How can a fabrication replicate reality? Entire curricula have been devoted to untangling this conundrum-the battle between representation and its supposed “limits.” And Omer Fast, a young Israeli-born, Berlin-based video artist, provides an ingenious update to the eternally returning struggle. You can read the complete version of this article in the July/August 2003 print edition of Film Comment.
The Dupes (Tewfik Saleh) The one cinematic moment I encountered in 2023 that is seared into my mind is from The Dupes, the recently restored 1972 film by Egyptian director Tewfik Saleh. The novella Men in the Sun by Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani is the kindling for the film, a blazing, black-and-white thriller about three Palestinian refugees attempting a treacherous desert crossing from Iraq into Kuwait in the 1950s. They’re taken along by a shady man—himself a Palestinian, now employed by a businessman in Kuwait—driving an empty water truck back to his boss....
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023) When I think through all the movies that I watched in the past year, it’s not an image, per se, that jumps out at me, but rather a cessation of images. As the credits roll on Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon, and the chanting of Osage dancers—seen whirling in circles in the film’s final, hawk’s-eye-view shot—fades out, we’re left with what sounded to me like a field recording of a prairie in the evening: crickets trilling, birds chirping, and above all, wind rushing through tall grasses....
In Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, critic and theorist Genevieve Yue looks beyond the film image to explore the feminist implications of the film object itself—of its emulsion and base, spliced edits, and laboratory printing. Yue opens her book with a discussion of the China Girl, also known as the “leader lady” or “girl head”: an image of a smiling, typically white woman attached to the beginning or end of a film reel as a gauge for color timing and setting tone density....
Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987) “It’s wonderful to live as spirit and testify for all eternity to only what is spiritual in people’s minds,” Damiel (Bruno Ganz) tells fellow angel Cassiel (Otto Sander), the two overcoated chroniclers of human affairs, invisible to their earthbound subjects, perched in the front seat of a showroom automobile. Yet sometimes Damiel longs to know the burden of mortal transience. “I want to enter the history of the world,” he’ll later declare....
201 Minutes of Space Idiocy For many of us, the first exposure to classic films wasn’t on film at all, it was in print. It was in black and white even if the films were in color, it was printed on cheap paper, and it was full of some of the worst puns known to man. We thrilled to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Oddfather, Arthur Penn’s revisionist Western Little Dull Man, the sophisticated sex comedy Shampooped, and Stanley Kubrick’s ground-breaking 201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy....
Film Comment’s interview took place in a music-rehearsal room at the Camerimage Film Festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland. Lenoir has strong opinions about film and digital, including an intriguing concern about the effect of digital photography on actors with blue eyes. Things to Come Your job has to do with how technology can help get to an artistic goal. Because of shooting digitally, is that now easier or is it more complicated?...
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethekul, 2021) With his sixth sense for setting the vibe of his films with blasts of pop fanfare, Sean Baker delivered the perfect anthem for Cannes’ final stretch in the opening credits of Red Rocket, his first entry in the festival’s official competition. NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” with its soft rendering of breakup drama, captured with pristine clarity what most journalists and critics felt after more than a week of cringing during the first COVID-19–era Cannes....
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki, 2023) It is Friday the millionth of May, and we are approaching the eerie end zone of the Cannes Film Festival. The tide of rosé-bleary journalists has begun to ebb from the Azure Coast, though the last Competition films—The Loach and The Rohrwacher, as The Old Oak and La chimera are termed here—still had not screened as of this morning. The uncharacteristic rains of last week have broken, but though the skies are blue, the air is muggy, and everyone would really love a nice, long nap....
Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024). Photo Courtesy of A24. Title and prerelease Reddit speculation notwithstanding, Alex Garland’s Civil War does not actually have much to say about a speculative Second American Civil War. In fact, one learns more about the film’s premise from its promotional materials than from the film itself. The multiple, conflicting maps of a newly war-torn United States—circulated by the distributor, A24, and resoundingly mocked by the online commentariat—appear nowhere in the movie....
Our House Yui Kiyohara Yui Kiyohara’s auspicious second feature—a mysterious, surprising work that recalls Jacques Rivette, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (her teacher), and even Mulholland Drive—is something like a low-key, stripped-down take on the oneiric “woman in trouble” film. Drawing structural inspiration from the fugues of Bach, the film interweaves two parallel narratives unfolding seemingly at the same time and in the same place, albeit in different dimensions. We first meet 13-year-old Seri with some friends during an apparent attic dance party, and soon we learn that she lives with her mother in a coastal town....
Images from Aladdin (Guy Ritchie, 2019) Disney’s remake of Aladdin features human actors and digital creatures, but don’t call it “live-action.” Maladroit and overlong, its resting state is moribund. The digital accoutrements of Will Smith as the Genie imprison him as much as the wild 2-D caricature art of the Disney cartoon liberated Robin Williams. Director Guy Ritchie (who shares script credit with John August) told Entertainment Weekly that he envisioned “a muscular 1970s dad ....
Few actors leap between feats of empathy and masterstrokes of imagination with the offhand brilliance of Julianne Moore. She’s never done it more stunningly than in her back-to-back performances in Still Alice as a linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer’s (it just won her the Oscar) and in Maps to the Stars as a Hollywood beauty who panics over aging because she’s an emotional adolescent (it won her the Best Actress prize last spring at Cannes)....
Spare but by no means sparse, Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night introduces its main character in the film’s first frames and then sticks with her for the duration. It’s hard to think of an example of a director’s camera paying such continuous and slavish devotion to a single character—but the Dardenne Brothers’ Rosetta does come to mind. Loktev’s nameless heroine, played with emphatic determination by Luisa Williams, has an indeterminate ethnic look that plays directly into the vagaries of the plot within which she’s embedded....
“To each his own Losey” is how the critic Tom Milne began his 1967 interview book with Joseph Losey. His tally of Loseys at that point was three: the Hollywood version (1948-52), the early British incarnation (1954-62), and the art-house auteur revealed in The Servant (63) and culminating in Accident (67). Immediately after that, of course, another one appeared, the internationalist and, for a while, fellow traveler of the Burton-Taylor jet set, the maker of weird, floating fables like Boom (68) and Figures in a Landscape (70)....
Easy Rider In 1970, following the phenomenal worldwide, cross-cultural success of Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper appeared on the Johnny Cash show. You can see an excerpt on YouTube, during which Hopper—wearing denim, a Stetson, and centrally parted long hair—removes his hat and recites the entirety of Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” The poem is delivered in a single spotlit shot, with the camera slowly moving in. Hopper’s enunciation is unexpectedly crisp, earnest, and assured....
To be fair, my dad did give me one thing: his passion for movies. So in honor of that gift, and with Father’s Day approaching, now seems like a good time to explore some of the worst dads in cinema history. (And it may go without saying, but they are in all cases terrible husbands as well.) Much breath and many words have been exhausted on analyzing the god-awful parenting techniques of Jack Nicholson’s axe-wielder Jack Torrance in The Shining; the daughter-raping Noah Cross (John Huston) in Chinatown; and the militant, abusive “Bull” Meecham (Robert Duvall) in The Great Santini....
While you’re busy waiting to see Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, the director is about to embark on his first American film. Idol’s Eye, which starts shooting in October in Chicago, stars Robert Pattinson, Robert De Niro, and Rachel Weisz. Let’s turn it over to Assayas: “It’s a true crime story, part of Chicago lore. End of the 1970s, burglars confront the Outfit, specifically mob über-boss Tony Accardo—the kind of guys you see in Michael Mann’s Thief, which was inspired by similar characters....
