Parallax Views
Share
Most cinephiles hearing on Thursday that László Krasznahorkai had won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature immediately thought of the novelist’s collaborations with two of his fellow Hungarians, director Béla Tarr and editor Ágnes Hranitzky. When Tarr read Krasznahorkai’s 1985 debut novel, Sátántangó, he insisted that they work together on an adaptation, but the Hungarian government refused to fund the project.
They wound up making Damnation (1988) instead. Sátántangó followed in 1994, and then Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), The Man from London (2007), and the feature Tarr announced would be his last, The Turin Horse (2011). “Though the director and novelist are credited as coscreenwriters on all their collaborations, they don’t write conventional scripts,” wrote John Penner in the Los Angeles Times in 2012. “Rather, Krasznahorkai serves as a kind of literary consultant as the film takes shape. ‘When we make films from his stories,’ Tarr once explained to critic Jonathan Romney, ‘we usually take the novel and we somehow in a terrible manner ruin it, and often what remains is just dialogues and situations.’ Then, he says, ‘we have to rediscover everything in reality that has already been discovered when he wrote the novel.’”
“Across five features,” wrote Robert Rubsam for Notebook a couple of years ago, Krasznahorkai, Tarr, and Hranitzky “have shown us slaughterhouse horses racing through vacant city squares, the bodies of little dead girls levitating in the air, a man who suddenly begins barking like a dog, and the world of a peasant family unmaking itself, element by element, until even the light has gone, a parade of surreal, even absurd grotesqueries that add to these stories of false prophets and far-too-credulous innocents an element of grandeur, even majesty.”
Celluloid Now, a showcase of experimental cinema organized by the Chicago Film Society, is currently running in Chicago through Sunday. For the Chicago Reader, Joshua Minsoo Kim takes a close look at “one of their six inspired programs,” a “selection of contemporary Korean analog film. It’s called Celluloid City Seoul and features nine evocative short-form works that are nonnarrative, abstract, and dazzling to watch in person.”
The Pordenone Silent Film Festival, too, is on through the weekend, and Paul Cuff, Silent London’s Pamela Hutchinson, and Paul A. Joyce have been posting daily dispatches. And the eleventh edition of IFFBoston Fall Focus is presenting twenty-seven features in two jaunts at the Brattle, the first on now through Sunday and the second running from October 30 through November 4. “It’s sheer gluttony,” program director Nancy Campbell tells Sean Burns at WBUR. “I’m calling it ‘One Brattle After Another.’”
This week’s highlights:
- Daniel Day-Lewis, back on the screen in Anemone eight years after announcing his retirement, “has set a standard for chameleonic transformations that is nearly without parallel,” writes Isaac Butler for Slate, “and he has also garnered a reputation in the public eye as a true weirdo, a romantic, tormented genius out of the nineteenth century.” Butler, the author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, dispels a few misconceptions about what it is that Day-Lewis is up to—and the degrees to which it does and does not adhere to Method acting. “Now that Day-Lewis’s hiatus may be coming to an end, I can’t help but hope for a new looseness in his performances. What would it mean for the most intense of actors to give himself the freedom to show us not just private torments, but secret joys?”
- “Juvenile, amoral, and quite carefree about wasting your time,” the films of Miguel Gomes “also open up a horizon of total freedom,” writes Ken Chen for the New York Review of Books. “They may not treat film primarily as a medium for stories, characters, and ethical certitude, but his works catalyze something else: a porous, unfixed sensation of political joy . . . Watching a Gomes film can give the impression of someone inventing the future of cinema by repurposing its prehistory, as if he were a Looney Tunes character who tears up the railroad tracks behind him and slaps them in front of the train.”
- Before asking Wes Anderson about each of the ten films collected in our new set, The Wes Anderson Archive,Isaac Feldberg gets the filmmaker talking at Letterboxd about his body of work as a whole. “For me,” says Anderson, “every movie is just its own, but there was a certain point where I started to feel these movies do have a connection to each other that I didn’t intend or anticipate. Somewhere around the time when we were doing The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, I started thinking, ‘It seems like the characters in my movies might walk out of one movie and join the characters in another movie.’”
- Sophie Fillières passed away shortly after shooting This Life of Mine, which opened the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes last year. Fillières was only fifty-eight, and her children, Agathe and Adam Bonitzer, oversaw the completion of her final feature. When the film arrived in New York earlier this year, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody called it “one of the most imaginative and poignant movies of recent years.” From Tuesday through November 11, L’Alliance New York will present The Films of Sophie Fillières, and at 4Columns, Melissa Anderson writes that the director “first garnered notice as a member of the Young French Cinema, a wide cohort of auteurs (Arnaud Desplechin perhaps its signal figure) whose 1990s films, often made on minuscule budgets, heralded a return to keenly observed realism following the gossamer, glam artifice that defined the cinéma du look of the 1980s. By the time of Fillières’s fourth feature, 2009’s Pardon My French (Un chat un chat in the original), she had become the maestra of cinéma du kook.”
- About halfway into Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), the narrative simply drops out for around five minutes while Warren Beatty’s undercover reporter undergoes a test to determine whether he might make a reliable assassin. Music swells, soothes, and unsettles while iconic images and words (home, country, mother, enemy . . .) flash before Beatty’s—and our—eyes. At 16:9, Ariel Avissar points us to Bill Geerhart’s history of the famed sequence and David Levine’s essay on its impact. Avissar has also had ChatGPT write descriptions of each of the 343 photos and titles cards from the sequence, and he then gave those descriptions to Picsart, an AI imaging tool. The ParAIax View is a disturbing yet undeniably fascinating experiment, and it would be a dangerously short-sighted mistake to take some sort of comfort in the sloppiness of the results.
Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
