What Might Be
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Just before Karlovy Vary opens tomorrow and runs through next week, Martin Kudláč talks with artistic director Karel Och for Cineuropa about the legacy of the festival’s late president Jiří Bartoška and a few tweaks to the programming committee. “I’m curious as to whether our audience will pick up on a slight shift in taste this year,” says Och. “We have given a bit more space to films that are more provocative, both in form and in subject.”
As an example, Och offers Greek director and musician Alexandros Voulgaris’s They Come Out of Margo, premiering in the Proxima competition. When a reclusive songwriter is invited to a party to celebrate her fortieth birthday, the film reveals “various influences, including animation techniques reminiscent of Jan Švankmajer,” says Och. “It’s a vivid, unpredictable audiovisual cocktail—exactly the type of work we aim to champion in Proxima.”
The festival delayed announcing that Bidad, the story of a young singer who refuses to accept the fact that women in Iran are not allowed to perform in public, would premiere in its main competition for the Crystal Globe until director Soheil Beiraghi and is crew were safely out of Iran. According to Jafar Panahi, Beiraghi has now been sentenced by the regime, presumably in abstentia, to four years and three months in prison.
Locarno (August 6 through 16) has announced a lineup for its Pardi di Domani program featuring new short and midlength works by such filmmakers as Neo Sora and Radu Muntean. Edinburgh (August 14 through 20) has unveiled a lineup of forty-three features and conversations with Kevin Macdonald, Nia Da Costa, and Ben Wheatley, whose Bulk will see its world premiere as the opening night film of the Midnight Madness program.
Le Cinéma Club, the superbly curated weekly program of free online screenings, will launch its Summer Music Festival tomorrow with Mike Mill’s Air: Eating, Sleeping, Waiting, and Playing (1999), a behind-the-scenes peek at the band’s Moon Safari tour. The weeks ahead will offer Marie Losier’s The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), Luna Mahoux’s The Other Queen of Memphis (2024), and Christian and Michael Blackwood’s Monk (1968).
This week’s highlights:
- Sight and Sound has republished a piece from its September 1995 issue in which the late Peter Wollen traces the roots of Performance (1970)—starring James Fox, Mick Jagger, and Anita Pallenberg and codirected by writer Donald Cammell and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg—from the Decadent movement of the Oscar Wilde era through to the 1960s subculture of Chelsea with detours to Persia and Morocco, William S. Burroughs and Kenneth Anger. Once Warner Bros. calmed its nerves and finally released Performance after holding it for two years, “I saw it as the beginning of something,” wrote Wollen. “Now I see it more as the end, the last splendor of heroism in Decadence, a strange vision of England as its own fantastic double, which might have turned out either angel or demon, but never got the chance.”
- Radu Jude, who will be feted next week at FIDMarseille, is currently completing Dracula and has already received funding for his next film, The Diary of a Chambermaid. Jude’s top ten in the summer issue of Artforum is a brisk run through his appreciation for UbuWeb, newly reactivated by its founder, poet and critic Kenneth Goldsmith; No Wave Cinema (“I hope to have the courage to invite the wonderful Lydia Lunch to act in one of my films sometime”); Forensic Architecture, whose “mind-blowing videos would’ve even made film theorist André Bazin scratch his head”; Andrei Gorzo, “Romania’s best film critic”; and Slavoj Žižek, Hong Sangsoo, and Bruce LaBruce.
- For BOMB Magazine, Gary M. Kramer talks with novelist and filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud about spending a year with the same crew as they made three features back to back—Love,Sex, and Dreams—each of them exploring relationships among contemporary middle-class Norwegians. “Watched in any order,” writes Guy Lodge for Film Comment, “the trilogy delivers the same collective examination of fluid sexuality and contemporary queerness, not least since each film closes, in its own way, on a note of quietly euphoric optimism. ‘Sex-positive’ has become an overused term by critics in this still-dry era for sex on screen, applied too liberally to just about any film demonstrating erotic abandon marginally above Hays Code levels. But it’s a term that Haugerud’s trilogy truly merits, with its delicate characterizations of women and men, across a broad age spectrum, whose lives are actively enriched by carnal curiosity.”
- Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) and Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) are currently on view together at Conditions, an artist-led space in Croydon, through August 10. Introducing excerpts from a conversation between the two moving-image artists, Plaster calls the show “a double helix of rave, rupture, and resistance. Jafa’s searing seven-minute reel reassembles the African American experience into a brutal and haunting loop—trauma and transcendence stitched together. Leckey’s fifteen-minute VHS fever dream is a ghost story masquerading as a love letter, where ghostly clubbers blur into specters.”
- A bilingual collection of interviews has just been published as a companion to Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell’s Direct Action, the winner of the Encounters Award at last year’s Berlinale. Most of the film’s 216 minutes is spent with members of the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, one of several Zones to Defend in France aimed at shielding the environment from massive construction projects. Talking to Russell for Verso Books, Benjamin Crais brings up Sergei Eisenstein, which gets Russell thinking about “that moment in Soviet cinema where the idea was to make a film that could talk about a movement without talking about individuals. If you’re trying to foreground a collective ideology, then celebrating individuals or creating characters that you follow through narrative space does that ideology a disservice and is a poor reflection of what the collective can be.”
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