Beggars of Light: The Nitrate Picture Show of 2015 by gina telaroli
"When the lights go down and an image graces the movie screen, we know the difference and it's our blessing and our profound curse that we can’t forget it (and worse, that we care). Where this leaves us, all we can do in the meantime (our own living cinema history), is to do our best to experience it—to form challenging and diverse relationships and communities; to do the necessary work to maintain those relationships and communities; to discuss; to document; to archive; to preserve—as this specific cinematic experience, this specific art form, will in all likelihood die with us."
Bette Davis: None But the Lonely Heart by Murielle Joudet (2013 - translated this year by Ted Fendt)
"All throughout her career, Davis’ face is composed of successive layers, each one revealing an age, a state of becoming. She removes or adds them depending on the film. At 36, again, she turned down the role of Mildred Pierce for which Crawford won an Oscar (in Curtiz’s 1945 film), instead choosing the role of Miss Moffat in Rapper’s The Corn is Green. In it, she plays an old teacher fighting to open a school in a small mining town in Scotland. Warner was against such a young actress playing the role of a woman over 50; to narrow the gap, Davis wore a gray wig and put on weight. This very pure movie is characteristic of Davis’ masterpieces: the script’s big twists and turns allow, paradoxically, for great emotional clarity. It is often after two hours of a film, during its final seconds, that the woman’s picture truly becomes a tearjerker."
The Green Inferno by Alex Ross Perry
"The Green Inferno works on its own terms, and terms familiar to Roth. This time, the bourgeois jerks for whom we are meant to feel no sympathy are Columbia University hashtag activists hoping to spread a message of deforestation via a feeble demonstration that results in them proudly “trending” on Twitter. I couldn’t wait for them to die by this point in the movie. Roth knows this, so their plane crashes five seconds later. In a nice and surely intentional homage not just to Cannibal Holocaust, but to innumerable Italian genre films of the ’70s and ’80s who could afford just one or two days of location filming in New York City (which usually functioned as some lame framing device), Roth recreates not only this story structure but also Italian genre cinema’s tendency for these scenes – always shot with a skeleton crew and very quickly – to be the least interesting and worst-looking part of the film. Flat, rushed and limp. So by the time we get to the jungle, things really come alive, narratively and cinematically."
Jean-Pierre Léaud by Simon Liberati
"I spent three months on a mountain preparing this film, learning all the words. The subject of The Mother and the Whore was the language. As you probably know, Jean Eustache only shot one take. during the rehearsal period, if i got one word wrong, he would make me redo the entire five-minute monologue. After that mythical film I didn’t shoot any interesting films for 20 years. Talk about a dry period!"
Lynch / Rivette by Christopher Small (Touch Me Not: “Blue Velvet” and “The Duchess of Langeais” ; Les filles du feu: “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and “Joan the Maid” ; Only by Sight, or Lost Allusions: “Eraserhead” and “Paris Belongs to Us” ; Love Me Tender: “Wild at Heart” and “L’amour fou” ; Wrest of the Night: “Lost Highway” and “Duelle” ; Locomotion, or: Dreams Are Orders I Obey: “INLAND EMPIRE” and “The Story of Marie and Julien” ; Phantom Ladies, or: It Doesn’t Hurt to Fall Off the Moon: “Mulholland Dr.” and “Céline and Julie Go Boating”)
"One senses the young Rivette, in Paris Belongs to Us, butting up against the boundaries, the limitations of his own calculations: there’s a demonstrable desire to keep expanding the borders of the project, to do away with the film’s rounded edges and send it spinning out, centreless, carried by its own warring energy forever. For all their similarities, the opposite desire seems to be at play in Eraserhead, where even the ineffable quirks of Lynch’s surrealism seem to reroute the movie’s energies back into itself, sealing the entrances and exits, so to speak, so that it remains a hermetic found-object; a whole universe contained as a kind of bioindustrial snowglobe the viewer might study from outside."
Maurice Pialat coverage at Craig Keller's essential Cinemasparagus blog
The Mystery of the Great Pyramid by Pedro Costa (1990 - translated this year by Ricardo Matos Cabo and Andy Rector)
"We never follow the Pharaoh through the Valley: Memphis, Thebes, Heliopolis. We are not allowed to see his treasures, to live his adventures. We are trapped in the shots and the keys of life and death have been lost. A pyramid takes such a long time to build… Montage of attractions, stone over stone, the images dissolving in each other as if in a dream. Everything is so heavy and real because time is carved into the film, guaranteeing us that all of them are already dead: we can see Land of the Pharaohs over and over again, but all those Egyptian extras will already be dead. Watch them dissolve, as grains of sand, grains of time, Egyptian-seconds, Egyptian-minutes, sons of the Great Desert where all our future films will be shot. Space and time are Land of the Pharaohs’ main characters: the Great Pyramid will stand forever, protecting the dead from the living. Khufu’s conflict is against time. This Pharaoh is none other than the brother of Scarface, a poor hoodlum. Crossing once more the antechambers of tall columns, he is only fighting to keep himself together, he is nothing more than a rotting carcass; he just wants to pack up his own corpse, to keep a fine balance between the stiff posture of a semi-God and the pathetic drunken fall of that old, stuffed Jack Hawkins. He wished to give some dignity to the time that he has left. The hauntings return and so do the close-shots: they are like déjà-vus inside the grave that hides this nightmare."
Pedro Costa by Michael Guarneri
"It’s this idea that time is money, and time is our enemy. To me, it’s just baffling that cinema managed to turn time into its enemy. Most films are simply commercial: for a few dollars, they deal in fake emotions and human feelings. On the contrary, what the citizens-photographers showed me was this patience, this vigil full of attention and care, this being there without forcing anyone to do anything. To me, the greatest thing in their work is the idea that you cannot steal anything with an image. Perhaps you cannot give anything, and perhaps you cannot offer much either. But you do not steal anything from the people."
Phantasmagoria of the Interior Text & Video (also available on the Arrow Films Blu-Ray/DVD release) by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
"It’s [Borowczyk's] auteur trademark, his intimate calligraphy, but if you blink you can miss it: sometimes just a few frames at the end of a shot, where Borowczyk or cinematographer Noël Véry moves the camera off whatever he has been filming, creating a sudden, inconclusive swerve of vision. And this was often kept in the final edit—to confound our contemplation and shake up our senses. It’s like the dazzling rays and reflections of light in the images, like the ever-crashing chords and synthesized swirls of Bernard Parmegiani’s music: Borowczyk opens up realms of perception that are beyond the niceties of cultural taste, past the laws of genre and pay no heed to the supposed distinction between narrative and experimental cinemas."
Necessary Means: Isiah Medina on 88:88 by Phil Coldiron
"In a frame, what appears may appear to be everything that there is. If politics is a tracking shot, then politics merely becomes the extension of what there is. Politics becomes a managerial exercise of organizing what is possible and immediately in front of us. Continue the shot at any cost, at any repetition. Who is excluded to make the shot possible? This shot may appear as a freedom. A freedom of movement. But what is this everything determined by? By what does not appear, by what in-appears. The flicker, and perhaps, a cut. We remember that there must be a cut before the shot even begins and a cut for the shot to end.
[...]
There is a political body, a scientific body, a body in love, a body of artworks—we are not simply our individual body. But this is why it is a constant experiment to think how bodies of truth exist in frame. Einstein did thought experiments wondering what it is to be a photon, but the same struggle exists when you do a thought experiment and wonder what it is like to be in your own body. I cannot think of the body as such in cinema, it has to interact with its split through some sort of procedure of thinking whether it’s love, science, politics, or art."
Use No Hooks: Maurice Pialat / Manny Farber by Adrian Martin
"Now we are inside a scene directed by Pialat. It is a plan-séquence, a long take, sequence shot lasting an agonizing eight and a half minutes, from near the beginning of The Mouth Agape (La gueule ouverte, 1974). Two Actors (Philippe Léotard and Monique Mélinand) are in small, cramped, dining room, a space crammed with all sorts of bric-à-brac heaped up everywhere, in no good order. So much to distract the eye, as always in a Pialat room, decanting the gaze in a niggly, even deliberately irritating way. Busy patterns on the walls, sometimes in the clothes and on the tablecloth, as Farber's protégé in San Diego, Jean-Pierre Gorin, pointed out: colours and some viewers, kitsch - but not in a way that can be reclaimed and recycled as glorious camp or excessive discord. In Pialat's cinema, we, like the characters, have to learn to live inside the discord, the irritation and the nagging physical discomfort."
