Holiday Reading
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Tsai Ming-liang’s Abiding Nowhere, Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils, and Johan Renck’s Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Isabella Rossellini, and Paul Dano, are among the films added this week to the growing lineup for the seventy-fourth Berlinale (February 15 through 25). On February 20, the festival will present an Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement to Martin Scorsese.
First, though, Rotterdam will open on January 25—a few days before Sundance wraps—with Jonathan Ogilvie’s Head South, which the festival describes as a “semi-autobiographical ode to a post-punk subculture.” At Cineuropa, Martin Kudláč has the full lineup for the fifty-third edition, which will run through February 4.
In the films of Otar Iosseliani, the Georgian director who died last Sunday at the age of eighty-nine, “the subtle blend of realism and low-key surrealism (he was a great admirer of Jean Vigo), the gentle absurdist humor, and the leisurely pace are repeatedly applied to microcosms of society where age-old tradition seems to be threatened by the ways of the modern world,” writes Geoff Andrew for the BFI. “Iosseliani doesn’t take sides so much as stand back to observe, often with a wry affection, the failings of both.” Two days before Iosseliani died, French actor and singer Guy Marchand, who appeared in films directed by Maurice Pialat, Bertrand Tavernier, Costa-Gavras, and Christophe Honoré, passed away. He was eighty-six.
This week’s highlights:
- For Filmmaker, Ruairí McCann talks with Maggie Renzi and John Sayles, who have been making films together for more than forty years. They discuss Matewan (1987) and the scarcity of movies about labor unions, Lone Star (1996) and what really went down at the Alamo, and the project they’re putting together now. I Pass This Way will star Chris Cooper as Pat Garrett, who, seventeen years after shooting Billy the Kid, is trailing a bank robber he begins to admire. The idea to adapt Eugene Manlove Rhodes’s 1927 novel Pasó Por Aquí struck Sayles about five months into Trump administration. He handed the book to Renzi and said, “I think we should make a movie about what it means to be a good man.”
- “There are many reasons Arnold Schwarzenegger invites cultural, political, and historical inquiry,” writes European Review of Books founding editor George Blaustein at the top of what becomes a surprisingly enjoyable ride. “He has, for example, embodied the international cliché of the American Dream more fully and more famously than anyone else: the immigrant from a pre-modern European nowhere, who became the most famous bodybuilder of all time . . . And he would seem to embody, again more perfectly than anyone else, the American Century and its obsolescence, for neither Arnold nor America can stave off the inevitable. Those ‘American’ arcs are good ones to start with, but a full Schwarzeneggerology will demand other arcs: from body to commodity, from action to comedy, from Mensch to Übermensch—and back.”
- “It’s not the multiverse that’s broken; it’s the ways it’s been employed by blockbuster cinema that are almost impossibly sterile,” writes Leonardo Goi in the Notebook as the Austrian Film Museum’s Raúl Ruiz retrospective carries on through January 10. “To watch a Ruiz film is to witness the simultaneous unfurling of countless others, for each eventually splinters into a thousand narrative shards, opening up cinematic possibilities beyond the chronicling of a cogent, linear story . . . Writing about his work in a time when cinema is routinely reduced to a storytelling machine, it’s striking that he viewed stories not as finite tesserae in a mosaic, but portals that would unlock other realms.”
- ’Tis the season for Clare Coffey to slap away the annual parade of contrarian takedowns of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). She lists a few of the easy targets at the Bulwark. “But there has always been one criticism I found harder to ignore,” she writes: “the Mary problem.” Without Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, would Donna Reed’s Mary Hatch really have remained single? “I would not, now, if I had Frank Capra’s ear and a gasper and martini in my hand and the studio at my command, go back and change the scene I once thought the only major blemish in a perfect movie,” decides Coffey, and she explains why.
- Let’s wrap with a holiday reading lightning round. Dana Stevens is hosting Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris at Slate’s Movie Club. There’s a new Black Film Bulletin up with articles on Arthur Jafa and Ousmane Sembène. The four participants in the Viennale’s first Young Critic’s Circle have posted their final texts, and Patrick Holzapfel discusses essayistic film writing with Aaron Cutler at Jugend ohne Film. And Catherine Grant points us to the new issue of MAI, with its special focus on Agnès Varda, and the latest Open Screens, featuring James Slaymaker on Chris Marker.
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