Before he fell foul of the Iranian government in 2010, Jafar Panahi was very much a realist filmmaker, his aesthetic seemingly a world away from the self-referential concerns which mark much of the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Then the social critique of films such as The Circle (00) and Offside (06) led to Panahi being threatened with imprisonment, prevented from traveling, and forbidden to make films for 20 years....
The time-honored trope of the treasure hunt never seems to get stale, although a central aspect of it may not be exactly translatable into every language—the idea of digging one hole in order to dig yourself out of another one. The theme receives distinctively sardonic treatment in The Treasure, a concise parable from Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu. For a long stretch, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal going on in The Treasure—something that was true of his earlier slow-burners Police, Adjective (09) and the somewhat claustrophobic meta-cinematic contemplation When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (13)....
Amos Vogel. © The Estate of Amos Vogel Thousands of miles away and a year before Amos and Marcia Vogel launched Cinema 16, another amateur appreciator of experimental film, Frank Stauffacher, with collaborator Richard Foster, presented the first Art in Cinema (AIC) series at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in the fall of 1946. The inaugural year was a survey of experimental and avant-garde film history. Amos Vogel was impressed enough to write to Stauffacher for details....
Merle Oberon in Night in Paradise (Arthur Lubin, 1946) In May 1935, a new star shone on Hollywood’s horizon. Raven-haired and tan-complexioned, her eyes a striking shape, she looked unlike most leading ladies the industry had seen up until then. To the now-defunct film publication Screen & Radio Weekly, these traits made her “bizarre, bewildering, and different,” as if she were a foreign object who did not quite belong on American screens....
The 1989 publication of Shahrnush Parsipur’s novella resulted in the author’s imprisonment in Iran, owing to its (allegedly) blasphemous depictions of female empowerment and sexuality. Parsipur currently lives in exile in the U.S., and the book, now considered a mini-masterpiece, remains banned in the motherland. It’s also perfect source material for Iranian expat Shirin Neshat, an art-world star known for work involving the complexity and contradictions of the Islamic female experience....
Photo by Julie Cunnah, 2015. Since her 1955 debut feature La Pointe Courte, the work of Agnès Varda has managed to reflect the interior and exterior worlds of her and her subjects in playful, insightful ways, regardless of genre or format (feature or short, digital or film). Her voiceover narration in documentaries like The Gleaners and I (00), The Beaches of Agnès (08), and the five-part series Agnès Varda: From Here to There (12) is direct and conversational, breaking down complex subjects of repurposing in the context of Western capitalism, loss, and art history into understandable and funny pieces....
Maelstrom Your second feature, Maelstrom, a dark comedy from 2000 about guilt and bodily alienation, meant a lot to me at the time, and still does. It feels more similar to Enemy than any of your other films. You’re totally right. There’s a symmetry [to them]. They are brothers in some ways. I thought of them together when I was writing and shooting Enemy. My challenge was not to fall into the same traps....
Like his previous fiction film, August Winds (14), Neon Bull is set in Brazil’s Northeast, a historically impoverished area of the country that has figured prominently into its culture, be it in Bahian sambas or in the imaginations of writers and filmmakers like Oswald de Andrade or Glauber Rocha. Playing on notions of what the area is, Neon Bull follows Iremar (Juliano Cazarré), a cowboy with a traveling vaquejada (traditional rodeo) who designs women’s clothing in his spare time; while on the road, he alternately bonds and feuds with Galega (Maeve Jinkings) and her precocious, put-upon daughter Cacá (Alyne Santana)....
With co-creator Andrew Mollo, Brownlow pioneered an experimental, documentary feature style in both the original “what-if movie,” It Happened Here (1964), which depicted a Nazi occupation of England, and the historical film Winstanley (1975), which re-created Gerrard Winstanley’s 1649 attempt to establish an agricultural commune on radical Christian principles. (Mollo, technical adviser on Dr. Zhivago, would go on to work as a military consultant on films like The Pianist and production designer on the popular Richard Sharpe and Horatio Hornblower TV movies....
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023) Nine years after the landmark historical drama Jauja (2014), Lisandro Alonso returns with a feature several times more ambitious than anything the 47-year-old Argentine director has yet undertaken. Structured around a series of narrative pivots reminiscent of Jauja’s climactic temporal ellipsis, Eureka is a time-, space-, and genre-jumping attempt to locate resonances among various indigenous communities in three distinct milieus: the Old West of some collective cinematic past; South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in the present day; and the jungles of 1970s Brazil....
In the Mood for Love A defining force in Asian cinema, cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing has shot key works for Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tran Anh Hung, and others. Born in Taiwan, Lee served in the Navy before entering a training program at the Central Motion Pictures Company. Beginning as an intern and working his way up, Lee developed an uncanny grasp of artificial and natural lighting. Over the course of 70 movies, he has attracted directors for his willingness to experiment with lenses, film stocks, and an array of filters, some of which he devised himself....
You originally worked on this script with Cezary Harasimowicz, and it had more of an action feel to it. Why did you feel the need to change the story, and why did you choose to work with Rebecca Lennkiewicz? It wasn’t about the writers. It was where I was with the story. I usually write my own scripts, and I like to have a partner to kick it around with....
The Viewing Booth (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz) “Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Viewing Booth is explicitly about watching, pursuing a conceit in which we viewers view someone viewing footage,” Eric Hynes writes in his Make It Real column for Film Comment (May-June 2020). “Adjacent to his editing suite, Alexandrowicz set up a viewing booth—ostensibly a voiceover chamber—that’s simultaneously isolated from and connected to the director, who’s stationed on the other side of the glass....
Drew passed away this past July at the age of 90. Two years ago, he generously spent a long time sharing with me firsthand recollections of documentary’s historic shift in the 1950s and 1960s. All too often the history of what’s usually called cinema verité tends to coalesce around the same names and victory-lap claims to “capturing reality,” and sometimes Drew’s role seems relegated more to textbooks. In our interview, his journalism-derived criteria for what makes a good story are evident, and he’s not shy about his role in guiding progress, but he also recognizes the influences of other filmmakers and the role of money in putting obviously appealing ideas into action....
These shorts and features are somewhat serene works, with scenes and characters that reappear with slight differences in each film, connected with a current of wry conceptual humor that could be called hopeful. In a sense, the best exhibition space for these “Asian films,” as Rodrigues and da Mata refer to them, would be a large gallery room in which each would play on a loop, both side by side and across from each other, producing multiple echoes and possible view points, and producing a wonder peculiar to travelers....
Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926) Most variations of the Faust legend work, at least on one level, as morality plays. Their drama is largely internal, a conflict between the Faust figure’s spiritual commitments and his mortal desires. Each one asks something along the lines of “What on this earth might someone want badly enough to sell away his soul?”—and each gives a slightly different answer. F.W. Murnau’s Faust, which after 87 years remains one of the most visually sophisticated films ever made, casts the story in different terms: here, Faust is a kind of Job figure, pushed to defy God out of duty to his fellow men....
Beware the movie based on literature, or, in that showbiz term of art, a “literary property.” Not because adaptations are an inferior form of cinema—I don’t believe that for a moment—but because they create an added layer of copyright issues for the film. When a movie stays long out of sight, and the studio still has prints, very often the reason you’re not seeing it has to do with the rights to its literary source....
Starless Dreams It’s often there, just above the frame, but you don’t really think about it. Even in documentaries there’s a suspension of disbelief, our attention focused on what’s visible within the box. Yet in a casually crucial moment in Starless Dreams, by Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei, the normally invisible boom mic not only becomes visible, it’s temporarily re-commissioned as a pop-star accessory. A teenage female prisoner in a Tehran detention center derails a sober conversation to acknowledge the bulbous cylinder looming inches above her head, then breaks into song as if she were auditioning for Iranian Idol....
