Rob Tregenza’s The Fishing Place

Eventually released in 1991, Talking to Strangers caught the eye of Jean-Luc Godard, who screened it in Toronto, describing the filmmaker’s work in his essay “Cinq Lettres a et sur Rob Tregenza” as “remarkable and at times astonishing, that is, softly imbued with the marvelous.” Refusing credit, Godard helped Tregenza produce his third feature, Inside/Out (1997). On the eve of a retrospective in New York in the spring of 2023, Nick Newman asked Tregenza for—and received—the full and fully complicated story of his collaboration with Godard.

As president of Cinema Parallel, Tregenza has distributed films by Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Michael Haneke, and as a cinematographer, he’s worked with Alex Cox (Three Businessmen) and Béla Tarr (Werckmeister Harmonies). At the Film Stage, Newman describes Talking to Strangers as “a ‘long-take’ film boosted by its mordant sense of humor; 1991’s The Arc is a sharp vision of the American road with regional-cinema appeal; Inside/Out is rather obviously a formal astonishment; and Gavagai [2016] has the makings of arthouse staple. If I can’t speak to the choices, circumstances, or matters of taste that stopped these films dead, I can lament their long-held obscurity (and maybe begrudge in light of what American markets have prioritized).”

Set in the southern Norwegian county of Telemark, Gavagai is a contemporary story of “implacable grief, unlikely companionship, and stunning landscapes” and “as beautifully singular a movie as I’ve seen all year,” wrote Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. Like Gavagai, Tregenza’s new film, The Fishing Place (2024), which sees its North American premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York tonight, is set in Telemark but during the Nazi occupation.

One Nazi officer, Hansen (Frode Winther), orders Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) to work as a housekeeper for a newly arrived Lutheran pastor, Honderich (Andreas Lust). Anna is to report on any signs of Honderich’s suspected sympathies with the resistance.

“Tregenza is adept at deploying the conventions of mainstream fiction—guns are fired here, blows struck, and brows furrowed—but he’s more interested in dismantling norms than in just recycling them,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “In that respect, the most intriguing figure in The Fishing Place is, in a manner of speaking, Tregenza, who throughout the film continuously draws attention to his camerawork, as he plays with the palette and different registers of realism, mixing in naturalistic scenes with more stylized ones that border on the hieroglyphic.”

“Tregenza’s agile camera connects characters to one another, linking actions in suspenseful chains of causality, and rooting the drama in a sense of locale, both in intimate domestic settings and in mighty, numinous landscapes,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “He creates images of a sculptural sinuosity, conjuring intricate depths of space and time.” For Zach Lewis at Slant, Tregenza’s “particular genius lies in a very consistent use of off-screen space.” In one tense moment, a 180-degree pan reveals that Hansen “has been just off screen the entire time and may very well have been just off screen throughout the entire film.”