Movie Enthusiast Issue 56: Fall Festival Preview, Joans of Arc, Eighth Grade, Bergman Centennial III
Watching
Eighth Grade (2018)
One of my coworkers and I saw this movie on the same night in the same theater at different screenings (I passed her on her way into theater 5 as I was leaving theater 4). Apparently our audiences saw wildly different movies! My audience seemed rather cool on this movie, easily the winner of this year’s Too Real award, responding mostly dispassionately to the travails of an awkward eighth grader trying to find her way in the world and on the interwebs (though we of course all laughed at the needle drop for Aidan with the Good Eyes). My coworker reported that her audience, of mostly women, was uproariously engaged, screaming and gasping and guffawing at all the relatable content. Final verdict? It’s no Lady Bird, but what movie is?
Winter Light (1963)
Many of the reviews of First Reformed mentioned this Bergman film as the ur-text for Schrader’s story and I for one am glad I didn’t see this until after I had written about FR—I would have been too distracted by the allure of writing that one kind of film essay where the author just talks about how allusive Some New Movie is to Some Old One. Winter Light provides the skeleton for the entire plot of FR, minus the environmentalism and jihad stuff. Somehow it manages to be even more grim than FR by having the protagonist decide that religion is meaningless but useful for keeping the depression at bay (whereas Schrader orchestrates an ending to his film that leaves grace on the table). Bergman’s film is also a much more compassionate one though, as far as frigid Swedish chamber pieces can be.
There are two astonishing moments in this movie: in one, Ingrid Thulin delivers a searing monologue about prayer and faith in 8 nearly uninterrupted minutes. In another…well, just watch (the moment in question’s about a minute long). Bergman really is the master of knowing just where to put his camera and for how long.
Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018)
When I was a kid, my parents and I would frequently watch action/espionage/heist movies together and I was never able to figure out who how to parse any of the relationships between any of the characters so I’d ask my parents to explain and they would provide answers that sounded well-informed, though I was still unsure how anyone watching the movie could actually figure all that out. Having reached an older age now myself I can confirm that no one really knows the answers to these questions, but why are you so worried about what exactly Angela Basset’s character’s allegiance is when a helicopter can DO that???
Writing
For The Weekly Standard I wrote about The Passion of Joan of Arc, which needs no introduction, and Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, a French punk-rock musical I saw in theaters so long ago that it feels a little weird for this essay to finally be out in the world after all the events of the last two months in both my life and in the life of the church. However! I still love both these movies movie and hope my reflections on faith in film make some kind of sense to somebody. (This is a topic I’ve been on about before.)
Reading
Pierre could be unreasonable, imperious, and perverse—I’m thinking of the time he sat outside a screening in order to buttonhole those in attendance on their way out (one of his favorite tactics) and announce that the movie we had just seen was “proof that Vertigo is a bad film.” None of that mattered, though. What did matter was his abiding love for the cinema. Is it meaningful? Does it contribute to the cultural conversation? Does it promote a positive image of this or that interest group or create a platform for that or this burning issue? False questions for Pierre, for whom the only question was: is it cinema? Pierre protected us by standing tall for the cinema amid the winds of so much fashion and moralizing. Like Flannery O’Connor, he scoffed at the notion that art is obliged to justify itself as a delivery system of moral ideas—like O’Connor, he knew that art was, in and of itself, a “good.”
—Kent Jones on Cannes 2018 and the memory of one of the festival’s biggest supporters
Coming Soon
The Venice and Toronto Film Festivals have announced their lineups, and many of the movies I’ve mentioned in this newsletter over the past 7 months are finally surfacing—along with a few surprises.
Venice (August 29–September 8) will feature Olivier Assayas’ Non-fiction, Damien Chazelle’s First Man, Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (which began its life as a planned Netflix miniseries), Jacques Audiard’s adaptation of Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria. Also featuring The Nightingale, Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to The Babadook, Laszlo Nemes’ Sunset, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 3-hour-long follow-up to The Lives of Others (we’ll pretend The Tourist didn’t happen). Out of competition, Frederick Wiseman, Errol Morris, and Tsai Ming-liang will premiere new films, and the finally-finished cut of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind will have a special screening ahead of its Netflix release.
At Toronto (September 6–September 16), audiences will get their first looks at Claire Denis’ High Life, Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Maya, David Lowery’s The Old Man and the Gun, Amma Asante’s Where Hands Touch, and Steve McQueen’s Widows—among others.
Speaking of Beale Street, Jenkins released the trailer on James Baldwin’s birthday and it’s easily the best trailer I’ve seen all year.
Documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson is following up her 2016 solo feature Cameraperson with an intriguing new collaboration with her father, a retired psychiatrist with dementia. The film is an experiment in what she calls “pre-traumatic therapy” in which she will stage and re-stage her father’s death in every scene of the film with the help of stuntmen and a healthy dose of humor. The point? To explore how cinema interacts with death, and to help father and daughter grapple with the decline in his mental functioning as it’s happening.
I have not seen Sorry to Bother You yet. I know there are like 5 of you now who have demanded me to talk to you about it! I will see it this week, I promise!!