Sincerity in Practice
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The Cineteca di Bologna is filling out the program for this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 21 through 29), Locarno (August 6 through 16) has just announced that Rithy Panh (The Missing Picture, Meeting with Pol Pot) will preside over its international jury, and of course, Cannes rolls on through next weekend. Follow along by keeping an eye on the critics’ grids at Moirée, the International Cinephile Society,Ioncinema, and Screen and by listening to the podcasts from Film Comment and Nicolas Rapold.
Any New Yorkers sensing an onset of FOMO will find plenty to distract them in the coming days and weeks. Opening this evening with the world premiere of a new restoration of The Asthenic Syndrome (1989), the sixteen-film retrospective Kira Muratova: Scenographies of Chaos, presented by Film at Lincoln Center and Faktura 10, will run through May 25.
Last summer, Jessica Kiang wrote about this “strange and restless body of work, across which Kira Muratova appears less concerned with making her ideas intelligible to some notional viewer and more involved in carrying on a mercurial, witty, inquisitive dialogue with Kira Muratova. In herself, she seemed to find her most encouraging ally and her most sardonic critic, and yet she also knew just when to listen to the counsel of neither and do whatever it occurred to her to do, apparently without analysis, guided only by a confidence in her instincts so complete that it was a kind of genius.”
Glauber Rocha: Of Hunger and Dreams, a program of six features and three short films, opens at Metrograph tomorrow to run through June 8. Rocha is probably best known for Black God, White Devil (1964), a key work in Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement in which he “merges national symbols with a style that incorporates a wide range of influences,” as Fábio Andrade wrote last year. “Here, Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectics meet Luchino Visconti’s penchant for the operatic, Luis Buñuel’s rough surrealism meets Pier Paolo Pasolini’s abrasive mysticism, and Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic gaze meets the narrative sociology of John Ford . . . A visionary artist with a global sensibility, Rocha was also a great synthesizer of tendencies in Brazilian art, which by the start of the sixties had begun exploring the radicalism of popular expression, as well as a national psyche shaped by decades of systemic underdevelopment.”
Starting today, the Paris Theater and the New York Film Critics Circle will present over the next six weeks thirty-six films by Alfred Hitchcock and twenty-three more that “stand as homages to his legacy.” Jack Lemmon 100, a nineteen-film tribute, is on at Film Forum from today through May 29; Michael Almereyda will be at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research to discuss Cymbeline (2014); and to celebrate The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim’s Films, a retrospective running at MoMA through May 27, Ultra Dogme has published Intervals of Light & Darkness, a freely downloadable zine gathering essays on and interviews with the filmmaker.
Beyond New York, the Stranger’s SIFF Notes are back to guide those attending the Seattle International Film Festival currently running through May 25. In Massachusetts, the Somerville Theatre is presenting F**k the Nazis, a series WBUR’s Sean Burns calls a “celebration of good triumphing over a purely evil ideology, running through June 10 with a collection of nine movies ranging from high adventure to heavy drama and even a few films for the whole family.”
The fourth edition of Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair will definitely not be for the whole family. The grownups, though, will want to know that the lineups are out for runs in Los Angeles and Chicago (June 1 through 7), Portland and Minneapolis (June 6 through 12), Boston and Dallas (June 8 through 14), and London (June 15 through 21). New York’s selections and showtimes will be out soon.
Robert Benton, who won Oscars for writing Places in the Heart (1984) and for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)—and was nominated, too, for cowriting (with David Newman) Bonnie and Clyde (1967)—died on Sunday at the age of ninety-two. In 1987, Joe Leydon had a terrific conversation with Benton about their shared love for Truffaut and Texas. And Mark Harris, the author of Pictures at a Revolution, suggests that if you’re looking for “a more off-the-beaten-track double feature, I recommend pairing Bad Company [1972] with The Late Show [1977], which shows his sensitive touch with a wide range of actors and demonstrates his writer’s ear.”
This week’s highlights:
- Back to New York. Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us is on at Japan Society through the end of the month before heading to Metrograph in June. Programmers Edo Choi and Alexander Fee discuss their retrospective with Nick Newman at the Film Stage, while at 4Columns, Andrew Chan focuses on Lightning (1952), “one of cinema’s most claustrophobic accounts of family dysfunction,” and Yearning (1964), which “shows the different effects and shades of meaning Naruse could draw out of a similarly morose tale of working-class strife.” As for Naruse overall, “each new occasion to assess his formidable oeuvre has boosted his reputation and made it harder to cast him in the shadow of his more famous compatriot,” Yasujiro Ozu.
- When Todd Haynes presided over the jury in Berlin back in February, he sat down on a red velvet couch with Rajendra Roy, the chief curator of film at MoMA, for an hour-long conversation that the festival has just posted. On Wednesday, Haynes received the Carrosse d’Or during the opening ceremony of this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, and that’s the occasion for Michael Koresky’s marvelous interview for Notebook’s special Cannes edition. “Every aspect of the medium excites me,” says Haynes, “the props and the costumes and the colors and the clothes and the shots and the lenses. So, it all is simulative, and I think if you feel sincerity in the films, even when they are making you feel conflicted by what you’re seeing, it’s because the sincerity is in the practice.”
- The L’Alliance New York series of films directed by André Téchiné and starring Catherine Deneuve wraps on Tuesday with In the Name of My Daughter (2014). For Screen Slate, Helen Fortescue-Poole talks with Téchiné about working with Jacques Rivette and Olivier Assayas, his love for the films of Jacques Demy, and of course, his collaborations with Deneuve, who, he says, “taught me to let go of my obsession with mastery. To relax a little. You can’t film Catherine like one of Robert Bresson’s models. It’s impossible to do so, because her presence alone brings something with it. She changed my attitude, because she was like a Sphinx to me, and I was trying to decipher her. I was not trying to ‘master’ her in the way that I had done with previous actresses and actors. On the contrary,” with Hôtel des Amériques (1981), “I wanted to make a sort of documentary on her depth as a person and an actress because she made me so dizzy.”
- As David Klion did a couple of weeks ago, Corey Atad has come to the conclusion that Tony Gilroy’s Andor is “one of the best shows ever produced for American television.” George Lucas’s Star Wars “may have taken after Flash Gordon, The Searchers, and The Hidden Fortress, but those are mere packaging. Mythologizing comes in many forms. When Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows was vilified by leftist French critics, it’s because it was seen to be mythologizing the Gaullists, rewriting the history of the French Resistance in the form of a cracker jack thriller.” Andor bears its influence, too, “with all its thrilling spycraft, heists, and escapes, along with its complex rendering of the tormented lives of the people who commit themselves to resistance.” Andor is “the best of Star Wars because it fundamentally is Star Wars. It is the imagining of a fictional history transmuted through time and space to arrive before us as a new mythology.”
- Writing for the New York Review of Books, Dennis Zhou, like so many of us now, has an eye on China: “How do you capture the emotional and spiritual dimensions of a societal transformation so expansive that, for example, a farmer who did not have ready access to electricity or running water as late as 2000 can now livestream their day to millions of people on a Xiaomi smartphone? Perhaps no artist has taken on the challenge of representing this still-nascent century as directly as the filmmaker Jia Zhangke.” At the A.V. Club, Alex Lei sets out to “unpack the important milestones in Jia’s fiction films that led him to arrive at Caught by the Tides.”
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