Viewing posts written by: Conall Cash
This paper is concerned with a gesture in film criticism so unabashedly perverse as to be perhaps difficult for us to take seriously: I’ll be talking about what it might mean for a critic to write about a film they haven’t seen. In considering some instances of this peculiar phenomenon in criticism, I hope to introduce a discussion of the (often untheorised) notion of experience as it is given to us in criticism, and to think about what it is…
Reviews of films by James Benning, Ivan Sen and the Dardennes.
Peter Tscherkassky: This is one of the things which I will explain during the masterclass. It’s a process which in my opinion could not be done with a computer. My example always is: I sit in the darkroom with my laser pointer, with the found footage in front of me, and I want to copy the face of Barbara Hershey [star of The Entity, from which Tscherkassky made two found-footage films, Outer Space and Dream Work]. So I sit there, and it’s nearly completely dark, with just a tiny bit of red light. And I know the face is in this spot. So I copy it, and then move on to the next frame, and I vaguely remember where it was, so I start looking around. Where is it, where is it? Ah, here. — So, I could never program a computer to go and look for Barbara Hershey’s face — but not immediately, to look around for it. This is one of the many effects, so to speak, where the manual process, the hand-crafted aspect, deeply informs what the film looks like. If you were to do that with a computer, it would look like an imitation of something, or I don’t know… I’m quite sure it would have its own beauty, but it would look completely different from what I’m doing. Besides, by that time [by the time I've found the section of the frame where Barbara Hershey's face appears], I’ve created three scratches. You spend months and months with the footage, with the films, and you don’t even start working until the material starts talking to you, asks you for something. And it’s constantly talking to you while you’re looking at it, for months. So, like in Outer Space, the sequence with the sprocket holes. This was something that came up just by chance. One day, by mistake, I copied one of the sprocket holes. So, OK, why not do it on purpose? And what happens if I lift it up, and what happens if I change the angle? There’s a huge amount of chance involved, which also could not be done with a computer. Of course you can put some chance effects inside the computer, but still it would be something completely different.
Sometimes I wonder how much I really like going to film festivals. Of course, I enjoy getting to travel to foreign cities to watch exciting new (and old) cinema, meeting and hanging out with other foreign critics, all at the festival’s expense — it would be outrageous and ungrateful of me not to. But fun and exciting as it is, still the experience even of a good festival (and South Korea’s Jeonju International Film Festival, under review here, is, I think, one of the best) is often in some way unsatisfying. There are the obvious reasons, things many people who travel to festivals no doubt experience — the discovery that going to three or four films a day quickly starts to resemble work, with its regulated hours and repetitive tasks; the narrowness of the world you are limited to when attending a festival in a foreign city, only dimly aware of your surroundings as you shuffle from one screening to the next; the realisation that you are, at the end of it all, simply a tourist, and as such cannot escape the boredom and fragility that are the essence of the tourist’s experience. But there are two primary reasons for my ambivalence at attending film festivals — the first, entirely personal one, is simply that when I’m at a festival I have to pretend to be a journalist (because, after all, it is as a journalist that I’ve been invited to attend). Pretending to be a journalist means pretending to know what’s going on, to inhabit the contemporary moment (as Chris Fujiwara has written, “journalists work in the very factory of the contemporary, at its “heart machine”… They make the contemporary contemporary”), pretending to care about what the important films are this year and even about the awards; sometimes it even means interviewing and hobnobbing with filmmakers and other visiting artists, pretending to be a part of the festival ‘world,’ or of ‘film culture’. I find this all perfectly impossible, but still I simulate the actions of the journalist or travelling critic (however ambivalently), because the drive to seek out interesting films keeps pushing me on to more festivals whenever the chance to go to one appears, where I find myself facing the same situation.
If nothing else, this year’s list confirms that we at Screen Machine are big Jesse Eisenberg fans (but then who isn’t?). It perhaps shows other continuities from our 2009 list, indicating some of the approaches and prejudices we have as film critics and spectators. We hope that the pieces we’ve written on each of the twenty films that appear here are of greater use and interest to readers than the mock-suspense of learning what finishes in which position. Returning to these films now allows us to say things about them that we couldn’t when they first appeared, and we think that these reflective pieces on the films of 2010 will offer plenty to discuss as we begin the new year.
David Fincher’s The Social Network is by far the most interesting mainstream American film of this year. If the film ultimately feels like a disappointment, unable, despite its brilliance, to do to us what those depictions of obsession and monstrosity which are Fincher’s masterpieces did, this can’t be explained simply by the fact that those films were about serial killers and ultra-violence, while this is a film about Harvard computer nerds.
Conall Cash reviews two of the major films of the festival, by veteran auteurs Manoel de Oliveira and Koji Wakamatsu, while Maggie Scott looks at MIFF’s closing night film and Ali Brown investigates Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia For The Light.
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.
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…
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…
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…
