States of Flux
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Cannes will announce its 2025 lineup next Thursday, and at Cineuropa, Fabien Lemercier explains why it’s a little harder than usual this year to predict which films might make the grade. In the meantime, Todd Haynes, who presided over the jury in Berlin in February, will receive the Golden Coach Award on May 14 from the Society of French Directors, which oversees the Directors’ Fortnight. Harmony Korine has designed the poster for this year’s fifty-seventh edition.
Looking further down the calendar, Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum has announced that the exhibition Tilda Swinton – Ongoing will be on view from September 28 through February 8. Swinton will present eight new works created in collaboration with filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Jim Jarmusch, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; fashion historian and curator Olivier Saillard; and photographer Tim Walker.
Through the Fire: The Films of Deepa Mehta opens today in Toronto and runs through April 23. TIFF programmer Robyn Citizen notes that Mehta is “renowned for her ability to craft deeply moving stories through a culturally hybrid perspective.” The retrospective celebrates the director’s “groundbreaking work and contributions to Canadian and transnational cinema.”
The second edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies is on through the weekend, and the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen talks with cofounder and artistic director Micah Gottlieb as well as with Black Film Archive creator and curator Maya Cade, who will introduce a new restoration of Jessie Maple’s Will (1981) on Sunday. “Set in Harlem,” writes Olsen, “Will is a story with deep emotional power.” Obaka Adedunyo stars as a former all-American basketball player recovering from addiction.
Another option for Angelenos is this evening’s marathon presentation of all seven episodes of On the Air (1992), the short-lived series created by Mark Frost and the late David Lynch. UCLA Film and Television Archive curator Mark Quigley suggests that On the Air is “perhaps best described as a brilliantly eccentric cousin to its slightly older relative, the beloved landmark series Twin Peaks (1990–91, 2017). Seemingly sprung from a hidden alcove of Peaks’ ‘Red Room,’ the genre-melting On the Air is much more of a joyfully Ernie Kovacs–inspired fever dream than a traditional network situation comedy.”
This week’s highlights:
- Henry Fonda for President (2024)—currently playing in New York and screening in Austin on Monday and in Los Angeles on Wednesday and the following Saturday—comes on like a conventional documentary before eventually revealing that director Alexander Horwath is up to something rich and complex. “Horwath’s film is at least three things,” writes A. S. Hamrah at the top of his interview with the curator and filmmaker for Screen Slate: “a study of Fonda’s career, a social history of his films as they relate to developments in American history from the eighteenth century to the present, and a clear-eyed, coast-to-coast travelogue by a European, in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville and Jean Baudrillard. It succeeds in all three.” Henry Fonda for President “argues that Fonda was an acteur who created his films along with their directors to describe a social reality in which—to paraphrase François Truffaut on [Fritz Lang’s] You Only Live Once [1937]—we are told everything is going well when in fact everything is going bad.”
- As part of its series In the Pinku: The Return of Roman Porno, New York’s Metrograph is presenting a new restoration of Shinji Somai’s Love Hotel (1985), which Beatrice Loayza, writing for the New York Times, calls a “human drama of romantic disillusionment and sexuality warped by trauma with serious feel-bad vibes occasionally tempered by mordant humor.” In Metrograph’s Journal, Jawni Han notes that some may consider the film to be an outlier in Somai’s oeuvre. “At a quick glance, it seems to lack many of the aesthetic trademarks found in his best-known works such as P. P. Rider (1983), Typhoon Club (1985), and Moving (1993),” writes Han. “But what makes Love Hotel unmistakably a ‘Somai’ picture is his keen interest in roleplaying.” Han notes that “decades later, Ryusuke Hamaguchi takes up Somai’s interest in diegetic ‘acting’ as an avenue for self-discovery and spiritual epiphanies.”
- The new film issue of frieze features Hans Ulrich Obrist’s conversation with Ed Atkins, interviews with Kevin Jerome Everson and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, and a roundtable discussion. Erika Balsom: “Part of the value of artists’ film historically has been its oppositional nature, offering an alternative to a mass-media sphere that is commercialized and often imposes rhythms and ways of being on us that are probably better rejected. Artists’ film doesn’t exit the realm of technology: it embraces this guilty, fucked-up medium and tries to use it to a different end. That is a very powerful gesture. Claire Bishop’s recent book, Disordered Attention [2024], tries to make a claim for the value of hybrid forms of looking and the dispersed gaze. But, while I think she’s right in identifying that is how many viewers experience exhibitions today, it’s not something I want to endorse. I’m not interested in dispersing my gaze further—it’s already too dispersed. I want to go to exhibitions that take me into something.”
- In the new Brooklyn Rail, Nolan Kelly considers works by Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Jia Zhangke, Paul Schrader, and David Cronenberg that contain “self-referential and historicizing elements”; and Jadie Stillwell writes: “Pursued too long, the question of what film restoration is becomes a Möbius strip—a fitting, if not satisfying, form for it to take. For every point (digital allows us to see more of the director’s original vision) there is a counterpoint (what if that original vision was on film?), and for each perspective there is, twisted a different way, another. That kind of cyclicity is oddly comforting: it suggests the end of the discussion is never the ending. In this way, the question of what the ‘end’ of film means for film restoration becomes a chance to countenance all the ways in which the practice resists finality.”
- For Film Comment, Vadim Rizov sketches a brief history of a lucrative sector of the industry that most cinephiles know very little about. “The American evangelical church’s superficial transformation from fundamentalist fire-breathing to a milder realpolitik was mirrored in the subsector of Christian filmmaking,” writes Rizov. “Evangelical cinema’s breakout was 1972’s A Thief in the Night, which was followed by three sequels (all directed, like the first, by Donald W. Thompson); the series’s signature scenes are of true believers breaking out large, crudely printed timelines of the Rapture, prefiguring YouTube conspiracists in their low-rentness, autodidactic certainty, and self-generated proofs . . . Though the world is currently short on neither right-wing governmental drift nor parallel evangelical movements, there is something uniquely and unexportably American about these films: they’re set in uninspiring, featureless cities . . . and they indulge in parochial persecution fantasies while relitigating very specific grievances and rewriting national histories.”
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