski decided that the moment was ripe for a big annotated list of the “Best Anti-Fascist Films of All Time.” One of the forty films they write about, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1976), is the subject of Tom Hall’s latest newsletter. “Because it so explicitly depicts suffering and violence as tied to fascist pleasure, the film has been deeply misunderstood by many as ‘obscene,’ and it is,” writes Hall, “but not because of its situations and images, but because it gets at the intolerable heart of fascism itself in a way that no other film does.” In the “corrupt void at the center of the authoritarian project . . . the cruelty is not just the point, it is the secret architecture of power itself.”
- “Alongside much-deserved praise, [Sarah] Maldoror’s cinema was from the beginning accused of being too beautiful and replicating the vapid aesthetics of Hollywood,” wrote Yasmina Price in her 2022 essay on Maldoror’s first feature, Sambizanga (1972). In a piece first published in 1977 and now up at e-flux, Maldoror herself wrote: “I don’t want to make a ‘good little Negro’ film. People often reproach me for that. They also blame me for making a technically perfect film like any European could do. But, technology belongs to everyone. ‘A talented Negro . . .’ you can relegate that concept to my French past . . . I’m no adherent of the concept of the ‘Third World.’ I make films so that people—no matter what race or color they are—can understand them.”
- Todd Solondz is “a total original, with a perspective on contemporary life that is both unflinching and surprisingly spiritual in the way it moves so lucidly between dispassion and compassion,” writes A. S. Hamrah in the introduction to his interview with the filmmaker for Screen Slate. The occasion is a new twentieth-anniversary restoration of Palindromes, which was distributed on DVD back in the day by Wellspring, a company run by Steve Bannon. After dwelling on that for a moment, the conversation turns to the story of Aviva, the thirteen-year-old played by eight different actors. “I like to describe Palindromes as a movie about a pro-choice mom who gives her daughter no choice and a pro-life mom who kills,” says Solondz.
- “If you are a leading woman in a Pedro Almodóvar film, your life will not be frictionless,” writes Alana Pockros for the Point. “To be one of these female protagonists means you will have familial trauma from your mother, or your daughter, or the history of your family going back decades and decades.” Last year’s The Room Next Door “both preserves this formula and subverts it in crucial ways.” The film is “driven by female characters who inhabit interesting jobs, self-medicate for their neuroses, and remain unmarried and uninhibited by boring domestic quandaries. But when it comes to its plot, it rejects many of the typical conventions of melodrama we see in Almodóvar’s early work; a turn toward a more mature kind of intimacy than the youthful tick of transgression.”
Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
