Movie Enthusiast Issue 64: Experimental Film
Listening
Michael Sicinski, is one of my favorite film critics who’s slightly outside of the critical establishment (emphasis on the slightly). This interview on Peter Labuza’s podcast The Cinephiliacs finally pulls back the curtain on his cinematic upbringing and influences! Sicinski’s story of falling in love with cinema deviates from what you normally hear from the film critic set, in that he came to his role as critic and film educator through an early love for experimental and avant garde movies. (He mentions how, consequently, he has a lot of blind spots in terms of Classic Hollywood and the other sorts of movies that most other film critics were reared on.) I’ve long wondered how to evaluate experimental films—don’t they just sort of exist in a realm of their own?—and Sicinski touches on that here, as well as the tension between wanting to evaluate the field fairly and wanting to promote even lesser-grade experimental movies for the sake of elevating the profile of the genre.
Watching
After listening to that podcast, I decided I wanted to spend some time this year watching experimental films. I tend to respond more readily to nonnarrative filmmaking than some of my friends, and I will go to bat for the more outré artistic flourishes of directors like David Lynch or Lucrecia Martel. I think it’s important for cinema that filmmaking techniques beyond those developed for expressly narrative or moneymaking purposes have practitioners at all levels of the craft. Sicinski recently watched Sorry Angel and noted on Twitter the influence from Gregory J. Markopolous. Intrigued by what the reference was, I went and tracked down some of Markopolousos’s movies on YouTube to see if I could piece together what his influence was. I couldn’t, and I don’t even have anything interesting to say about Markopolous yet! Which is fine. Most of his films are difficult to find and watch, so while I wait on their availability I’ll add his book of film writings to the reading pile.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
When the English title of this movie debuted to the world nearly ten years ago, we were gifted with one of the greatest movie titles to have ever graced the earth. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives—say it aloud! Who is Uncle Boonmee? How can he recall his past lives? Why is the title of this movie so long? All these questions and more will be answered, one assumes, by finally working one’s way around to watching this movie, after fits and starts and after seeing zillions of parodic tweets by one Mr. Eric Allen Hatch—about whom you will learn more later in this newsletter—and after a failed attempt in college at watching director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (we call him Joe)’s early 2000s movie Tropical Malady, a mere 10 minutes of which was enough to send me running in the other direction to the familiar embrace of my library copy of On the Waterfront instead.
Uncle Boonmee can recall his past lives by means never explained to the viewer. More puzzling is how or why a woman mysteriously appears in the corner of the frame in one early scene, without prompting, somehow edited into the image to be translucent. Yes, this woman who has just invited herself to dinner as Boonmee and his family eat out on the veranda one night, is possessed of an ectoplasmic quality that allows one to look right through her pink sweater to the jungle behind. The easily perturbed viewer might want to eject the DVD now, before a man who for reasons also mostly left unexplained has turned into a monkey—but one still possessed of a humanoid size and posture—crashes the party.
Joe’s storytelling draws on a tradition of Buddhist thought and practice. It’s easy to find oneself drifting off to sleep in one of his movies, which, evidently, is a quality hailed by as uniform a group of filmmakers as Lucrecia Martel and Abbas Kiarostami as a positive one. Uncle Boonmee, whatever it is trying to communicate, did not hold my attention quite the same way as did my first full trip to planet Joe for 2016’s Cemetery of Splendour. Nor was I left pondering its mysteries, whereas I was left reeling for weeks by the final shot of Cemetery, in which Joe regular Jenjira Pongpas, having just spent the last hour sojourning through the neighborhood accompanied by a local goddess serving as docent to the land’s vast and storied history, stares, wide awake, at the fraught symbolism of a bulldozer clearing away her ancestral earth to make way for the demands of a rapidly urbanizing economy. Uncle Boonmee does, however, contain an interlude in which a goddess—not the same one as the one from Cemetery—is impregnated by a catfish, so at least we have that.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)
There it was, a few cards into the end credits: CREATIVE ADVISOR APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL. I’ve long had the sense that Joe is among the most influential directors for the up-and-coming generation of critics and filmmakers, and this only firms up my conviction. RaMell Ross’s debut documentary, recently and surprisingly nominated for an Oscar, is an experiment in capturing the sound and feel of a place—a county of Alabama in the South’s Black Belt region—without resorting to the usual modes of cinematic expression. This movie has picked up a lot of fans in the last year, many of whom could count themselves in attendance at the screening I attended in New York last month, judging by the post-show applause.
Ross’s style is distinct from Joe’s; where the latter likes to take things slow and quiet, the former is trying all sorts of things with rapidly edited layers of sound. (Hale County is at times almost too loud, which I assume is the point.) Ross puts his camera in unexpected places, not always capturing anything especially noteworthy by so doing. He uses a lot of time-lapse photography and shoots about half the film either at night or in extreme low light. Watching this movie feels at times like trudging across black pavement at dusk, still warm from all the heat it absorbed during the day.
I was surprised by all the specific memories this movie evoked: watching the light on a gymnasium wall dip lower toward the floor to track the time until summer basketball camp ended and I could go home already; running across parking lots and swatting away flies en route to an ice cream stand; trying to find a way to stifle boredom sitting in the musty drawing room of a house owned by a woman I do not know in my grandmother’s town, across the street from a movie theater I’d rather be in. Why these memories, and, more importantly, where was I keeping them all this time? These are undoubtedly not the questions Ross set out to get his audiences to ask themselves, though I am intrigued that his formal experiments caused this particular reaction for me. In general I side with the critics who find Hale County a promising start and a valiant failure; someday Ross will find something to say with the language he’s developing.
Remembering
As I was compiling this newsletter on the theme of experimental and avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas, one of the most important critic-filmmakers associated with the American avant-garde movement, passed away; an unhappy coincidence. His criticism gives a good impression of his strong personality: “I am surrounded by such a deep layer of mediocrity that I have to shout really loud to succeed in stirring at least somebody to move, one way or another.”
Reading
When “A Separation” opened in Iran in the spring of 2011, it electrified the public. People lined up overnight to see the premiere at the Fajr Film Festival, which takes place every year on the anniversary of the revolution. Theaters sold out, and it ended up grossing $24.4 million worldwide, making it the most profitable Iranian movie in history. “From Iran, a Separation,” a documentary about the film’s reception, captures some of the heated debates it provoked across the country. Many people, feeling that the film implicitly sides with Simin (the mother who doesn’t want her child growing up under “these circumstances”), were exhilarated by Farhadi’s frank portrayal of middle-class ambivalence toward the values on which the Islamic republic was founded. Others saw the movie as a vindication of Razieh, whose struggles laid bare the difficulty of leading a devout life in a modernizing nation. Still others viewed it simply as an anti-Iranian slur and asked why they should pay money to be insulted in theaters.
—behind the scenes with Asghar Farhadi
You cannot trust the internet to keep media available, and you cannot trust corporations to commit to supporting film culture.
However, you might be able to trust eight maniacs trying to build a sustainable place to hang out.
—Baltimore’s got a new video store; listen to the podcast linked in the first section of this newsletter for more
Coming Soon
Julie Dash—the first black woman to direct a feature film with a general theatrical release—will be directing a biopic on Angela Davis. Filming will begin this June.
Killer of Sheep director Charles Burnett, who hasn’t made a feature film in ages, is set to direct Steal Away, about Robert Smalls, who escaped slavery in Charleston, SC in 1862 and went on to be elected to the House of Representatives during Reconstruction.
Okay WHO chose this awful music for the trailer for Xavier Dolan’s new movie? (Let’s be real, it was probably Xavier Dolan.)
Peter Jackson will be assembling a Beatles documentary from several dozen hours of footage shot in 1969 for their 1970 film Let It Be.
If anyone has any experience asking film distribution companies to sell their posters to you, please direct your intel my way so I can get this beautiful one sheet for Hong Sang-soo’s Hotel by the River (distributed in America by Cinema Guild this spring) for my living room: