“Yet the death of this friend inexplicably relieves something, like the threat of his death.”—Jean Louis Schefer, in his eulogy for Roland Barthes1For Jean Louis Schefer, the distinctive writer and nonpareil theorist of art who died in early June of this year, the interaction between oneself and the image is a fraught site of self-definition. Perhaps no other thinker was as dedicated to exploring the interlocking of interior self-consciousness and external perception that the experience of images provides. It is an event that occurs across cultures, across eras.The singularity of his thought stems in part from the uncommonness of his childhood. He was born in 1938 into an aristocratic and well-connected family. And like something out of Proust, his childhood was filled with the household visits of famous artists and writers. The most memorable for Schefer, and the person who would exhibit great influence on his thinking, was...
- 7/11/2022
- MUBI
Adhering to what has become a new rite of passage for French filmmakers of a certain pedigree — which is to say, those with the industry clout to get calls returned and favors cashed in on the fly — Bertrand Bonello has gone and made his own pandemic doodle. Like Céline Sciamma, Arnaud Desplechin, and Claire Denis before him, Bonello put a larger-scale project on the back-burner when the lockdowns hit, embraced Covid restrictions — or at least accepted them with a weary Gallic shrug — and dreamed up another bit of socially distanced cinema with few actors, limited sets, and a form wholly dictated by the circumstance of its production.
To this growing (and hopefully soon fading) genre, Bonello offers “Coma,” a hybrid film that differs from the pack in a few notable ways, not least of which by way of tone. Because , making a film in the zeitgeist about the zeitgeist. Of course,...
To this growing (and hopefully soon fading) genre, Bonello offers “Coma,” a hybrid film that differs from the pack in a few notable ways, not least of which by way of tone. Because , making a film in the zeitgeist about the zeitgeist. Of course,...
- 2/14/2022
- by Ben Croll
- Indiewire
A contemporary cliché that weakly attempts to diagnose what ails us in modern life is the idea of being addled by technology––of our minds and attention spans swamped by screens, content, scrolling. But as the pandemic hit this notion gained a new relevance: it’s not that the virtual realm of content and media was luring us away from our reality––faced with an indefinite lockdown, it had finally become our sole one. Even though this can be poorly rendered by some, it’s the more sensitive and aware artists, such as Bertrand Bonello with his new feature Coma, that remind of the urgency to confront it.
Like the best films on this topic, Coma is anything but a navel-gazing work, and more one of imaginative empathy. It is not Being Bertrand Bonello, but addressed to and concerning a person of a far-removed generation and gender: his teenage daughter Anna.
Like the best films on this topic, Coma is anything but a navel-gazing work, and more one of imaginative empathy. It is not Being Bertrand Bonello, but addressed to and concerning a person of a far-removed generation and gender: his teenage daughter Anna.
- 2/14/2022
- by David Katz
- The Film Stage
This audiovisual essay proposes an understanding of cinema as a transformative device able to affect a series of re-signifying operations, involving political and historical re-examination as well as shifts in the subjective experience of time-space. The essay is focused on the transformation that takes place in the viewer’s perception of a specific kind of cinematic entity: filmed void spaces, and how they may turn out to be read as places of memory.Cinema has the possibility of qualifying spaces, materializing information and connotations that, at first sight, seem invisible. This potentiality of cinema unveils the paradoxical complexity of filmed void spaces: something simultaneously is and is no longer there.This is a double transfiguration between each unity of image and sound and what that specific image-sound brick communicates, since they effect each other respectively and at the same time, as a result revealing what is condensed in the shot,...
- 4/5/2020
- MUBI
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Philippe Garrel's L'enfant secret is exclusively showing October and November 2019 in the United Kingdom and United States in Mubi's Rediscovered series.To engage in Philippe Garrel’s autopoetic world is not a task; instead, the viewer’s participation fuses with a spellbinding mood. Garrel is a filmmaker who seems to be forever working on the periphery, yet he is treasured whenever he is discovered. His body of work, which spans over six decades, is remarkably self-complementary and bracingly emotionally consistent. Across it can be found an unmissable thread of thematic preoccupations, as well as typified characters drawn from Garrel’s biography, such as a consistent filmmaker protagonist (Garrel shot his first film age sixteen) and tumultuous relationships (mirroring his own with the singer Nico), electroshock and heroin abuse. A son of an actor himself, he often explored familial...
- 10/27/2019
- MUBI
Josephine Decker's Madeline's Madeline is having its exclusive online premiere on Mubi in the United Kingdom. It is showing May 10 – June 8, 2019, and a retrospective of Decker's work is showing May 7 – June 27, 2019.With only three features under her belt, Josephine Decker has already established herself as one of the most exhilarating young American filmmakers to have emerged in the 21st century. An actress, writer, director, and multimedia artist, Decker rose to prominence as a performer in a series of films directed by micro-budget wunderkind Joe Swanberg, and although her own directorial work clearly bears signs of the mumblecore aesthetic—handheld Dslr camerawork, improvised dialogue, non-professional actors, frank sexuality, an emphasis on performers and their bodies, an infectious Diy attitude—it also rejects the movement’s slavish adherence to naturalism. Instead, Decker’s cinema occupies a strange position between narrative and experimental cinema, employing intricate strategies of pictorial, aural, and temporal...
- 5/13/2019
- MUBI
Vladimir Lenin at Smolny (1930) by Isaak BrodskyIf there exists a history of popular themes, then, there too must exist a history of unpopular ones. For every grand theme—good versus evil, man versus nature—there exists myriad small and minor ones. These sorts of thematic marginalia haunt the peripheries, sifting through the substratum, making far-off ideas warm to the touch.It is of no coincidence that some of the best film writers have written in defense of this sensation: Manny Farber’s “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” Claude Chabrol’s “Little Themes,” and Tom Gunning’s “Toward a Minor Cinema.” In his essay, Farber inveighs art aimed at Grand Themes that obsequiously fall in line with traditional notions of “densely wrought, European” masterpieces. In his rock-true manner, Farber writes how graceless, capital “A” art becomes antiseptic and stiff, citing Antonioni and Truffaut as promulgators. Chabrol’s essay makes the...
- 2/4/2019
- MUBI
“Directly opposite is the Elkridge Hotel. It can’t be entered. I wonder what’s inside. Is the block/cube poured full of colour, or transparency, with the road/pavement continuing on the floor?” —An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in GTA Online, Michael CroweA ride in an autonomous taxi through a speculative future city via a lecture-cum-film performance, Hello, City! is surely one of the more immediately eye-catching prospects at this year’s Open City Documentary Festival in London. The set-up will be reminiscent of Sam Green’s performative documentaries like A Thousand Thoughts (2018) and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (2012). In this instance, speculative architect Liam Young, co-founder of the London think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, will act as tour guide to the city of the future while a big screen blend of documentary footage and computer-generated imagery illustrate and illuminate his words. What promises to...
- 10/4/2018
- MUBI
In 1972, future screenwriter and director Paul Schrader was a young film critic who wrote a highly influential book about how three filmmakers – Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, and Carl Dreyer – had forged new ground by bringing a spiritual dimension to film language. Schrader showed how these directors’ use of shots – ones that were longer in duration and locked down (fixed frames with no movement), all the better to withhold visual information and capture slower unfolding action – served as a distancing device that “could create a new film reality – a transcendent one.”
This week, the University of California Press is reissuing Schrader’s “The Transcendental Style in Film” with a new 35-page introduction by the author. Schrader wanted to revisit the book because he had come to realize that what he chronicled 46 years ago was actually part of a larger trend in filmmaking. There were many directors after World War II that...
This week, the University of California Press is reissuing Schrader’s “The Transcendental Style in Film” with a new 35-page introduction by the author. Schrader wanted to revisit the book because he had come to realize that what he chronicled 46 years ago was actually part of a larger trend in filmmaking. There were many directors after World War II that...
- 5/24/2018
- by Chris O'Falt
- Indiewire
Barbara and Phoenix director Christian Petzold returned to Berlinale this year with Transit, without regular muse Nina Hoss for the first time since 2005’s Ghosts. Rather, the drama centers on Georg (Franz Rogowski), an escapee of a concentration camp who flees Paris just as the Nazis march in as the film depicts his few weeks in the French port city of Marseille before his final trip out of the continent. Despite the film taking place during the era of the Second World War, Petzold boldly decides to ignore the historical setting, costume- and production-wise, rather having the feel of the present day.
“Local boy Christian Petzold’s audacious retelling of Anna Seghers’s World War II-set novel about refugees escaping Nazi-controlled France is a strange, beguiling creation that will be hard to beat in the competition line-up, and ranks as a rare period piece that utterly gets under the skin of contemporary concerns,...
“Local boy Christian Petzold’s audacious retelling of Anna Seghers’s World War II-set novel about refugees escaping Nazi-controlled France is a strange, beguiling creation that will be hard to beat in the competition line-up, and ranks as a rare period piece that utterly gets under the skin of contemporary concerns,...
- 3/13/2018
- by Zhuo-Ning Su
- The Film Stage
The 2017 Locarno Film Festival recently wrapped its 70th edition, where several aspiring film critics participated in the latest edition of the Locarno Critics Academy, an international workshop to educate promising writers in the craft and discipline of contemporary film criticism. This year’s participants will contribute essays on highlights from the festival. Here’s an overview of their backgrounds and interests.
Name: Jaime Grijalba Gómez
Age: 27
Twitter handle: @jaimegrijalba
Home: Santiago de Chile, Chile.
Cinematic area of expertise: Chilean cinema, film festivals, horror cinema
Best movie you’ve seen in 2017: El mar la mar
Favorite book (or piece of writing) about film: Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematographer”
I’m taking part in the Locarno Critics Academy because… I want to think that criticism today still has a role that goes beyond those interested in film or in making them. It has a role in society, and I want to find it.
Name: Jaime Grijalba Gómez
Age: 27
Twitter handle: @jaimegrijalba
Home: Santiago de Chile, Chile.
Cinematic area of expertise: Chilean cinema, film festivals, horror cinema
Best movie you’ve seen in 2017: El mar la mar
Favorite book (or piece of writing) about film: Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematographer”
I’m taking part in the Locarno Critics Academy because… I want to think that criticism today still has a role that goes beyond those interested in film or in making them. It has a role in society, and I want to find it.
- 8/15/2017
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
Darren Aronofsky’s film portrays the horror and violence of becoming a different species.
When I first watched Darren Aronofsky’s 2011 film Black Swan, I immediately knew that it was the kind of film that required multiple viewings. Naturally, I went back to the theater and watched it again before buying a DVD copy which I have since worn out with repeated viewings. Black Swan is a dense and layered film, with so much to focus on: the theme of doubles and doppelgangers, the prominence of mirrors, the way the plot matches the story of Swan Lake, the meticulously crafted visuals, and the film’s obsession with differing expressions of femininity. However, it wasn’t until I took a class focusing on Animals in Cinema that I realized this film deals with a woman’s literal transformation into a swan. Nina’s (Natalie Portman) transformation into a swan neatly matches up with French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and...
When I first watched Darren Aronofsky’s 2011 film Black Swan, I immediately knew that it was the kind of film that required multiple viewings. Naturally, I went back to the theater and watched it again before buying a DVD copy which I have since worn out with repeated viewings. Black Swan is a dense and layered film, with so much to focus on: the theme of doubles and doppelgangers, the prominence of mirrors, the way the plot matches the story of Swan Lake, the meticulously crafted visuals, and the film’s obsession with differing expressions of femininity. However, it wasn’t until I took a class focusing on Animals in Cinema that I realized this film deals with a woman’s literal transformation into a swan. Nina’s (Natalie Portman) transformation into a swan neatly matches up with French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and...
- 4/20/2017
- by Angela Morrison
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
For Anglophone readers, Jean Louis Schefer’s name will most likely only be familiar through the reverent, often enigmatic references made in translated works by some of the most eminent French film theorists and critics: Gilles Deleuze, (“Jean Louis Schefer, in a book in which the theory forms a kind of great poem…”), Nicole Brenez, (“In the beginning was Jean Louis Schefer…”), Serge Daney (“[a thinker] mysterious and more complicated than we were”), etc. Semiotext(e)’s recent translation(1) of Schefer’s The Ordinary Man of Cinema, published in France in 1980, rectifies what was previously a serious gap in our knowledge of French film theory and offers the chance—especially as “film-philosophy” is so in vogue in academia right now—to reappraise how we conceive the relationship between cinema and thought today. In the opening line of the book, Schefer introduces himself as “the ordinary man of cinema”—someone with no professional...
- 12/23/2016
- MUBI
The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015) takes the form of a conversation. The most recent feature by American filmmaker Thom Andersen unfolds as a running dialogue between him and the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who wrote extensively about cinema. Throughout this new film, clips from older films are interwoven with lines of text that appear onscreen — some of which are direct quotations from Deleuze, and some of which are personal ruminations, responses, and elaborations from Andersen, who taught his two volumes on cinema for a quarter-century at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). A few of […]...
- 6/2/2016
- by Aaron Cutler and Mariana Shellard
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Engram of ReturningThe selection at this year’s installation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real film festival, an annual showcase dedicated to conveying the spectrum of nonfiction filmmaking, are an intriguing bunch culled from a variety of seemingly opposing cultures, yet still exhibiting a fascination with interrogating the past. That this fixation is explored through a miscellany of aesthetic methods is only testament to the veracity of the festival’s undertaking.As this year’s sidebar retrospective of avant-garde giant Bruce Baillie’s work evinces, the nuances and vagaries of the term ‘“nonfiction” allow for fruitful pairings of works that continue the lineage of the abstract, non-narrative work that comes to define our idea of the American avant-garde with those of more familiar documentary tendencies. Daïchi Saïto’s superlative Engram of Returning, playing as part of the second shorts program,is certainly the film...
- 4/7/2016
- by Eric Barroso
- MUBI
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