Death and Other Strangers
Depending on your outlook, the rollout of so many film festival lineups this week during a global pandemic is either encouraging or worrying, maybe even a bit of both. Following announcements from Venice and Il Cinema Ritrovato,Toronto has unveiled a program of fifty features, and nearly half of them have been directed or codirected by women. Again, this will be a mix of indoor, outdoor, and virtual screenings, and again, we should mention that some of the heavy hitters we’ve been looking forward to since January are holding out for better times.
- The editors of Senses of Cinema have outdone themselves with a new bumper issue. Nearly every contributor to the walloping dossier on The Shining, which turns forty this year, opens his or her essay by noting that Stanley Kubrick’s most-memed film has inspired more far-flung readings than perhaps any other work in cinema. Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary on some of the most out-there conspiracy theories to have sprung from The Shining, Room 237, is just the beginning; the dossier gives us nearly twenty fresh and rich approaches. A second dossier gathers reflections on the state of cinema during the pandemic, and in a pair of features from Michael Witt and Raymond Vouillamoz, we learn about the rediscovery of Voyage à travers un film (1981), Jean-Luc Godard’s reworking of his 1980 return to commercial cinema, Every Man for Himself (1980). Witt calls Voyage “a significant work in relation to Godard’s oeuvre, television history, and the history of the relationship between cinema and television.”
- When Axel Madsen profiled Fritz Lang for the summer 1967 issue of Sight & Sound, it had been seven years since the director had made his final feature, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, and four since he appeared in Godard’s Contempt. “Ask him cold his opinion of Le mépris and he will come up with a neat and lofty defense of Jean-Luc Godard’s integrity; but put the same question to him some time later in a flow of pleasant after-dinner chatter and he will make a plea for creators’ right to failures,” wrote Madsen. Lang, seventy-six at the time, was in a mood, dismissive of Brecht and Antonioni but also of some of his own work. He comes down pretty hard on Metropolis (1927), for example. “Tell him you think a new era is dawning in American cinema,” wrote Madsen, “and he will shut you up with a blunt ‘Name one great American film in the last twenty years.’”
- In a moving personal essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, film critic and scholar D. A. Miller admits that his decision to revisit Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) during the lockdown is “an obvious morbid choice.” Dirk Bogarde’s Gustav von Aschenbach, who arrives in early twentieth-century, plague-stricken Venice and finds himself drawn to a fourteen-year-old boy, has “grown on me during our interminable ordeal,” writes Miller. “For several weeks, I’ve been shadowing him as assiduously as a caregiver. I stick close enough to observe the desperate petition in his eyes; I pull back, often, to give him space. And always, I follow his avoidant gaze as it drifts over the crowd or zeros in on the object of his desire. I mirror, in other words, the close-ups, wide shots, pans, and zooms of Visconti’s film, which is—‘now more than ever’—a film about watching, about watching out, about wanting a stranger.”
- In “Pretty Little Cults,” an essay for Another Gaze, Katherine Connell writes that films such as Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke! (1999), Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling’s Sound of My Voice (2011), and any number of stories inspired by the women of the Manson Family are “about microcosms of power, and even when they attempt to deconstruct misogyny on an allegorical level, they often end up reifying it through aesthetics and normative beauty ideals. Where is the breaking point between the cult as meaningful allegory and visually alluring cinematic product? More bluntly, when does the attempted deconstruction of patriarchal structures slip into patriarchal fetishization?”