Nobler in the Mind
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The week began with lineups for two Cannes sidebars, Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight, and there’s one more that needs noting: ACID, the program that’s been put together by an association of film directors since 1992. You may not recognize many—or any—of the names behind this year’s 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 Questlove’s latest music documentary, Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial VS That’s 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 Riley’s I Love Boosters. Ebertfest is staging its “Last Dance” today and tomorrow, and in Nyon, Switzerland, Visions du Réel, 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, “Brimful of Asha,” and/or the 2005 album You’ve Stolen My Heart are mourning the loss of playback singer Asha Bhosle, who has passed away at the age of ninety-two. “In some ways,” writes Anastasia Tsioulcas for NPR, “Bhosle'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, ‘Dum Maro Dum.’ By Bhosle’s own reckoning, she recorded some 12,000 songs over a career that spanned about eight decades.”
This week’s highlights:
- Aneil Karia’s 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 “we seem to be at a rather ripe moment” for revivals of “the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays.” Hamlet “embraces grief, rage, betrayal, indecision, cowardice, duty, melancholy, madness, and so much more,” writes Ebiri. “For 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 ambition—unlike, say, Macbeth or Richard III—but for noble reasons. In one of this picture’s more intriguing twists on the material, Shakespeare’s invading Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, now becomes an encampment of activists pushed out of their homes by the Elsinore Corporation. Thus, Ahmed’s Hamlet discovers not just his father’s murder and betrayal but also the criminality on which his family’s entire wealth has been built. Hamlet’s disillusionment here feels of the moment, but it’s also thoroughly appropriate for this most rebellious of cultural icons.”
- Starting tomorrow, New York’s Metrograph will screen new restorations of four erotic films directed by Radley Metzger, two of them released under his “nom-de-porn,” 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 “that most aristocratic of pornographers,” Nick Pinkerton writes: “The elements that set Paris’s hardcore apart from the lower order of fap fodder are much the same that established Metzger as one of softcore’s 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 cliché.”
- Edoardo Rugo poses a question he then sets out to answer in his thoroughgoing essay on Marco Bellocchio for Bright Lights Film Journal. “Though shaped by a Marxist-Leninist background, his political vision frequently dissolves like smoke in the wind at the moment of mise en scène, in the crystallization of the cinematic image,” writes Rugo. “It is precisely this ‘coherent incoherence’ that becomes the true mechanism running through a career as vast as Bellocchio’s—a 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 rebellion’s impossibility, that forms the true authorial question in Bellocchio’s cinema?”
- Inspired by “Film and Dreams,” a 1978 essay by Vlada Petrić—theoretician, historian, and cofounder of the Harvard Film Archive—Kinaesthesia 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 he’s programmed for the BFI. For AnOther Magazine, Rory Doherty gets Fox talking about five essential sequences, such as the one in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) when the projectionist climbs into a movie. “The precision of those effects; they’re actually better than CGI,” says Fox. “You sense the authenticity of the imagery.” In Metropolis (1927), Gustav Fröhlich’s Freder has ominous visions, and Fritz Lang pulls off the sequence “through 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.”
- For designers, or for those of us who simply enjoy engaging eye candy, Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s 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 you’re not careful, coffee machines turned into tiny cafés by “Wes Anderson’s go-to model-maker Simon Weisse,” and a delightful, five-year-old interview with director Jes Benstock about the making of the stop-motion animated video for Orbital’s “The Box,” featuring Tilda Swinton as an alien wandering through East London. She was very, very into it, and as Benstock explains, she left the team “a gift” that they would only discover when they saw the rushes.
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