All About This Week
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Even while headlining hit television shows and frequently stunning moviegoers, Andre Braugher, who passed away on Monday at the age of sixty-one, returned again and again to Central Park to perform in the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare productions. Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction) first saw Braugher playing Angelo in Measure for Measure in 1993. “He fired onto the stage,” tweets Wright, “and I was like, ‘Whoa. What just happened?!’ Different level. That was as plain to see as the sky above the stage. Super smart. Forceful. A master. And good dude.”
To most, Braugher was first and best known as Baltimore detective Frank Pembleton in Homicide: Life on the Street, the series based on the 1991 book by David Simon, who later went on to create The Wire. “I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful actors,” tweets Simon. “I’ll never work with one better.” In the comedy series Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Braugher played Raymond Holt, the NYPD’s first Black gay captain, and the writers often worked words and phrases into his lines simply because they wanted to hear what he’d do with them.
“When he acted, the words were notes; the sentences, lyrics; every monologue, an aria,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture. Braugher’s “career was such a matter-of-fact and consistent demonstration of excellence that when it suddenly ended, much too early, it was like learning that a beautiful building you used to pass each day had been demolished overnight. Frank Pembleton would have delivered a bitter, blistering monologue about that. Ray Holt would have tied one on and muttered while constructing a balloon replica, impeccably pronouncing French terms. And Braugher would have dazzled as both, making every word sing.”
In the Guardian, Ryan Gilbey remembers Shirley Anne Field, who, before appearing alongside Michael Caine in Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966) and with Daniel Day-Lewis in Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), enjoyed a breakout year in 1960. She had small but crucial roles in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer, and in Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, “a defining work of kitchen-sink drama,” writes Gilbey, “she was a vision of self-possession as Doreen (‘Rotten name, ain’t it?’), who works in a Nottingham hairnet factory, lives with her mother, and catches the eye of the discontented lathe operator Arthur Seaton, played by Albert Finney.” Field was eighty-seven.
Cari Beauchamp, the author of Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood as well as books on Anita Loos and Joseph P. Kennedy, died on Thursday at the age of seventy-four. Beauchamp was a feminist activist who served as California Governor Jerry Brown’s press secretary from 1979 to 1982. The Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Barnes remembers her as a “respected film historian who put readers and viewers in close touch with the early days of Hollywood through her painstaking research as an author, editor, and documentary filmmaker.”
This week’s highlights:
- The first issue of Film Quarterly to be edited by Rebecca Prime is out, and the online samples include Eleni M. Palis’s essay on the work of Jordan Peele and Pedro Almodóvar’s survey of his own oeuvre. “I have a particular passion for the thriller and for melodrama, two sister genres,” writes Almodóvar. “My fascination with extreme feelings and exaggerated situations, prominent in my early period, changed over time. During the 1990s, I matured and stylized my stories. The melodrama of High Heels (1991) becomes more Douglas Sirk than Mexican melodrama . . . I believe that the moment that marks my maturity as an author comes with All About My Mother (1999).”
- Being Human: The Films of Roy Andersson, a retrospective that includes a selection of the arresting television commercials the Swedish director has made over the years, opens today and runs through December 31 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. A Swedish Love Story (1970) “remains as sincere and tender a depiction of adolescent romance as movies ever will provide,” writes Jonathan Kiefer at Screen Slate. “In his debut feature, Andersson wasn’t yet the surrealist virtuoso and purveyor of coolly configured, artfully drab dioramas, playing self-delusion and indifference for the driest possible laughs. But clearly his empathy for the bewildered was established very early on.”
- “An academic’s life is none too cinematic,” writes Lauren Michele Jackson, noting in the New Yorker that most filmmakers are eager to yank their professorial protagonists out of the classroom à la Indiana Jones. Jackson weighs the merits and demerits of depictions of life on campus in such films as Oppenheimer, Tár, Dream Scenario, and American Fiction. “Musings, digressions, asides—figuring out how to convey the stuff of thought is one of cinema’s definitional challenges, but don’t tell me that the pondering can’t look good,” she writes. “For an exquisite portrayal of academic life, I recommend Losing Ground, the 1982 film by Kathleen Collins . . . Gorgeously shot and studious about its people and places, the film takes a keen interest in the professor’s life as equal parts intellectual and libidinal and pedagogical, both frustrating and full.”
- In October, Karina Longworth wrapped the epic Erotic 90s season of her podcast You Must Remember This with a two-part deep dive into the making, initial reception, and eventual reevaluation of Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). In a personal essay for Alta, Sam Wasson, the author of books on Chinatown, Bob Fosse, and Francis Ford Coppola, looks back on the Los Angeles premiere: “Eyes Wide Shut was so without human values that, watching it, I wondered how anyone who had lived, let alone a supposedly great filmmaker, could have mistaken such sterility for actual life. There were no performances, only colors, lights, sounds, the physics of film. Yes, there was the air of naughtiness, as if we were someplace adult, someplace ‘Hollywood’ filmmakers—whatever that meant to Kubrick—allegedly feared to tread. But where?” If you think you know where Wasson is going with this, don’t be so sure.
- Toward the end of each year, the Belgian film magazine Sabzian invites a guest to deliver a State of Cinema address. Past speakers have included Olivier Assayas, Nicole Brenez, and Wang Bing, and this year, Sabzian reached out to Alice Diop, whose Saint Omer won the Grand Jury Prize and the award for the best first feature in Venice last year. “The cinema that has always interested me the most and which nourishes me is a cinema which takes its time and makes you wait,” writes Diop. “It’s one that is generally created in the shadows, on the margins, on the world’s periphery; it’s a cinema that we will perhaps discover in ten, twenty, or even thirty years and which will probably capture our era better than anything we were able to glimpse at the time.”
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