I distinctly remember being in ninth grade, trying to convince friends to make a movie with me. The pitch: the opening scene of the film was interrupted by the lead actor being hit by a car; as the serious narrative went on, the film kept being interrupted by worse and worse accidents, by more and more actors leaving, until the last scenes were filmed by the director alone in his bathroom, depicting the action with dolls.
What I remember was giving this pitch to a friend. He turned to me and said, very seriously: “A movie about making movies?” A pause. “It’s been done.”
Somehow, the sheltered private school kids in my ninth grade class already knew that movies about making movies are as masturbatory as it gets. Pere Portabella’s 1971 Cuadecuc, vampir isn’t quite the typical entry, though.
Cuadecuc is made up of footage shot on the set of Jess Franco’s 1971 Count Dracula, but, shot on very high-contrast black-and-white film with no spoken dialogue recorded, it can’t be called a documentary. Approximately two-thirds of the footage is shot as if it was diagetic, and we more or less follow the narrative of Franco’s Dracula film.
Between scenes, we see glimpses of set work: Christopher Lee, playing Dracula (despite this not being a Hammer production), lies in his coffin while PAs spray spiderwebs over him with a rotating fan; Maria Rohm and Soledad Miranda (as Mina and Lucy, respectively) ironically pose for Portabella’s camera.
But at no point do the interstitial scenes feel more real than the narrative ones. The complete absence of on-set sound (until the final moments) finishes what the cinematography begins, unmooring us as viewer from “the set” as a specific place. Instead, we are left with Carles Santos’ soundtrack, who sets everything to barely-audible drones and bleeps that sound like Stars of the Lid accidentally doubled their daily dose of laudanum.
The editing and camerawork, too, play too much into the story to allow the real and fictional worlds to settle into layers. Portabella uses a cut to turn Lee into a bat, matching Franco’s original cut, and the zooming handheld camera — Portabella regularly repeats that most characteristic of classic horror camera moves, the slow zoom on a woman’s horrified face — to invest emotional energy here and there, where it makes dramatic sense.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, a vocal fan of Cuadecuc, sees in it a deep political significance. I will leave such speculations to those more informed about Portabella, who certainly was politically engaged in Spanish life, although I’m not sure the connection between Jess Franco the director and Francisco Franco the dictator is enough to go on. Even absent all subtext, though, Portabella’s film is a strange, wonderful thing, and deserves to be seen.
Thinking things through is not 
Brody is too kind. Godard Mon Amour posits that Godard (
Garrel is encouraged to play Godard as the Forrest Gump of the revolution, stalking around with the mock-simian postures of a Groucho Marxist, minus the anarchist glee. A recurring slapstick motif finds Godard’s glasses repeatedly crushed, often by protestors, which does double duty in demonstrating that: a) he’s a 
Why, then, does Godard Mon Amour exist? For who? The biopic elements, that bourgeois romance, is clumsily intertwined, a transtexual Contempt for the Cliff’s Notes set. The whole air of
I’ve noticed 
It’s never boring because boredom is (usually) the conflict between not being interested in something, but feeling you should pay attention to it for some later payoff. But no scene in Infinity War points towards some future payoff; as a result, almost every scene is unnecessary. If you zone out for a few minutes, you’ve missed nothing; if you pay attention to every moment perfectly, you’ve gained nothing.
If I had seen Succubus (1968) about a decade earlier, my 16-year-old self would probably have just given up and mentally categorized it as a horror movie. The movie does open up with one of those BDSM-themed theater acts that are omnipresent in 60s European movies, and there are a few murders sprinkled throughout, as our heroine Lorna Greene (
You can find it in the talking head/archival model abutting the discursive essay film (
Like much of Greene’s work (
By contrast, Purge This Land is almost entirely still, oblique enough to invite charges of inscrutability. As the title quote indicates, this is a meditation on 
Meanwhile, we look at the land, the places Brown lived and traveled, the house where he spent a final night with Frederick Douglas, who declined to accompany him on his doomed mission. Schmitt’s film doesn’t editorialize, but the authorial presence is there all the same. We are left wondering how a stubborn gaze, a refusal to zoom or pan, even could editorialize, but we feel it. What are these objects, these landscapes? What do they reveal or hide? What do they “mean”? Why are we being asked to look, and look, and look closer? There’s something unsettled. We become unsettled.
The occasion is technically the release of 
La Ciénaga has a number of options amid its sprawling bourgeois tapestry of a cast, but there’s little doubt that the men mostly haunt the periphery, phantoms of dissolute or dubious influence, their taciturn bodies frequently subject to a female gaze in the sweltering heat, with the erotically frantic teenagers, 
The Headless Woman (
Re-watching Fantasia for the first time since childhood, I thought a lot about Bohannan’s piece. Deems Taylor, the narrator, presents Fantasia to the viewer as educational in his opening comments, but is the point here merely to “educate”? After all, to educate is to pass on a body of knowledge, something that could be done much more effectively by a series of lectures and full performances than by animated short films.
But entertainment is diachronic: the order of things does matter. It does matter whether we learn about modernism after Romanticism, or the other way around. As such Fantasia is stuck between two positions. We cultured elites must entertain the average moviegoer to get them to learn about classical music — we must introduce it to them on a reduced, primal level.
I Am Not A Witch is full of these images, hauntingly captured by 
Shula’s adventures can take her from a government-mandated outdoor school in a forest clearing to the set of a Zambian talk show, coming on after a hip-hop artist to sit silently while her overseer tries to normalized her presence and more urbanized Africans look with something like horror at her exploitation. All of the witches are attached to ribbons, which can be retracted by enormous, surreal spools when they are needed elsewhere.
Nyoni’s magic realist satire inverts this: witches are born rather than exterminated in Shula’s Zambia of the mind, though their bodies are still rendered work-machines for late capitalism. An early comic scene in I Am Not A Witch finds a villager recounting his evidence for Shula’s sorcery in detail to the local policewoman — the girl appeared out of nowhere and lopped his arm off! — before abashedly adding that this happened in a dream. Still, the information is sent up the chain, from village rumor to police report to corrupt government official Mr. Banda (
The focus is less the beatings suffered and deadly dangers faced by the children — mostly recounted in heartbreaking asides, all the more painful because of the youthful innocence and shrugs hiding unimaginable hurt — then the friendships that sustain them in horrific circumstances. Poetic and lavish images of sunsets on the water alternate with memories of brutality and with the story of 17-year-old Peter, awaiting the removal from bondage of his missing friend. We also trail Kwame, verite-style, on rescue missions by boat across the vast expanse.
But there’s a structural limit to the film’s perspective. For one thing, it would’ve helped The Rescue List, and our understanding of the situation, to spend more time with the parents. We get a bare sense of why they would do it — poverty — but never get to delve deep into psychological or social ramifications in home villages (with small exception at end). We are talking about selling your own children here; the film’s otherwise admirable matter-of-factness obscures the gravity of this act. Fedele and Fink also opt to steer clear of any real examination of the government’s role, or the mining companies that created the conditions for slavery to flourish, or the colonialism that created the condition for the mining companies. We are routinely submerged, in media res, and experience first-hand what it’s like to confront these injustices, but we never get a full grasp on how or why they came to be.
For a variety of reasons, Singapore has not historically been known for its cinema, certainly not its home-grown productions. With the notable exception of 
Tan’s documentary is an evocation of the time, place, and people involved in this oddball story, and also something of a necromancy. After Cardona’s death decades later, his widow gets in touch; Shirkers lives! The complete reels of film, minus the sound, had been kept and preserved over the years, transported obsessively between the houses and countries where Cardona had lived in the interim, along with an alarmingly meticulous collection of Shirkers ephemera. He’d somehow appointed himself sole curator of the world’s most bizarre personal archive, like a mythological creature hoarding other people’s memories.
We are left with a triple absence, in the form of a movie that never was and a man it is nearly possible to situate in a country that has changed dramatically since Tan’s cameras captured its storefronts and countrysides. Shirkers, the documentary, is not simply Cardona’s story, as creepily compelling as it is. It’s also the road movie — its unspooling, indeterminate structure emphasized with experimental manipulations and complex textures in the sound design — that Tan never got to release, an excavation of memory and an occasion for reunion. Her Shirkers compatriots Jasmine Ng (with whom Tan endearingly pledged to form “the Coen Sisters” back in the day) and Sophia Siddique are on hand to give their takes, which range from lingering bewilderment to bemused grievance; the two are, respectively, a filmmaker/activist and the chair of Film Studies at Vassar. Their Shirkers is a flickering, cinematic bond between the three, made of fugitive stills.