Nobler in the Mind
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The week began with lineups for two Cannes sidebars, Criticsâ Week and Directorsâ Fortnight, and thereâs one more that needs noting: ACID, the program thatâs been put together by an association of film directors since 1992. You may not recognize manyâor anyâof the names behind this yearâs nine selected titles, but ACID has quite a track record, having in the past presented first features from Radu Jude, Justine Triet, and Kaouther Ben Hania.
In other festival news, Tribeca, too, is all lined up and will open with Questloveâs latest music documentary, Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial VS Thatâs the Weight of the World). The twenty-fifth anniversary edition will run from June 3 through 14. Seattle (May 7 through 17) will showcase more than two hundred films and open with Boots Rileyâs I Love Boosters. Ebertfest is staging its âLast Danceâ today and tomorrow, and in Nyon, Switzerland, Visions du RĂ©el, opening today and running through April 26, will host guest directors Kelly Reichardt, Laura Poitras, and Sergei Loznitsa as well as artist Meriem Bennani.
Fans of Bollywood movies, âBrimful of Asha,â and/or the 2005 album Youâve Stolen My Heart are mourning the loss of playback singer Asha Bhosle, who has passed away at the age of ninety-two. âIn some ways,â writes Anastasia Tsioulcas for NPR, âBhosle's career was the reverse image of that of her older sister, the equally famous playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. While Mangeshkar earned her reputation singing the roles of chaste, virtuous heroines, Bhosle specialized in saucier characters, such as in one of her most famous songs, âDum Maro Dum.â By Bhosleâs own reckoning, she recorded some 12,000 songs over a career that spanned about eight decades.â
This weekâs highlights:
- Aneil Kariaâs Hamlet, starring Riz Ahmed, is the latest of many reinterpretations to appear in just the last year or so, and in his review for Vulture, Bilge Ebiri references plenty of them before considering why it is that âwe seem to be at a rather ripe momentâ for revivals of âthe greatest of Shakespeareâs plays.â Hamlet âembraces grief, rage, betrayal, indecision, cowardice, duty, melancholy, madness, and so much more,â writes Ebiri. âFor all his royal status, Hamlet is a figure of resistance, who targets, mocks, humiliates, and ultimately kills a king. He does this not for profit or ambitionâunlike, say, Macbeth or Richard IIIâbut for noble reasons. In one of this pictureâs more intriguing twists on the material, Shakespeareâs invading Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, now becomes an encampment of activists pushed out of their homes by the Elsinore Corporation. Thus, Ahmedâs Hamlet discovers not just his fatherâs murder and betrayal but also the criminality on which his familyâs entire wealth has been built. Hamletâs disillusionment here feels of the moment, but itâs also thoroughly appropriate for this most rebellious of cultural icons.â
- Starting tomorrow, New Yorkâs Metrograph will screen new restorations of four erotic films directed by Radley Metzger, two of them released under his ânom-de-porn,â Henry Paris, and all of them introduced by Rob King, the author of the Metzger biography Man of Taste, and Ashley West, the founder of the Rialto Report. In his Journal essay on âthat most aristocratic of pornographers,â Nick Pinkerton writes: âThe elements that set Parisâs hardcore apart from the lower order of fap fodder are much the same that established Metzger as one of softcoreâs gold standards: a keen compositional sense, a unifying air of suavity and ease, a sharp ear for comic dialogue, an aptitude for getting the best from performers, and a nimble erotic imagination uncolonized by pornographic clichĂ©.â
- Edoardo Rugo poses a question he then sets out to answer in his thoroughgoing essay on Marco Bellocchio for Bright Lights Film Journal. âThough shaped by a Marxist-Leninist background, his political vision frequently dissolves like smoke in the wind at the moment of mise en scĂšne, in the crystallization of the cinematic image,â writes Rugo. âIt is precisely this âcoherent incoherenceâ that becomes the true mechanism running through a career as vast as Bellocchioâsâa continuous and unrelenting engagement with history, which repeatedly translates into a disenchantment with the processes that political history is supposed to bring about and that private history is supposed to bear. Is it this disillusionment, this loss of faith in the student movements and the eventual recognition of rebellionâs impossibility, that forms the true authorial question in Bellocchioâs cinema?â
- Inspired by âFilm and Dreams,â a 1978 essay by Vlada PetriÄâtheoretician, historian, and cofounder of the Harvard Film ArchiveâKinaesthesia is an exploration of dream sequences in silent-era cinema. Director Gerald Fox, who narrates over a rapid-fire series of countless clips, will be in London this evening to launch a season of hallucinatory movies heâs programmed for the BFI. For AnOther Magazine, Rory Doherty gets Fox talking about five essential sequences, such as the one in Buster Keatonâs Sherlock Jr. (1924) when the projectionist climbs into a movie. âThe precision of those effects; theyâre actually better than CGI,â says Fox. âYou sense the authenticity of the imagery.â In Metropolis (1927), Gustav Fröhlichâs Freder has ominous visions, and Fritz Lang pulls off the sequence âthrough photographic means, through montage, through architectural means. Every film director who has wanted to do sci-fi with that kind of edge has gone back to that film.â
- For designers, or for those of us who simply enjoy engaging eye candy, Daniel Benneworth-Grayâs newsletter Meanwhile is an essential subscription. The latest issue, #233, points us to a daunting array of sci-fi book covers, a postcard collection that could kill an entire afternoon if youâre not careful, coffee machines turned into tiny cafĂ©s by âWes Andersonâs go-to model-maker Simon Weisse,â and a delightful, five-year-old interview with director Jes Benstock about the making of the stop-motion animated video for Orbitalâs âThe Box,â featuring Tilda Swinton as an alien wandering through East London. She was very, very into it, and as Benstock explains, she left the team âa giftâ that they would only discover when they saw the rushes.
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