Daydreams and Nightmares
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This week brought happy news from Cannes. Park Chan-wook (No Other Choice) will preside over the jury during the seventy-ninth edition (May 12 through 23). But the week also brought unhappy news. When news broke on Wednesday that German culture minister Wolfram Weimer was calling an emergency meeting the following morning, presumably to fire Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle, reaction was swift and thunderous.
Vigorous statements of support for Tuttle came from the Berlinale staff and in the form of an open letter signed by hundreds of filmmakers, including Sean Baker, Todd Haynes, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Tilda Swinton, and Ilker Çatak, who won this year’s Golden Bear for Yellow Letters and announced on Wednesday evening that if Tuttle is booted, he will never again submit another film to the festival.
Monday’s Daily offers fuller background, but Scott Roxborough outlines the situation pretty succinctly in the Hollywood Reporter. “If its loudest critics are to be believed,” writes Roxborough, “the Berlinale is simultaneously a platform for antisemitic, anti-Israel propaganda and an instrument of the pro-Israel German state that censors pro-Palestinian voices. Both narratives are absurd and have little relation to what actually happened at this year’s festival.”
On Thursday morning, Weimer announced that he’d need a few days to mull things over. “If Tuttle is indeed ousted in the coming days, who would want to pick up what looks ever more like a poisoned chalice?” asks Philip Oltermann in the Guardian. “Which filmmaker of international repute wouldn’t think twice before accepting an invitation?”
This week’s highlights:
- In Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), Mossad agents carry out a string of assassinations as revenge for the 1972 Summer Olympics massacre. Revisiting the film in the wake of October 7 and its aftermath, Corey Atad finds that “almost every moment is charged with insight so deep it begins to feel like foresight.” Atad’s fascinating conversation with Tony Kushner in GQ covers a lot of ground, beginning with how Spielberg coaxed him into writing his first screenplay. When, to the consternation of a more than a few powerful people, Spielberg committed to the project—“I mean, he was Mr. Schindler’s List,” notes Kushner, “He was the Shoah Foundation”—Kushner remembers telling him, “You do understand that we’re going to get into an enormous amount of trouble.” They did at first, but then came the five Oscar nominations.
- A new restoration of Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest (1970) opens today in New York and next week in Los Angeles. Four friends from Kolkata take a road trip to rural Palamu, where they bribe a watchman into letting them stay at a guest house. “These cosseted, Westernized urbanites—their Bengali heavily sprinkled with English—also behave like entitled jerks to all the working-class (and poorer) locals they meet during their getaway,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns. But when they meet and begin hanging with a family of Kolkatans and two of the women in particular catch their roving eyes, Days and Nights “deepens in both profundity and pleasure, shifting from droll depictions of the guys’ loutish behavior to incisive, detail-rich segments that underscore the composure of these fascinating women as they try to make sense of these tourists.”
- The infinite night sky is reflected in the eyes of three donkeys who discover an abandoned astronomical observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert in Alison McAlpine’s perfectly a strangeness (2024). Reviewing the short for the Film Verdict, Ben Nicholson calls it “a heady blend of myth, science fiction, documentary, comedy, and philosophical exploration.” Having premiered in competition in Cannes, perfectly a strangeness is now up for an Oscar and will see its debut on the Criterion Channel on Sunday. Filmmaker, editor, and sound designer Walter Murch, best known for his work on the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, is a fan of McAlpine’s film, and he tells her why in a conversation at the Film Stage.
- While panning On This Day . . . 1776, Darren Aronofsky’s online series produced with generative AI tools, the New Republic’s Phillip Maciak is reminded of D. W. Griffith’s claim in 1915 that moving images would supplant the written word within just ten years: “Griffith’s rhetoric of replacement and obsolescence—his framing of literacy as a burdensome task and research as an impossible obstacle to truth; his vision of cinema as a technology that will smooth these processes, make them supernaturally easy, transform the labor of learning into an instantaneous magic trick—would not be out of place in a viral Substack post from a Silicon Valley CEO. Why must the future of cinema necessitate the vandalizing of our libraries? Why must the future of AI slicken and impoverish our vision of history, or even just of historical film?”
- The new issue of Film Quarterly is fully and freely accessible, and if there’s a running theme, it’s horror: Yugoslav horror, analog horror, and three contemporary witches. Editor J. M. Tyree opens the package by noting that “over the last century, cinema has developed a knack for outliving its own deaths, whether technological, commercial, or artistic, although these now seem to recur with increasing frequency as catastrophe gives way to utter chaos: legalized vertical integration, COVID, the LA fires, AI hype/catastrophism, monopolistic streamers, predatory megamergers, and McCarthyesque political bullying.”
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