Sequences from History
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Nearly every filmmaker on the planet has spent this past week trying to suss out the implications of the American president’s announcement late last Sunday night that he intends to slap a “100% tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Long story short, as entertainment consultant Kathryn Arnold tells Time’s Chad de Guzman, “if you understand how complex and interconnected the global film market is—both on a production and a distribution level—it’s devastating and doesn’t make any sense.” But as Ben Schwartz points out in the Nation, “the administration began its Monday morning back-pedaling bright and early.”
Cannes, in the meantime, carries on pedaling straight ahead. Set to open on Tuesday, the festival has just added four films to its Official Selection, including Bi Gan’s Resurrection, in which a gifted woman explores a monster’s dreams. This year’s Cinéma de la Plage program, a series of nighttime open-air screenings, will include films by Terrence Malick, Mamoru Oshii, and Billy Wilder.
In an astonishingly generous move, Milestone Films founders Amy Heller and Dennis Doros will gift their company to Black Film Archive founder Maya Cade. Since 1990, Milestone has been crucially instrumental in the restoration and revival of work by such filmmakers as Charles Burnett and Shirley Clarke, and recently, the focus has been on “artists from segments of the population that are underrepresented in the canon,” as Derrick Bryson Taylor points out in the New York Times. “Milestone Films gives me the ability to not just have awareness of these filmmakers but protect, preserve, acquire, insure funds are in the hands of filmmakers,” says Cade.
For Gina Telaroli, writing at Film Comment, one of last year’s most significant restorations was completed as part of the Locarno Heritage Online program. Idrissa Ouédraogo’s “taut study of guilt” Samba Traoré (1992) is a noir from Burkina Faso now streaming for free through June 6. In other streaming news, Wong Kar Wai’s thirty-episode series Blossoms Shanghai is heading to MUBI, while Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio, which has just swept this year’s David di Donatello awards—Italy’s equivalent to the Oscars—will arrive on the Criterion Channel on May 20.
Starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, and Jonathan Pryce, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) was one of the greatest showcases of male acting bravado since Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957). The adaptation of David Mamet’s play was directed by James Foley, who has passed away at the age of seventy-one. “His career was marked by versatility, from music videos with Madonna to commercial multiplex thrillers to talky TV dramas to erotic romances,” writes the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee. And as Variety’s Leo Barraclough reports, Jiří Bartoška, who appeared in nearly seventy Czech films and starred in several popular television series before serving as president of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, has died at seventy-eight.
This week’s highlights:
- Opening today, Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides is “a tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. Since Platform (2000), Zhao Tao’s “cherubic smile and poised, somewhat inscrutable demeanor have graced nearly all of Jia’s films,” notes Leo Goldsmith at 4Columns, and in the New Yorker, Justin Chang observes that throughout Jia’s oeuvre, “a staggering human parade has passed before his camera, and a monumental subject has emerged and reemerged: the upheaval of individual Chinese lives amid ceaseless social, cultural, economic, and technological change.” For Filmmaker, Inney Prakash talks with both Jia and Zhao about their past and future work together.
- In March 1989, Jacques Rivette was the guest on two episodes of Serge Daney’s radio show, Microfilms. Ted Fendt has translated both conversations, which cover a wide range of topics such as Godard’s use of actors, whether cinema is more like sculpture than painting, and so on. “I’m addicted to being in front of a screen on which shadows are projected with some accompanying sounds,” Rivette admits. “Sometimes seeing films gives you ideas. Bad films more than good ones! Good films don’t give you any ideas . . . Unfortunately, there is everything in between and that is not interesting . . . And the only thing in cinema that I still think is interesting is surprise, good or bad.”
- Last fall, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody wondered if Virginia Tracy, who wrote for the New York Tribune in 1918 and 1919, might be “the first great American film critic.” This week, he’s made another discovery in archives of the New York Times, Andre Sennwald, who reviewed around four new movies per week and wrote an “extensive movie-centered Sunday essay” in the mid-1930s. “Sennwald reflected both the passion and the burden of such a heavy diet of new releases: his excitement at exceptional films is palpable, but far too much of his effort went to plot description and finding witty ways to say ‘meh,’” writes Brody. But Sennwald’s “absorption in what was happening day-to-day in the world of movies made him a crucial witness.” He railed against the enforcement of the Hays Code, studio heads, and the star system but championed the work of King Vidor, Dziga Vertov, Alfred Hitchcock, and “a filmmaker whose work he loved so intensely that it nearly damaged his own system of thought: Josef von Sternberg.”
- Anyone looking to catch up with The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974) and Leila and the Wolves (1984) now that they’ve arrived on the Criterion Channel will want to know about Nihal El Aasar’s deep dive into the work of Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour for the Baffler. Leila is “a testament to resistance that serves a political purpose,” she writes, “namely, to reject victimization and seize control over the task of narration, putting it back into the hands of the revolutionary subject at the same moment the enemy was seeking to dismantle that revolution.” The film is “also clearly a critique from within, nodding to the fact that while the main contradiction in the region is imperialism, Srour was willing to address what needed to be done to combat the liberation movement’s internal weaknesses, including the expectations placed on women.”
- “Early in American Psycho, Mary Harron’s blisteringly good adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel, Patrick Bateman walks us through a typical morning,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore. The sequence is “a floor-to-ceiling window into the life of someone with a credit-card statement in the place of a soul,” and it is “not supposed to be aspirational. But pull up TikTok or Instagram or Reddit and you can easily find your way into a digital hole of content that veers hilariously close to American Psycho in form, if not in intent . . . The entire history of online culture is a cautionary tale about how little distance there is between ironic and real appreciation, and Bateman has always been a more malleable icon than most.”
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