What If This Was Real?
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The San Francisco Film Preserve launched a new festival yesterday, and it’s running through the weekend at the Roxie Theater. The inaugural edition of Re:Vision offers thirty-four films in fourteen programs, and Screen Slate has been spotlighting highlights throughout the week.
Patrick Dahl writes about short films by Len Lye, whose work is “as playful and joyous as any mainstream animated spectacle, but is far more invigorating in its instability.” Arlin Golden revisits Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959), “an impressionistic portrait of sustained toil” on Venezuela’s Arayan peninsula. And Corina Copp writes about Karen Sperling’s The Waiting Room (1973), a “psychological Lehrstück, if I may, that uses straight female friendships and relationships as a surface at a time when it was *just* beginning to feel outrageous that feminists continued to dwell primarily on the problems of the bourgeois domestic sphere.”
Now on view at Pace Gallery in Los Angeles through December 23, David Lynch: LA is an exhibition of photographs made between 1979 and 2008. “True to the Lynchian sensibility, there’s obviously a sense of liminality to his photographs,” writes Ava Lachini for Flaunt. “Though his visual language is ostensibly universal at this point, Lynch’s singular perspective still feels new.”
Another opening in Los Angeles made a lot more noise this week. “Both surgically somber and proudly over the top,” writes New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, designed by Ma Yansong and funded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, is “a weird kind of wonderful and an instant city landmark.” Luke Skywalker’s X-34 Landspeeder is in there as well as work by Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, and several comic artists, including Winsor McCay, Frank Frazetta, George Herriman, Jack Kirby, and Robert Crumb.
Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, the most complete survey of the artist’s work yet, has just opened at the New Museum in New York. On view through January 3, the exhibition features new work and two of Jafa’s landmark moving-image pieces, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and the Golden Lion–winning The White Album (2019). “Together the films project alternately outraged and euphoric versions of United States racial history,” writes Holland Carter in the New York Times.
On Thursday, Marina Vlady, who won a Best Actress Award in Cannes for her performance in Marco Ferreri’s The Conjugal Bed (1963), passed away at the age of eighty-eight. Though she played Lady Kate Percy in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1966), Vlady was best-known internationally for her turn as Juliette Janson, a housewife who earns a little extra cash as a part-time prostitute in Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967). “With the whispered complexities of a semiotic secret agent, Godard’s voiceover introduces her first as an actress and then as a character,” wrote Nathan Lee in the Village Voice in 2006. “Acting is montage.”
This week’s highlights:
- We mentioned yesterday that the new Film Comment is up, and there are new issues out from Cineaste and Film Quarterly as well. In a Cineaste “Web Exclusive,” Ehsan Zamani writes about five Iranian films “that, through their social narratives, have each entered the sensitive territory of religious politics in a unique way.” Freely accessible features from FQ include a dossier on David Lynch and Mulholland Dr. (2001), a conversation with Christian Petzold about Miroirs No. 3 (2025), and—relatedly—a poem by Erin O’Luanaigh inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).
- Speaking (again) of Lynch, he was so impressed with Godfrey Cheshire’s review of Blue Velvet (1986) that he cold-called the writer and they wound up hanging out at The Cave in Chapel Hill. Let’s flag a few more recent newsletters: Patrick Wang (A. Rimbaud) introduces a series of six hourlong videos on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel The Leopard, Luchino Visconti’s 1963 adaptation, and last year’s Netflix miniseries; Farran Smith Nehme writes about Joan Crawford, Clarence Brown’s restored and revived Letty Lynton (1932), and Gilbert Adrian’s costumes; then there’s Corey Atad on Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945), and style; Filipe Furtado on curtain calls from Hitchcock and John Wayne; and Fred Barrett on Paul Fejos’s Lonesome (1928), Valerio Zurlini’s Violent Summer (1959), and Ishmael Bernal’s A Speck in the Water (1976).
- With the Metrograph series Winona Ryder, Analogue Youth returning next month, Christine Smallwood surveys the career in a Journal piece, suggesting that “a strong contender” for Ryder’s best role was Charlotte Flax, the devout Catholic daughter of a wayward mother (Cher) in Richard Benjamin’s Mermaids (1990). When a young man sparks something in Charlotte, she “discards her cardigan, wiggles into Cher’s hot pink dress, and heads out into the night,” writes Smallwood. “This combustive mix of female sexuality and Christian iconography recurred in Ryder’s career, next in the fever dream psychosis that is Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the melodramatic delirium of The Crucible. If Ryder is not entirely convincing as a seventeenth-century Puritan, she is more than persuasive as a mean girl who, through force of will and sexual fury, summons the girls around her into a vengeful and possessed army.”
- One admirer of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is Neil Jordan, who has overseen the restoration of his own Interview with the Vampire (1994). “If you look at F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, they’re expressionist, poetic nightmares,” Jordan tells Dan Mecca at Letterboxd. “But then the entirety of Bela Lugosi and Hammer Horror turned the whole vampire into a joke, really. It was great to restore it to something like its origins, in a way. And that’s what Francis did. He was brave enough to add all this huge opulence to the Carpathian Mountains and the characters. I had this different, beautiful book, which was even richer than Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, and it was more challenging and more interesting in many ways. In a strange way, it was more like: What if this was real?”
- Let’s wrap with an engaging, hourlong listen. In 1980, the New York Review of Books ran “The Perils of Pauline,” an eight—thousand-word takedown in which Renata Adler argued that fellow New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s collection When the Lights Go Down was “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Jarrett Earnest, host of the NYRB podcast Private Life, talks with Lucy Sante about what she perceives as the lawyerly construction of Adler’s argument—that the demands of Kael’s weekly gig amplified her “quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses”—and about the impact of the piece on the literary milieu of New York at time. The conversation then segues into Sante’s own writing for the NYRB.
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