Diverging Futures
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Tom Gunning, the esteemed scholar and author of books on D. W. Griffith and Fritz Lang, has a new collection out, The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde, edited by Daniel Morgan. Gunning and Morgan will kick off two days of screenings and discussions tomorrow at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York with a program that, as he wrote for a presentation in Chicago last week, shows “how the early twentieth century caused machines of movement and the camera’s ability to capture motion to collide, transforming our sense of time, and merging physicality with virtuality.”
On Monday, Gunning and filmmaker Ernie Gehr will screen and then talk about four of Gehr’s films at Anthology Film Archives, and then on Tuesday, Gunning will present another personal selection of films at Light Industry. “Too often,” writes Gunning in the introduction to the latter program, “historians made a dichotomy between the path of realism (Lumière company’s views from around the world) and the magic of Méliès (illusions created by the camera). But in fact they both were after the same thing: images that moved and seemed to live and change.”
Turning to festival news, Cannes has rolled out lineups for this year’s Short Film Competition and La Cinef Selection and announced that Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann) will preside over the jury that will present the Short Film Palme d’Or and the three La Cinef prizes. Directors’ Fortnight, in the meantime, has added Nadav Lapid’s Yes! to its lineup. Set in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, Yes! tells the story of a jazz musician commissioned to set music to a new national anthem.
Filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa passed away last Sunday at the age of fifty-six. Writing for Notebook in 2023, Michael Sicinski called Nishikawa “an exemplary cinematic formalist, locating the underlying order of things in our shared visual world. Many of his best films have employed a theme-and-variation structure to bring out the unexpected beauty of large-scale architectural or industrial forms.”
It’s been a rich week for movie-loving readers, and before turning to this week’s highlights, shout-outs need to go to a few magazines. Filmmaker, artist, writer, and teacher Sky Hopinka—recently interviewed for Screen Slate by Emerson Goo—has guest-edited the forthcoming issue of Seen. Animus editor Elena Lazic and her twin, Manuela, have launched a new podcast, Hard Truths, and in the first episode, they discuss Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia and Louise Courvoisier’s Holy Cow. A Rabbit’s Foot has put together a collection of articles on Greek cinema before and after the Weird Wave. And the latest issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine features a brief but excellent primer on Yasujiro Ozu from Slate’s Dana Stevens.
- The Film at Lincoln Center series LA Rebellion: Then and Now opens today, pairing films made in the 1970s and ’80s by a loosely knit collective of directors who studied together at UCLA with recent works that bear their influence. Writing at 4Columns about films by Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and their peers, K. Austin Collins suggests that “nothing has made their movies more visible, in recent years, than the pop-signifying, shamelessly borrowed glimpses of these works seen in content as far-flung from post-Watts LA as Beyoncé videos and the Frankenstein’s-monster Pan-Africanism of the Black Panther movies—sincere-enough celebrations of Gullah and other cultures that nevertheless mass-commodified them so rapidly, so thoroughly, my head is still spinning. The LA Rebellion, as an idea, has been memed to death—which has no bearing on the movement itself, of course, but only makes a series like this all the more vital.”
- On Monday evening, John Waters, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Dua Lipa, John Turturro, and Rossy de Palma will be among the presenters as FLC honors Pedro Almodóvar at the fiftieth Chaplin Award Gala. For Film Comment, Michael Koresky talks with Almodóvar about Spain during and after the Franco era, Hitchcock, screwball comedies, and the liberating impact of his own work. With Law of Desire (1987), “I was declaring quite emphatically that desire is the primary motor of life,” says the director, “and it’s also the primary motor of your own sexuality. I was also exploring that obviously for myself. I was not aiming to have it transcend boundaries and reach the whole world. But I’m very proud that to this day, people from all around the world come up to me and tell me that Law of Desire changed their lives. One of the important things that runs throughout my films is that my characters always have moral autonomy. And that in itself is a political statement.”
- Sabzian is running Jonathan Mackris’s close readings of three films by Jean-Luc Godard released after he died in 2022: Film Annonce du film qui n’existera jamais: ‘Drôles de guerres’, Scénarios, and Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario. “There is a want to see these films as Godard’s testament, a personal statement on the fact of his impending death,” writes Mackris. “But Godard has already dealt with these questions some decades earlier, in films like JLG/JLG – autoportrait de décembre, Deux fois 50 ans de cinéma français (both 1995), and, in another sense, King Lear (1987). To place the posthumous films in the realm of the autobiographical, to my mind, limits their interest. Instead, one might take them for what they are, fragments of a future ‘that will never exist,’ but which nonetheless point us in a different direction. Insofar as the problems to which Godard dedicated his life, artistically and politically, remain unresolved, they remain for us both the most pressing and the most generative.”
- For In Review Online, Caleb Hammond talks with Amalia Ulman (El Planeta), whose second feature, Magic Farm, opens in New York today. Notebook is running Ulman’s appreciation of Elaine May’s “sweet but tragic, nerdy characters . . . Her women are annoying to men precisely because they’ve chosen to invest their intelligence in something other than seduction, in interests that aren’t necessarily appealing to the opposite sex. A curative for the contemporary trope of the pick-me girl, May always plays and writes the leave-me-alone-I’m-doing-something-else girl. The beauty of May’s women is that they are aware of how unattractive their interests are.”
- In his latest newsletter, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie points readers to a sprawling but necessary piece in the New Republic in which Ana Marie Cox looks (not all that far) ahead to “a future where pop culture is little more than a careless swirl of stock images, slapped together with no rationale beyond ginning up engagement—the wholesale replacement of storytelling with slop. To an extent, this future is already here, and it’s impossible to make sense of the extraordinary power held by right-wing podcasters in American politics or understand the meaning of Hollywood’s ‘unwokening’ without recognizing that slop—content shaped by data, optimized for clicks, intellectually bereft, and emotionally sterile—has been overwhelming Hollywood’s cultural impact and destroying its business model, not to mention countless careers along with it, for years.”
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