Pages, Paints, and Protests
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Back in October, the Austrian Film Museum and the Viennale launched a monthlong Yoshishige Yoshida retrospective. In the program notes, Haden Guest called Yoshida an “innovative stylist and profound thinker about cinematic form and meaning” who “helped usher a new spirit into postwar Japanese cinema.” When Srikanth Srinivasan heard that the director of such fiercely political films as Eros + Massacre (1969), Heroic Purgatory (1970), and Coup d’état (1973) had died on Thursday at the age of eighty-nine, he tweeted: “2022 is determined to take all the giants of cinematic modernism with it.” Writing for the New Left Review, Jonathan Rosenbaum remembers Jean-Marie Straub and Jean-Luc Godard as “the two most imposing pillars of cinematic modernism in Western Europe.”
Julia Reichert, who codirected the Oscar-winning American Factory (2019) with her husband Steven Bognar, died late last week. She was seventy-six. Reichert was “in the forefront of a new generation of social documentarians who came out of the New Left and feminist movements of the early 1970s with a belief in film as an organizing tool with a social mission,” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times. “Her films were close to oral history: Eschewing voice-over narration, they were predicated on interviews in which her mainly working-class subjects spoke for themselves.”
Through December 19, New York’s Spectacle Theater is paying tribute to another documentarian we lost this year, Heddy Honigmann, who died in May. “Her films don’t feel like they are setting out to make a point,” writes filmmaker Sierra Pettengill (Riotsville, U.S.A.) for Screen Slate. Instead, “they revel in the loss of control and give into their own searching.”
In other news, the National Board of Review will give its 2022 Best Film award to Tom Cruise and Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick on Sunday, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO won the European University Film Award, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis topped Australia’s AACTA Awards, and the African American Film Critics Association crowned Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King. Critics at Slant have voted Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans to the top of their list of the twenty-five best films of 2022.
At Vulture, Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is Alison Willmore’s #1, while Bilge Ebiri is still wild about Romain Gavras’s Athena. Todd Field’s Tár tops lists from the Atlantic’s David Sims, Variety’s Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman, and the staff at the Playlist. At the Ringer, Adam Nayman’s #1 is Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, and for the New Statesman’s Ryan Gilbey, Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl is a “perfect heartbreaker.”
In the New York Times, Wesley Morris and A. O. Scott write pretty thrillingly about the year’s best performances. Discussing the 2022 Sight and Sound poll with Manohla Dargis, Scott suggests that “the presence of newly consecrated masterworks” shifts “our understanding of the old ones, refreshing them with new meaning. You see new patterns and affiliations when the poignant household observations of Tokyo Story are in conversation with the rigorous attention to domestic alienation in Jeanne Dielman.” Dargis agrees, though she also thinks that “the overall list is too narrowly shaped by respectable, consensus favorites from two familiar traditions: Hollywood and the art film.” As for her own top ten, “I wish I’d made room for weird, messy, disreputable movies, for a genre masterwork like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a movie that is forever lodged in my being, and for more avant-garde filmmakers.”
Writing for the Nation about the backlash in some quarters against Chantal Akerman rising to the top of the list, Ben Schwartz suggests that “it’s not simply Jeanne Dielman’s ranking that exasperates but that its aesthetic utterly rebukes that of the cherished film it bounced, Vertigo. Hitchcock once asked, ‘What is drama but life with all the dull bits cut out?’ Here Akerman cuts out everything but the dull bits, asking us to acknowledge arguably the dullest life in Belgian history . . . Hitchcock’s film is about a sad man trying to remake a dull woman into his ideal. Akerman’s is all about the dull woman and the drudgery of pleasing sad men.”
Looking ahead to next year, two days after Sundance presented its 2023 features lineup, the Berlinale has announced that Kristen Stewart will preside over the International Jury during its seventy-third edition. Meantime, Taylor Swift has written a feature and plans to direct it. On to a few suggestions for weekend reading:
- It’s been two years, but Screening the Past now returns with a bumper issue to savor over many weekends to come. And it opens with a bang. Patricia MacCormack, Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University and self-described “old school Melbourne goth,” asks what’s so upsetting “about the idea of the extinction of the human species, and with it the end of the anthropocene? And what has it to do with cinema?” Issue 46 also offers essays on Jacques Rivette, Pier Paolo Pasolini, “It Girl” Clara Bow, and Anthony Mann; reviews of books on Terrence Malick, Mike Nichols, and Douglas Sirk; and in the “Classics and Reruns” section, shorter pieces from Philippe Grandrieux, Jacques Rozier, and Adrian Martin.
- Through January 4, Another Screen is presenting Films from Iran for Iran, a freely accessible program of “films by women and nonbinary filmmakers, made from 1979 to the present day, with a focus on experimental and nonfiction work.” In an accompanying essay, Pegah Pasalar, Katayoon Barzegar, and Niloufar Nematollahi trace the roots of the ongoing protests to 1817, when a woman refused the veil, through the street protests that led to the Constitutional Revolution of the early twentieth century and the mass demonstrations on International Women’s Day in 1979. The essay is “a denunciation of the commodification we have witnessed over the last couple of months of the new Woman, Life, Freedom movement.”
- White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, arrives on Netflix on December 30. “It’s a Cultural Studies bibliography rendered in 35 mm,” writes Sukhdev Sandhu at 4Columns, adding that “DeLillo has always been preoccupied with cinema (in 1982’s The Names, he describes the twentieth century as ‘the filmed century’).” Leonardo Goi goes long on this in the Notebook: “It’s not just that screens bob up everywhere in DeLillo’s books; images—and cinema—end up shaping their structure, rhythms, and textures. Asked about his earliest influences, DeLillo once stated that the movies of Jean-Luc Godard had ‘a more immediate effect’ on his craft than anything he’d ever read.”
- The new fortieth anniversary 4K restoration of The Draughtsman’s Contract is currently touring selected cities. Introducing his conversation with Peter Greenaway for Screen Slate, Nicolas Rapold describes the film as “part floridly witty post-Restoration drama, part serpentine mystery, part aesthetic treatise on artistic practice and property . . . A Peter Greenaway interview is its own subgenre, with its themes and variations invariably featuring a proclamation of cinema’s inferiority and infancy next to painting.” Walking to Paris, featuring Emun Elliott as Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, is now in postproduction, and Greenaway hopes to make a film with Morgan Freeman “about death to ask the extraordinarily stupid existential question: is death necessary?” And he’s working on a new screenplay “which is very much about Christianity.”
- To circle back to the Sight and Sound poll one more time, many were surprised to see Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) not only enter the top one hundred so soon in a poll conducted just once every ten years but also land so high: #30. Isabel Stevens, the magazine’s managing editor, talks with Sciamma about what the director calls the slow burn of “desire and then the burst of love” between a painter (Noémie Merlant) and her subject (Adèle Haenel) who have “this strong sense of chemistry but also equality.” Also, spoiler alert: “I want people to get ‘page 28’ tattoos.”
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