After the Revolutions
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This week has brought a flurry of festival news from Europe. The Berlinale, opening next Thursday, has nailed down its program and filled out its juries—and speaking of, Juliette Binoche will preside over the jury in Cannes (May 13 through 24). Raoul Peck and Corneliu Porumboiu will be fêted as special guests at Visions du Réel (April 4 through 13), and FIDMarseille (July 8 through 13) will celebrate Radu Jude with a major retrospective.
Stateside, True/False (February 27 through March 2) has unveiled its full lineup, and SXSW (March 7 through 15) has added twenty titles, including opening and closing night films. The thirty-second edition will open with Paul Feig’s Another Simple Favor, starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, and close with Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses, featuring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jacob Elordi, and Will Poulter.
In New York, a new restoration of A Woman Is a Woman (1961), which Jean-Luc Godard called a “neorealist musical,” begins its theatrical run at Film Forum. And Obayashi ’80s: The Onomichi Trilogy & Kadokawa Years, a series of six films Nobuhiko Obayashi made after breaking out with his first feature, House (1977), opens today at Japan Society. You’ll find an excellent backgrounder in Paul Roquet’s 2009 essay for Midnight Eye.
This week’s highlights:
- Surveying our new Criterion Channel program Sara Gómez’s Revolutionary Cuba, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes that the first female Cuban director created “a cinematic world of her own—an entire complex of themes, tones, styles, and passions that she could put to the test in the world at large. Gómez, with her blend of documentary and fiction, of drama and intellectual analysis, devised a new cinematic method, which she used to express a powerful vision of her country, her time, and her own place in both. With its enthusiastic but critical portrait of Cuba’s revolutionary ideology and postrevolutionary order, her work exemplifies an ideal fusion of analytical, personal, and empathetic cinema.”
- In an interview with Frederick Wiseman for IndieWire, Harrison Richlin asks about any projects he may be working on. “Doing one of these films requires an enormous amount of energy both during the shooting and during the editing, and I just don’t have it,” says Wiseman. “I also have to reconcile myself to the fact that I’m ninety-five.” The retrospective currently running in New York through March 5 is one of several that already have or will soon take place in cities around the country. “It turns out that a retrospective is an ideal context in which to take in his work,” writes Andrew Chan at 4Columns. “Marathon viewing emphasizes his career as one cohesive project . . . As we follow the director’s arc from the savagery of his first film, 1967’s correctional-facility exposé Titicut Follies, to the ode to epicurean sublimity that is 2023’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, he gradually seems to emerge from behind the camera, no longer the unobtrusive observer but a character as rich and self-contradicting as any of his subjects.” In the New York Review of Books, Andrew Katzenstein writes about Wiseman as “a miniaturist who works at an epic scale.”
- In his latest newsletter, Sasha Frere-Jones takes on Andrei Tarkovsky’s final feature, The Sacrifice (1986), as well as several documentaries related to the film’s making, including Chris Marker’s One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (2000). “Tarkovsky, like Marker, uses his films to think and, like every filmmaker, holds everyone hostage until he’s done,” writes Frere-Jones. The Sacrifice stars Erland Josephson and was shot in Sweden by Sven Nykvist. “When Bergman speaks of God,” Tarkovsky said a few months before he died, “he does it in the context of God who is silent, who is not with us. So we have nothing in common, just the opposite.” For Frere-Jones, the “biggest difference between the two directors is hidden in Tarkovsky’s God comments. Tarkovsky was devout enough to trust his characters would all be fine, hence the benign neglect they suffer. Bergman was of this world and loved each of his actors with a kind of necessary tenderness almost entirely absent from cinema now.”
- “The idea of the individual haunts much of the writing on Vittorio De Sica’s films,” writes Jonathan Mackris in the Notebook. “Despite his own lifelong allegiance to the Italian Communist Party, the films of De Sica’s neorealist period tend to reflect a Christian existentialist outlook on politics, less interested in collective action than in characters confronting their lack of individual agency over their lives. Yet despite this, they are pluralized by the film’s mise-en-scène: none of his characters are alone in struggle, but their struggle is, for the most part, a lonely one.”
- Back to the New Yorker, where Justin Chang remembers David Lynch. Mulholland Dr. (2001) “became an obsession, the dream movie of my dreams” when Chang was a student at USC, and over the past few weeks, “I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the Los Angeles that he left behind.” Little White Lies, in the meantime, has been running a series of tributes that includes Willow Catelyn Maclay on the moment in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) when the Log Lady places a hand on Laura Palmer’s forehead “the way a caring mother might for a sick child” and Juan Barquin on an astonishing exchange in the third episode of the second season of the original series that reminds us that “sincerity is key to everything that David Lynch is.”
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