msicism

A Couple of Recent Views

Grandma's House (Sophy Romvari, 2018)

I watched this, along with the somewhat more straightforward Nine Behind (2016), on the Criterion Channel, which has wisely decided to showcase the work of Romvari, a very unique maker of short films. They are not exactly experimental, nor are they essay films, and although they all engage with narrative elements, one couldn't really call them narrative shorts. Her work stems from...

The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm (Morgan Fisher, 1973)

Morgan Fisher is an unusual figure in experimental cinema. While his work is clearly aligned with the concepts and procedures of structuralism, he isn't always cited as one of the major figures of that "school." Fisher's work is wry and rigorous; it is probably closest in attitude to the films of Hollis Frampton. But where Frampton's films are wide-ranging in approach, reflecting his underlying fascination with philosophy and mathematics, Fisher's d...

Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (David Rimmer, 1970)

This is a bit of classic as far as Canadian structural film goes, although it isn't shown all that much these days. (A few years ago, TIFF Wavelengths premiered a restoration print, although I don't recall its general reception.) I'd previously only seen Variations in a highly degraded video transfer, so this lovely copy sort of makes me feel as if I'm seeing Rimmer's film for the very first time.

If you look back at P. Adams Sitney's...

Agnus Dei (Miklós Jancsó, 1971)

Obviously it's a bit premature to make any grand declarations about Jancsó, seeing as I've only seen three of his films, one so long ago I can barely remember. But seeing Agnus Dei closely on the heels of The Round-Up, I feel like I've now gotten a fairly solid sense of the style, the brand, the atmosphere. I joked about this on Twitter...

The City and the City (Christos Passalis and Syllas Tzoumerkas, 2022)

A film that is far more interesting than successful, The City and the City more than lives down to its odd, elliptical title. It seems that its makers are laboring under a false assumption. Given that its subject is a complex, sprawling one -- the lives and fates of Jews living in Thessaloniki, particularly following the Nazis' occupation of Greece -- it only makes sense that the film's makers, Passalis and Tzoumerkas, would conclude that t...

The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966)

The first of Jancsó's films to really break through in the West, The Round-Up seems to suggest things to come. The film is explicitly about the situation in Hungary following the failed 1848 revolution. With the Habsburgs firmly back in power, the military was rounded up dozens of defeated rebel soldiers and their fellow-travelers, essentially toying with them until they receive the order of exactly what to do with them. The director's uni...

The Cathedral (Ricky D'Ambrose, 2021)

Often we follow filmmakers who show continued promise, but for whatever reason are unable to bring their talent and vision to the next level. So it's incredibly gratifying when all the pieces come together and a "subject for future research" (to borrow Sarris's phrase) achieves the breakthrough that all previous works have been suggesting was on the way. Ricky D'Ambrose's The Cathedral is such a work, one that maintains the director's basic...

Welcome to the Yawn Show

Miklós Jancsó, that is! The Hungarian master, who shone brightly in the 60s and 70s, fell out of favor in the 80s, and is now making a comeback here in the 20s, is April's Director of the Month. Actually, very few of these films are available online, so I will most likely purchase the Kino Blu-ray set. But for now, I do have a copy of  Round-Up (not affiliated with the Monsanto Corporation), so I'll get started on that.

April Director of the Month Poll

In Reverse

So I've been swamped with work this semester, and I am not getting to write as much here as I'd like to. In light of this, I have decided to make some minor changes. 

1. I am bringing back the monthly director poll. I felt like those auteur-plunges really helped me focus my attention, and were much more educational than just the odd, random film from 1972.

2. I am not entirely abandoning The 1972 Project, however. I will work from a...

The Novelist's Film (Hong Sangsoo, 2022)

Once again giving the lie to the common claim that all Hong films are the same, The Novelist's Film pointedly demonstrates the formal limitations of his method. Although Hong's latest rallies in the end, proving to be somewhat more complex than its banal first-half would suggest, The Novelist's Film is one of the few recent Hong films that feels like a dramatic exercise rather than a full-fledged piece of cinema. For quite some tim...

Azor (Andreas Fontana, 2021)

One of 2021's standout debut films, Azor is a meticulous and frustrating experience. Loosely patterned on Heart of Darkness -- even ending with a literal trek into the jungle and discovering the hidden nexus of political power -- Azor is a film that asks us to observe the fastidious naivety of its protagonist while affording its viewers the benefit of hindsight. It's not that Swiss private banker Yvan De Weil (Fabrizio Ron...

Master (Mariama Diallo, 2022)

[NOTE: This review contains spoilers.]

In his review for the 2014 comedy Let's Be Cops, Wesley Morris observed, "all movies choose their moment. It's called a release date. Some moments, however, choose their movies." He was of referring to the "coincidence" that a dumb buddy movie about two guys prete...

Jackass Forever (Jeff Tremaine, 2022)

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Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)

There's no getting around the historical importance of Losing Ground, it being the second feature film directed by a Black woman. (See below.) Taken exactly as it is, Losing Ground is a flawed film, but one that is never uninteresting. Like so many debut filmmakers, Collins directs Losing Ground as if she will never have another chance to make a film, and this was almost correct. (After a ...

Three Floors (Nanni Moretti, 2021)

Moretti's latest is bizarre. The film hurtles from incident to incident, almost as if an entire season of some middling prestige-TV entry had been edited down to a mere two hours. It's also tonally inscrutable. Random life-shattering events that seem to cry out for Sirkian treatment are presented with a dour middlebrow realism. Now, it's been quite some time since I've really liked a Moretti film (checks logs) -- eek, not since Caro Dia...