The 58th New York Film Festival
Featuring: Lovers Rock, Malmkrog, Time, Her Socialist Smile
Writing
For Fare Forward, I reviewed Claire Denis’ Beau Travail for its new re-release in the Criterion Collection. I haven’t done a straightforward, 800-word piece in ages! This was quite fun to write, and while I don’t break any new conceptual ground with it I hope you’ll go give it a read.
Watching
The 58th New York Film Festival transpired virtually, with a smattering of drive-in screenings in the outer New York boroughs for those with cars close enough to benefit. For me the experience was positive overall. Since every movie premiered at 8 PM, I didn’t have to take any time off of work to make all the screenings I wanted to; since you had a 24-hour viewing window you could make your own intermission for the longer movies; and since this was all done from the comfort of my own home, I didn’t need to subsist on a diet of adrenaline and burekas from the Breads bakery across the street from Lincoln Center—although I did miss the burekas.
Lovers Rock (2020)
At the first NYFF in 1963, founder Amos Vogel selected Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel as the opening night film. It was a practical joke: all of Upper West Side high society, gathered together for a movie about a dinner party for folks of their social standing where the guests can’t leave. If I am remembering this correctly, Vogel and colleagues laughed the night away in the projection booth while the cinema patrons down below grew increasingly restless and outraged.
I sensed a bit of the spirit of 1963, minus the malice, in this year’s opening night film, one of several from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology. (Two others from the series, Mangrove and Red, White and Blue also screened this year; the full series will be streaming on Amazon in November.) Lovers Rock is only an hour long and takes place almost entirely at a Black house party, precisely the kind of locale that everyone watching from their couches or their cars wishes they could go to right now but can’t. There’s menace lurking at the edges of the movie, first in the form of a man seen carrying a collapsible cross around on his back, later in some white neighbors and a police car who are all pointedly and quickly shunted out of frame. We can worry about all them some other time; tonight what matters is that we enjoy ourselves, possibly for the first time in McQueen’s filmography.
The movie alternates between a light romance between two of the partygoers and extended scenes of the crowd on the dance floor. Earlier in the night this means 80s pop hits and reggae slow dancing (to Janet Kay’s “Silly Games”—how, but like, how does she hit that high note?!—which is followed by an extended, ad-libbed a cappella encore by cast). As the night wears on and the bass drops, McQueen’s camera puts you in a death grip and throws you headfirst into the chaos of the after-midnight dance floor. It’s as horrifyingly immersive as any of the more undisguisedly violent scenes he’s shot before (or maybe that’s just my natural aversion to these kinds of situations in real life). I knew while watching it that critics would reach into their bag of stock phrases to pinpoint what Lovers Rock is all about: bodies in motion for one, Black joy for another. Lo, in the pre-recorded Q&A with McQueen after the film, NYFF programmer Dennis Lim trotted both of them out in the same sentence.
Malmkrog (2020)
This year’s token Romanian movie is an adaptation of the Russian Orthodox mystic Vladimir Solovyov’s War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ. Malmkrog is director Cristi Puiu’s second go-round with this material: in 2011 he led an acting workshop with the text and from that activity was somehow born his 2013 film Three Interpretation Exercises (two of the actors from that film reprise their roles in Malmkrog).
A few weeks before NYFF, Puiu threw a stink at a public, outdoor showing of his film in Romania. “OK, I understand, social distancing, and the obligation to wear a face mask in open air in Cluj. OK, I am sorry for you, it is a 200-minute film. To stay with your mask on while watching a 200-minute film is inhuman.” OK, I understand where you’re coming from, but you’re not doing yourself any favors by rambling on, “I know people are scared and I respect the social distancing and I wear masks in any enclosed space. But if tomorrow you’ll be asked to walk with your hands, you’ll do it.”
Anyway. I am no enemy of long movies but Malmkrog is taxing even by my standards. In six “chapters,” five named for each of the aristocrats in the main cast and one for the head of the serving staff, Puiu stages Solovyov’s conversations—about war, Europe, spiritual struggle, and modern man’s resemblance to mushrooms—inside a house in some wintry mountainside clearing near the beginning of the 20th century. Puiu has always exercised bravura control of mise en scène and in this regard, at least, Malmkrog does not disappoint. In the early chapters, Puiu keeps the camera at a medium and wide distance from his actors and delicately pans back and forth to move additional actors in and out of frame. As the film progresses and the sun starts to set, the camera pushes increasingly closer to the action, such as it were. The climax of the film consists almost entirely of alternating close ups at a candlelit supper between the idealistic and Resurrection-denying young Christian philosopher Olga and her steadfast intellectual sparring partner Nikolai, who wisely if somewhat pedantically brought his Bible to the dinnertable in the event that a theological fight would break out, which it does.
I’ve seen more than a few reviews of Malmkrog state the obvious: a movie about aristocrats blathering on about the state of the world, all the while so far removed from it that their analyses and interpretations are practically meaningless. This isn’t the worst jumping-off point, since the same sort of goes for the viewer. Why am I spending three and a half hours watching this? What does Puiu want from me? Is he trying to punish us? Meta questions like these are fine for framing a review of a movie you only have 24 hours to watch and no hope of fully ingesting on only one go-through, but I don’t want us to give up on the text itself. Solovyov’s questions are provocative, important, regardless of whose mouths they’ve been put in, and I hope that in the afterlife of this film’s rollout we have all the rich conversations about it that it deserves.
Time (2020)
Her Socialist Smile (2020)
To atone for watching only one new-release documentary last year, I’ve been consciously trying to see more this year. NYFF had plenty of options for the nonfiction crowd. Garrett Bradley’s Time, which you can now already stream on Amazon, is a moving film about Fox Rich, a Black woman who has spent some 20 years advocating for the release of her husband Robert from jail, where he is serving a 60-year sentence for a failed bank robbery (Fox was also involved, but served only 3 and a half years of jail time).
Bradley pairs her own footage with old home videos shot by Fox to accentuate the personal stakes of Fox’s present frustrations trying to work through a legal and judicial system that’s uninterested in seeing men like her husband back on the other side of the prison’s walls. It’s a good movie, though I’m a bit bewildered that I haven’t seen more people take issue with the hackneyed use of heartstring-tugging music. Trust us to feel our own emotions, filmmakers!
The find of the festival, for me, was John Gianvito’s Her Socialist Smile. It’s a movie about Helen Keller’s long career as a socialist and radical activist, an aspect of her life which I was always dimly aware of without ever knowing much of the specifics. After a brief prologue featuring one of what I understand to be only very few recordings of Keller’s public speeches, Gianvito cedes the vocal storytelling to poet Carolyn Forché, who narrates a chronological account of Keller’s life.
Shots of Forché in the recording booth are intercut with close-up shots of the natural world—leaves on a tree, snow on a brick wall, the sort of grounding things that would have comprised Keller’s sensory terrain. The majority of the movie, however, is given over to one of two kinds of shot: a wall of text, taken directly from Keller’s speeches and writings, or text in Q&A format superimposed over shots of an old theater, presumably to evoke the image of audiences asking Keller questions at her public appearances.
So prolific and verbose was Keller that at times watching the movie feels more like reading a very fiery book. Keller’s moral seriousness is unrelenting and seems to have been firmly so from early in her life. About her education at Harvard she does not mince words. “Education has taught me that it is a finer thing to be a Napoleon that to invent a new potato,” she writes in a rebuke to the latent imperialist mindset of the school’s educational program. Keller understood so clearly how unacceptable the conditions of life are for so many people on earth that compromising on her commitments to revolutionary change was rarely an option (“I don’t give a DAMN about semi-radicals”), although she would adjust some of her views about, e.g., Soviet Communism, when new information prompted her to do so.
Frederick Wiseman was also in (virtual) attendance this year with his second-longest film ever, a 4.5-hour tour de Boston City Hall. We are longtime fans of Fred in this house, and I’m pleased to report he’s still got it at 90; I may write more about it later, but in the meantime you can look forward to watching City Hall in virtual cinemas starting in early November.
The festival ran for nearly a month, in which time I saw over a dozen films, new and old, short and long. The highlight was probably the restoration of Mohammad Reza Aslani’s The Chess Game of the Wind, previously only publicly screened once before it was lost (except for a censored VHS copy), until 2015, when an original film print was discovered in an antique shop. Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland also had an early premiere here; while I didn’t like it quite as much as her previous movies (The Rider and Songs My Brother Taught Me), there’s much to love about her continued spotlighting of nonprofessional actors in their element. Eugène Green’s original Basque myth Atarrabi & Mikelats was a last-minute addition and wonderful surprise, while Hong Song-soo’s The Woman Who Ran was comfortingly familiar, yet not without some changeups to his beloved formula. I saw only one debut film: Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, a film too brutal to recommend, even if its best moments more than make up for the evil she inflicts on her characters.
Listening
Friend of the newsletter Eleni Palis appeared on the Framing Media podcast for a discussion inspired by her article “Race, Authorship and Film Quotation in Post-Classical Cinema.” The conversation covers how filmmakers in the post-classical Hollywood era quote or “recycle” footage from classical Hollywood films (think, for instance, of the use of Rebel Without a Cause in La La Land). The prohibitively expensive costs of licensing even a few seconds of some of these films obliged Black artists working either independently or with meager budgets within the studio system to find new ways of situating their work within film history—or circumventing the process altogether.