Inside the Echo
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On the first full day of this year’s Berlinale, you might want to take a moment and poke around the festival’s page dedicated to its seventy-fifth anniversary. There are brief texts on some of the debut features that have screened in Berlin, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), Werner Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968), Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche (1985), and Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1988).
And there are photo galleries to tap through. In 1954, seven years before the Wall went up, festival posters drew attendees from both sides of the border between West and East Berlin. Douglas Sirk reaches out for the hand of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1978. Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton, and Derek Jarman present Caravaggio in 1986. Cate Blanchett laughs it up with Anjelica Huston in 2005. Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke pose for cameras as they present Before Sunrise in 1995, Before Sunset in 2004, and Before Midnight in 2013.
This week’s highlights:
- The “conceptual breakthrough” of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) “involves rendering a woman’s ordinary daily life—at home, in the kitchen—as inherently dramatic, history-rich, and choreographically exquisite,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Akerman achieved her second breakthrough by conceiving a film in drastic contrast with the first.” Toute une nuit (1982), newly restored and playing on the Criterion Channel, “follows not one character but many (it has a cast of seventy-five), and, during the single night of the title, they are seen in fragmentary microdramas that highlight not their banal routines but some of the most inherently melodramatic moments in any life; namely, romantic encounters . . . Jean Cocteau famously wrote that there’s no love—there’s only proof of love, and Akerman is love’s most diligent and forensically persuasive detective.”
- The complete retrospective Water and Oil: The Movies of Ang Lee opens today at Asia Society in New York and runs through February 23. “Because Lee is from Taiwan,” writes Genevieve Yue for Film Comment, “his career is discussed differently from those of other Hollywood directors, even fellow émigré filmmakers with similarly wide ranges, like Michael Curtiz or Billy Wilder. This usually plays out in one of two ways. The first is the essentialist position, which sees Chinese traits in all of Lee’s films, and qualifies him as a great Asian director. (The racist version of this is the stereotype that Asians are good imitators, but lack creative integrity of their own.) The second is the assimilationist position, which values narratives of cross-cultural reconciliation. In this telling, Lee becomes an exemplar of Asian-American cinema, and his hybridity is taken as an affirmation of a pluralistic, liberal worldview. In reality, Lee fits neither of these models.”
- Through next Wednesday, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is screening new restorations of Anthony Harvey’s Dutchman (1996), an adaptation of Amiri Baraka’s one-act play, and Billy Jackson’s We Are Universal (1971), a twenty-four-minute survey of Black art and culture. A two-hander set in a subway car, Dutchman stars Shirley Knight as Lula, a white woman who comes on to Clay, an uptight Black man played by Al Freeman Jr. “The dialogue is often terrific (Baraka was, after all, a poet) and until the climax, Dutchman is essentially a verbal sparring match,” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times. “Knight and Freeman, both members of the Actors Studio, were matched in the play’s Los Angeles production and, both electrifying in their own ways, returned to the fray with relish.”
- Jason Bailey and Mike Hull’s seriously fun podcast A Very Good Year has morphed into something new, just as serious as just as fun. Each week, a guest selects “one of the 1600+ ‘must-see movies’ collected in Danny Peary’s seminal 1986 book, Guide for the Film Fanatic” to discuss in depth. This week, filmmaker Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Black Phone), who teaches a course on Akira Kurosawa—and whose new feature, The Gorge, starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller, premieres today on Apple TV+—delves into Rashomon (1950). As Stephen Prince, the author of The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, has written, Rashomon’s “greatness is palpable and undeniable.”
- Nearly a full month since the death of David Lynch, the tributes keep coming. Writing for the Atlantic, K. Austin Collins calls Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) “not only his final major project but also a culmination of his style, obsessions, ideas, and feelings.” For Sean Burns at WBUR, it was “a perfect capstone to a career that began with the first midnight movie and ended with arguably the last communal TV series event.” And for Mark Asch at Little White Lies, it was “the greatest collective pop-cultural event of my lifetime.” The Return was “a show whose bad vibes mingled with those of the first year of the first Trump administration, a time likewise defined by a nostalgia that was either vague or curdled . . . This is how Lynch left us, with the yawning abyss of Laura Palmer’s howl, a reminder of her pain, uneradicated, and the knowledge that comes with it; of Coop’s failure and fear; of our collective guilt and spiritual homelessness, because it’s been seven and a half years now and we live inside the echo.”
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