How Late Is It?
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On January 10, 1927, Fritz Lang’s monumental sci-fi classic Metropolis premiered in Berlin. An exhibition, The Metropolis Century: Dystopia and Rebellion, will be on view from March 18 through September 26 at the Deutsche Kinemathek, which is partnering with the Berlinale to present the festival’s 2027 retrospective, Rage Against the Machine.
The full lineup for the timely program won’t be revealed until December, but organizers have already teased a few titles: Helma Sanders-Brahms’s The Last Days of Gomorrah (1974), Muscha’s Decoder (1984, and with a cast featuring William S. Burroughs, Genesis P-Orridge, and Bill Rice), Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), and Rintaro’s Metropolis (2001).
Starting this evening, the Harvard Film Archive will spend the weekend presenting a newly struck 35 mm print of what curator Haden Guest calls Masaki Kobayashi’s “towering magnum opus, the nine-and-a-half-hour WWII epic The Human Condition (1959–1961).” In the Chicago Reader, Micco Caporale talks with Circuit des Yeux (Haley Fohr) about her new original score for F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), which she will be performing live with Alan Sparhawk tomorrow evening at the Studebaker Theater.
If you’re in Los Angeles, you might catch E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1989) tonight at the Los Feliz Theatre—and if you miss it, it screens again on Sunday and Thursday—and then head to the launch of the UCLA Film & Television Archive series Ryusuke Hamaguchi: Early Works tomorrow, and then to the Culver Theater on Sunday, when Blake Williams will present A Woman Escapes (2022, codirected with Sofia Bohdanowicz and Burak Çevik) and four of his 3D shorts, followed on Monday at 2220 Arts + Archives by Williams’s selection of 3D shorts directed by others.
Wellesnet passes along the sad news that author and critic Bill Krohn has passed away at the age of eighty-three. For decades, Krohn was the Hollywood correspondent for Cahiers du cinéma, and Adrian Martin has written that his 2020 collection Letters from Hollywood: 1977–2017 “offers one of the very best examples I have ever encountered of a fertile space intermixing popular-journalistic and intellectual-critical modes of writing about and analyzing cinema.” With critic Myron Meisel and filmmaker Richard Wilson, Krohn cowrote and codirected the acclaimed 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles.
Writer Jim Knipfel, who passed away last week at the age of sixty-one, was probably best known for “Slackjaw,” a column that ran for years in the New York Press. In 1999, he used the title for the first of three memoirs, earning a blurb from Thomas Pynchon, who found the book “maniacally aglow with a born storyteller’s gifts of observation.”
Knipfel’s last piece for Truthdig was an appreciation of Roger Corman, but his last piece period may well have been his own obituary: “He never liked gardening, playing cards, or fishing, and his ‘bright smile’ was neither ‘contagious’ nor did it ever ‘light up the room.’ Despite those deliberating character flaws, looking back he summed it up this way: A thousand regrets, failures, mistakes, traumas, tragedies, bad decisions, and humiliations, but no complaints.”
This week’s highlights:
- The Metrograph series Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Earth and Empire is on through the weekend, and in a discerning guide to the oeuvre for the New York Review of Books, Sophie Pinkham calls Dovzhenko “a complicated hero for a Ukraine at war with Russia. His films are mind-bogglingly beautiful paeans to Ukraine’s land and its people, animals, and plants, but he also played the Soviet game, his work vetted and reviewed by state organs and censors. He likely survived the 1930s only thanks to Stalin’s personal patronage and protection. Ukraine’s greatest director hid his youthful affiliation with Ukrainian nationalism, embraced Bolshevism, and created magnificent works exalting the October Revolution and the collectivization of agriculture, two of the most traumatic moments in Ukraine’s twentieth-century history. His films celebrate the Communist project, but at their best they depict human suffering and survival with a complexity that is alien to propaganda.”
- Possible Love, tracking the complex dynamic between two couples, one working-class, the other well-to-do, is Lee Chang-dong’s “most narratively ambitious film in scope since Peppermint Candy (1999) and a testament to Lee’s prolonged ethical deliberation both as an artist and the son of a utopian socialist father,” writes Jawni Han at Reverse Shot. Profiling the director for the New Yorker, E. Tammy Kim writes that “Lee talks about his work in terms of exigencies: ‘Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a film?’ At first, I interpreted this line of questioning as an acknowledgment of how costly—in money, time, and manpower—a feature can be. Later, I saw it as a test of social necessity. He told me, ‘I like to think, both for me and the audience, What is an important issue that we’re struggling with right now?’”
- Each year, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies offers an open-access Fifth Issue, and the latest features essays on Georges Méliès, Lino Brocka, and Bruce Lee as well as a six-article dossier on Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966). “It is hard to believe that a film so tapped into the spirit of youthful rebellion and so attuned to the desire to take a hammer—or perhaps a kitten heel—to the system is sixty years old,” write Tanya Goldman and Masha Shpolberg in their introduction, noting that they aim “to honor Daisies’ uniqueness—in Chytilová’s filmography, in the canon of the Czech New Wave, and within Eastern Bloc filmmaking more broadly—while also emphasizing the film’s perennial quality: its ability to animate audiences across space and time. With authoritarianism resurging and war an urgent reality, we turn to Daisies once again for inspiration on how to resist—joyfully, playfully, and courageously.”
- In the weeks since Film Comment presented its series John Berger and Cinema, Tom Overton’s biography of the artist, writer, and critic has appeared, and it’s “deeply informative, deferential, and perceptive, sometimes lyrically so,” writes Megan O’Grady at Hyperallergic. “It is in the space of the cinema where Berger’s achievements—his vision of a world dynamized by those love-drenched, one-to-one human connections we dare to call ‘friendships’—coalesce,” writes Carlos Valladares in the Brooklyn Rail. “The greatest filmmakers, he believed, could ‘go beyond individuality’ and achieve ‘a spontaneous continuity with all of mankind.’ At first glance, such rhetoric may strike one as nastily bombastic, wildly overblown in its starry-eyed optimism. But a slow comb-through of Berger’s writings, and particularly the trilogy of films he made with the Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner (La salamandre, 1971; Middle of the World, 1974; Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, 1976) shows that Berger walked his talk with stringent militancy. He never stopped striving for a better, differently organized world, one whose roots began at ‘home’—wherever that provisional realm may lie for any given lonely soul of Faustian modernity.”
- “Who are these billionaires who claim to hold the power of life and death over humanity?” asks Arundhati Roy in a new essay up at Equator. “They give the impression that they have already disaffiliated themselves from the human race.” The Guardian’s global technology editor Dan Milmo notes that “film villains used to be hoodlums, ex-deep state operatives, people with posh British accents. Tech execs are the new Darth Vader.” And “films about them have in turn evolved from coming-of-age stories and stylish biopics into whistle-blower dramas and dark thrillers,” writes Brady Brickner-Wood in a New Yorker piece that touches on Alex Gibney’s Musk, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, and others, but focuses primarily on Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning. In the New Republic, Annie Berke pairs that one with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger because both films “unfold urgent stories of our shared future, but ask what it means to tell them too late—too late to undo past wrongs, too late to change course, too late to do something with the lesson we might learn.”
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