Movie Enthusiast Issue 57: Sorry to Bother You! Bergman Centennial IV, 14 Hours of Experimental Argentinian Filmmaking If You Want It
Watching
The Black Power Mixtape (1967–1975) (2011)
It’s always been fascinating to me to discover how the rest of the world keeps tabs on American race relations (did you know schoolchildren in the Soviet Union learned all about Comrade Angela Davis struggling to bring about communism in the other hemisphere? of course they did). This film was assembled, by Swedish director Göran Olsson, from news footage by Swedish reporters and filmmakers stationed in America from 1967–1975 and is stitched together by voiceovers from African American activists and artists.
This movie is the source of this incredible interview with Davis, filmed during her incarceration, which you should watch of course, though I also want to highlight the appearance by Lewis Michaux, a bookstore owner in Harlem. Crusty in a pie-crust kind of way, Michaux shows up fairly late into the film, sitting up tall in the middle of his domain, and shares this nugget of an anecdote:
A gang of little black boys came in, they had up their fists talking about Black Power. I said, ‘Look son, black is beautiful but black isn’t power, knowledge is power. You can be black as a crow, you can be white as snow, but if you don’t know, you ain’t got no dough, you can’t go, that’s fo’ sho.
In voiceover, Talib Kweli carries on the conversation and summarizes one lesson among many he learned from Michaux: “Black [Power] is the tool, that’s not the goal.”
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
WHAT? No, what??
I avoided seeing any marketing for this movie beforehand so all I had to go off of was the vague plot synopsis I had in my head (dystopian Oakland, something something commentary on code-switching something something communist agitprop something something Tessa Thompson with amazing earrings) and the anxious recommendations that kept coming in from a new friend every four days.
This is SUCH a strange movie. It’s hilarious! I can’t get over how it starts as, let’s go with the amusement park metaphor here, a roller-coaster ride, and then after a certain point it flies off the rails and as it’s in free fall it suddenly turns into a rocketship in midair and just…goes for it. Whatever it is? The moon? Wall Street?
This movie lures you in by following the basic outline of a typical office comedy, gradually adds in more anticapitalist sentiment than usual (I don’t know that I’d call anything this film does “commentary” because Boots Riley seems much more interested in galvanizing laborers to collective action than in making audiences scrunch up their faces and tell each other “it really makes you think, doesn’t it,” over drinks after the film), and then WHAMMO you’re in Armie Hammer’s hell mansion and suddenly anything is possible. I will note though that I sensed a pretty noticeable dropoff in the exuberance of Riley’s filmmaking by the time we get to the second half, and I’m sure you could call that intentional but I’m not convinced. (The one criticism of this movie I’ve seen and would be interested in pursuing further deals with how Riley’s filmmaking doesn’t actually draw on leftist aesthetics to back its critique of capitalism.)
Titicut Follies (1967)
Oh MAN I watched THIS movie too last week!! Frederick Wiseman was already one of my most revered directors and that’s before I had even seen the movie that started it all, his documentary of Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, famously banned for decades because of its disturbing content.
I have so many questions: what exactly did the wardens at this asylum think they were getting themselves into when they let Wiseman in to film them? What did half of these patients even do to end up in this place? HOW did the priest in the funeral scene know to emend “Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return” with that IMMORTAL deadpan line delivery of “That’s all.” ?? Did any of the women at the birthday celebration have any idea what the men in this institution were really doing to their patients?? Do I really have to read Madness and Civilization now? (I kept anxiously glancing over at The Foucault Reader on my shelf during this movie and breaking out into a cold sweat thinking about Foucault’s impossible syntax and argument structure.)
Cries and Whispers (1972)
This film is a nightmare and that is the highest compliment I can pay it. No, there’s a higher one: this is a perfect film. Four perfect performances, the greatest cinematography I have seen in a theater setting (Andrei Rublev, you’re #2, don’t panic), the perfect final lines and ending title card. Why do I even bother trying to write about this? I mean it’s quite disturbing, and without the emotional catharsis of the ending you might wonder why anyone would think so highly of this movie based on its plot synopsis. You simply have to experience it for yourself, and even if you know what Ingrid Thulin does when her husband breaks a wine glass at the dinner table, as I have known for YEARS because IMDB plot synopses beckon like a candle to a moth when you’re young and unsure if you have the stomach for Bergman, there is still nothing else like seeing the events of this movie play out in context. That lighting! Those faces! The costumes! All that RED!! Ingmar and his collaborators really outdid themselves here.
Reading
I think every cinematographer has their own unique gaze, technical skills, and style regardless of their gender. And reducing things to two types of gaze doesn’t make much sense to me. Plus, we are always working with a director and putting our skills at the service of manifesting their vision. So the final ‘gaze’ is the result of the combination between these two artists creating a frame together.”
—Natasha Braier, in a roundtable discussion of female cinematographers and the female gaze
Coming Soon
The talk of the town this month has been La Flor, a genre-crossing 14-hour-long Argentinian movie with 40 minutes of end credits that premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and will be screening at New York Film Festival in October (I’m planning on going to the festival but I will only see this if someone pays me to). The director filmed it with the same cast over a period of 10 years (ball’s in your court again, Richard Linklater) and gradually unveiled the completed bits on Argentinian television; the director even appears in the film itself to inform the viewer how long they have to make it before the intermissions! How considerate of him. Festivalgoers have two options to view the film: in three sittings, or in 8 smaller chunks, at which point you're basically just binge-watching a Netflix series.
Wes Anderson is off to France, where production on his 10th film will begin early next year.
I don’t have strong thoughts on the newly-announced Oscar for Popular Film, except that I agree with the sentiment of whoever pointed out on Twitter that most of the movies that will be vying for this award from year to year are likely going to be Disney properties (Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, that forthcoming live-action Mulan, y’know) and it will therefore just amount to more ad time for Disney, which as we all know owns ABC.
To nobody’s surprise, Jack Nicholson has dropped out of the American remake of Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann. Why do we need to remake this movie, again? About a third of it is in English anyway!
Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons will finally be available on Blu-Ray when the Criterion Collection releases it on November 20. Alas, the lost footage cut by RKO remains lost.
This isn’t news exactly, but I only just found out about it now! Jennifer Lawrence is set to star as Elizabeth Holmes in a forthcoming adaptation of John Carreyrou’s BAD BLOOD (to be directed by John McKay of The Big Short).
[tangent unrelated to movies]
BAD BLOOD IS A WILD BOOK AND ALL OF YOU SHOULD READ IT, with apologies to all my coworkers who subscribe to this newsletter and have already been hearing me shout about this around the office for weeks.