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Agnes Varda
News

Old News: April 1, 2019

by rick
written by rick

1. Local news

Local to me, anyway.

Free Angela and All Political Prisoners2. Women’s History Month 
March may be over, and with it “Women’s History Month”. But it’s always a good time to focus on contributions and perspectives from those excluded from the dude-canon. (How’s your #52FilmsByWomen going, by the way?)

In 1928, she wrote of the rapidly declining fortunes of female directors in Hollywood (of whom she was only one of many), saying, ‘Women entering the field now find it practically closed. Frequently a male writer is given a directorial chance on the supposition that he ought to know better than anyone else how his story should be presented on the screen. But you do not hear of a woman writer being so favored.’ Moreover, she wrote, ‘Men bosses are also less tolerant of failure or mediocrity in a woman director than in a man.’ The sexist culture on sets and in offices also posed a problem. ‘Men also like men’s talk in a business which may or may not always be attuned to the ears of women,’ she wrote.

The more things change …

3. Archives

  • Archives are an instrument of cultural memory, but as that term implies, the specifics of their use are fraught with political implications. Patrick Gathara argues that they, rather than museums, can assist in a process of colonial reckoning, but only if the objects on which colonialism is inscribed are returned to those who were oppressed, making them “curators of their own history.” Meanwhile, Chelcie Juliet Rowell and Taryn Cooksey argue for an ethic of care in confronting, and preserving, ugly histories, so that efforts to retain and make available hateful cultural products do not make us accomplices in their present-day promulgation.
  • Digitizing historical footage in Connecticut: “Thanks to that grant for about $24,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the society was able to loan approximately 75 films to a company called George Blood LP, which specializes in digitizing audiovisual media. CHS has about 50 more films in its collection but will have to apply for another grant to complete the digitizing project. The grant, received in September 2017, also allowed them to digitize thousands of photos and negatives as well as maps, architectural drawings, lithographs and posters.”
  • The odyssey of Scarecrow Video: “As for Scarecrow, it survived bankruptcy, the threat of closing and the death of its charismatic founder. In 2014, it became a nonprofit. And now, after 30 years, with more than 132,000 titles — many on VHS, laser disc and DVD — it is as much a cultural warehouse as anything else.”

Shackleton discovery4. Exhibition, Streaming, Unearthing

  • The Guardian has a look at the dynamic between cinema exhibition, video clubs, cell phones, and the use of public space across Africa: “Meanwhile not all the old cinema buildings house shops. ‘Every 15 kilometres in Ghana, they used to have a cinema,’ said Cooke. ‘They’ve all closed down. They’ve turned them into churches.’
  • A fascinating account of more celluloid documents beneath our feet: “For the past 100 years, a box of never-before-seen negatives has been preserved in a block of ice in Antarctica. Recently, Conservators of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust came across the 22 exposed, but unprocessed, cellulose nitrate negatives during an attempt to restore an old exploration hut.”
  • Terry Collins argues that “the death of the physical medium has been greatly exaggerated”: “So, I’m grateful to home video for this kind of preservation, and I know I’m not alone. Yes, some folks might be dumping their DVD collections, but an equal number are getting some amazing deals in the online classified ads or at stores who specialize in used media. These same collectors are also purchasing new movies on Blu-ray – the prices of which have fallen substantially on thousands of catalog titles and can be found in Dollar General chain stories discounted for as little as $2.99 each.”
  • Which sounds great. Unfortunately, Samsung, the market titan in Blu-ray players, also announced it’s abandoning their production.
  • In the streaming realm, Ovid.TV is live: Wang Bing, Chris Marker, Mila Turajlić, and Jean Rouch among the offerings. Criterion’s streaming service officially launches on the 8th, after a steady, predictably stellar roll-out of weekly movies-of-the-week like Mikey and Nicky, Wanda, and To Sleep With Anger.
  • Video Psychosis digs into low-budget horror, cult esoterica, and other miscellaneous vaults of disrepute. Episode 3 — “Killer turkey men, bad acid trips, Egyptian sacrifices, human flamethrowers & MORE” — here.

Agnes Varda on beach5. RIP

When I thought to include an in memorium section in this inaugural round-up, I didn’t anticipate how emotional it would be. I expect, as we mark anniversaries of cinema’s first century and a quarter, we’ll have to get used to this.

  • It seems impossible — intolerable — that Agnès Varda is gone. Despite living 90 years, and with diary films frequently fixated on death and impermanence, she always seemed too curious to rest. There are many tributes, and many more to come. This Bright Wall/Dark Room interview is essential (“I am in time. I’m old. I’ve been crossing time for years. I love the idea that even with a bad memory I can pick something which is years ago or someone I met years ago and I am here, and I enjoy it.”). So is this one in The Guardian (“’The grandmother of the New Wave!’ I found it funny, because I was 30 years old!”) I took a break from reading the obits and then came across this deliciously confrontational 1977 discussion, and missed her all over again (“If women must independently find their images, what of feminist-friendly men? ‘If men want to join, leave the door open. They can listen,’ Varda says.”) Elsewhere, she told an interviewer: “Finding fun where sometimes it’s just a bore; finding fun when it’s a burden. You can always make something look different.” When I think of Agnès Varda, I think of possibility, and light, and lightness, and the world seems heavier without her.
  • We also lost another irrepressible auteur in Larry Cohen. Subject of the recent Shudder doc King Cohen, he’s often summarily inserted under the heading “cult director” — true enough, but it doesn’t come close to encapsulating his long, weird career and singular visions. Film School Rejects has a “Larry Cohen starter kit”. Will Harris’ oral history of Q: The Winged Serpent for The Dissolve remains a hilariously insightful tribute.
  • Enigmatic, fiercely beloved pop chameleon Scott Walker died at 76.  Many of his incarnations are intertwined with cinema, from the films he scored (Carax’s Pola X, notably, and Vox Lux just last year among them) to the ones he programmed as part of the Meltdown Festival.
  • Hollywood Reporter: “John Carl Buechler, whose Hollywood horror makeup and special effects made movies like Hatchet, Deep Freeze and the Michael Moriarty-starrer Troll into classic frightfests, has died. He was 66.”
  • Pioneering performance artist, avant-garde filmmaker, and general creative force Carolee Schneeman passed on at 79. Maggie Nelson’s piece in The New Yorker, on Schneeman’s “re-enchantment,” is astute and affecting: “Carolee’s long-standing devotion to pleasure and atrocity, ecstasy and rage, protest and preservation has provided and will continue to provide a lavish example of what it might mean to meditate on these two crucial questions in the course of a life.”

 

 

 

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Film

The Weak and Idle Theme of Hermia and Helena

by rick
written by rick

The films of Matias Piñeiro are, we are told, above all other things “clever”. Arthouse confections structured, however loosely, as riffs on Shakespeare’s plays, the Argentinian-born director’s works straddle a line between creative reimaginings and film school twee. Hermia and Helena is my first Piñeiro (grain of salt and all that), but if it’s any indication, I’m coming down decidedly on the side of the latter. This is a film of ideas that amount to far less than the film seems to think they do.  

As the title suggests, we are in A Midsummer Night’s Dream territory here: the air-light narrative emphasizes doublings, four interconnected plots, and other ethereal call-backs. We open with Carmen (María Villar) vacating her NYC apartment after finishing up an artistic residency there and preparing to return to Buenos Aires. Camila (Agustina Muñoz), the woman with whom we spend the most time, arrives from Argentina to take her place in the program, and quickly strike up a relationship with an American named Lukas (Alex Ross Perry favorite Keith Poulson), who also had something going with Carmen it seems. (Lukas, with his indie flick hipster sensibility, seems likely to have something going with anyone in this program.) 

The doublings and meta-texts pile on top of each other. Camila’s project in Hermia and Helena is to translate (you guessed it!) A Midsummer Night’s Dream into Spanish for an Argentinian performance back home: her walls are covered with transliterations, and Piñeiro misses no opportunity to remind us that this is what it’s all about. Unfortunately, he frequently has to — the connections between stage play and romantic ex-pat Round Robin are so tenuous you have to squint to see them in the first place.

There is more. A left-behind Argentinian boyfriend is slighted by Camila’s bubbly shrug of a departure, and the two can connect only through the internet. A former lover in New York — a filmmaker whose Du Maurier-inspired short Piñeiro compels us to watch in full, like a guest arriving with a slide-show from his trip to undergraduate studies — is encountered and just as quickly jettisoned. Carmen receives postcards from a mysterious friend of Camila’s making her way across the Western U.S., which she turns into an art project as she awaits the arrival of someone she doesn’t know. Dislocation is the theme of the day here; if you missed it, Piñeiro tells the entirety of Hermia and Helena backwards, at random intervals. “Clever”.

Still, there are deft touches and some pleasant light comedy amid all the writerly hijinks. Superimpositions, sometimes three or four deep, convey that dislocation better in a few short transition moments than the narrative scenes they divide, and they’re beautiful to boot. One longish scene, set in upstate New York, in which Camila meets the father she never knew hints at a grounded film with recognizable humans, rather than the collection of fantasies, dodges, and non-places that constitute the bulk of Hermia and Helena‘s front-loaded aesthetic.

But these moments can’t redeem the interminable frothiness of the rest. Clocking in at less than an hour and half, Hermia and Helena somehow felt simultaneously far longer and far slighter than Cristi Puiu’s three-hour Sieranevada. Both Piñeiro (who splits his time between Argentina and New York) and the Romanian Puiu (who wrote his script after the death of his own father) clearly draw on personal experience in constructing their latest features, but to much different effect. Sieranevada feels like a comic grappling with ritual. Hermia and Helena feels like a clothesline on which to pin half-finished notes.

And irony of ironies: an introductory title card dedicates Hermia and Helena to Setsuko Hara, the iconic star of some of Ozu’s best films. Is Piñeiro subtly poking himself, contrasting the frequent silence and stasis of Tokyo Story or Late Spring with the non-stop, incongruously ragtime-scored motion of his film?

He doesn’t seem like a particularly self-deprecating director, so I’m guessing no. What that dedication means is up for grabs. But what’s clear is that Hermia and Helena is too long, too unmoored, and too faulty in its conception to work, even on its own terms.

 

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Film

Wake In Farce: The Maddening, Hilarious Family Dynamics of Sieranevada

by rick
written by rick

Sieranevada is a chronicle of false starts and interruptions. Clocking in at nearly three hours and rarely venturing out of a single, cramped apartment, writer/director Cristi Puiu‘s ultra-realist epic of Romanian family dysfunction is simultaneously hilarious and insufferable, filled with complicated interpersonal back-stories, old grudges, and meals that can’t seem to get started. Someone’s always arriving, departing, getting into a political argument, or dredging up past offenses.

Sound familiar? Sieranevada plays like an absurdist version of many an off-screen family gathering. Though probably with significantly more chain-smoking in the kitchen.

Our protagonist is Lary (Mimi Branescu, who also appeared in Puiu’s 2005 breakthrough The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), a mild-mannered guy who gives off a bemused, long-suffering air — the shaggy referee of the family, always two seconds from bursting into laughter at everyone’s ludicrous behavior. We meet him and his wife stuck in Bucharest traffic, appropriately enough, bickering because he bought the wrong color dress for their daughter’s Disney-themed play. (“The Brothers Grimm never even said the color of the dress,” he argues. “The play includes Mulan. Did the Brothers Grimm write Mulan?” she counters.)

They’re headed to Lary’s mother’s apartment (Nusa, played by Dana Dagaru, another Mr. Lazarescu vet) to commemorate the death of his father Emil, 40 days prior. According to custom, the family will gather, a priest will sanctify things, and a symbolic suit will be passed on. In this way, the passage of Emil’s soul to heaven will be assured.

Things don’t go well.

For starters, it’s been only three days since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and a conspiracy theorist nephew with a laundry list of internet references wants to open everybody’s eyes to the various plots afoot. The communist grandma’s pride in the revolution butts up against the modern liberalism of Lary’s sister Sandra (Judith State). The priest is late, as usual. A rebellious niece arrives with a passed-out friend in tow, who spends the entire film in an adjacent room, occasionally vomiting. No one wants to wake up the baby.

And that’s all before Nusa’s blustering brother-in-law Tony shows up, despite having been told to stay away thanks to his recent philandering with the building manager’s wife.

This narrative account could go on for, well, three hours. Puiu piles character on character, locking them into this small flat full of opening and closing doors. Sieranevada generates huge, stagy laughs from all these dynamics, as well as the kind of claustrophobia that only family can provide. The film’s insistent emphasis is on the quotidian and banal: one amusing sequence involves the stationary exercise bike that Lary, a doctor, has brought for his mother’s health, assembling it only to realize it needs a power adapter for the Romanian outlets. This is how things go here: the time spent on everything — bike assembly, food preparation, tailoring the ill-fitting suit so central to the ritual — is undone by something else.

Puiu plays his narrative like Bunuel in reverse: instead of a party one can’t leave, this is a gathering that can’t seem to get going.

Along the way, Sieranevada makes offhand references to contemporary politics and Romanian history, embodied in the generational conflicts and things as simple as those goddamn power outlets. Relationships are discussed — as is Tony’s notorious blow-job, much to his children’s horror, at the would-be dinner table — and histories revealed.

Puiu and cinematographer Barbu Balasoiu emphasize those seemingly endless doors that open to include or shut to separate, but also the constant motion of people going nowhere, trying to keep things under control. The ceremonial aspect of the gathering is mirrored in other rituals: the setting, and un-setting, of the table, the pouring of drinks in lieu of food that seems like it’s probably never going to be served, the trip to the store for cigarettes, the smoking of cigarettes. (The characters in Sieranevada smoke a lot of cigarettes.)

The one time we do leave the apartment, it comes as something of a relief (just as it would in real life). Of course, that outing is something of a catastrophe, too, so maybe it’s safer inside, with the devils you know.

Sieranevada takes its time going nowhere, and audiences unwilling to invest that time will likely find themselves frustrated. But if you have three hours to spend immersed in this world and its farcical trappings, Puiu’s latest is charming, in a maddening sort of way, and even revealing: about this family, this culture, and a Romania caught between eras.

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Film

Triumph, Redemption, and Tragedy in I Called Him Morgan

by rick
written by rick

Lee Morgan was only a teenager when he exploded onto the bop scene, a cocky but undeniably talented kid ably sharing the stage with Dizzy Gillespie. He played alongside his friend Wayne Shorter in Art Blakey’s legendary Jazz Messengers, basically defining Blue Note’s hard bop sound at the time. He released seminal records under his own name like The Sidewinder, Search for the New Land, and The Rumproller before getting caught up with heroin, vanishing into addiction, and triumphantly returning clean and full of energy.

And at 33, Morgan was shot dead on stage at a sawdust-floored Lower East Side saloon.

It’s a hell of a story, and I Called Him Morgan tells it concisely, through archival footage, still pictures, talking-head interviews, and the one big coup around which it structures the narrative: a late-in-life audio testimonial from the woman who shot him — his long-time common-law wife and manager, Helen Morgan.

Lee Morgan with trumpet

I Called Him Morgan announces its dual focus in the title, which is a quote from Helen. (She didn’t care for the name ‘Lee’.) The film wisely splits the telling in two, tracking the early lives and careers of both the doomed trumpeter and the woman who would bring him back from the dead only to kill him.

For one thing, this helps I Called Him Morgan avoid the standard archival doc pitfall of only featuring colleagues saying things like, “Boy, he was good” over records you could check out on YouTube, while also rounding the story out with crucial context. And, even if it’s in this tragic context, try and name another cinematic treatment of jazz that gave any space to the women in these stars’ lives? I can’t do it. (When Helen tells of meeting Miles Davis — “that nasty man” — who told her, “You got a smart mouth. I don’t mess with bitches with smart mouths,” we remember how these things usually go.)

Not that the film lacks for head-nodding footage of Morgan in action. Far from it. We get early performances with Gillespie and some great footage of the Jazz Messengers tearing it up, testimony to his talent and underscoring what was lost for no particularly good reason at all.

Morgan on stage

By interweaving the audio of Helen, recorded by her adult education teacher with a penchant for jazz a month before she died, with depictions and recollections of earlier times, I Called Him Morgan feels like an elegy for an entire era. The hardscrabble Helen, who grew up in the South and fled for New York as soon as she could, emerges as a sympathetic voice — if not necessarily earning forgiveness, at least deserving of understanding.

It’s difficult to listen to her frank account of their tumultuous life together — almost single-handedly rescuing Morgan from the gutter, supporting him, getting him back to work on his art — and not feel at least some amount of empathy when he more or less turns his back on her. Nor is hard to see why he would. Things are complicated in this world.

Some of the best moments come by way of his friend and collaborator Wayne Shorter, who sits down with the documentarians along with many others. (Cinematographer Bradford Young is credited with some of the later footage, and it’s not hard to guess which ones.) Shorter speaks of his admiration for Morgan, and also his horror at the toll Morgan’s drug use was visibly taking. When he stares at one of Francis Wolff‘s iconic pictures of the two of them, you can feel the sadness in his loss of words. He points out what’s behind his expression: a growing feeling that his friend is lost. Like me, you might end up wanting an entire documentary about the subjects of these images excavating their own fraught histories.

For those who know the story, there will not be a tremendous amount to learn here, except about Helen’s childhood. For those who do not, I Called Him Morgan may prove a mind-blowing, often artful dive into a true-crime story, with a hard bop score.

Still, even it doesn’t exactly break new ground, the film is absolutely solid, depicting the times and places, the people and relationships, with skill and nuance. It tells a story that needs to be told. Jazz fans will surely seek it out for the archival footage alone. Anyone interested in tales of glory, redemption, and tragedy should join them.

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