Viewing posts written by: Conall Cash
In a previous generation it took the genius of a Fassbinder to reveal, in all its banal horror, the role of love as an instrument of capital; but for us today it seems to have required a couple of fools like writers Sean Anders and John Morris to demonstrate that, at our stage in late capitalism, love even as a function of state power has become dangerous and insufficiently controllable, and must be ruthlessly regimented in such a way that its auratic value is thoroughly ground down.
Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, published in 1964, is a major work of twentieth century gay literature, and a challenging book to make a film out of. If Isherwood is today rather less widely recognized than his contemporary Truman Capote – upon whom a brief, mean joke is played at one point in this film – one suspects that director Tom Ford intends with his adaptation of A Single Man to re-establish Isherwood’s place in the popular consciousness, much as…
If there is one scene in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus that is sure to provoke derisive laughter from cynical viewers, it is that which occurs just before the film’s long climactic sequence detailing the events of the 1995 Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand. In this scene, President Mandela (Morgan Freeman) touches down in a helicopter on the Springboks’ training field, while they are going through their final drills the evening before the big match. As the…
(Jacques Demy, right, with his wife Agnès Varda. A Demy retrospective will screen at the Melbourne Cinémathèque in April. Varda’s film “Daguerreotypes” screens on March 24.)
This Wednesday, February 10, the Melbourne Cinémathèque will begin its 2010 season with a screening of two films by Max Ophüls, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image cinemas. The program for the year, which can be found at the Cinémathèque website and in paper form at ACMI and the other usual outlets, features…
I was at the Telluride Film Festival back in September, when Up in the Air had its premiere there (as often happens, the film had its first public screening at Telluride, shortly before its “official” premiere at Toronto). I didn’t see it then, but the people I knew who did were very enthusiastic, speaking not at all about its relationship to director Jason Reitman’s previous hit film, Juno, but all about the film as a statement on the economic crisis…
When Kanye West, at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, grabbed Taylor Swift’s microphone during her acceptance speech for Best Video of the Year by a Female Artist, and pronounced the now infamous words – “Yo Taylor, I’m real happy for you and I’mma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time, OF ALL TIME!!” – there was immediate shock and astonishment, from both initial viewers and those who caught the outburst later on…
Post by Conall Cash
I hope to write a more essayistic piece on my experience of the festival in the coming weeks, but for now, a general roundup of what struck me as the most significant things about this year’s MIFF. The best new films I saw, listed in the order in which I saw them, were
À L’Aventure (Jean-Claude Brisseau)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Paper Soldier (Alexei German Jr.)
Love Exposure (Sion Sono)
A Lake (Philippe Grandrieux)
Nymph (Pen-ek Ratanaruang)
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel…
This short (64-minute), rather slight film, directed by the 100-year old Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira, is one of the best things I’ve seen at MIFF this year. One particularly lovely scene actually brought some tears to my eyes – an increasingly rare kind of emotional response to be had in the environment of this festival where quick, authoritative judgements are the name of the game. My tears were inexplicable – brought on not by any tragic occurrence in the…
The third feature directed by Philippe Grandrieux, A Lake is an astonishing, almost unbearably passionate film; it is unlike anything I have ever seen. The film alienated most of the audience that ventured into the small cinema at ACMI last night – roughly a quarter walked out during the screening, and afterwards I heard at least three groups of viewers express anger, confusion, resentment and dismissal. Such responses are understandable, particularly from the uninitiated, for Grandrieux’s film offers nothing at…
Lately it seems like every year a new film shows up that either proclaims itself or is proclaimed by the most audible voices in criticism as an hommage to the films of Yasujiro Ozu. The latest is Still Walking, by Hirokazu Kore-eda, but already in that act of naming its director we notice something that immediately distinguishes this film from the crowd. Ozu adoration takes on many forms, produces very different effects – sublimity in Hou Hsaio-hsien; devastating pathos in…
Katalin Varga marks the feature film debut of British director Peter Strickland. At 35, Strickland is not particularly young for a newcomer, and so perhaps it is no surprise to learn, as one does from just watching the first few minutes of the film, that he has already learnt his craft extremely well. What is surprising, and which only becomes apparent gradually through watching the film, is that Strickland is not just extremely …
A group of friends go on a holiday by the sea, and after a while one member of the group, a young woman, disappears; the rest of the film chronicles the friends’ attempts to deal with this disappearance. If this description of the plot of Asghar Faradi’s About Elly might give the impression that Faradi is gunning for the position of ‘the Iranian Antonioni’ (as Abbas Kiarostami might be called the Iranian Rossellini, Jafar Panahi the Iranian De Sica, etc.),…
When I first heard about this movie, a couple of months ago, I quickly skimmed the review and got the impression that it was a kind of uplifting documentary about a resilient guy living in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile who uses his love of disco to overcome oppression and fully express his individuality. Fortunately, a day or two before it was due to screen at MIFF, I decided to read about it more closely to see if it’d be worth getting…
Review by Conall Cash (catabloguing.wordpress.com)
A film whose soundtrack I’ve known for a long time but which I never expected to get a chance to see, watching Anna at MIFF was a real treat. A little bit Funny Face and a little bit Blowup, as anarchic as Godard but also as loving an ode to the movie musical form as Demy, I guess Anna, which was made for French TV in 1967 and directed by Pierre Koralnik, could most succinctly be…
A friend once remarked to me that, whenever he sees an advertisement for MIFF, he accidentally misreads it as ‘MILF.’ Upon entering the Festival Lounge for the conversation with Anna Karina today, one could have been forgiven for thinking that David Stratton, her interviewer, and many members of the audience had made a similar error. A weird, not terribly satisfactory, and occasionally rather sexist event, the conversation with Ms. Karina offered her a kind of adoration, but an adoration so…
Review by Conall Cash (catabloguing.wordpress.com)
A fun idea for a documentary, Our City Dreams follows five female artists of different ages who have moved to New York City from a variety of locales, and made their lives and their careers there. Attempting to offer impressions of the personality, artistic sensibility and personal history of five different contemporary artists in the space of about ninety minutes, the film is not exactly Rivette’s Belle Noiseuse, but it’s impressive how much it manages to…
