Making, Unmaking, Remaking
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Contributors to Sight and Sound have cast their ballots, and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light has been voted to the top of the resulting list of the fifty best films of 2024. “It is a film made with the love of many collaborators, over many years,” Kapadia tells the magazine, “a handmade film. I can be only thankful and grateful towards those who treated it as their own. And now I thank you for also accepting it and treating it as your own as well.”
Rose Glass’s “hilarious, bloody film noir” Love Lies Bleeding is “the best movie of the year, one that Russ Meyer might have made if he had been a lesbian intellectual addicted to steroids,” declares John Waters at Vulture. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody tops his list of twenty-one films with Nickel Boys, writing that RaMell Ross “creates a bolder, riskier, and more imaginative adaptation (of Colson Whitehead’s superb 2019 novel) than any other recent filmmaker.”
The #1 film of 2024 for Time’s Stephanie Zacharek is Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, which explores “the ways in which human beings—especially women—often want things they don’t know how to ask for.” And Rolling Stone’s David Fear goes for the winner of this year’s Robert Altman Award, Azazel Jacobs’s His Three Daughters, which is “as close to a masterpiece as the Momma’s Man filmmaker has ever come.”
In other news, despite the Berlin Senate’s intention to slash its budget for the city’s arts and culture by thirteen percent, the Berlinale, now stripped of two million euros, is forging ahead with plans for its seventy-fifth anniversary edition under a new director, Tricia Tuttle. Frauke Greiner, the head of press relations for the Berlinale, tells Screen’s Martin Blaney that the festival has been able “to secure balanced financing until the end of March 2025.”
Berlinale 2025 will open on February 13 with Tom Tykwer’s The Light, premiering out of competition and starring Lars Eidinger and Nicolette Krebitz. The story hinges on Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), a housekeeper from Syria who upends the everyday life of a middle-class German family.
Werner Herzog is back in Germany for a few days before he heads to Paris, where the Centre Pompidou will present the features he’s made since 2010. Tomorrow evening, Herzog will preview his latest film, The Ghost Elephants, a nonfiction work in progress about a mysterious herd in Angola, at the Filmmuseum München.
The exhibition Jean-Luc Godard: Scénario(s) will be on view at the ICA in London from December 14 through 22 (more from Arijana Zeric at Little White Lies), and from tomorrow through February 28, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will present G. W. Pabst: Selected Films, 1925–38 (more from Andrew Reichel at Screen Slate).
In New York, Elaine May will be at Metrograph this evening to talk about editing Mikey and Nicky (1976), and cinematographers Ed Lachman and Sean Price Williams will be there on Sunday to discuss Lachman’s Report from Hollywood (1984), an hour-long documentation of Wim Wenders shooting scenes in Los Angeles for The State of Things (1982).
This week’s highlights:
- Wenders has just completed a short film for Chanel featuring Tilda Swinton, Xin Zhilei, and Leah Dou (scroll down here until you see Tilda). For Letterboxd, Ella Kemp talks with Wenders about the restoration of Paris, Texas (1984), Nastassja Kinski’s Texas accent, a $20,000 one-way mirror, and the “heroic act” Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) performs at the end by leaving. Even after the film won the Palme d’Or, Wenders’s American distributor “asked me if I could change the ending,” he recalls. “They said, ‘It’s going to be so easy. All we want you to do is shoot the car on the freeway making a U-turn, and that will be the last shot of the film. Let him make a U-turn and then everybody will know it’s gonna be okay.’ And I said, ‘Not over my dead body will I shoot a U-turn.’”
- Gabe Klinger’s Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater (2014) focuses on the filmmakers’ shared but distinct fascinations with time—and their love of baseball. A sequel might explore what’s drawn both to revisit Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). Linklater has wrapped shooting on Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white film in French about the making of the New Wave milestone, and he tells the Guardian’s Tim Lewis that he “can’t explain how happy I am with that crazy film, I love it so much.” With his own Breathless (2023), Benning set out “to play off” the original “because I think its narrative is stupid,” he tells Othon Cinema’s Matthias Kyska. Benning “wanted to make a non-narrative film of the exact same length,” but “that didn’t happen when I set up the camera. Events unfolded in front of it, creating what I would call a ‘found narrative,’ which turned out to be a political found narrative. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is what Godard was interested in with his work.’”
- Collin Brinkmann has been working on a book on late style in film, and he’s posted a sample chapter on Howard Hawks packed with insight, anecdotes, and smartly chosen references. “There are pleasures and profundities galore in early Hawks, but the late films display a quiet maturity that is an integral result of their unhurried, casual, unzeitgeisty temperaments,” writes Brinkmann. Red Line 7000 (1965), for example, is “ostensibly a thrilling picture about the lives and loves of modern racecar drivers, yet the majority of the film consists of remarkably hushed conversations in intimate spaces—quiet moments between friends or lovers in a bed, a car, an office, an empty courtyard, a hospital room, etc. Hawks takes a cast of young, fresh faces in a 1960s environment of hopping bars and roaring racetracks and somehow ends up making one of his most muted, mature, minor key films.”
- “The allure of the interactive movie has lasted for over half a century, and yet the idea has never quite escaped the bounds of novelty, or the sinking feeling that what’s technologically possible is not necessarily artistically worthwhile,” writes Gabriel Winslow-Yost in the New York Review of Books. “But there is now one exception: the work of Sam Barlow.” In Barlow’s Immortality, players are invited to explore what’s gone wrong in the making of three features. Winslow-Yost: “A view of cinema is being presented as the fragments accumulate: that it inevitably involves violations of trust; that it is inseparable from lust and brutality; that it, and art in general, is nonetheless worth any sacrifice. Presented, but not quite endorsed.”
- “I, with no irony, love Christmas,” announces John Waters. He’s one of twenty-four writers, directors, and actors invited by the Observer New Review to recommend a favorite holiday movie. For Mike Leigh, Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987) is a “joyous masterpiece.” The Laurel and Hardy musical Babes in Toyland (1934) “was the holiday movie growing up, or at least my holiday movie,” says Sean Baker. Alice Rohrwacher goes for Vittorio De Sica’s “sociopolitical fairytale” Miracle in Milan (1951). Richard Eyre and James Ivory both go epic, choosing Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) and Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), respectively. And Waters’s favorite? Lewis Jackson’s Christmas Evil (1980).
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