Among the themes are how we manage—or fail to manage—our sexuality, the fascistic nature of male desire, the sheer abundance of unrequited desire all around us, and in particular how women face the consequences of all of it. Women are desired but, whether attained or unattained, soon cast aside (such as Annie Hayworth) or left to wither alone (like Lydia Brenner, the key tragic figure among several others) or bear the responsibility of birthing and rearing human life (again, Annie, as the teacher looking after the community's kids at its only school, but also the—possibly single—mother at the diner concerned for her children's safety whose envy and spite spill over into violent conflict with Melanie).

Mitch's problems seem to be limited to the number of women he picks up in San Francisco (or apparently just drive out to meet him in the middle of nowhere of their own accord bearing gifts) and ultimately fails to build a real relationship with. Meanwhile, Lydia is terribly lonely, left with no identity aside from widow and mother, a beauty now sapped of lifeblood and purpose—it is no mistake that she is Melanie's doppelganger in hairstyle and dress but drained of all colour.

Mitch’s former lover Annie is left to wallow in memories of past-would-be love. With her unkempt overgrown bob, she falls in between Melanie and Lydia on Hitchcock's spectrum of women from desired, to once-desired, to long ago desired and now forgotten—or, in other terms here: lover, friend, and mother.

While the women are pitted against one another, men lacking the looks and status of Mitch are depicted as ogling perverts. The lovebirds are Hitchcock's greatest and most inexplicable MacGuffin: they permit him to follow our protagonist to her suitor out of sheer horniness, to cut between the eyeline of a homely, lusting man and Melanie’s curves next to the caged birds, and to generate an unresolved red herring for what may explain away the implausible waves of avian attacks.

Of course, it is simply the polished beauty of a blonde stranger arriving to this small town that stirs up the repressed and potentially even violent sexuality of its residents—for which Melanie will ultimately be punished in one of Hitchcock's most challenging and visceral scenes when she is attacked in the upstairs bedroom. For my money, it is even more powerful than Psycho's shower scene if only for its more overt severity and implication—it is less narratively shocking but more genuinely horrifying.

The Birds expands Hitchcock’s venomous reflections on the rules of attraction (see North by Northwest) into something more self-implicating in its acknowledgment thereof, but also more personal and despairing, expressing and articulating guttural emotions around unwieldy desires, aging, mortality, and the march towards bodily irrelevance.

Imaging is an ongoing series of shot-by-shot breakdowns of movie scenes and motifs

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Housed in George Eastman Museum’s historic Dryden Theatre, the Nitrate Picture Show is the only festival of its kind and features several prints from its own collection as well as an array of films from archives around the world, including BFI, La Cinémathèque Française, Eye Filmmuseum, and MoMA. This year’s edition — the 9th annual excepting one skipped year amidst COVID — was dedicated to the memory of Robert Rosen, a key figure in film preservation who founded the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Recognition of work is a key part of Nitrate’s mandate; at every turn speakers made sure to acknowledge the tireless efforts of the archivists, curators, and technicians who are responsible for the stewardship of film that makes the festival, and our access to history, possible. Some film introductions would trace the origins of a print all the way back to a single person making a key decision in the 1930s or 40s that otherwise would have all but guaranteed its demise long ago. More than one print benefitted from the intervention and stewardship of the iconic Henri Langlois.

The impact of preservation was not only emphasized but palpable. After viewing one beautiful print of Max Ophül’s wonderfully mischievous La ronde (a film cyclically structured around vignettes of fleeting trysts that follows one new lover to their next romantic rendezvous until we end up back where we started), Peter Bagrov, the festival’s eccentric director, informed us that we may have been the last audience to be able to view it. This came as a shock as it appeared to be in relatively good shape. However, it turns out that our seamless viewing experience was credited to the efforts of the trio of projectionists negotiating with the print’s numerous splices, expertly adjusting the focus 40-some times throughout the screening. It may not hold out through another go.

Each screening presented the projectionists with considerable challenges to which the audience was mercifully left ignorant. This is why the projectionists are named and applauded before each and every film, and received an extended standing ovation at the festival’s end. A trio of experts rotating from a roster of 10 handle each screening, working with the Dryden Theatre’s twin Century Model C projectors which were installed in 1951, around the same time nitrate was phased out of use due to its flammability. When handled properly, they allow for seamless transitions from reel to reel which is central to the safe projection of nitrate stock. Two projectionists manage one projector each while the third rewinds the film and liaises with management. If you sat in the back row, you would catch Bagrov consistently hopping up from his seat to communicate with the booth. In the event of ignition, fire roller clusters built between the body of the projector and film magazines prevent the destruction of the image and rapid spreading to the hundreds of feet of film. A fire safety shutter automatically shuts off the lamp if the motor slows or stops to prevent ignition in the first place. The projection booth itself is fireproof, ensuring that a fire would not spread beyond its walls. Projectionists rehearse for emergency scenarios and are instructed to flee the booth upon any sign of ignition as fighting the fire to salvage a print would be futile and dangerous.

A number of fires and the loss of films can be blamed on nitrate, most famously the 1937 Fox Vault Fire which resulted in one death, two injuries, and the destruction of every single film kept in its archive. While the particular fragility and flammability of nitrate led to its appropriate discontinuation in the 50s, there is no denying its superior visual quality. This can be attributed to the silver nitrate base, and either orthochromatic or panchromatic emulsion, depending on the film in question, resulting in a greater representation of the dynamic range of light to dark. It was pointed out to me by a Nitrate Picture Show veteran ahead of the first screening to pay particular attention to any shots involving fire (how ironic!) in the frame for its pronounced luminosity. I wasn’t sure what to expect and had trouble imagining what sort of discernible difference there would be. It took all of five seconds to notice. In my own words, I would say the key differences lie in clarity and motion. Perhaps the latter is a consequence of the former, as the clarity of minute details results in a more lifelike sense of motion. Indeed, the presence of bright light produces a radiance I had never seen before, short of staring at the sun. It sounds somewhat silly to say that you haven’t seen white represented on film until you’ve seen a nitrate print, but I’m saying it regardless.

Both black & white and colour prints benefit from the nitrate stock, partly for the same reasons but with some distinction in effect. The programme for the festival is not announced until the day of, aside from the opening film. This year was kicked off by the first ever Technicolor feature (which is to say three-strip Technicolor, the revolutionary process and iconic aesthetic we associate with the brand), Becky Sharp, a film infamously known to be historically significant but critically disregarded. Bagrov’s introduction implored the audience to do away with this well-known context and to view the film as experimental, both for its use of colour as a formal and storytelling device, and for the inimitable Miriam Hopkins’s accordingly different approach to her (Oscar-nominated) performance that matched her colourful range of costumes with an array of disparate moods from scene to scene. The advice worked and helped unlock the film’s considerable qualities for myself and, judging by ensuing conversations and a spattering of letterboxd reviews, seemingly the entire audience. While I was delighted with the film’s own formal virtues, the print itself may have been the most mesmerizing of the entire event (aside from one notable exception I will mention shortly). I was completely surprised and bowled over by qualities of the image I never would have expected above all else in a Technicolor film. In spite of the artificial aesthetics of a studio-produced period melodrama, the clarity of the image rendered it so lifelike. Close-ups of Hopkins look like they could have been shot yesterday. The veil or sheen we associate with such films was subdued, and the nuances of faces, or the folds and shifting fabrics of costumes, had a sort of clarity and motion that exceeded any high-definition moving images you have encountered. That sense of actors from the early decades of Hollywood all looking a similar way or of their time all of a sudden rang false. Everyone in Becky Sharp looked like someone I might encounter in the audience rather than on screen. It was almost startling to see a film from 1935 appear like this. It also led me to thinking how our conception of how older movies characteristically look has more to do with their reproduction than their original negatives and first-run prints. Indeed, we were reminded more than once that these screenings were the closest one could possibly get to experiencing what an opening weekend audience would have experienced.

Speaking of Letterboxd reviews, in an introduction the following day, Bagrov made sure to correct the attending amateur critics in the crowd, who had, in otherwise positive reviews, pointed out that the usually saturated colour palette of Technicolor appeared faded on the aging Becky Sharp print. In fact, Bagrov insisted, this was precisely how Technicolor ought to look, and the scratches of wear and tear aside, the quality of the print’s image and especially its colour not only were maintained but factually identical to when the print would have been struck as, while the print itself will degrade over time, Technicolor does not and will never fade (!). The phenomenon of fading colour stock, a very serious issue in the history of film preservation, only becomes relevant with succeeding and inferior film stock that was more cheaply produced (as an aside for those who do not know, it was Martin Scorsese who called out Eastman Kodak for its quickly degrading stock in the late 70s, after noticing that his first few films were fading after only a few years, rallying filmmakers from around the world, including Michael Powell, Akira Kurosawa, Kenneth Anger, and Ingmar Bergman, and successfully calling for a more stable stock). Our common perception of how Technicolor ought to look, Bagrov continued, has to do with the careless restorative practices of major studios and distributors. Restorations for digital reproductions of films, DVD and Blu-Ray releases, 4K, etc. often involve colour correction processes that ignore original negatives in favour of a fake, more saturated, “eye-popping” look.

This highlights the importance of preservation and rigorous, historically responsible restorative practices, but it also points to the transience of our ability to see these films as they were made to be seen, something that will be all but impossible in just a few decades. Ultimately, nitrate prints have a limited shelf life, even in the best conditions. That is one reason why the majority of films shown at the festival are from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Fewer and fewer prints from the silent era are projectable. Nitrate Picture Show is proud to point out the alarmist sensationalism of a retrospective curated by the BFI in 2000 that was titled “The Last Nitrate Picture Show”. 25 years later, they have been proven wrong by the George Eastman Museum nine times. A small number of cinemas around the world continue to project nitrate film in proper conditions. In fact, more are on the horizon. The “Last” Nitrate Picture Show is a ways away still, but it cannot be staved off forever.

This context imbues a special significance into screenings of older prints. Each year, an audience favourite is a shorts programme composed of various oddities and animated works. This year’s slate was designed to demonstrate as many colour processes side by side as possible and included Pathécolor, Kodachrome, Multicolor, Gasparcolor, and Technicolor (this dispatch is growing in length so I will spare readers of a lecture on their differences here). Among the films was the Bugs Bunny classic Rhapsody Rabbit, abstract works by Norman McLaren and Len Lye, and an array of obscure animated advertisements. The most memorable of the latter, made by notable Czech husband and wife animation duo Irena Dodalová & Karel Dodal, featured a drunkard clumsily making his way back home from the bar, zigzagging through the streets, and eventually finding his way to his bed, only to be interrupted by an anthropomorphic tube of toothpaste reminding him to brush his teeth (no, I did not feel personally attacked by this). The standout of the shorts, however, was a silent documentary about caterpillars, Les destructeurs de nos jardins, produced in 1916 by Pathé. Accompanied by live piano and standing at just over four minutes in length, this was the unexpected masterstroke of this year’s festival. At first I scoffed at the claim during the introduction that it was the highlight of the festival. How could a silent short about caterpillars exceed masterpieces like Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage or Mikio Naruse’s “Wife Be Like a Rose!”? Of course, on a certain level, it couldn’t. But my jaw literally dropped when the film began. By a minute in, my eyes were watering. The filming technique put us in intimate proximity to caterpillars as they crawl along, and feed upon, leaves and plants. On one hand, the stencil techniques of Pathécolor (a laborious process done by hand involving the creation of stencils for each colour in each and every frame to make it possible to “colour in the lines”, so to speak) created a stylistic playfulness. On the other hand, this was the clearest and highest definition image I had ever witnessed of an insect, giving state-of-the-art nature docs or photography a run for their money—and from a film shot over 100 years ago! If you told me that four minutes of caterpillar footage would be worth the trip in itself, I would not have believed you. Admittedly, there was something bittersweet about the experience, and maybe that was part of what made me emotional. To encounter the highest achievements of celluloid film as a medium is also to confront its rarely-tapped potential, its impermanence, and the technological and aesthetic regressions of capitalist society where the demands of mass production and profit take priority.

On a note with more levity, Nitrate Picture Show might appear on paper like a stuffy or even elitist event for snobbish cinephiles (couldn’t be me), but part of what makes it special is its lack of pretense. This is neither a red carpet event nor a gathering of (pseudo-)intellectuals egotistically passing judgment. It brings together film fans, archivists, and other professionals on a level playing field. Not a day went by without someone making a joke about the annotation accompanying each film’s program note regarding the print’s shrinkage rate (just one of Nitrate’s delightful idiosyncrasies). And no attendee was immune from the allure of taking part in the festival’s annual guessing game, “Blind Date with Nitrate”. Each year, the closing film remains a mystery until it is projected on screen. The only clue is one screengrabbed still (a strategically obscure one) included in the programme book. In the middle of the festival, I found myself at a table of twenty or so people shoveling brisket and ribs in their mouths at Rochester’s local Dinosaur BBQ, part of a famous New York State chain (my last visit to a Dino BBQ was in Buffalo following a transformative encounter with the light installations of Anthony McCall at the AKG Art Museum, so I am all for meat-art pairings). Among those seated around me were representatives from the Harvard Film Archive, TIFF Cinematheque, and notable curators, each of us taking stabs at guessing what may be in store for us Sunday evening. Previous Blind Date picks have included some major movies such as Pinocchio, The Third Man, and Day of Wrath. Accordingly, our guesses included Hitchcock, Lubitsch, and Sternberg. To my knowledge, not a single person guessed correctly.

In a provocative and controversial move that still has people debating the decision, the Blind Date film was The Journey to Tilsit, a 1939 German melodrama directed by Veit Harlan (and adapted from the same source as Murnau’s Sunrise) right on the cusp of him becoming the go-to filmmaker of the Third Reich. The relative obscurity of the title would be enough to give one pause (everyone in my vicinity turned their heads when it appeared on screen), but especially bold, and, for some, questionable, was it to screen such a film with no context, leaving many to discover the nature of the director and the historical moment of its production after the lights had come up. If the intention was to spark conversation, the curators succeeded. Regardless of one’s specific feelings as to the film itself, it also provided the opportunity for a rare audience experiment. Political and historical context not only would have garnered skepticism going into the screening, but would also have imposed slanted readings of the film’s subtext (“all films are born free and equal”). Instead, Bagrov and company created an unusually pure encounter with something that otherwise in 2025 would be relegated to being a problematic bad object. Notably, a couple of people around me were visibly moved by the film.

That the Nitrate crew can get away with such a maneuver is a testament to the event’s growing cult-like success. Reportedly, its first edition was sparsely attended. With no marketing aside from word of mouth since then, passes to the festival are now selling out weeks in advance. To satisfy audience demand, a second mini-Nitrate event is scheduled to debut in November. More people are relishing the opportunity to engage with an obsolete medium as its encroaching finitude becomes closer to a reality. As always with cinema, it relies on active efforts to create space and possibility by those working behind the scenes in archiving, restoration and curation just as it does on the curiosity of audiences—something which can still spread as contagiously as a nitrate blaze.

The 9th Nitrate Picture Show took place May 29–June 1, 2025 in Rochester, NY.

For the first two thirds of Rear Window (1954), Alfred Hitchcock commits to a strict set of rules in regards to his film’s presentation of its infamous setting, roughly limited to an approximation of the range of perspectives available to its wheelchair-bound protagonist, L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), as he observes activity in the buildings opposite and adjacent to his apartment and in the courtyard that lies in between. Excepting objective views of Jefferies (limited to shots just outside or within the apartment) and pointed departures from his subjectivity that (very) occasionally show us things he does not see or shots that give us a closer, more privileged view of what he is looking at, Hitchcock presents the cast of characters and the glimpsed goings-on of their private lives as though there is an uncrossable axis as defined by the purview of the titular rear window.

The framing and viewing through various windows figured as boxes and rectangles within the memorable set and the meticulous staging therein has invited obvious connections between the voyeurism within the diegesis of Rear Window and the voyeurism inherent to spectatorship. Indeed, Hitchcock is interested in the underlying perversity in the act of watching movies—this fact informs the formal choices of many of his films—but Rear Window’s treatment of the voyeuristic gaze is hardly limited to spectatorship in this sense. Spectatorship here characterizes our very experience of the world. It sets the boundaries for what we can and cannot experience for ourselves. The film mounts a subtly tragic articulation of a modern condition that relates the limits of living versus the intrigue of looking to our relationship with our neighbours, and, more broadly speaking, others.

Two thirds into the film, Hitchcock subverts these rules. The central romance involving Jeffries and Grace Kelly’s Lisa has to this point been stalled by our protagonist’s wandering gaze. Just when they have finally shuttered the windows and refocused their attention on what is right under their nose, a scream gives out.

The neighbours’ dog is discovered dead, with its neck broken, lying in the middle of the courtyard for all to see. A ruckus ensues and various neighbours rush to their windows and balconies, perhaps out of concern or perhaps driven by the very same sort of voyeuristic curiosity that has led Jefferies to the unfolding murder mystery that is the film’s MacGuffin.

The axis is crossed: we see characters from different vantage points for the first time.

Briefly, the fragmented neighbours are united in wide shot, connected by a passive empathy that teases human connectivity and yet ultimately further pronounces their divisions.

Another angled view is introduced, suggesting the crisscrossing gazes of others.

Between sobs, the heartbroken dog owner curses her neighbours for the death of her beloved pet:

“Which one of you did it?! Which one of you killed my dog?! You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘neighbours’! Neighbours like each other, speak to each other, care if anybody lives or dies. But none of you do! But I couldn’t imagine any of you being so low that you’d kill a little, helpless, friendly dog. The only thing in this whole neighbourhood who liked anybody! Did you kill him because he liked you?!”

We see her palpable sorrow resonate with “Miss Torso” and the vulnerable “Miss Lonely Hearts” as well as our principal couple. Such a cry for help contains the longing to not be contained to the self, to share one’s suffering. But human suffering is not enough to make us one. Thus, Hitchcock breaks through his imposed axis to express the transient shared experience of the tragic death of a dog only to further point to and illustrate the alienating borders between individual lives that, whether transparent like windows or opaque like walls, cannot be crossed.

Once the commotion has passed, the rules are back into effect.

Imaging is an ongoing series of shot-by-shot breakdowns of movie scenes and motifs

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Made in collaboration with Su Friedrich's Sink or Swim (1990) & ChatGPT. Watch below:

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My new video essay, Tsai Ming-liang: A Cinema of Bodily Sense, has been published in the latest issue (10.2, 2023) of [in]Transition. The video, as well as my creator’s statement, and two peer reviews, can be found here: https://mediacommons.org/intransition/cinema-bodily-sense.

From the creator’s statement:

“Tsai’s cinema consists of sites of encounters where the phenomenological aspects of perception are mobilized in order to form aesthetic and thematic meanings and resonances. This phenomenological dimension becomes the primary force of the film, the primary level of engagement. Subject and form blur, the body becomes, in part, medium in itself, creating a state of heightened embodiment.”

From Andrea Bachner’s review:

“Approaching Tsai’s entire oeuvre in a video essay is a tough assignment. And yet, 'A Cinema of Bodily Sense' provides us with a remarkably clear impression of what is key in Tsai’s films, moving between and juxtaposing on the screen scenes from individual films while creating the impression that all of Tsai’s films could be combined into a whole work of art in progress.”

From Corrado Neri’s review:

“Cook’s hypnotic, slow-paced montage spirals in a vertiginous slow accumulation that lets the bodily presence be apparent in its weight, and ponders on the reactions of the spectators, immersed in an experiment of haptic visuality.”

At this point, Betsey Brown is probably known best for her breakthrough lead role in Dasha Nekrasova’s The Scary of Sixty-First, a wild, manic performance that feels just as possessed as the character she is playing. Brown is also known for collaborating with her brother, Peter Vack, who has acted alongside her from a young age as well as directed her in his own directorial debut, Assholes. Now, Brown is making the rounds with her own first feature, the aptly titled Actors that casts her and Vack as themselves engaged in what she calls “a race to depravity”. It’s fiction, of course, but that’s too easy an out for a movie that sets out to interrogate the motivations of its competing creators.

The race begins when Peter decides to rebrand himself as a trans artist named “Petra Vack” as a way to avoid fading into obscurity amidst a cultural climate that no longer prizes the contributions of straight cis white men such as himself. Betsey is outraged but soon engages in her own questionable act of performance art when she succumbs to her partner’s wish to have a baby together only once she agrees to document the experience as part of her next project.

A film about the sort of troubling instincts that according to some it is also guilty of having, Actors neither synchronizes with the actions it portrays nor weasels its way out of responsibility towards them either. In fact, it’s a film poignantly rooted in shame and insecurity—a sort of existential exorcism where its staged provocations become pointedly antagonistic to its own human concerns and fears.

I spoke with Betsey ahead of the film’s August 25th Canadian Premiere at Paradise Theatre in Toronto.

Adam Cook: Your family plays a big role in your and your brother’s work. Can you talk about your parents and your family’s relationship to creativity?

Betsey Brown: My family is a big part of why I do anything and definitely why I do this kind of work. My mom is a psychoanalyst who had the calling to be one when she was in the second grade, which is a similar sort of conviction to what I think actors and artists have. There are a lot of psychoanalytic through-lines in both Peter’s and my work.

My dad is a business owner but came to New York to be an actor. For a lot of his young life he was auditioning for musicals. He played the understudy for Prince Charming in Snow White at Radio City Music Hall. Then because he is such a business man he had this side job where he opened up an ice cream parlour and that ended up becoming his real job. When I was in middle school, he returned to making films so my growing up was basically seeing my father struggling to make films. He made two features and a short through selling his business. I saw him living the artist’s struggle firsthand and then go back to business when the money had run out.

Those experiences shaped us so much, first with work ethic, I was raised to love what you do and to make sure you are fully committed to what you do, and with the psychoanalytic background our religion was uncovering layers of ourselves with each other.

Cook: What is the role of performance in your life? How has it changed in the age of social media?

Brown: It’s hard for me to have this label as performer because it comes with shame that I’m not a consistently working actor—which I would love to be—and then it comes with this other thing where I don’t really believe in performing. My interest in performance is getting to a truth and often I feel what I have learned in order to get to a deep truth is that people put on masks. There’s a performative aspect. My relationship to the word performance is charged because I want to get at something that’s the opposite of performance by way of performing.

I feel very strange about social media. In making this movie I realized I do have to perform myself online for anyone to care. When I meet anyone in real life and they ask to follow me I’m worried it’s going to be so annoying for them because I am going to show you this other side of me that’s trying to be shameless, a shameless performer and a shameless advocator of myself because that’s what people are required to do now in this age. I’m trying to figure out how to do that in the most me way I can but I definitely haven’t figured it out.

Cook: Actors feels like part of that figuring-it-out process.

Brown: Definitely, working on the movie and putting it out is part of that process and also that relates to this idea of this tension I have with the word “performer”. I have really had to confront and admit that I am a desperate actor. [laughs] I want nothing more than to be an actor. That’s what every actor who isn’t acting consistently is trying to hide. There’s this cringe-y thing about actors because unless they’re a household name, you know they’re not where they want to be at and you feel sorry for them.

Peter and I used to talk about how when we’d mention to people we’re actors, they would look at us like we just told them we have cancer. It’s kind of embarrassing but I feel like the movie has made me realize that hiding from what I really want will only result in me becoming like the Betsey in the movie which is exactly what I don’t want.

Cook: In Actors, both yours and Peter’s arcs are different versions of that sort of desperation for success and relevancy. Can you talk about putting those parallel narratives in the film?

Brown: The idea came to me because I noticed that I wasn’t feeling jealous of Peter even though we’re both actors and filmmakers and he’s been more successful than me. I certainly do have the capacity for that jealousy. Originally, there was going to be a scene of me walking down the street as credits rolled on screen of real women that I’m jealous of, actors and filmmakers. In asking myself why wasn’t I jealous of Peter, the thing that came to me is that I feel a lack of competition because he’s a man. We’re not auditioning for the same roles and we have very different perspectives. That’s where it started. Something I fear in Peter is his willingness to push the envelope to a dangerous, even irresponsible level. That’s what I was playing with in coming up with his character in Actors’ abhorrent plan to co-opt an identity that he knows nothing about.

By starting with that notion of jealousy, I got to this place of asking what is it in him that is willing to just go places that most people aren’t willing to go and what is my response to it? The response is a simultaneous disgust, fear and a moral high ground, but also an admiration for the sort of conviction that gets you places and that makes new and exciting art.

So, the Betsey character getting pregnant solely for art is a reaction and sisterly attempt to one up her brother in moral depravity. The movie is a race to depravity that Peter starts.

I will never not be Peter’s little sister who looks up to him. That is deeply within me. His bad behaviour also affects me and also makes me be bad. I think it’s really important for me to note that what the Betsey character does winds up being more harmful than what Peter does—he’s mostly hurting and even erasing himself—the Betsey character has damaged her partner and another living person who had no choice in being created. I was getting at this fear that my impulses are purer than Peter’s but I am that influenced by him that I can maybe do even worse.

Deciding to have these arcs in tandem, I was inspired by Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts which puts her journey with pregnancy alongside her partner’s transition. I found this to be a really interesting parallel and that has gotten me into some muddy waters because some have read Actors to legitimize the biology of gender. However, It would be different if I were comparing this awful person to a saint mother but I believe Betsey is just as much as a fraud as a mother as Peter is as a trans person.

Cook: The film is especially vulnerable to an increasingly common tendency to conflate the actions and beliefs of characters with those of the filmmakers. There can be a lack of nuance in how people approach movies.

Brown: I agree and just because you’re showing something doesn’t mean you’re supporting it. However, I want to own up to how Actors leans into that lack of nuance by using real names, real relationships, and intentionally confuse the audience about what is real and what is not. I love to be confused when I’m an audience member. I’m excited when I can’t tell the difference between what is real and what isn’t. That’s why Q&As for this film are so important. You see a different version of me, the truer version of me, and so the identity of the film is becoming confusing too. Is it a movie or is it a performance art piece that includes the Q&As after?

Cook: That methodology can be productive because if you believe with complete certainty either that the filmmaker is completely aligned or completely opposed to what you are seeing, it’s a zone of reassurance whereas lacking that certainty forces you to work through that murkiness on your own. If I don’t trust the work than what do I have to do to make sense of it for myself?

Brown: Definitely and I wanted to strip away the comfort that any distance might have given us. Even though I’m dealing with things that I hope don’t come true with me or Peter, I’m dealing with a grey zone where it’s only a notch or two away from it being possible.

Cook: Many films opt for that kind of distance and as a result end up being condescending towards the subject matter and to the viewer.

Brown: That’s so important to me. There’s definitely a world where I could have made Peter’s character way more of a two-dimensional villain. He has some qualities to him. He’s a powerful performer. It makes it harder to just hate him. There’s also the desperation…There’s a scene where I’m surprised by the response every time where Peter is trying to get me to get pregnant for the second time and he says, “let me talk bitch, let me talk bitch,” and he’s really intense and says, “if I let go of my creative spark I’m dead”. When we were editing I thought that was a really serious scene and I was upset by it every time. Now when it screens people laugh and it's the opposite of how I see it. I’ve been wondering what it is that makes people laugh and I think it's how real it is, how much they can connect to this desperation. It’s almost so uncomfortable that it is funny.

Cook: I think having it being versions of yourselves, these sort of funhouse mirror portrayals of each other, gives it a resonance. For instance, early on where Peter is talking about Assholes with you, and then you start annoying him with the camera, you feel that authentic sibling dynamic. And later when you both are in front of a mirror together and you start crying, it carries weight. There’s an anchor point of emotional authenticity that complicates things.

Brown: I believe that later mirror scene is the heart of the film because it becomes so clear that that while these characters are so deeply obsessed with themselves, the thing that is grounding and transcends that is the relationship. It’s the thing that potentially allows the audience to relate. My mantra when making the film was that this is coming from a place of deep love and I think that that love lives in my family, it’s in the familial bond that makes us continue to work together. It’s the light that shines through the darkness of what we are wading in.

Cook: It’s interesting how the film grew out so much out of this intimate scale of self-interrogation and these personal questions when it ends up really reflecting our culture more broadly. I see Peter’s actions as a hyperbolic version of what many people do in less overt ways in order to stand out in this landscape.

Brown: It started with those intimate impulses and where that brought me was thinking about how this does connect into what is happening right now with this general fetishization of otherness and the way identity politics have been taken to an extreme. When I was writing the movie I had so many conversations with straight white cis male friends where it would come up that they do not feel like they can make art in this climate. I even had a musician friend say he couldn’t be the lead singer of his band anymore. I felt that was basically…funny.

[laughs]

It’s a really interesting thing this certain group is dealing with because of their access to power and it does reveal this fragility that people in power have. It reminds me of billionaires who talk about why they have to penny pinch for some reason.

Cook: One thing I appreciate in the film is how you integrate elements of the indie film apparatus—you cut to Vimeo, to IMDb, to an Indiewire article—which I feel like is such a big facet of the aesthetic of art creation and engagement today. But there’s also something inherently funny about including an Indiewire article. [laughs]

Brown: The scene that includes that is when Peter is talking about this exact thing of feeling like he doesn’t have a voice anymore and can’t make art in the framework of straight white maleness. I found that the easiest way to satirize that was to use the most obvious shit that pointed to him being ridiculous. I have this interesting relationship with being on the nose. I feel like a lot of artists are afraid of being too on the nose and I think what we’re pointing to is where I allowed myself to be as on the nose as I could. I’m going to show his extensive IMDb page and the attention that he is getting to show how ridiculous this point of view is. Again it is taking a little from this mischievously symbolic Peter approach where he says “I don’t do things right, I do them wrong”. So that was my way of not doing things right is in adding in these unaddable things to the movie.

Cook: That reminds me of what I thought was a key line of yours where you say, “I just want to put things out there, I don’t want to give a fuck”.

Brown: That is the exact line that has been going through my head since putting it out. I have been comfortable in what I call the abyss where I have just been making things and holding onto them but this process of putting Actors out there, it’s all in this practice of not giving a fuck in spite of my insecurities.

Cook: You have been working on Peter’s new film, www.RachelOrmont.com. How has that experience been?

Brown: It was the most incredible acting experience of my life. It really confirmed that this collaboration with Peter is what I’m meant to be doing on a profoundly deep level. I feel Peter and I were leaning into an immense amount gratitude we have for having been put on this earth together so we can make this kind of work and it just made me even more sure I want to be an actor. It confirmed everything about my need to tell stories—specifically through acting. I really want to be able to do that more. And I know I’m doing it all wrong by telling everyone!

[laughs]

I’m supposed to act way cooler as an actor but I just can’t. I am dying to do it. I need to.

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The cinema of Philippe Garrel has mostly revolved around a small set of elements: love, heartbreak, family, children, suicide. Among his films are devastating, despairing works, caught up in the turmoil of the emotional inner worlds they portray. With Jealousy, however, these elements realign in a new way, from the perspective of an aging man looking back on life with heightened maturity and wisdom. A simple story of shifting romances, in which Louis (played by Philippe’s son, Louis Garrel) leaves Clothilde (Rebecca Convenat), the Mother of his child for a new relationship with a struggling actress named Claudia (Anna Mouglalis), the film does not delve into the melodrama of the situation so much as it observes how each character, in their own ways, accepts change and continues living. It is a film that shows us loss, life’s source of pain, and regards it not with despair but with respect, and understanding. At one point or another each character in the film moves from one thing to another, from one love to the next, and Garrel subtly and beautifully captures how this passage is inevitable. It is a film of acceptance and quiet strength.

Another remarkable film in cinemas right now is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. In that film, the unique approach of shooting the project over 12 years makes for an unprecedented study of the passage of time. Linklater creates an incredible portrait of how time slips so quickly into the future. Garrel’s Jealousy is an equally if not more profound film about this, albeit an entirely different one. While Linklater uses elliptical jumps through a decade spanning story, Garrel is equally attuned to time’s movement—but from moment to moment, second to second, frame to frame. The present folds into the past so subtly and neatly we simply do not take account. One must be careful because a moment is so immediately a memory that things too easily get away. Garrel captures escaping moments, memories as soon as they register. Both Boyhood and Jealousy see life as precious, but Garrel locates this preciousness in the smallest gestures and feelings—glimpses of life being lived, felt, and becoming the past.

All of this centers around the child, Charlotte. Unlike a typical take on divorce, the little girl seems to adjust to life’s new arrangement quickly. She likes her Dad’s new girlfriend, she’s playful, happy, clever (something must be said of Olga Milshtein’s amazing, natural performance here)

The child connects everything in the film, as if the future and its hopes and possibilities accompany everyone, at their side, tugging on their coats, depending on their love and willingness to continue. The film begins with Clothilde crying—it seems 40 years on after Les hautes solitudes, Garrel is still studying faces in black and white, a testament to one of cinema’s most empathetic lenses—we don’t know the context at first, but then we take on Charlotte’s perspective, peering from a keyhole as her parents discuss separating. While the POV of the film shifts, it is this entryway to the film that frames it, and at the film’s closing, a seemingly arbitrary moment with Louis as he turns off a light (a moment where a reel actually comes to an end precedes it, the finality of a moment and the immediate beginning of another—perpetually succeeding chapters in a neverending story), we feel as though the future is always watching.

I’ve seen the film twice, and both times I emerged from it with my burden lightened, the film’s spirit having given me new power to face living, full, as it is, of pain, always moving forward clumsily, strangely, beautifully. The first time I saw it, I started watching it around 4:30am, the pitch black sky visible from a nearby window. When the film’s credits rolled, the sun had just begun to rise. I cannot think of a better film to begin in the dusk and to finish at the new dawn. A friend of mine told me a story once, about how she and her lover, who was to move away for a year across the world, embraced on their last night together in the street. When they began to hold each other in the dark, the road was illuminated by streetlights. When they finally, reluctantly let go, the morning had arrived, and the streetlights had retired. Garrel’s Jealousy is similar, I think, to this embrace: laced with sadness and love and change, lights exchanged for sun, love for loss—the ruthless transience of moments, each worthwhile and full of meaning if we look closely enough.

As James Gray enters a whole new phase of his career and his cinema with the Brad Pitt-starring science-fiction epic Ad Astra, we are thrilled to present this TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of an American filmmaker whose fidelity to cinematic tradition has often placed him at odds to the movies of the moment.

When James Gray made Little Odessa in 1993, he seemed perfectly poised for success. Fresh out of NYU, the untried 23-year-old filmmaker had managed to secure such talents as Pulp Fiction’s Tim Roth, Edward Furlong (then “hot” from Terminator 2), and Academy Award winners Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell for his feature debut; his film had a hitman at its centre, the ’90s protagonist du jour thanks to John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson’s jive-talking killers in Tarantino’s zeitgeist-defining hit; and, as with Pulp Fiction’s Palme d’Or win at Cannes, Gray took home a prestigious prize of his own, the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. With his obvious reverence for the “New Hollywood” directors of the 1970s (Scorsese, Friedkin, and above all Coppola), his affinity for genre (specifically the crime drama), and his visual flair, Gray appeared to be at the forefront of a new generation of emerging young American filmmakers who were bringing “indie cinema” into the mainstream.

Right from the beginning, however, Gray also demonstrated that his sensibilities were markedly at odds with those of his contemporaries. While Tarantino helped usher in a hip, self-aware, and self-reflexive cinema of irony, Gray was straight up: he took violence seriously, treated classical storytelling principles as if they were holy writ, and was openly emotional and sincere. Despite their crime-movie frameworks, Little Odessa and the films that finally followed it — Gray’s second feature, The Yards, was not released until five years after his debut, his third, We Own the Night, another seven years after that — are not bound to genre: they are tragedies, in the classical sense. Gray’s protagonists may happen to be crooks and cops, but more importantly they are pawns of fate, condemned to destinies they didn’t choose or don’t want by forces beyond their control: environment, class, and, above all, the bonds of family, which pull at the characters like puppet strings, determining the trajectory of their lives even if they seek to reject them entirely.

This kind of deeply, unabashedly serious filmmaking has only become more unfashionable in the decades since Gray’s debut, and it has often relegated the filmmaker to a kind of limbo space. Not arty enough to be arthouse, not crowd-pleasing enough to run with the more commercially viable work of Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson, Gray’s films have often seemed to be out of step with the cinematic times. While his films are as visually distinctive as those of any director working today (Gray has retained a singular look even while working with a variety of cinematographers, including such superstar DPs as the late Harris Savides and Darius Khondji), and feature career-best performances by such major stars as Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, and most notably Joaquin Phoenix, in North America they have been dismissed and condescended to in a way that the films of his contemporaries never have.

The past decade, however, has seen a rising tide of critical celebration that has started to lift Gray to new and deserved heights of recognition. Bless the French, who were there right from the beginning: Claude Chabrol became Gray’s first major supporter after encountering Little Odessa at Venice, and the director’s films regularly received prestigious premiere slots at Cannes even as they went largely unnoticed in their limited North American releases. As Gray’s work began to depart from genre and expand in scope and ambition, this Gallic enthusiasm began to cross the Atlantic, with North American critics offering (sometimes grudging) praise of the contemporary romantic drama Two Lovers and two very different historical works: the small-scale character piece The Immigrant, and the adventure epic The Lost City of Z.

While Gray has often seemed to be working in a mode of the past, his concerns are timeless. Driven by fundamental questions about love, morality, responsibility, and fate versus choice, yet grounding these grand themes in meticulously observed details and the emotional realities of his characters, his films transcend the fashions of the moment in their search for essential human truths. In today’s American film landscape, Gray stands apart.

Little Odessa

dir. James Gray | USA 1995 | 98 min. | R  35mm

Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival (where it also received the vocal admiration of nouvelle vague legend Claude Chabrol), James Gray’s remarkably assured feature debut sees the director’s style and sensibility arriving fully formed: deeply personal, deathly serious, and exquisitely rendered. Set in the eponymous Russian-Jewish enclave in Brighton Beach, Little Odessa focuses on the fateful homecoming of Joshua Shapiro (Tim Roth), a mob hitman who returns to his old stomping grounds to take out his latest target. While intending to lay low, Joshua finds himself inexorably drawn back to the family he left behind: his father (Maximilian Schell), who has disowned him; his gentle, terminally ill mother (Vanessa Redgrave); and his worshipful teenage brother (Edward Furlong). Inevitably, personal and professional spheres collide, placing Joshua and those he loves in grave danger. Inaugurating Gray’s career-long preoccupations with family and fate, Little Odessa serves as a premature rebuttal to the post-Tarantino irony that was then just beginning to put its stranglehold on American filmmaking. “[Roth’s] finest performance to date … James Gray, aged 25, directs this dark, spare piece — his first feature — as to the manor born” (Time Out).

The Yards

dir. James Gray | USA 2000 | 115 min. | 14A  35mm

A troubled production that faced much meddling from then-Miramax head honcho He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named — who insisted that the director shoot a new ending after production had wrapped, and then effectively dumped the picture with a paltry release — The Yards nonetheless remains Gray’s finest and most moving work. Released on parole, Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) returns to his devoted mother (Ellen Burstyn) in Queens, determined to stay on the straight-and-narrow. His best friend Willie (Joaquin Phoenix), who is engaged to Leo’s beloved cousin Erica (Charlize Theron), swings Leo a job with his employer, Erica’s stepfather Frank (James Caan), owner of a subway-car repair firm. Embroiled by Willie in a spot of industrial sabotage against Frank’s competitors, Leo finds himself implicated in a murder and forced to go on the run, sparking the slow implosion of his extended family as overlapping loyalties become irreconcilable. Featuring darkly gorgeous cinematography by the late Harris Savides and a stunning score by Howard Shore (with an assist from Gustav Holst’s The Planets), The Yards is an operatic tragedy of great moral and emotional complexity.

We Own the Night

dir. James Gray | USA 2007 | 117 min. | 18A  Digital

Seven years after the Miramax-managed box-office failure of The Yards, Gray returned with this riveting cop drama set in the violence-plagued New York of the late 1980s. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Bobby Green, a nightclub manager whose decadent lifestyle and mob affiliations have earned him the disapproval of his father Burt (Robert Duvall) and brother Joseph (Mark Wahlberg), high-ranking NYPD officers who try to enlist Bobby’s help to take down a Russian drug lord with ties to his club. When Burt and Joseph are targeted by the mob, a repentant Bobby volunteers to go undercover, sparking a clash between blood loyalty and individual freedom that could cost him everything he holds most dear, including his loving girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes). Featuring a number of standout setpieces — including Bobby’s nightmarish descent into a drug lab and a rain-drenched vehicular pursuit that ranks as one of the most spectacularly staged car chases ever put to film — We Own the Night is a deceptively understated, richly complex crime drama of unusual sensitivity and artfulness.

Two Lovers

dir. James Gray | USA 2008 | 110 min. | 14A  35mm

Loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” (which had previously been filmed by Gray’s idol Luchino Visconti), the filmmaker’s first wholesale departure from the crime genre is a darkly comic examination of how the heart can distort our perceptions of our objects of desire. Joaquin Phoenix plays Leonard, a bipolar aspiring photographer who has moved back in with his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov) after his engagement falls apart. He becomes infatuated with a gorgeous neighbour, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who he gazes upon from across the way à la Rear Window and eventually befriends; meanwhile, he is also confronted with the hesitant courtship of the shy but kindly Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), who his parents eagerly seek to set him up with. Caught between fantasy and reality, Leonard entertains the advances of Sandra even as he obsessively pursues Michelle, willfully blinding himself to her own deep-seated problems. “The typical romantic drama calls upon us to believe in love … Two Lovers is singular in its ambition to critique the very premise of that emotion while still embedding us deep within its power” (Andrew Chan, Reverse Shot).

The Immigrant

dir. James Gray | USA 2013 | 117 min. | 14A  Digital

Set in 1921 New York, The Immigrant is not only a sort of prelude to Gray’s tales of familial and ethnic ties in contemporary NYC, but also another of the director’s studies in twisted love and dark romance. After a long sea journey from Poland, Ewa (Marion Cotillard) arrives at Ellis Island in search of a better life — a hope that is quickly dashed when her seriously ill sister is quarantined and Ewa falls into the clutches of Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), an opportunistic charlatan who runs a burlesque show and sidelines as a pimp. Selling herself at Bruno’s sleazy theatre as she strives to make enough money to buy her sister’s freedom, Ewa becomes enchanted by a kindly magician (Jeremy Renner) whose amorous attentions arouse the ire of Bruno, who himself loves her in his own sickly, controlling way. Loosely patterned on Fellini’s La Strada, beautifully shot by Darius Khondji (his first collaboration with the director) and performed with heartbreaking emotional directness and silent-film pathos by its magnificent cast, The Immigrant is a singular film about sacrifice, self-worth, and redemption.

The Lost City of Z

dir. James Gray | USA 2016 | 141 min. | 14A  35mm

Based on the non-fiction novel by David Grann, Gray’s first adaptation is unquestionably the director’s greatest and most ambitious departure from his previous work, even as it is powerfully personal in its story about the impossible balance between individual ambition and familial devotion. Denied promotion due to his class background, British officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) accepts a commission from the Royal Geographical Society to chart a river in the Amazon jungle. Completing his mission with the aid of old Amazonian hand Henry Costin (a virtually unrecognizable Robert Pattinson), Fawcett becomes convinced of the existence of a fabled lost city, which he dubs “Z” and envisions as a classless utopia that defies the destructive materialism of the modern world. Reluctantly encouraged by his devoted wife Nina (Sienna Miller), Fawcett mounts a number of arduous expeditions to search for Z over the course of two decades, his obsession ultimately drawing in his teenage son Jack (Tom Holland). Despite unavoidable echoes of Herzog’s Aguirre and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, The Lost City of Z is a completely different take on the going-up-the-river movie, one located somewhere between David Lean and John Ford.

Nearly a decade since his tenth feature film Stray Dogs was declared by its director to be his swan song, Malaysian-Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang has gone on to create a varied, exploratory, and unexpectedly prolific new chapter of his oeuvre. From short films to mid-lengths to art installations and exhibitions to theatre to virtual reality, and, recently, an (unintended) new feature, Days (which I wrote on here), in 2020, Tsai has discovered newfound inspiration and freedom working in smaller and more spontaneous modes of production spurred by commissions and the artist’s own impulses. Now removed from the intricate narrative works that earned him renown as one of the world’s most beloved and original art filmmakers, appreciation and attention have continued to grow for Tsai as the themes of loneliness and disconnection—and the uncanny recurrence of pandemic-like elements—resonate even more strongly in our present day. On the heels of a successful theatrical release of Days, amidst newly restored versions of his previous films, and the quiet 2021 premieres of three new short films that exemplify his current working method, Tsai Ming-liang joined me from his home via zoom to discuss his latest work.

Note: an unedited video version of the full interview will be available to paying subscribers next week.

Adam Cook: I have this memory from when we first met in 2014. We were walking the streets of Lisbon when you saw these birds and stopped to film them on your phone. You stood there for several minutes. I know that your recent work is partly made from footage you shoot at different times so I am wondering how often you film things like this? Is it an instinctual thing?

Tsai Ming-liang: I don't really shoot something or take pictures that often. It is so convenient to use smartphones and I rarely actually bring a camera with me. I also don't think that I'm that great at it. Someone who can operate a camera will use the cell phone as I am shooting those images. I'm not that great as a cinematographer or photographer. Sometimes, I have that impulse when I see something that's so beautiful and I really want to capture that image. Then, I will use my cell phone that I have, or very rarely, the cameras that I have. Even if I take those pictures and videos, I don't really look at them. It's just something that I do out of instinctual impulse when I see something that is beautiful and worth capturing.

But I do capture quite a lot of images of Lee Kang-sheng. We travel a lot and we are opposites when we travel: he is always sleeping, whether or not this is in a car, an airplane or train, he doesn't even pay attention to the landscape outside to enjoy the views. For him, it's just about sleeping. And for me, it's the opposite. I don't sleep when I'm traveling. So what I do other than enjoying the views is I take a lot of time to observe him as he sleeps. During these trips to different film festivals to promote films, I have a lot of opportunities to capture him, whether with a video or picture. Frequently, I actually draw him as he's sleeping.

As I said, I don't think that I'm that great a photographer and recently I tried to help him with some casting shots of him in costumes and I was blamed for them not being good enough because I made his leg so short because the angle wasn't quite right, and he had to tell me that it has to be from this low angle shot and all that. So, I'm lucky, that for me, I love images, I do have a sense of knowing what kind of images and compositions that are beautiful to me and I can rely on the cinematographer to execute those shots for me. When I look at the viewfinder, I can decipher what images I want, but personally I’m not great with a camera.

Cook: You released three new short films last year. Maybe we could talk first about Wandering. I'm curious about this idea of turning an exhibition of your work into a film.

Tsai: This particular short film came out of the exhibitions that I have been doing for the past three years along the seaside of Northern Taiwan. It shows the Walker series I have been working on for the past 10 years and it is very much about this particular space and this particular series that I want to showcase. I don't really have a specific reason or purpose for making it. At one point, I thought maybe it can be promotional footage for the exhibition, but then I didn't really use it for that. Recently, the way I think about filming is that I really want to become freer. As an artist I don't want to limit myself in terms of what kind of purpose I have to make films. Also, I am not inclined to do narrative films anymore. And the reason for that is because I do think that freeing myself from that kind of format and framework is where I am right now with my work. I would rather film something that doesn't have a beginning or ending and is just for the for the sake of it that without any specific reason to do so.

So, I just talked to an actress friend of mine, Yin Shin, and told her that she will be going to the Dune Art Museum and will be a spectator and I'm going to film the way she goes through the exhibition. In a way, I wanted to capture that moment in time and space through this particular short film. I wanted to keep it very simple. This particular exhibition might no longer be there and I just felt that there should be some kind of visual record of that moment in time and space.

Cook: Like Wandering, many of your films juxtapose your characters with the space that surrounds them, but in The Night, there are no characters whatsoever. It brings attention to different qualities of your work like light, colour and movement. Can you talk about the significance of the footage that you used and what compelled you to put it together as a film?

Tsai: The film came about around the end of 2019 when I was in Hong Kong at the height of the protests with university students protesting regulations and the changes in Hong Kong. I was invited for an art event and it was very chaotic, what was going on there. Personally, I have an affinity with the people there and with Hong Kong as a city as someone who consumed culture from Hong Kong growing up. And, as someone who is Malaysian living in Taiwan, because of that kind of diasporic experience, I have a very close connection emotionally with Hong Kong. I think that is the major reason why I wanted to capture these images not during the protests but of the remnants or the trace after the protests had happened. Also because there's also an element of danger if I got too close. I did feel a little bit conflicted as I was filming.

Luckily, the hotel where we were staying was very close to the main protest march route, which is in Causeway Bay and I just happened to have a camera with me. I took it out and started to film those traces of the marches from earlier on during the day. It’s nothing I planned, it just so happened that I thought that this will be something I can do outside of the event I was invited for. I didn't have any purpose in mind in terms of making it into a documentary or short film. All I wanted to do at that time was just to capture those images as as a way for me to show my care and my feelings towards Hong Kong, and also my sense of the sense of uncertainty I feel about the future of Hong Kong. I just wanted to use this particular experience of filming the footage that I captured to express that. You can see from the film that I do have a very strong feeling about the city through the images I captured.

Cook: With The Moon and the Tree, you follow two different people: Lee Pei-jing, who is disabled, and Chang Fang, who is elderly. Your work has always been sensitive to and interested in bodies but I wonder how you consider bodies has changed in light of aging and health?

Tsai: Indeed The Moon and the Tree has everything to do with how aging and illness have an impact on the human body. It was a commissioned piece from a foundation whose mission is to bring attention and awareness to performers after retirement.

One of the board members is actually Yang Kuei-mei from many of my films. So, I was commissioned to create a film for this purpose and I have a wealth of actors and actresses that I can choose from. I was especially drawn to Lee Pei-jing. She was my idol growing up and when she was young, she became ill and has been wheelchair bound for the past 40 years. That really creates an interesting subject for me to approach. The other person is Chang Feng who is a very well-known actor and is almost 100 years old. You can see how aging has changed his body. The corporeal reality is completely different from the images we remember from when he was young. I do think that this type of connection between the body with aging and illness is the motif of many of my films, including The River and Days. It's very much about how the body changes and evolves and morphs into something different as a result of aging and illness.

The way I approached this with Lee Pei-jing was to keep it simple. I just wanted to capture her daily life after retirement. We shot this in one morning. I approached her and asked when can film you? And she said she needed to put on her makeup and go through a process before being filmed. So I thought that why don't we just film you putting on your makeup. And not only having that part in the film, but also the way she brushes her teeth, washes her face, doing her exercises, and at the end, she sings a song. As an observer, I want to see how she deals with having these kinds of disability issues and how she performs those simple daily tasks in retirement away from the spotlight.

For Chang Feng I took a different approach. I just wanted to capture the state he's in right now as someone who, from his exterior, you can see the traces of aging very dramatically. I wanted to know how his body naturally moves in space. I directed him to walk towards this tree and then he stood there and you really see how aging has changed the way he moves and looks. I only wanted images without any type of interviews like how other documentaries might approach this, I just want to observe and see visually how aging and illness impact someone’s body.

Cook: How do you see the body in relation to the mind and the soul? Is it just a cage or are these things entwined in a more complex way?

Tsai: If I can borrow Buddhist philosophy, we as human beings are very limited. I do believe that we are predestined for the amount of food that we can consume throughout our lifetime or the amount of money that we can accumulate throughout our lifetime…I have this very fatalistic view on what we are given during our limited lifetime. So, for me, not only thinking about how we will all age and die eventually, very early on, I already thought that when I was shooting Rebels of the Neon God, I already told myself that it is so exhausting to make films, I think I'm predestined to make 10 films during my lifetime. So that's what I was aiming for.

That was the quota I thought I would be allotted as a human being on Earth during this life. And when I made Stray Dogs, that was pretty much my tenth film and I thought anything that I make after Stray Dogs will be like a bonus. So, I didn't feel as motivated to make films because anything from then on will just be a bonus. Also because I have this new journey and adventures with art museums, that completely changes the conditions of how I can do my artwork and be creative. I do feel very different about my body and I'm very sensitive to the issues and the process and the concept of aging, because I am living it. Right now with the 4K restorations they are doing of my previous films, I looked at what I made when I was younger, and I was astonished about full of energy I was and how imaginative I was, and the ways I was able to execute a lot of things I planned to do. I just no longer feel the same way about making films.

My latest narrative feature, Days was not intended, it wasn’t something I wanted to make, it just happened. I think it's a blessing or a gift from above for me to actually make this film. I do believe that for a filmmaker, when you're in your 30s you make films that will somehow reflect that reality, and when you're in your 40s you make films that will be suitable for someone who's in his or her 40s and similarly when you reach your 50s. I do think that that kind of aging process certainly changes the way you make films and what kind of films. If you're in your 50s, I don't think that you will be able to have that kind of sensibility to make films that that are designed for someone who is in their 30s. If I still make films in my 60s in my 70s I will make films with that particular perspective and make the films that can only be made by a director in their 60s and 70s, as a result of aging processes, and maybe as a result of illness—something that I think is inevitable.

Cook: Speaking of Days, it might be your purest and your gentlest film. For example, sex is not always something that's simple or pleasant in your films. But in Days, the massage sequence is very beautiful. I know you've spoken about this before and I'd actually like to contrast it with one of the most talked about scenes in all of your films, the scene of incest between the father and son in the bathhouse in The River. I realize how different these scenes are overall but I think it's interesting to consider that the scene in The River is also beautiful and sensual up until the revelation of who these two characters are. Because bodily sense is something foregrounded in your films, the viewer really relates to the experience of these sensations before we feel shocked or alarmed. Could you talk about your approach to that scene and the strategy of how we experienced the bodily sensations along with the characters and the effect that that creates?

Tsai: In both of these scenes, I'm very lucky to have the actors that I work with. They are so open minded and so committed to the performance. They freed themselves from the baggage that may be associated with sex because of the trust that they have with the scene and with me as a director. They know that they are not doing this to pander to the audience, they are doing this because it is an artistic performance that they are a part of. For The River, Miao Tien, who was a well-known actor in martial arts films, there was nothing sexual about his characters in the past, these asexual warrior characters, so sex was never a subject he was asked to perform. And I paired him with Lee Kang-sheng, a young and new actor at the time, and they have to somehow perform this very intimate, very sexual, interaction in a juxtaposition of someone who is much older and someone much younger. They trusted the scene, the storyline, the director to a point that they just went for it. And that created a kind of very beautiful, sensual moment that eventually has this incest connotation to it at the end.

I do think that can be also be seen in Days, that again, now, Lee Kang-sheng himself is that older person with the young actor, Anong Houngheuangsy who is a Laotian migrant worker in Thailand. He had many jobs before I met him, including as a massage therapist and as a sex worker to make a living. He was trained to perform the movements and techniques I filmed in Days. So I was very lucky that also in this case, the performers, while they know that this is a performance, they also know that the most important thing is to keep it as authentic, as natural, as realistic as possible. And both of them accomplish that, especially Anong because of his training, he really had the skills with these kinds of movements and gestures that are so beautiful, so well choreographed, that it actually transcends this sexual transaction into something that is a moment of pleasure, a moment of joy between these two human beings, these two human bodies. As I was filming this particular scene, I was very, very confident because of the energy I had observed and the connections that I had seen between them. And I wanted to keep this scene going for as long as possible. It ended up being 20 minutes. I know that it will move the audience not only visually, but the viewer can also feel the kind of touch of the movements, of the massage being performed on them as they watch the film.

In terms of the sex scenes I have in all my films, I do think that the best way I can describe it is that because there is this balance of the actors knowing that they are performing but wanting to keep it as authentic as possible.

Cook: I think in talking about the body, it naturally leads us to talk about time, not just because time is used in your work in such a powerful way but because the body itself has a subjective relationship to time. I think of scenes like in Stray Dogs when Lee Kang-sheng is holding the real estate sign and battling the wind which you can feel against his poncho, or the last scene of Vive l’amour with Yang Kuei-mei crying for several minutes. In Stray Dogs, if it was a short take, we would learn that this character does this thing but because it's a long take, we experience it and it embodies us maybe even in, say, his class position, and we come to know him in this different way. Or in Vive l’amour, it's not about recognizing that a character is sad, but eventually the physical act of crying, the exhaustion of it. I'm wondering if you can talk about the way you like to use the cinematic experience of time in conjunction with this foregrounding of the body.

Tsai: A lot of those things happen sort of by accident during the filming process. I can give you an example when we were shooting The River. For one shot, Miao Tien, the father character, actually woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom, and we shot from the back so that we'll hear and see from the back that he's going to the bathroom. And that particular scene was so long, so unusually long, because of the long stream of pee coming out of Miao Tien. After we said “cut”, the crew just started laughed because it was so long. Miao Tien actually thought that maybe it was too long to be kept in the film. So, he was actually peeing and wasn't “acting”.  He couldn't control how long it took to pee. So, when I’m trying to decide how much will be kept in the film, the most important thing is to keep it as realistic and as authentic as natural as possible, as I mentioned before. So in terms of this particular scene, this is someone's true bodily, physiological state that I just captured. In order for me to be true to it to be authentic, I need to let it play out in real time.

During screenings of this scene, a lot of people actually laugh. I don't know whether or not they laugh because they can relate to this type of bodily function or because they find it absurd. But to me, the only way I can approach the filming process as well as the editing process is to think about, if my priority is naturalism, how can I use the temporal component as an element to make this particular scene as real, as natural, as authentic as possible? A lot of time when I edit or shoot something, I think about that extra time that some people and directors might consider meaningless but to me, that is where you can get all the contextual information and a lot of the authenticity that can be manifested through the use of that extra time.

Cook: I wonder if it's different in the context of the Walker films where you're directing Lee Kang-sheng in such a deliberate way. You're kind of imposing a slowness, an invented slowness. I'm wondering if this is a different kind of idea, because for me the Walker films almost visualize time.

Tsai: For the Walker series, I do think that it really has something to do with how it started. It started as a solo theatrical performance for the stage we were invited to perform in 2011 where Lee Kang-sheng played a character that would eventually morph or transform into my father. I wanted this process to be very, very long and also very, very difficult. Lee Kang-sheng found a way to really use movement to showcase and to highlight how long the transformation will take and how difficult. His idea was using body movements in such a slow fashion that it would look like someone is walking, but it's not how people will walk. It is using movement to somehow capture the essence of time as he moves across space from one point to the other. So for me, I think that is such a beautiful way of expressing this concept. The beauty of the body movements he produced was something I didn’t want to disappear at the end of this performance. I really wanted this to be something that can be seen not only in that particular time and space but also around the world against the context of different locations, to see Lee Kang-sheng walk with different backdrops in different cities and for you to see visually how time played out in these different contexts.

Cook: Okay, one last question: what makes you happiest in life?

Tsai: [smiles then laughs] To be with people I like.

Thank you to Claude Wang for helping coordinate this interview and to Vincent (Tzu-Wen) Cheng for translating.

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The unlikely team-up of Lindsay Lohan and Paul Schrader behind The Canyons, the troubled starlet’s artful “comeback” film, unsurprisingly yields strange results. Lohan is Tara, who with her boyfriend Christian (James Deen), is helping produce a horror film with Gina (Amanda Brooks) whose boyfriend, Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk) has the lead part. These are the principal characters of what is a melodrama virtually isolated to the interiors of sickly modern Canyon residences and restaurants. A web of secrets, lies, and dirty deeds entangles Tara, Christian, and Ryan, as they jockey for position: texting, drinking, and fucking (strangers, occasionally)—seemingly, their only three past times. Schrader’s Hollywood Hills figure as some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, barren of everything aside from its populous wealthy, whose vapid lives signify an artless landscape of cinema, where any aspirations involving the seventh art are beyond the frame, an unwelcome ghost merely haunting its attic.

The cold and unforgiving digital aesthetic feels synonymous with the sterility of the lives it dresses, the sheen-less mise en scène of high-resolution pixels revealing la dolce vita stripped of anything sweet. The Canyons is so relentlessly devoid of romanticism, refusing to indulge in what the characters of its film at least must consider pleasure, instead imbuing the entire film with static misery. In unwaveringly accomplishing this ambition, the film ultimately falls victim to it, as watching it is a definitively glacial experience. It is pointed though, even as it rarely penetrates its obvious surface observations, opting to exploit them for mood rather than anything truly insightful. What remains is a portrait by mirror of Lohan and everything her image connotes, and all the darkness the boulevard of broken dreams harbours.

However, the film is not made without empathy, even as its characters unknowingly possess the keys that could free them from the prison that oppresses them. A startling close-up of Lohan during the film’s penultimate scene find her at her most naked—even if she still is at her most fake—as the artificial tears of a washed up actress drench the face of the character she’s playing. In one striking moment, cheating lovers Ryan and Tara meet each other in a bedroom and embrace in alternating parallel tracking shots, locked into each other’s trajectory. They each think that in the other they see some sort of salvation, but it’s another dead end in a convoluted labyrinth of smoke, mirrors, cocaine, and blow jobs. At times the film achieves a quasi-Antonionism—and Schrader’s direction is tight and focused—but the end game is as unfulfilling as the beginning. But that’s the point. It would be tragic if it weren’t all so pathetic.

When I first saw Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! in 2016, hyped for some time as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, I spent much of its running time looking for a different movie—or, rather, looking for a clearer pronouncement of some kind of critical lens on its portrayal of testosterone-driven antics. Like the great many who misinterpreted The Wolf of Wall Street as some kind of rah-rah glorification of its characters’ behaviour, a take that I righteously scoffed at, I found myself in a similar position. It all just seemed too fun with little drawback. Where was the paddling scene á la Dazed that brought out the underbelly of adolescent hedonism? The overtly pathetic creepiness of McConaughey’s Wooderson? Where was the malaise? A lifelong lover of the game of baseball, Linklater was once upon a time a promising athlete with another path ahead of him entirely before a heart rhythm problem laid those plans to rest. Everybody nostalgically looks back on that lifestyle and more generally on the open possibilities of early college days when your whole life is ahead of you but soon will take shape and before you know it, the track you were on takes you in one direction and away from many others. This is the genius of structuring the film over the first day of college for its protagonist, Jake (Blake Jenner). The excitement and pleasure of being a hunky jock without a care in the world aside from the game they love, good times with the boys, and the pursuit of similarly promiscuous young women. Most of the film consists of frat(-like) shenanigans, nights on the town and parties galore. And it’s all a great time. Which it is. If you’re looking for some kind of indictment of toxic masculinity you have come to the wrong place: Linklater generously lenses his squad of bros with a diversity of personality, intelligence, and humour. Their supposedly single-minded pursuits are undercut by hints of thoughtfulness, of depth. And the pleasures they seek are genuine.

There’s an ingenious balance of looking at the cast’s boneheadedness (mostly performative, something made very clear and that some of the characters briefly reflect on in quieter moments), competitiveness (deeply engrained and part and parcel with their way of life for better and worse rather than one or the other), and their creativity, curiosity, and camaraderie. Linklater looks at them and their way of life fondly even as he points to the deeper possibilities of life that it may be covering up—and hints at what it may mean for those who doubledown on the former further down the road. Linklater’s baseball career-ending health issues allowed him to shift his attention to more intellectual and artistic pursuits—something that some of Everybody’s characters have the potential to discover for themselves but may or may not be able to because of their narrower trajectories. “Who are these people?” asks one character during a stroll with the fellas, “I know what we’re doing here. We’re playing baseball. What are all these other guys doing?”

The possibilities life can offer us is a matter of exposure. Jake is quickly presented with an alternative in the form of a theatre student named Beverly (Zoey Deutch) who captures his eye and gives him a hint of another world. At one point, Jake explains to Beverly that his teammates have the same range of intelligence as any other clique, something that Linklater makes abundantly clear in how he articulates the ensemble and how, on occasion, some of them articulate themselves. Linklater’s jocks are not as closed-minded as they may seem. They embrace tastes of other lifestyles, crashing a punk show and an arts kids’ party without rolling their eyes. These successful instances of cross-pollination suggest the arbitrariness of lifestyle divisions. Conflicts you’d expect to emerge in such a movie never truly do, whether between these cliques or in clashes amidst the teammates whose competitive streaks bring on moments of tension that never really boil over. The closest it gets is between the team’s alpha dog, McReynolds, and Jay Niles (Juston Street), an overly intense hot shot pitcher, who after a tense moment in scrimmage, share an understated and surprisingly affecting moment of reconciliation. Linklater finds tenderness under even the most seemingly stereotypical sports bros in his ensemble.

The film plays out like one extended party with only the most minor bumps in the road. Shades of irony and reflexivity are subtle but effective. Wyatt Russell’s Willoughby (perhaps a Wooderson stand-in after all) is revealed to be a 30-year old trying to pass as a college player just so he can cling to this transient passage in life that has already passed him by (“you gotta appreciate it while it lasts,” he remarks early in the film, before he is found out and kicked off the team). In the final scene, after a wild weekend of fun and passion leaves Jake too exhausted to pay attention to his first ever college class. The professor writes “frontiers are where you find them” on the chalkboard, and Jake shuts his eyes. He is on the brink of finding frontiers but will he open his eyes to others? How much of that is personal choice and how much of it is circumstantial as in the case of Linklater himself?

This is the bittersweetness of Everybody Wants Some!!. Their single-mindedness will fast-track some of these characters to dead ends when they will discover, or not, that the unexamined life is not worth living. Meanwhile, others will and in so doing will discover new frontiers. Some of them are inquisitive and will crave ways out (ways that their purviews may obscure from them even as they seek them). The most uncanny balance of the film is in finding meaning within these limited trajectories even as it suggests those limits are encroaching. Appreciate it while it lasts, sure, but don’t blind yourself to what lies beyond the next hill. It could be the rest of your life—and it could be a good one.

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1. France (Bruno Dumont)

Bruno Dumont’s France is, in one sense, one of his most accessible and palatable films, tinged with the satirical, comic, and melodramatic, and far removed from both the bleak austerity that characterizes much of his work as well as the more playfully experimental flourishes of his more recent work. Or is it? France is almost like a movie in a disguise of sorts. It is 2021’s most confounding and original film. It oscillates between styles in an uneasy way. It renders its images either unstable or overdone. Its camera is always thinking about what it means to use a camera. It is the tragic portrait of a narcissist trapped in a prison of images who cannot tell the real from the unreal and is a purveyor of the latter even as she yearns for something beyond. In other words, it’s a portrait of living life today. A masterpiece that can obscure its own urgency, France is a film that, even as it reckons with a world of clichés, generates new images.

2. Drive My Car (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)

Hamaguchi is one of today’s great masters of tone and pacing. He can take the simplest of setups and stir complex emotions and ideas through his control of timing and how he directs his actors. His knack for internal suggestiveness allows for moments of explicit verbosity to carry with them a sort of natural indirectness. One can feel every character’s effort to express themselves, to just exist, and Hamaguchi’s films try to provide avenues for them to do so. Embodying the compelling malaise of Murakami’s work that serves as its basis, Drive My Car is an abstract staging of mostly absent drama revolving around a production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya that creates a cross-section of intangible coherencies that can emerge between people.

3. Annette (Leos Carax)

“Carax has made the sort of pop spectacle lacking in our present day. It suggests alternative possibilities for our culture and for cinema. Annette exemplifies Carax’s uncanny ability to make cinema new again, to make it exciting, wondrous, and awe-inspiring. He is a creator of new images and a defier of clichés who reaches for the sublime and transcendent capabilities of the art form”.

Read the full review here.

4. Old (M. Night Shyamalan)

"Shyamalan creates an impressively disorienting yet legible visual experience that is constantly finding ways to express ideas and sensations. In this sense, it’s not unlike his other work but it’s the dizzying and breakneck way it’s enacted that has an altogether different resonance. Like the characters, we are unable to catch our bearings, to freeze the moment at our fingertips, to just be still and live. Everything is rendered ellipses, not just that which escapes our purview, but even what we can see is so transient—change is too quick, too constant, and too discreet for us to keep up—even what’s in the frame feels as if it is out of frame."

Read the full review here.

5. Memoria (Apichatpong Weearasethakul)

Aural resonances as ripples of unfinished hi(stories), Apichatpong’s career-spanning obsession with memory finds new dimensions and expressions in what can feel like one of his smallest and simplest films yet contains exponentially expanding mysteries. Structured with the straightforwardness of a procedural drama, Memoria leaves you with the sense that it is always more than what you can see and hear—and therefore so is everything.

6. Malignant (James Wan)

“Through its mastery of form and embracing of possibilities without mind paid to what’s perceived to be fashionable or palatable to audiences, Malignant liberates modern horror from its contemporary configuration.”

Read the full review here.

7. Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven)

“Verhoeven is one of our most honest filmmakers whose perceived provocations come from a commitment to what he understands to be accurate and, importantly, compelling. One of the sharpest directions in Benedetta is to provide all of the evidence of [the protagonist’s] manipulations without compromising the portrayal of her faith—these things are not mutually exclusive which leaves us with a much messier idea of human behaviour, and between right and wrong.”

Read the full review here.

8. Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve)

Cinema has a lineage of portrayals of the challenges of relationships between artists, usually focused on clashes of egoism and narcissism. Here, Mia Hansen-Løve takes a nuanced look at the power dynamics between a middle-aged couple whose respective creative pursuits have earned disproportionate levels of success. Bergman Island delicately captures the way we can push and be pushed in relationships, the way we navigate our interior worlds, where it can take us emotionally, and where we can end up should we choose.

9. Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson)

The semi-adolescent romance at the core of PTA’s latest film suggests a more youthful, romantic subject and while LP is his most effusive work since Punch-Drunk Love it is also his most mature, appropriating the formal intricacies he’s honed amidst his more overtly ambitious projects in subtle ways, creating a fully lived in past with an overflowing periphery of details that other come in to frame or come close. His most skilled ensemble work, it may be more about every other character than its inconveniently aged protagonists, the plight of everyone the camera encounters and its implications.

10. The Beatles: Get Back (Peter Jackson)

A Wiseman-esque documentary on The Beatles from Peter Jackson was not one of things I expected 2021 would have in store. One of the year’s best surprises, no other film caught me off guard like Get Back. Its commitment to the minutiae of the artistic process is what makes it as compelling as it is sprawling. The inherent dramas of the band’s nearing final days crack through overtly at times but are always underlying every moment and yet are transcended by the beauty of art and its creation—not to mention its perpetual power of renewal—and the bittersweet movements of life that take us from the past to the future, close to new things and further from old ones.

+ 1 special mention
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (C.W. Winter, Anders Edström, 2020*)

Had I seen The Works and Days last year it would have been on my end of year list, so I’m including it here to make amends. From the introduction to my interview with C.W. Winter: “Divided into five chapters and four parts, sprawling over eight hours, and taking place over 5 seasons, it is a film that evades durational conventions within both the cultural mainstream and contemporary art cinema of which it may initially seem part and parcel. In fact, it avoids easy placement into any contemporary categories, and while this makes up a fruitful portion of the conversation below, it is less interesting than that of how co-directors C.W. Winter and Anders Edström render their anti-epic of minimalism, discreet construction, and de-privileging of moments—which as with many great works of art makes the poetic and political inextricable.”

Read the full interview here.

+ 10 more
All Light, Everywhere (Theo Anthony)
Red Rocket (Sean Baker)
In Front of Your Face (Hong Sangsoo)
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
The Girl and the Spider (Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher)
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze)
Jungle Cruise (Jaume Collet-Serra)
The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)
Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood)
Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara)

+ 4 pure pleasures
The Tsugua Diaries (Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes)
Sycorax (Matías Piñeiro, Lois Patiño)
Train Again (Peter Tscherkassky)
earthearthearth (Daïchi Saïto)

I was initially offered a screener to watch Out 1, which, like most of the people in this room, I had never seen. I thought about it and, possibly selfishly, decided against watching it at home. Like most cinephiles, I heard whispers about Jacques Rivette’s opus in the early days of my film exploration, and it seemed wrong to watch it anywhere but in a cinema. Out 1 was this holy grail, one of those esoteric masterpieces at the fringe of the film world that was just out of reach. Especially in the first stage of my cinephilia, marathon watches of long films by auteurs I was just getting to know where particular points of pleasure and accomplishment such as Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz or Bela Tarr’s Satantango. But Out 1 couldn’t be seen. I could only read about it, which made it feel even further away from me and all the more alluring.

Rivette’s films have hardly ever abided by conventional running times. His only film less than two hours long was his final one, Around a Small Mountain from 2009, which due to health issues he needed help completing. They often run well over three hours, but Out 1’s nearly 13 puts it well ahead as the longest. Shot in 1970, the film, was initially considered for TV but was rejected by French State television. It had a premiere in Le Havre and all but disappeared afterwards. Rivette then made a truncated version that runs one third as long under the title Out 1: Spectre, which has been a little easier to see over the years, but is not so much an abridged version as it is an entirely different film made out of the same footage.

Out 1 was seemingly lost to the abyss, but never forgotten. Impassioned critics never lost sight of it, even as it became something like a mirage in the distance, an oasis we may never arrive at. Truffaut said film lovers are sick people, and I fully endorse this view. Whatever that instinct is in us to see everything, to naively be on top of cinema even as it inevitably remains on top of us, it’s this sense of completism. The seeking out of badges of honour from our most daring movie-going adventures. Perhaps enabled by the fact that cinema is relatively young, that a century of an artform that is highly consumable feels like it is something manageable, that cinema can be conquered. But as I’m sure Out 1 will prove over these next few days, seeing isn’t conquering. There are documented screenings of Out 1. It screened in 1989 in Rotterdam and Berlin, but as soon as Out 1 would surface for such a momentary glimpse, it would retreat back into the abyss of lost films. One might even wonder if it ever appeared at all.

It wasn’t until 2006 in London that a complete, subtitled version finally emerged. And then not long after, thanks to Mark Peranson and VIFF, Out 1 had its unlikely North American premiere 45 years after it was completed right here in Vancouver. I was still in high school watching Tarantino and Kubrick at that point and had never heard the name “Rivette”. It screened twice, once before the festival, and once during, introduced by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Now I can’t speak to the specifics of Out 1, but I can touch on Rivette’s singular approach to making movies. His cinema is one of games and puzzles, with players instead of characters, where the viewer is one too. Even with the same spectator, the games can be played again, with variations each time. Creating intricate worlds complete unto themselves, Rivette, it could be said is one of the great purveyors of make-believe, hardly what could be said of his French new wave contemporaries. Rivette’s formalist puzzles twist and bend and expand not just within their stories, but within the very way they are put together. No New Wave director eliminated the line between form and content like Rivette, and no new wave director’s cinema seemed to arrive so fully formed from the very first film. Paris Belongs to Us, shot in 1959 released in ’61 after The 400 Blows and Breathless took the cinema world by storm, is relaxed, confident, and content, and already finds Rivette fluent in the language he would build on his entire career. In contrast to the deconstructive Godard and the sentimental Truffaut, Rivette had an altogether singular vision, one that seems to respond to a secret world of conspiracy the rest of us cannot perceive, a secret world that if you look closely at his films, you may begin to recognize around you everyday. Geography is essential in his films. Pay attention to how he creates a labyrinth out of Paris, how he connects and disconnects real spaces. Many have referred to his films as board games but the critic B. Kite may have articulated it best when he referred to the Paris in Rivette’s films as a pinball machine, and one can feel the characters bouncing around, trapped, in danger, helpless. His work is difficult but playful and ultimately it is up to the viewer to play along, to be the piece that completes the puzzle.

Sadly, Rivette passed away just last week. It wasn’t a shock. He was known to be in poor health for several years. But it’s an immense loss. Few filmmakers remain so engaged with the world of cinema their whole lives. While Godard & Truffaut left Cahiers Du Cinema when their film careers took off, Rivette stayed on as editor, & until late in life retained his cinephilia. In a 1998 interview, it was Rivette who suggested that Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls was a misunderstood masterpiece, prompting its reappraisal that has taken place in recent years. He was an adventurous movie lover & one of the greatest film critics.

As for Out 1, I’ll have to let it speak for itself but be prepared to meet it halfway, & if like me you’ll be sticking around over the next few days, it may be helpful to jot down some notes about the characters and their relationships to keep track. Made without a script, Rivette had the actors develop their own characters, instead supplying a complex diagram that showed how all the characters in the film were connected and when they would intersect in the structure. Made on the heels of the 1968 student riots, Rosenbaum describes it as “an epic meditation on the dialectic between various collective endeavors and activities and situations growing out of solitude and alienation”, as way of reflecting on the French left during the late 60s. Like nearly all of Rivette’s films, Out 1 revolves around theatre. For Rivette, theater was a forum through which to explore how his characters perceive themselves, present themselves, and how they interact with the world around them. The stage is a place to find answers to the questions the outside world poses. Delueze wrote about three circles in Rivettes work consisting of our roles, our attitudes and postures, and our masks. Theatre was a way for Rivette to investigate the dynamic of these three circles.

The full title of the film, Out 1: Noli Me Tangere comes from the latin of “do not touch me”, which Jesus remarked to Mary Magdalene after the resurrection. The title seems especially appropriate now, in the absence of Rivette, and the presence of this once lost film.

“Jesus’ companions must have heard him snore, snuffle, and fart. If I were to make a film about Jesus, these everyday aspects would resonate in the background.”

– Paul Verhoeven, Jesus of Nazareth

Benedetta feels of a piece with every Verhoeven movie to this point, including his yet-(never?)-to-be-made Jesus flick which sought to demystify “the historical Jesus” as a human being. Benedetta’s steamy romance between two misbehaving nuns is presented as nonchalantly and frankly as the central relationship in his first feature, Turkish Delight. It has the same sensationalism and kid-with-a-slingshot attitude as his Hollywood work. Its modern style is probably closest to Elle—and was largely made with the same team—though it is less burdened by the stylistic and tonal conventions of contemporary French cinema which provided fertile but perhaps less extensive grounds for Verhoeven to play with and against than those of Hollywood. Alongside Black Book, it provides a window into what kind of work a career of the director’s own design might have consistently produced had he not made the move to the mainstream. In this way, in terms of passages of his filmography, it may be closest to the Dutch films he cut his teeth on in just how natural and relaxed it feels. Lastly and obviously, the film it overlaps with the most, at least in terms of content, is his underrated first english language feature, Flesh + Blood, which also portrays hero worship and mob mentality in medieval times and similarly involves the plague as a plot device. Ultimately, Benedetta asks the same fundamental questions or points to the same fundamental things that all his films do about human nature.

“The human being is bad,” says Paul Verhoeven, but this statement is not as misanthropic nor nihilistic as it may at first sound. It is more about how morality is one of the less natural aspects of humanity. It is something that emerges historically and socially. This is what makes religion so fascinating for Verhoeven. It is an imposition of an organized system of morality and ethics—or at least is veiled as such—onto the immoral human being. This is made abundantly clear in Benedetta in which characters live their lives according to a devotion to the divine, but only in so far as social conventions so beckon them. It is a kind of costuming on top of who they really are, both individually and collectively (and the putting on and removal of costuming figures importantly here). What does emerge here as an essential human quality is the hunger for power that Verhoeven does see as driving all human beings, whether it’s a showgirl spilling beads onto a stage to sabotage a competitor or a nun seeking to displace the Reverend Mother who oppresses her to be the top dog of a convent. Whether it’s closer to center stage or closer to God: it’s all about the spotlight, baby.

Benedetta is struck with visions of a hunky Jesus who prizes her, saves her, and even asks her to undress. Verhoeven, as he is wont to do, has his cake and eats it too by rendering these visions as kitschy camp while also emphasizing the seriousness of their resonance with Benedetta. A master of distancing himself from the perspectives of his characters while fully realizing them, Verhoeven’s detachment from his characters’ worldviews is hardly a lack of investment in them. (Verhoeven is a master of showing us how his characters think, feel, and imagine the world around them, they are in part its makers and sometimes said world seeks to exile them, whether a corporatized, militarized Detroit, a dog-eat-dog Las Vegas, or the inherently structured oppressiveness of a convent). Resultantly, Benedetta’s visions are contextualized neither as real nor as laughable delusions. For Verhoeven these are plausible, explainable phenomenological happenings that he seeks to contextualize and in so doing illustrates how the particular belief system and cultural placement of an individual shapes how they relate to and perceive the world. This is something which someone living in this time, brought up in the way Benedetta is, as someone who from a young age believe herself to be close to God and is raised in a convent, may experience and sincerely believe. However, Verhoeven also wishes to illustrate how someone may take advantage of the prevailing belief system of those around them, even when they themselves are invested in it. If there’s profit to be had, be it monetary or social, it takes precedence over all else. A blunt and sly subversion of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Benedetta is contrastively impure. The titular would-be martyr with a direct line to The Powers That Be is a horny, clever, ambitious woman who may very well believe Jesus is on her side but has no problem with how that may benefit her and be to the detriment of those around her. This great invention of God’s light inspires jockeying for position like any other spotlight and we are indifferent to the fate of others if it does not concern our own.

We are first introduced to Benedetta as a child when she and her family are ambushed by a group of nefarious men on horseback. The young girl is able to stave off the potential threat by “conjuring” God’s will in the form of seeming to beckon a bird to shit on one of the bandits. This divine intervention (coincidence) helps her learn quickly what carries power. Verhoeven sees this human cleverness in a historical way but it can fitted to any moment: people who discover what people believe and how it can be used against them ultimately discover one of the most valuable weapons which can be yielded against even those who are in greater positions of power. Those same people may even themselves believe in the same manipulative ideological forces of which they take advantage. That the film arrives after several years of reckoning amidst cancel culture where the lines between righteous empowerment and Machiavellian opportunism are irrevocably blurred makes it especially pointed but this is not the film’s sole aim. Verhoeven is as always interested more in what transcends a given moment and instead in what qualities and potential wickedness underlies the human being at large and here in particular how people are at the mercy of their prevailing belief systems.

We are introduced to the convent that will become Benedetta’s home for the rest of her upbringing via Charlotte Rampling’s Reverend Mother—superb here in an interestingly subdued humanized role that could have been played up towards divergent extremes of bitch or saint and is poignantly grounded and human—as she barters with Benedetta’s family to have her taken into the fold. It is the bottom dollar that motivates even this seemingly holy figure who sees herself as a chess player when she is in fact a pawn just like anyone else.

Jesus appearing as the muse of wet dreams says a great deal about what life and civilization after Christ was to become, and the frankness with which these characters are detailed tells us just as much about who Jesus may have been—we may not yet have Verhoeven’s Jesus movie but even this peripheral and implicit portrayal articulates how he may have been a remarkable person who lived and not a benevolent resurrected spirit who absolves all—a figure clung to by the desires of a people seeking to be more than they are. Verhoeven has less to say about the church and religion in themselves, as well as faith itself which is, again, a historical phenomenon to him, and more about how any institution is beholden to the same fallacies of mankind and the power structures they construct. Benedetta’s sexuality is channelled towards the only figure she is taught to believe is pure and holy, a leap from the wrinkled men and women of the cloth with whom she is surrounded. That is until a nubile new arrival—Bartolomea, played by Daphne Patakia—enters the convent who naturally becomes the object of her repressed desires. Their ensuing relationship seems less like a romance than it does an extended sexual conquest for Benedetta.

As blunt, comic, and broad as Verhoevens style can seem, what drives him is, in a sense, realism. He is cinema’s mischievous realist. Verhoeven wants to construct a context within which human beings behave how they actually behave. It turns out he is a historian after all. If we stretch such definitions then what distinguishes a Haneke from a Verhoeven? Haneke is interested in similar things but his methodology is more specific and yet more removed from an in-the-dirt perspective. Verhoeven doesn’t judge, he beholds. When he says the human being is bad, he does not exclude himself.

In the end, in any context, it comes down to power, sex, and ideology. The characters in Starship Troopers are hijacked by imperialist propaganda. They believe in what they are told to believe because human beings seek something outside the self. Shitting, farting, fucking, eating - Verhoeven’s humans are fundamentally the same, distinguished only by status and appearance and whatever belief system it is to which they have subscribed. The Hollow Man rapes because he will not be identified as a rapist. He can get away with it and knows it. So too do men of power who can take advantage of it. But just the same a woman is capable of taking advantage of her position. Verhoeven is not just a mischievous realist but a mischievous feminist. His feminism comes from believing women are just as capable of Machiavellian pursuits as men, just as clever, just as powerful. For all that might be subversive about Benedetta, it lacks the Trojan Horse pleasure of his Hollywood films which feel like they get away with murder. In spite of the overt transgressions of Elle and Benedetta, their festival-arthouse origins and trajectories ultimately make them feel safer.

Nevertheless, Verhoeven is one of our most honest filmmakers whose perceived provocations come from a commitment to what he understands to be accurate and, importantly, compelling. One of the sharpest directions in Benedetta is to provide all of the evidence of her manipulations without compromising the portrayal of her faith—these things are not mutually exclusive which leaves us with a much messier idea of human behaviour, and between right and wrong. Especially when it leads to the supplanting of a patriarchal abuser of power willingly inflicting harm on those around him. And then, in a sort of sleight of hand, it is in another character altogether, whose relationship to their faith is rendered beautifully human in its competing devotion and skepticism, that we find a true act of martyrdom towards the film’s closing moments.

As for the verdict on Benedetta herself, the character’s slyness earns a sort of respect from Verhoeven (who similarly admired Sharon Stone’s Catherine in Basic Instinct). He understands and is fascinated by morality but clearly isn’t a moralist himself and much of what makes Verhoeven’s cinema interesting lies in that gap—and is especially welcomed today amidst a landscape of navel-gazing and self-censorship. Amen.

Nocturama, written, directed, co-produced and scored by French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello, arrived in 2016 amidst controversy for its portrayal of terrorism in Paris on the heels of the November 2015 Paris attacks. Its production began well before those violent incidents, however, and had already completed filming earlier in the year (Lucca 2017). The terrorism it depicts, while it shares certain characteristics as a coordinated attack with multiple targets, has little in common with that of the Islamist suicide bombers who stood outside the Stade de France in Saint-Denis and the gunmen who opened fire in the Bataclan theatre, among other locations, on November 13th, 2015. That didn’t stop the film from having a difficult landing in its native country. It was shunned from the Cannes Film Festival where otherwise it would have surely had its premiere, debuting instead at the Toronto International Film Festival, and its subject and themes became tangled with a reality distinct from the one it wished to confront. The terrorists of Nocturama do not appear to be linked by a clear ideology, ethnicity, class or religious background. They are a motley crew of young people, in their teens and early 20s, whose reasons for collaborating on a coordinated attack are ambiguous. We witness as they execute a carefully orchestrated series of bombings. Their targets include the Ministry of the Interior, the Stock Exchange, the Tour Total high-rise in the La Défense business district, and the golden statue of Joan of Arc near the Louvre. Afterwards, they hide out in a department store—played in exterior by the first arrondissement’s iconic La Samaritaine—after closing time, until they are found and killed by the state police. Less inspired by real world events of violence, Nocturama’s primary raison d’être revolves around its portrayal of contemporary French youth and a shared generational discontent. It is less about violence or terrorism than it is about the discontent behind that violence and what the meanings and effects of that violence may be and furthermore how such subversive actions fit into the larger contemporary moment and condition. This might seem odd when considering that the film deliberately obscures their motivations and takes measures to reduce the narrative’s focus from a wider context to a minimalist, even abstract, tracking of actions and their consequences; or rather, a chain of cause and effect dislocated from any clear preceding causes and effects. However, Nocturama’s provocative withholding is strategic, by placing emphasis on what is there, Bonello expands the possibility of how we may consider what isn’t there.

The film is not a moral consideration of political violence. It does not support the actions of its characters nor does it go out of its way to condemn them. It removes that possibility by disallowing the spectator to fully know the motivations behind the actions. One cannot stand "with" the characters ideologically for we do not comprehend their ideology. Likewise, nor can the spectator stand "against" the characters on that basis, though we may find their actions abhorrent. We instead are invited to stand "alongside" the characters largely in a position of feeling rather than thinking. Bonello does not articulate the world outside and its machinations, but the spectator can be assumed to be familiar enough with them and accordingly can dream up a number of specific reasons as to why these young people chose to resist them. Or maybe they themselves don’t really know. The characters are implicitly positioned against an unarticulated totality of capital that markedly and paradoxically is felt through its absence and omnipresence as a non-subject. Nocturama is, in part, a zombie movie (without zombies). It is also a ghost movie (without ghosts) where totality exists in its spectral non-presence through manifestations of capital and consumerism which surround and enclose the characters. It is in this way that Nocturama approaches what Mark Fisher defines as, "the eerie": "a particular kind of aesthetic experience," in which "the sensation of the eerie clings to certain kinds of physical spaces…constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." (2017, 61).

In sketching a vague angst with obscured political underpinnings, and the eventual ruthlessness with which that angst is itself resisted, Nocturama illustrates two sides of one coin of a "capitalist realist" present that underlines the notion that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism" (Fisher 2010, 2). Mark Fisher defines capitalist realism by "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it" (2010, 2). In its refusal to allow any imagined alternative, the film may first appear to be a nihilistic or cynical exercise. While it certainly does not provide encouragement or hope of any kind, it provides a valuable and uncompromising look at disconcerting notions of a subject-less capitalist totality that swallows anything in its path while combatting spectator interpassivity. Nocturama is an example of "the eerie" in the form of a non-horror film that nevertheless peers into the horrors of capitalist totality as represented by a paradoxical presence-absence. Nocturama affirms and articulates insights and notions of Fisher’s capitalist realism while problematizing spectator interpassivity.

In the film’s first half, we are thrown, without explanation or exposition, into the carrying out of the bombings. We follow the characters as they simultaneously perform various tasks across Paris, moving the through the streets, riding the metro, and gaining access to spaces and monuments that they have targeted. Although we do not come to understand their guiding principles for the attacks, "the group’s targets all turn out to be sites or emblems of state and financial power" (Lim 2017). Their one human target is the Director General of HSBC. We can make a general assumption that whatever outrage is shared by the characters is vaguely directed towards the oppressive powers of capital. Nocturama meticulously tracks their movements and actions in accordance with a precise timeline denoted by intertitles. The clarity provided is only of the doing, the how but not the why. However, the film mysteriously and mischievously disrupts this strict temporality by freely moving between scenes from the day of the attacks and flashbacks that are contrastively not marked by any designation of time or any obvious linearity. The viewer is left to piece together what is past, what is present, and what may have taken place when, and furthermore what clues these scenes may give us to understanding the characters and how they came together. Some of the characters seem angry, some of them indifferent, some just cynical, and collectively perhaps even confused.

The flashbacks may represent other instances of characters coming together or getting to know each other but again it is not clear whether some have known each other for longer. Scenes ambiguously straddle the line between skeleton keys and red herrings. One such moment reveals an encounter between two friends, Yacine (Hamza Meziani) and Fred (Robin Goldbronn), and a stranger named Greg (Vincent Rottiers), by far the oldest and presumed eventual ringleader, in a waiting room before Fred and Greg each have a job interview for a company called ADS Surveillance (Fred’s later employment here plays a role in their plan). They connect briefly over their struggle to obtain employment. This may be the origin of this "terrorist" group, but we cannot be certain. From here it cuts to Greg at night in his apartment (the appearance of which suggests he is affluent), where he is on the internet reading an article about HSBC laying off nearly 50,000 workers. The film cuts to a scene where André, a university student, has trouble getting into an HSBC branch, when due to their security measures, he finds himself in a small entry room where he fails to provide adequate proof of his identification and gives up on depositing a cheque because of his claustrophobia in the tiny space. In the following scene, André is at a café with Sarah (Laure Valentinelli), advising her on the courses she’ll be taking at university. He describes an essay she’ll have to write in a history class. He previously chose the topic of "War and Totalitarianism since 1900" and explains how to structure the essay. Their dialogue toys with providing a window into their attitudes:

ANDRÉ: Always stick to the same plan. In part A, expose the problem and define it. In B, explain it. In part C, take it to its paroxysm to define the limits. And in D, suggest a solution. You can add a risky theory, too. Something politically incorrect, even unacceptable. Even if they don’t like it. They’ll want you to fuel the debate.

SARAH: What was your theory?

ANDRÉ: I ended saying the 20th century was proof that so-called democracy becomes its own enemy. It can only be judged by its enemies, not its results because the results brought us to the end of civilization.

SARAH: I don’t understand a word.

ANDRÉ: Going further, civilization is a condition for the downfall of civilization.

SARAH: I won’t take the exam.

ANDRÉ: Why not? It’s cool.

(They’re interrupted by their server, who happens to be Yacine. He and André share and exchange and are clearly friends.)

ANDRÉ: Historically, what comes after decadence?

SARAH: Rebirth?

ANDRÉ: And when rebirth is death, what happens?

(Sarah’s boyfriend, David, enters, interrupting the conversation)

            I would caution against over-scrutiny of any of these "clues" that Bonello gives us, at least in determining specifics, but I do think that they offer the viewer some possibilities. It is with those possibilities that the viewer must actively interact, not to simply construct narrative coherency, but to think along multiple strands of potential context around the film’s unfolding scenario. André’s glib, arrogant remarks suggests the flippant attitude of a rich kid trying to impress a young woman, and yet his provocations feel at once like clues into his (and the collective group’s) discontent. The unanswered question, about what happens when rebirth is death, however, feels like it belongs to the film itself. Other scenes show the whole group hanging out at Greg’s apartment and in a striking sequence, dancing together in the dark to electronic music, the camera weaving through their tentatively moving bodies as they slowly coalesce and huddle together. Is this the night before the attacks? This ritualistic moment feels like a collective last grasp at their youth before they knowingly give it away.

After they pull off the bombings, their after-hours access to the department store is made possible by Omar (Rabah Nait Oufella), a collaborator working as a security guard. Instructed to gag and tie up his fellow night shift surveillers, Omar inexplicably decides to kill them instead but hides this fact from the others in a tellingly discreet burst of pure violence that is but one suggestion of the distinct undercurrents of rage, frustration, and confusion harboured by the characters. The naive youth enter this bastion of consumerism with the belief they won’t be caught and that “nothing will ever be the same.” Exactly what changes they anticipate are never divulged. From the streets of Paris to the sleek, shiny interior of a multi-floored shopping centre, the characters spend their final hours surrounded by symbols of capital excess, and vapid mirror images of themselves via similarly adorned mannequins whose ominous presence is doubly effective as a reflection of the characters as well as a symbol of that which they oppose. Here then is the first hint that they may be their own unconscious targets.

There’s something of a Rivettian configuration to the film’s first half in its portrayal of a labyrinthine Paris and the tangled web of conspiracy it catches us in. In contrast to the playful mysteriousness of Out 1 (1971), Bonello’s game is purely one of nuts and bolts. In that sense, the films it more directly evokes are both Alan Clarke’s and Gus van Sant’s Elephant (1989 and 2003 respectively) for their matter-of-fact detailing of acts of violence abstracted from conventional narrative arcs. Violence is less of a subject in Nocturama though, and is more interested in setting up the context for exploring the consequential aftermath. It is here that the film moves from its terrorist thriller mode to one of eerie foreboding when our characters retreat to the department store to hide. Bonello’s clearest influences emerge, each from genre cinema: George A. Romero’s The Dawn of the Dead (1978) and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Nocturama borrows elements from each of these films while hollowing them out and removing their signature aspects: there are no actual zombies à la Dawn nor a drawn out standoff wherein our heroes bravely defend their fort as in Assault. Bonello works in the abstraction of these influences and synthesizes them into something purely and provocatively aesthetic. We, the viewers, are not afforded buffers of cinematic pleasure between us and the film’s harrowing content and yet we are knowingly "inside" cinema. There is something pointedly unsafe about the feeling of watching Nocturama. In one scene, Bonello recreates the famous Steadicam tracking shot from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) wherein young Danny roams the halls in his tricycle, but here there are no ghosts waiting around the corner. The present is its own haunting. Why this mysterious homage other than to conjure the eeriness of its source? Speaking to postmodernism, Jameson argued, "all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum" (1985, 115), but Bonello seems to be up to something more sly and self-aware. If anyone is guilty of empty pastiche, it is the young characters themselves in their imitations of terrorism. Their violence is bound to consumption. They can mimic destruction but not imagine creation. With demonstrably different ethnic and class backgrounds, the characters perhaps instead share a common affective response to contemporary capitalist precarity—but this affect flattens all else and emerges, or expresses itself, as something vague, and ultimately benign.

There’s a sickening irony in how the first half of the film finds the characters attacking old symbols of capital and civilization and the second half finds them take comfort and refuge in one of its most blatant contemporary manifestations, nestling in the belly of the beast, trapped by the literal structure of what they oppose. The characters do not represent an alternative so much as a further symptom, their seemingly subversive gestures are in fact just the anxious twitch of begrudgingly grinding cogs in a solely capitalist landscape, their generation robbed of a "thinkable horizon" outside capital (Fisher 2010, 8) that they can only flounder within it, symbolically buried in the tomb of a postmodernist mecca but not before admiring and playing with the material possessions that surround them, from big screen TVs, to state-of-the-art sound systems, to designer clothes. The characters are their own zombie antagonists.

Nocturama introduces us to the angular interiors of the department store with slick, gliding tracking shots, revealing its geography to us before the characters seize the space and peruse its glistening, ornate displays of fashion, home theatre appliances, and housewares. Bonello’s own synth-driven Carpenter-esque musical score kicks in as the characters spread out and get their lay of the land. The youngest of the cohort, Mika (Jamil McCraven), immediately finds himself lost and trapped in a stairwell, struggling to find his way back to the group. The slowly creeping camera creates an ominous tone that ensures certain doom and also seems to promise something distinctly horrifying. The reality of their actions appear to set in at different paces for each character, and they avoid talking about it head-on, choosing instead to wander the floors, "borrow" items of clothing, and test out equipment. Omar fires up some pop music and turns on the display TVs. A report on their attacks plays on the evening news. Several of them gaze with inscrutable stares before David (Finnegan Oldfield) asks Omar what song is playing. It’s "Whip My Hair" by Willow Smith. "It’s totally sick," remarks David, as a montage of the fiery images of their violence plays against the beat and becomes a music video. The characters spend most of their time apart. Some play with toys, others with weapons. Some seem calm, some seem visibly shook. The night becomes something of a masquerade, as they don their new outfits and playfully slip into disguises. Their identities are not only unclear to us but also unfixed, characterized by the malleability of their youth. Mika wanders around in the department store in a gold mask he finds which reduces him to a zombie-like mannequin himself. He seems full of despair. Is that despair from his conscience, having participated in an act of violence? Or is it the very despair of existing in the world which made him want to burn it down to begin with? Yacine, in drag, delivers a lip-synching rendition of Shirley Bassey’s "My Way" for his comrades. This exuberant performance is briefly interrupted with a hard cut to the exterior of the store as sirens take over the soundtrack. The camera zooms in on the building. They are trapped, and not simply just within the building but within a looming totality that surrounds them inside and outside their hideout. Their fate is closing in on them. The scene cuts back to Yacine as he finishes the song, his mouth agape in mimicry of delivering its last note but he looks as if he could be screaming.

The film’s second half is not entirely confined to the inside of the department store as, unbeknownst to the others, David slips outside on a couple of occasions for a cigarette. During his first smoke break, he encounters a homeless man named Jean-Claude (Luis Rego), whom he invites to come inside along with his wife. This gesture seems generous but in fact it will lead to their death. Later, the execution of this poor couple underlines the inhumanity of the state police force’s violence. They make no effort to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, and shoot down even those who surrender without the slightest hesitation. Regardless of the viewer’s feelings toward the terrorists, it is impossible not to be unsettled by this unwavering, indiscriminate demonstration of authority and punishment. Fisher argues that one way to work against capitalist realism may be to invoke "the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us" (2010, 18). Bonello’s depiction of the tactical, uncompromising slaughter of these young criminals is a potential uncovering of one such Real. During another one of David’s smoking breaks, he ventures further away and encounters a young woman (Adèle Haenel). He asks her if she knows what is going on with the bombings. "They say it’s war," she explains before offering her opinion that "it was bound to happen". Whether her statement expresses a solidarity with David’s cause is not clear but what is significant about this remark is it suggests destruction is inevitable, that there’s an understanding that such actions are a logical consequence of some kind.

After seeing on the news that their hideout has been located by the police, David peaks outside to try and spot a sign of them, and sees no such imminent threat. Soon though the police infiltrate the building and take care of business in short order. Even then, the totality remains outside and invisible, hidden in the otherwise quiet night. The police are merely tools performing their designated function on behalf of an entity that governs them and their victims alike. Nocturama creates the feeling we are watching a horror film, as well as a conspiracy film featuring the conspirators, in which we feel like we are tangled up in something beyond our understanding. In reality, it couldn’t be simpler: a group of kids blow stuff up out of frustration and are killed for it. However, Bonello imbues the film with the tonality of a film with something to reveal or be revealed that never will and perhaps cannot be defined whatsoever, giving us the inkling that we are witnessing something wrong unfolding distinct from the literal wrongs that the film depicts.

The looming totality that dwarfs all casts a shadow over the entire film. In Capitalist Realism (2010), Fisher refers to the "corporate affective tonality" (68) of Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) in reference to qualities of the film observed by Frederic Jameson in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992). In detailing The Parallax View’s mapping of a connective tissue of a corporatized totality and an according affect, Jameson makes reference to that film’s "nagging stylistic peculiarity" and something about it that is "imperceptibly unnerving." (64). Perhaps we can liken such qualities to the "eeriness" of Nocturama, which could be described as a "capitalist realist affective tonality". The film creates the sense of an all-encompassing, inescapable black hole. Concrete reality—the explosive violence on monuments in the first half and the immaculate marble, plastic and metal sheen of the second half—is de-stabilized by a pervasive sense of that which is intangible yet imbues everything. The department store is one of Fisher’s eerie "landscapes partially emptied of the human" and a perfect space wherein to evoke the "immaterial and the inanimate" (2017, 11). The material surfaces and objects in Nocturama feel as though they exist less than the unseen, a seductive mirage. Fisher describes the intrinsically eerie nature of capital as, "an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity." (2017, 11). Later, in the chapter "Approaching the Eerie", he elaborates:

Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the forces that govern our lives and the world. It should be especially clear to those of us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world that those forces are not fully available to our sensory apprehension. A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect. (61).

The influence of capital exerts itself not just in relation to the motivations of the characters and the targets of their attacks in Nocturama, but on their behaviour, their surroundings, their interactions, the dynamics between themselves, media, and media products. It’s everywhere. Furthermore, Fisher links the eerie to questions of agency and the notion of the unknown. The ambiguity of what agent is acting, or whether an agent is acting whatsoever, helps create and sustain "the eerie". There is very little antagonism to be found within the characters aside from the psychological suggestiveness of some of their destructive gestures and the antagonistic force of the state only makes itself known at the end through the efficient violence of the police force who slay the characters, but these officers are merely an anonymous manifestation, not unlike the mannequins, who are instructed to kill on behalf of something that remains invisible, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. These climactic killings do ensure, however, that nothing will be illuminated, either for the characters or for the viewer, and certainly not for the world outside. "The eerie concerns the unknown; when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears," argues Fisher (59). Suffice to say, the eerie never disappears in Nocturama, even after the movie is over.

It is in part this conjuring of the eerie that helps obstruct interpassivity on the part of the viewer. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher applies Robert Pfaller’s concept of "interpassivity" to how cultural objects like movies can perform "our anti-capitalism for us" by explicitly criticizing capitalism within the safe confines of an entertainment product (he specifically cites Disney/Pixar’s Wall-E from 2008) that manages to reassert capital’s domination of our consciousness. If we can "combat" capital passively via spectatorship, we can more easily accept its total presence in our lives (12). In the lack of specificity of Nocturama’s portrayal of capital, and in the total lack of clarity of one single antagonistic entity, there is no defined subject to resist. We cannot fully side with the young characters for aforementioned reasons, but we likewise cannot side with the forces of capital that antagonize their and our lives. We recoil in horror at the sight of the police brutally executing them. In fact, I would argue that it is easier for the viewer to quickly leap to identifying the actions of the state apparatus as wrong than that of the characters once we witness the climactic executions. But the police are not the subject or object of capitalist antagonism or totality either. We are refused any explanation, logic, or resolution in any sense. The film simply ends once the characters are dead. Nothing aside from their lives has concluded. The viewer is unable to locate avatars of identification, a failed righteous cause to lament, nor any kind of justice to celebrate. There remains that which was there from the beginning, the eerie capitalist realist tonality and the totality that is evoked but not grasped. There is no way to emerge from Nocturama with satisfaction or a definitive viewpoint with which to align. Bonello only gives the viewer something to reject. The viewer is left dissatisfied with the characters actions as well as the dystopian present. It beckons for the very imagination it itself knowingly lacks, not just its characters but its creator. It is a cry for help. Where many films would double-down on their anti-capitalist gestures only to create interpassivity, Bonello presents us with lack, insufficiency. If it does not contribute to the anti-capitalist imagination, it does so from a point of view on the oppositive of the naivete of its characters, one that squarely depicts the opposite of anti-capital imagination: "here is capital imagination, look at it, it is real, it is all around us, it is all I see." How can these characters resist capitalism when capitalism is all they know?

The processing of their violent actions and its associated guilt or even trauma is internalized and unarticulated and therefore becomes indivisible from whatever grievances they have and share regarding the very circumstances they at first sought to rebel. The unknowability of the characters’ inner worlds as they undoubtably contemplate—but pointedly elude—confronting their actions while possibly also dreaming of the world they would prefer to live in, in effect, creates a collapse. In place of any psychology, Nocturama gives us anguish without definition. In so doing, this palpable malaise becomes attached not to ideology, not to political aim, not to guilty consciences, but to all and none of these things. Thus, the violent actions of the young terrorists, the violent actions of the state, and the violence of the world at large collapse into one tragic object produced by late capitalist society.

André, who boasted to Sarah of his proficiency in navigating university exams not upon concrete knowledge but the ability to perform knowledge for the system, has the same features of capital itself, to interpassively adopt rhetoric in order to carry on accordingly. There is no sense of him meaning what he says, writes, nor claims. Language and knowledge are images or simulacrum and even this subversive agent is a programmed individual. We can presume that his act against the system is meaningful and sincere, or we can perhaps speculate that it is his understanding of the fraudulence of it all that leads to his destructive impulse. He knows it is not real but he is it. My argument here is that Nocturama is the depiction of an unconscious mass suicide by a group of young people who grasp but do not understand that they are inherently that which they wish to exterminate from society. Plagued by the very knowledge that "something is missing" (Fisher 2010, 22), they creep over invisible cracks and fissures and are part and parcel of capital, knowing in their heart it is bad but yet all they know, even after taking action, is to indulge in its comforts, and its hyper-mediated consumer culture. It’s a short-circuit, the story of the robot who comes to know itself but cannot change itself, or quasi-self-aware zombies in denial, who are so oppressed by the culture that bore them that they cannot imagine its alternative. In spite of their claims that "nothing will be the same", what they really mean is they are that nothing and the only option is through the exit door. The state will happily comply with their wish. It plays out almost like a transaction.

The biggest tragedy in Nocturama is the utmost certainty that no one will look to the real causes of their violence, that there will be no reflection, no communication, no discourse other than that which serves the reinforcement of the status quo itself. There is no dialogue between the characters and the state, no dialogue between media and citizens, and no dialogue between the police and their employers. It will all blur into the vague cause and effect of the everyday as if it were as normal as withdrawing cash from the ATM. An invisible entity that is not seen but felt in its totality, capital is depicted in Nocturama as a "cause-that-is-not-a-subject" (2010, 70), and here it wills living subjects out of existence, by the hands of the state, with whom they are collaborators.

Citations

Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Random House Inc, 2017.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2010.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism and Consumer Society. Hal Foster (ed.), London, Pluto. Pub., 1985.

Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington : London: Indiana University Press ; BFI Pub, 1992.

Lim, Dennis. “Essays: Dennis Lim on ‘Nocturama.’” Grasshopper Film.

Lucca, Violet. “Directions: Bertrand Bonello.” Film Comment, Jan. 2017.

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Matt Grady founded Factory 25 in 2009 for the very simple reason of wanting to release films he loved. After working for Plexifilm throughout the aughts, Grady set out on his own to forge a catalog of indie films guided only by his idiosyncratic taste. The first was Ronald Bronstein’s divisive Frownland, which blew Grady away, and attracted him all the more for its polarizing nature. From there, he never looked back, having since released films by some of the independent film worlds greatest talents, including Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel, Amy Seimetz’s Sun Don’t Shine, Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven, as well box sets of the work of Caveh Zahedi and Joe Swanberg. What distinguishes Factory 25 is its emphasis on physical releases in an era of digital intangibility. Lovingly crafted books, records and artwork that house the films make Factory 25’s releases a collector’s wet dream.

Two of the latest films making the rounds are Tim K. Smith’s Sex and Broadcasting, about New Jersey’s famous radio station WFMU, known for three decades for its uncompromisingly eclectic programming. A story close to Grady’s heart, the film specifically looks at the struggle to retain independence and vision in the face of the shifting tectonic plates of how we access and present media. The other is Factory 25’s first foray into Toronto’s burgeoning film scene, Diamond Tongues, co-directed by rising talents Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson. The film follows Edith, a painfully self-centered aspiring actress played with equal parts charisma and venom by Leah Goldstein.

Having joined forces with the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee for the first time, The Public Cinema (a local microcinema co-founded by Paul Harrill and Darren Hughes) mounted a ten film retrospective entitled “10 By 25” to shine a spotlight on Grady’s offbeat distribution label Factory 25. Grady was on hand to present the films and hold a public Q&A. Grady seems to be solely motivated by genuine passion. After his Q&A, I observed as he was about to exit the auditorium until the first frame of Frownland graced the screen. As if in a trance, Grady immediately turned around and grabbed a seat without taking his eyes off the film.

I caught up with him on the festival’s final morning as Sex and Broadcasting screened in a nearby cinema.

Adam Cook: What’s it like having ten of Factory 25’s films playing here at Big Ears?

Matt Grady: Having a retrospective of a distributor’s films at a festival like this just doesn’t happen—it’s been an amazing experience. People are showing up for these films at a such a great music festival and we’re getting a great response.

Cook: It’s a testament to the identity you’ve built with Factory 25.

Grady: Having the films programmed alongside such an incredible music lineup makes me feel like I’m doing something right. I sat through Frownland yesterday and the response was perfect. Some people were into it and others were like, “what is this?” I hadn’t seen it on the big screen in five years and I was excited to watch it too. I’ve watched it so many times but seeing it on the big screen is still special, seeing the grain of the film.

Cook: And that’s your deal, you distribute films that you’re excited to watch again and again.

Grady: I love all my movies, I really do. I feel like they’re all my kids. I didn’t make them but I really believe in all of them.

Cook: When you see a film that you feel passionate about, as a potential distributor what are the next questions you have to ask yourself?

Grady: Some of my films people have called painfully slow, and others are kind of insane. And they both work. I need to feel something, I like extremes, I can’t do middle of the road. It can’t just be “fine”. I feel like so many indies are following formulas, you get your minor TV star and try to make a Hollywood film. I don’t think that works. I do see films I like that I just don’t think are Factory 25 type films. I like meeting the filmmakers and talking to them. I like distinctive voices. All the ones I work with have opinions and are passionate. I don’t want to work with someone who will just walk away.

Cook: Making a movie has to be life or death for them.

Grady: Exactly, and the involvement of them is really important for me. For smaller films you need engagement from the filmmakers.

Cook: Alex Ross Perry’s distinct voice and engagement exemplify that.

Grady: He’s got a unique voice and he’s an amazing writer, and he keeps together a great group of people he works with. Sean Price Williams and him work together so well, and Robert Greene on the last couple of films. That’s important. With The Color Wheel, we did a physical release of that, it’s a book with several pieces on the movie, a 35mm film strip I personally cut out for it, and Impolex is on the disc too. Physical media is tough. With something like Iron Man 3 it’s worth doing, it’ll sell, but for small movies it’s tough. But I still love physical things. I wanted to make the world of the film, so we put that release together.

Cook: Right now Ebook sales are going down, books and vinyls are going up. There’s a desire to return to physical media. But you have to make it special.

Grady: That’s what I try to do, I try to make fetish items. I’m a collector, I have a decent sized vinyl collection. With Caveh Zahedi, he put his whole life into a release. That’s the only way to make it now. I treat it usually like I’ll make a book or a record that comes with the DVD rather than a DVD plus something. With Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven we made a VHS.

Cook: How is the business then, is it a sustainable model? I think people look at something like this and are impressed but wonder if it’s really working economically.

Grady: The distribution world is changing so much almost everyday. Now with Netflix and Amazon, that’s gonna change everything. That model makes sense. I’ve been able to make it work where I know I can put out a film, and if I don’t do a physical thing, I will at least break even. And the physical thing it ends up being the most profitable thing or sometimes it doesn’t work. That’s the risk. It’s all changing. Sometimes I still take on jobs to support myself. I produce things on the side, I’ve done a little editing. I’m working on projects to make it possible for me to release more difficult films. I’ve been able to make it work, but I can’t retire today. It’s about forming partnerships with theatres and digital outlets, exclusives. Getting theatrical in New York is essential. I have relationships with everyone. So many of them are cinephiles and they want to book the type of films I distribute.

Cook: They look at it the same way you do, breaking even on some things, profiting on others. Making it work. It translates to how we all make it work, filmmakers, critics, programmers. To enable our full-time hobbyist lifestyles, we take on different things. A lot of great filmmakers have day jobs. I think we need more transparency about that, it’s important for aspiring people in the field to know.

Grady: People look at me as a distributor and think, “oh he must be making so much money from all these films,” but I treat it like my art, Factory 25 is my art project, I’m a curator. It means a lot to me. Sometimes that means I go with my gut and my heart and it doesn’t always work out but I don’t have any regrets about any films I’ve put out.

Cook: That’s rare, I think. Do you think what you’re doing could only work in New York? You draw on New York talent, you have the relationships with theatres, etc.

Grady: I think about that a lot. I look at rent costs in other places and it’s so much lower and I think to myself, “if I live there I can afford to put out an additional film each year,” but could I? I don’t know if I could if I existed outside of that New York film world. Right now we have the best filmmakers working in New York since the 70s. People are going to look back at Alex Ross Perry, Dustin Guy Defa, Ronnie Bronstein, the Safdie Brothers. We have amazing voices and visions right now. I’m happy to be there now and be a part of it. The best thing at NYFF this year was the shorts program. There are exciting pockets of filmmaking outside of New York of course. Toronto is amazing right now.

Cook: Could you talk about film festivals and the big label culture of Sundance, Cannes, etc. that impacts distribution?

Grady: I would love to be able to resist that culture so much. I don’t want those labels to mean anything, it should all just be based on the merit of the film. If a film that premieres at a smaller regional festival is five times as good as a film that premieres at Sundance, their lives are totally different. The latter will have a better chance of being seen. There have been a couple of films I was tempted to distribute but their lack of a festival life was probably the deciding factor. Locarno is amazing, I wish that festival meant as much as Toronto or Cannes. Sarasota, Maryland, and Montclair are amazing regional festivals with great curation. I go to Sarasota and Maryland every year and that’s where I see the most films.

Cook: When you’re sitting in the cinema, is the audience part of the audition?

Grady: Definitely. If there’s a film I’m considering but I’ve only seen it on Vimeo and it’s playing at a festival, I’ll go see it again to gauge the audience’s reaction. I like films that polarize.

Cook: What do you think of the future?

Grady: it’s like the Wild West. We’ll see what happens. With Amazon and Netflix being so aggressive, that’s going to have consequences. There are easier ways to self distribute too, I think more people will be doing that. There’s crowdfunding for theatrical. Everyone’s figuring it out. Some people think you don’t need theatrical, from my point-of-view, I do. A week in New York gets you in The New York Times and a rating on Rotten Tomatoes. You have to let people know it exists.

Cook: And film criticism?

Grady: I’m more of a believer in PR than marketing. A review from a critic means more than anything, I focus on that the most. If certain critics like something it gives me confidence that it could work. I still will distribute a film I really believe in without that support though, it’s just a lot more work.

Cook: In Factory 25’s seven years, what has changed?

Grady: It was all physical at first. I had things on iTunes but that didn’t matter much. I had to adapt to VOD and digital. At first Cable VOD was huge and now it’s not. Digital has not made up for the decline of physical sales. It’s a balancing act. Having a catalog with a reputation helps with exposure, people trust the curation, so it’s on an upswing, people are looking at my titles more.

Cook: Can you tell me about your latest releases, Sex and Broadcasting and Diamond Tongues?

Grady: Being a college radio nerd, I was really drawn to Sex and Broadcasting: A Film About WFMU than after watching it, I realized there were so many more reasons to love the film including it being just a really compelling story and that I firmly believe in the ideals of the stations and Ken the station manager. It's more that just about a radio station, it's about passion. 

There is a film scene in Toronto that is going to break out soon and the filmmakers of Diamond Tongues are a big part of it. The film's protagonist is one of the most evil and manipulating female characters I've seen in ages but you totally fall in love with her while being totally aware that she would destroy your entire being.

As part of their special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image, EuropeNow has published my review of Hester Baer’s new book, German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), an impressive feat of constructing and making visible a coherent—almost tangible—mapping of an insidiously evasive shift in the political and cultural makeup of society across four decades of film history across West, East, and post-unification Germany and the disparate yet interwoven genres and movements therein.

Click here to read the full review.

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After an instance of domestic violence, Madison (Annabelle Wallis) starts to have visions of a series of murders that turn out to actually be happening. She and her sister enlist the help of the police who doubt them at first but begin to suspect Madison’s own involvement once a body turns up after she describes one of the grisly episodes. Meanwhile, a mysterious presence from her past as an orphan under psychiatric care, memories of which she has long repressed, seems to be tied to the killings.

There are enough clues in the opening credits that one can figure out the twist right then and there but Wan is a smart enough director that such a showing of his cards is deliberate. It’s part of what makes Malignant such a dazzling feat in that it then becomes all about how he is going to play those cards, and it is the playing of those cards that is so surprising moment-to-moment. The film is always gradually and perpetually shifting and changing into something else and is structurally designed in such a way that it pulls you into a vortex of the movie and its momentous movement. In this way, it makes for a nice pairing with David Prior’s The Empty Man, another recent triumph that feels like it contains more than one film or type of film within it. It's a new kind of horror cinema that opens up possibilities of what a single film can contain and even when transparently drawing on past influences—and it really runs the gamut in where it finds its sources—defies existing categorization. It's a level of tonal mastery and dexterity that could only be described as virtuoso.

Wan oscillates from the purely throwback to the purely original in such a way that it transcends its roots—not unlike the the old Seattle underground featured in the film and the new city built on top of it which makes for some of its most memorable staging. Wan's film too is built and stands upon the old but redraws a new map for genre. In one of those uncanny things that happen with films released in the same moment, Wan integrates “Where Is My Mind” (by way of Safari Riot) into Wan regular Joseph Bishara’s score not unlike how Collet-Serra utilized Metallica's “Nothing Else Matters” as a leitmotif in Jungle Cruise—another film that mixes old and new schools, albeit in a way more contented with convention, that renders itself utterly distinct from its moment.

The skillset that has endeared Wan to auteurists and horror fans alike is present here but at a new level. His deployment and control of light and darkness, his obsession with playing with lamps and diegetic light sources (and of course the colour red), of creating caves of shadow out of any spaces whatever, makes for awe-inspiring craft. No space that is introduced is not fully mined for its potential. Nearly every set that’s introduced eventually gives birth to an inspired set piece. The film's initial classical setup shows that Wan can pull off the most pure and effective horror mise en scène and its aforementioned shifts show that his skillset is adept at seemingly whatever he wants to do, seamlessly moving between chilling horror to blatant camp, from Argento to De Palma to Cronenberg to Raimi to Henenlotter, from thriller to action—all while keeping the core grounding of the film's impetus and emotions intact.

By making sure that the true surprises of the film are contained in its movement and its feeling more so than in its plot ensures the film's effectiveness and ability to maintain its tonal integrity even in its most batshit moments. That these shifts and oscillations are executed with such assured confidence creates a duality of experience: on a base level there are the pleasures and scares of the movie in the common sense, and secondarily in the gleeful roller coaster ride of Wan's stylistic and storytelling leaps. Such tonal schizophrenia would be a recipe for disaster in lesser hands, but Wan, whose talents have never been in doubt, reaches a new peak that ensures his status as one of the genre’s best and most inventive craftsmen working today. Through its mastery of form and embracing of possibilities without mind paid to what’s perceived to be fashionable or palatable to audiences, Malignant liberates modern horror from its contemporary configuration.

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The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is a film that does not obviously bear the markings of either fiction nor documentary. Divided into five chapters and four parts, sprawling over eight hours, and taking place over 5 seasons, it is a film that evades durational conventions within both the cultural mainstream and contemporary art cinema of which it may initially seem part and parcel. In fact, it avoids easy placement into any contemporary categories, and while this makes up a fruitful portion of the conversation below, it is less interesting than that of how co-directors C.W. Winter and Anders Edström render their anti-epic of minimalism, discreet construction, and de-privileging of moments—which as with many great works of art makes the poetic and political inextricable.

Winter and Edström follow two impetuses which may appear to be contradictions to some: to pay attention to and respond to the real world, and also to have no obligation to some naïve conception of the integrity of that reality. It is a film that knows the real world provides its material but not its direction. Thus, The Works and Days freely fictionalizes, re-stages, and constructs the year in the life of Tayoko, a character and a real person who also happens to be Anders’ mother-in-law, who lives in a small Japanese village in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture. We move between her own daily life and life in various forms contained in her periphery. As Winter describes below, he and Edström do not provide an explicit mapping of the village but it is a different sort of mapping, one that literally maps out a space, but one that does so rhizomatically, and in the process maps out much more that extends beyond the film both spatially and temporally.

At odds with the clichés of slow cinema, The Works and Days operates in a durational mode that restores power to the cut, to the art of sequencing, to the fundamental building blocks of filmic language. In this way, it is intensely modern and deceptively classical.

Winner of the Best Film award in the inaugural Encounters Competition at the Berlinale in 2020 and now finally screening in some cinemas after COVID-19 dramatically altered the film’s theatrical plans, I enjoyed a generously and appropriately long conversation with co-director C.W. Winter.

Adam Cook: What drew you to cinema?

C.W. Winter: In junior high, I had a friend whose family had a Hi8 camera and we made little movies together. That was my first experience. I was drawn to it because I was a TV junkie. My older siblings were off to college and my mom was at work and my dad had already died. When I wasn’t with friends or playing sports I would sit in front of the TV drawing every day. I had this precocious sense of thinking about narrative. Then I thought I would go to USC and study film only to arrive there and be mortified by the state of affairs because it turned out—and I’ve heard it’s changed since—it was largely a pipeline for studio film and television. I didn’t know enough at that time to be able to articulate why I wasn’t interested in that but I knew that I wasn’t. So I left it behind and thought I wouldn’t do movies anymore.

After undergrad I was looking for jobs and because it was Los Angeles I ended up working on film sets and fluked into becoming a ghost writer for a number of directors. I spent some years working with these kinds of directors, learning how I didn’t want to do things, how to not make films. So I applied to CalArts because I knew Thom Andersen, James Benning, and Allan Sekula were there—and others who turned out to be wonderful. That’s when I made the first feature with Anders, The Anchorage.

Cook: How did you first encounter Anders?

Winter: Anders was maybe my favourite photographer before I met him. He started taking pictures in 1986 and his style hasn’t changed much since then other than certain refinements, the spirit and quality are largely the same. He was one of the first photographers on the cover of this French magazine, Purple, arguably the most important photography magazine at the time. I knew his work because there was this newsstand run by this Frenchman in L.A. that would get these small press French journals. I would go and constantly be looking at and thinking about those images.

I was working for a German director and was sent to Berlin for this job. One of my first nights there I asked for a recommendation for a bar and they sent me to this place that really wasn’t my taste. I was sitting there with my head in my hands and I got this tap on my shoulder and this Japanese woman asked if I would like to be in some pictures in a magazine. I told her that of course I would definitely not like to do that [laughs] and she seemed so dejected that to be polite I asked ok can you tell me who the photographer is and she said Anders Edström. So I said I’d do it. She was shocked I would respond so strongly to this name and it turned out it was his wife. That’s how we met. We did these photographs together. It was this complete fluke where some producers recommend that I go to a bar that I would never go to and the producers on Anders’ job recommend he go to a bar he would never go to. Me living in L.A. and he in London, meeting by preposterous chance in this place we would never normally be.

Soon after, we started talking about how we might make things together.

Cook: That’s an amazing story. Clearly there was a sensibility you had in common but how does that collaboration work and why?

Winter: At first it was hard for Anders to imagine working with me and for me to persuade him to do moving image. It’s very hard for people to remember how disruptive his photos were at the time. I’m occasionally prone to offering up a partially provocative statement that the three most important things to happen in photography in the last 35 years are photoshop, smartphones, and Anders. I like it as a claim. I know it’ll get a rise if nothing else. And it's a fun argument to make. And a useful thought experiment. In the 80s, the dominant culture of photography was virtuosity and Anders was bringing some intentional failure, what Hal Foster might call brutal aesthetics.

Anders thought the value of what he was doing was taking pictures between the pictures other photographers would take. So how could you do that with movement? You lose that in-between moment. But everything is relative to its own medium: it may not be about capturing the single moment between moments, it could be the shots between shots or the scenes between scenes that others would film. When we figured that out, the lightbulb went on and we started doing some test films.

The reason we’re able to collaborate so well is that our division of labour is very clean. He’s in charge of the images and I’m in charge of the sound and coming up with the story. It’s not as if you have two people trying to do the same thing and constantly converging. I trust him to do his bit and he trusts me to do mine. We’re never butting heads. At the same time, we are each other’s best critics. We remind each other when something is too strong, too alluring, or too beautiful. We trust each other when the other has a strong opinion about the other’s thing.

Cook: With both The Anchorage and The Works and Days, there is a familial connection for Anders. Could you talk about the origin of this latest project and also, from your positionality, your relationship to the village and the people?

Winter: That’s another part that works out well for us. For what I’m doing on the projects, I believe it benefits strongly to do it at a remove so that I can see a detached picture, a superordinal kind of view, whereas Anders it’s from having been in a place for a long time. When one arrives in a new place, one will make touristic observations and be drawn to things that are too easily interesting. When one spends a long time in a place, one works past those touristic observations and closer to that of a long term resident. We have made two films with Anders’ families because he had spent many years there taking pictures and done a lot of that work already.

With The Anchorage, shooting Anders’ family—well, sort of, because we fictionalized who the family members were— we had gone to Sweden to make a botanical film on mosses and lichens in the Stockholm archipelago. One day Anders’ mother, Ulla, showed up at the island and told us about when Anders and his sister were small, they were on the island, and this hunter had begun walking around the cabin at night during moose hunting season. We realized this little story was enough to make a whole film. During that filming, Tayoko came out to make food on the film. She got to see Ulla being in a film which then allowed us to ask her to be in a film in Shiotani because she was familiar with the process.

With both films we didn’t have a full story. Our films don’t have stories in a classical sense. Our stories aren’t about getting from the beginning to the end but just to the beginning. We went on multiple trips to Japan and spent time until one night, when we had all been drinking sake, Tayoko talked about these years she had spent in frustration because she had been denied an education and a career, all because she was a woman in this society. Everyone was visibly moved and surprised by this story. We knew we had a story that could get us to the beginning of making the movie.

Cook: Does the film that now exists resemble what you had imagined at the outset? To what degree do you have ideas you want to explore at the outset and to what degree do they emerge throughout the process?

Winter: When we begin we hardly have a sense of what the film is going to look like. I kept this big scroll of butcher paper in my studio and occasionally I would tape note cards to it, but they weren’t scenes or anything,  just notes like “make sure to shoot a bunch of dawns up on the fire road” or “make sure to go out and hang out with the wild boar hunter”. Vague things, not in an order or in an arc, things that may be useful to film, and that’s about it. And then Anders’ photographs are used as loose inspiration, reminders of ways of looking.  

For the most part it’s a just-in-time model. A lot of times, understandably, younger film studies people or critics might ask in terms of influence or cinephilic reference. That doesn’t really give a very good picture of how we work. If anyone is familiar with Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled, a piece he had at Documenta in 2012, which is just an area in this compost on the edge of the city where he installed a sculptor by another artist and put a beehive on it and there was a white dog running around and he planted marijuana plants…When one gets there one can’t tell where the work begins and where it ends, which objects were already there and which were brought there or made. It begs questions about what even is art as an object. That’s a more useful reference for us than any movie would be. What we had was this valley, this little basin, and in it we had 47 people, and we had two cameras and two microphones and we would wake up every morning and have this little ecosystem to go out and film in. Some days we would walk this way and some days you walk that way, other days we climb the mountain, some days we get in the kei truck and drive, some days we stay in the house. We have these tools and every day we’re just waking up to make things. Like what I was saying about when I was a kid and I would spend every afternoon drawing. It’s like we’re saying we’re going to go draw now. We’re going to go film now.

Once in a while we have an idea but for the most part we are just using the tools to go out to make stuff and it’s only in the edit that we decide what to do with it and find how to make it coherent and forward-moving. We added Tayoko narrating her diary so that there’s a baseline to follow and there are these seasonal divisions—even if the seasons themselves are disordered.

Cook: In regards to what is already there versus what isn’t, the main narrative or thematic element that was already there in this case was that Junji, Tayoko’s husband, had passed away. I’m curious about her creative input. There must have been some shaping of that story with her from the beginning.

One thing we talk about a lot is the idea of antifragility. If you ask a typical person what’s the opposite of fragile they would think something solid or unbreakable, but that isn’t the opposite of fragility. The opposite of something being fragile is that when it is hit it gets stronger instead of crumbling.

Winter: It happened early but not straight away. One thing we talk about a lot is the idea of antifragility. If you ask a typical person what’s the opposite of fragile they would think something solid or unbreakable, but that isn’t the opposite of fragility. The opposite of something being fragile is that when it is hit it gets stronger instead of crumbling. The dominant model of cinema is incredibly fragile. There’s a script that’s been approved by a committee of money people that they have to stick to, they have a schedule they must follow. If anything goes wrong in that formula it’s something like a catastrophe.

In the way that we work, contingency is built in from the beginning. Contingency is the medium. It’s important that people don’t confuse this with chance or improvisation, which are very different things. Those come from within. Contingency comes from without, it’s a thing that befalls you, that’s what the latin contingere means. It’s a thing that comes from the outside. So we go into a place and we know that things are going to befall this production but with the way that we work with a small team and few tools, living in this house for free and cooking our own meals for cheap. We can just wait and wait and wait in a way that the expensive fragile productions cannot. So we wait around and when things befall us, things befall us.

Days before we were supposed to go Japan to begin filming, thinking that he was going to live for 18 months, we got a phone call and found out Junji had suddenly died. I sat there on the phone and within the next 15 minutes—because I had planned for this eventuality—I said okay, we’ll make another film. I remember thinking about Close-Up by Kiarostami and hearing that he was ready to make one film and that he got this news story and they re-mobilized the operation to make Close-Up. I had it in mind to always have a plan B ready because this can happen. So we did, we had a plan that if Junji died we would go and use Tayoko’s diaries, and make a recreation of something like their last year together even though our version is fictional.

Then when we got there just in time for the wake. We filmed that and it was a two-day process. Once that was over we took a week off to regroup and think about what the movie was going to be. I had this idea bouncing around of casting someone as Junji and using Tayoko’s diaries but then I heard Tayoko speak to Junji at the shrine that was set up in her home for 49 days after he died. Everyday she was at the shrine speaking to him knowing he can hear every word. In watching her do this and realizing that in her mind that these were concrete certainties, I proposed this idea that we recreate the last year as an opportunity to do things over because she had expressed remorse that the last year of their marriage was the first year they had fought since the very first year of their marriage. This could be a chance to go back and say many of things she wished she could have said and do the things she wished she could have done and so with that as a vague writing principle, I didn’t write a plot or make an arc out of it, but with that as something like a background radiation, we got back to work and started making a movie.

Cook: A painter may paint one painting or several of a particular place, and must choose what to show, what captures what they want, a photographer may do something similar, but in this film you have eight hours and hundreds of shots, but showing everything is always impossible, it’s still a limitation, how do you choose what to show, what to capture, and what to exclude?

Winter: Are those cicadas that I hear over there?

Cook: Yes! I even made a note to mention that we have this huge population of cicadas that emerged this summer in Toronto. It reminds me of your film.

Winter: I knew it, it’s very appropriate. I’m glad you could arrange that. [laughs]

Anders has been taking these pictures since 1986, we’ve been talking about these pictures for two decades, we have very specific ideas about what a photograph is and how it works. When we go out everyday with our tools we are looking for that.

So, what do we use and do we exclude…When we’re filming we’re not too hung up on this. We used to be. With The Anchorage we had to be because we were shooting on super 16 and we didn’t have the budget to play around whereas this way with video we were free to try a lot of things out. This shouldn’t be confused with a lot of lazy techniques people use in independent film or on television where they’re just blanketing everything because they don’t have any guiding impetus. Anders has been taking these pictures since 1986, we’ve been talking about these pictures for two decades, we have very specific ideas about what a photograph is and how it works. When we go out everyday with our tools we are looking for that.

We give ourselves a lot of room based on the idea that editing is probably our favourite part so we just go out and we shoot. Between scenes with people there are sequences that are just of the land, the natural or built landscape. For those we either walk somewhere or we load into the little kei truck and drive around until we find a place that seems especially uninteresting—we pull over and we’re forced to extract something out of this uninteresting place. Anders and I came from commercial cinema where the impulse is the opposite. By handicapping ourselves at the beginning, it creates a density to the images for us. We don’t think a lot about exclusion aside from that we know we are excluding…We don’t like things that are gritty. We don’t like the excessively beautiful or the clever. We’re drawn towards weaker images because we know that people are going to have to consume them over a long duration and it’s too fatiguing to give people uninterrupted allure for eight hours—the mind just turns off too quickly.

With editing, I sat down with all of it on the first day and realized I didn’t know what to do and that it was going to be a matter of learning how to make this film, how to edit this film, because there is no script. There is some chronology but that’s pretty weak. So I spent a long time just organizing and arranging the footage until it became clear how to start working with it. I would edit the same way we edit photographs: I would find an image that spoke to me and see if I couldn’t edit sequences around that image, and then treat those sequences like patches. Then, somehow, arrange these patches in some kind of linear quilt. I don’t love this analogy but it’s something like that. It was important to me that this not be the longest film ever so it’s not laden with gimmick, or that it not be a film that must be screened over multiple days because I don’t like that, so I decided it should come in at the length of a work day.

Cook: The Works and Days is described as a work of fiction but it obviously has characteristics of what people consider to be documentary-like. Can you describe what these boundaries between fact and fiction mean to you? Do they even exist?

Winter: I don’t want to sound too absolutist because of course I could go back and find exception to this, but I think at least as a general sensibility it’s safest to proceed as if those categories don’t exist, because they don’t concern us. Filmmaking is largely problem-solving and so we go into these situations where we’re trying to make something, here we are, we have cameras, we have a microphone, now let’s just make something, and you’re solving the problem of how to best make that thing. Or, in scenes where you do have something more explicit to communicate, how do you solve the problems of communicating that thing. And there are a whole bunch of tools of cinema and among them is a separate dropdown menu that relates to fiction solutions, this sub dropdown menu of fiction solutions is just another set of potential solutions to what might be the problems of a situation. So the idea that we would think in terms of documentary or fiction just doesn’t interest us. We’re solving problems. Any number of fiction solutions for us will often be the best answers to those problems.

Cook: Going off of that, what do you consider the relationship between a real place, a real time, and a recording of a place and of that time, to what degree can you represent or re-present it?

Winter: Well of course the first answer is that the map is not the territory, so any attempt we’re going to have to map this place is going to be incomplete but it’s especially going to be so because we’re not doing reportage. This is an expressivist exercise unabashedly full of impurities and artificialities and fictionalizations. There are even a couple instances—and I hate to disappoint Thom Andersen—where we resort to geographic license. Sorry, Thom. At the same time, I think there is a quality we can find in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, or My Darling Clementine, or Fort Apache, where having watched these films, if you were forced to, you could go back and make a map of the village, you could draw it on paper. We don’t spell it out as explicitly as John Ford, we don’t show you the one street that faces out onto the nature, we don’t draw out the town as clearly, but if forced, if having only the recourse of this film, a surveyor could easily map this village. The struggle might be watching an eight-hour film multiple times, but it’s all in there.

It is an exercise of mapping a place, even if the map isn’t the territory.

Cook: Going into the film, I didn’t know that it would involve the death of Tayoko’s husband, that there would eventually be this eventual dramatic point, and so I had accepted early on that there wasn’t going to be anything like that. My experience became exclusively about paying attention to moments and details for the sake and value of those moments and details themselves. What I find moving about the film is the idea that the quotidian is enough, the stuff of life is enough, more than enough, it’s overflowing, even bursting, and the things worth knowing and understanding can come from paying attention—and that cinema can be a wonderful way of paying attention, of making that clearer.

I get this feeling when watching the film of something larger beyond the frame at all times, that this one story or one person or one village or one passage of time is encased in a larger, indivisible time than what we’re watching.

Winter: We’re happy to allow that there’s something to Junji’s death that becomes narrative-like and we don’t object to the fact that that’s present in the film, but for us it’s about amplitude and narrative wavelength. We let these moments breathe to a degree that everything is of the everyday, including death, that enough space and time is given to them that the amplitude of the various waves of the film are kept low so there’s an equanimity that’s maintained even if somebody dies.

I think the great…I mean where do we even begin with these people…but one of the greatest…I don’t know…how do we rank the crimes of Sundance? [laughs] But one of the crimes of Sundance, besides destroying access for Americans to the best films in the world playing in their cinemas, I mean when I was a kid the latest Godard film played in the cinema in my little suburban town. You got to see the best films and now all of those parking spaces are taken up by indie movies. One of the things that those types of films do, especially the non-fiction ones, is to try to come up with the most clever subject. Who can come up with a subject that is odd or quirky, bizarre or weird, or somehow so compelling that the filmmakers barely need to show up. Part of what we’re interested in when we’re making films is not letting the subject do too much of the work. A film is images and sounds and cuts. And we try to have it be as much about images and sounds and cuts as we can. I like this story—even though it might be apocryphal because apocryphal stories can be useful too—where before he made Breathless, Godard went to Truffaut and asked if he had any scripts from which he could shoot a film and he settled on the Breathless script because he found it to be the worst of the three. Even if it’s untrue, it relates with this idea of not relying on the subject, of forcing the authors to have to do it even without the benefit of an incredibly compelling topic.

A film is images and sounds and cuts. And we try to have it be as much about images and sounds and cuts as we can.

Another aspect of spending time is that we wanted people who you wanted to spend time with. You can think of films like How Green was My Valley and the Morgan family or we can think of the Earp brothers in Wichita or the siblings of Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family. In pulling away of this conflict resolution structure that defines 99% of films, it’s a lot like the first 14 minutes of How Green was My Valley before the conflict arises. We have that first 14 minutes for seven hours, and so you have the time to just live with this family and enjoy their company because they’re people you would want to spend time with. This of course isn't exactly correct. But it'll do as a heuristic.

Also in regards to time, with cinema and music, there were these parallel movements which were Noise Music and Slow Cinema. In each case, when they rose up, they were these resistance approaches that were defiant, shocking and alienating. Then they devolved into being styles that can be taken up somewhat easily, maybe by people who haven’t thought through all of what made them powerful in the first place. By around about 2013 or so we had largely lost interest in those kind of films with the exception of people who had been there so long that it’s kind of their birthright to make those films forever. James Benning can make those films until the end of time and they will be great and Tsai Ming-liang can do it. Our film is edited together with an average shot length of 18 seconds, somewhere around that of a golden age screwball comedy, which divorces us from the way duration is normally reached through excessively long shots.

We also thought about ways that time works in more expansive ways, so you have these jisei, Japanese death poems, that start every chapter that go from the 18th century to the 1920s. The beautiful way these jisei are written resist the idea of a final gesture being one’s grandest, instead the final gesture is unremarkable. They are this reinforcement of the idea that the death in the film is unremarkable, that it’s just one death of many in Japan on farms or in villages over the last how ever many hundreds of years. But then we pull out further to another poem which is Hesiod’s The Works and Days which follows a tradition of farmers’ manual poetry that includes Marcus Terentius Varro’s Agricultural Topics in Three Books and other georgic poems. They remind us that Tayoko’s experiences are not just of this time and place but are tied to the 11500 years of the human history of farming, at once small and yet related to ideas that are larger than we can comprehend. That’s how we were using time in a sort of accordion way.

Cook: It makes me think of Deleuze’s line of the universe, when he’s talking about Mizoguchi, this idea of this line of the universe connected to the image we’re seeing. As well as this idea of the mental image constituted by invisible relations—you always know you’re looking at more than just the image itself but a set of relations. By making death appear unremarkable like you describe, it also makes the moments we normally do consider to be unremarkable to be given rise by way of that equanimity.

Winter: That is important for us. I think there are ways we think when we’re in a cinema space. You can relate it to learning a new card game. When you learn a new card game your mind is functioning in the memory region and it’s memorizing as much as it can about what it’s seeing. Once you’ve memorized that card game, you’re playing in the default mode network. You’re no longer thinking about what the game is or how it’s constructed. You’re just playing. In front of 99% of fiction cinema, pretty early on our brain is going into the default mode network. And part of what we’re doing is trying to keep the mind in the memory region by upsetting narrative expectation continually and sufficiently enough that one is constantly having to commit to the sense-making of this thing. It’s a different type of thinking and I would argue that it’s a different quality of thinking. It’s an avoidance of inattentional blindness by disorienting the experience and getting the audience to pay attention to objects in a way that allows them to bring their own creativity to bear.

Everyone will bring their own imaginations. I’ve had artist friends in the scene where Tayoko uses the roto and they’ll think of Bruegel’s Icarus, or if they notice the screens in the house they think of Agnes Martin's grids or people who are into landscape might think of Claude Lorrain, literary friends will think of Robbe-Grillet or the Russian formalists. I can’t say that stuff is in there or isn’t in there, but we’re pattern seeking primates. People are going to pull things out if you’re not forcing them in the claustrophobia of an inattentional narrative. When you free people up you’re able to use the time and space in different ways.

A lot of what we’re doing relates to duration and for us some of the interest in duration is to leapfrog back over postmodern critical theory back into what we consider to be the good stuff, looking at art of the mid-20th century and various conceptualisms and minimalisms. Cinephiles might go to Benning, Warhol and Akerman. There’s a finite regress from there that takes us back to Empire which was likely inspired by the kind of music playing at Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street which was likely triggered by La Monte Young arriving in New York and declaring himself the inventor of minimalism when in fact that actually took place when he was living in Los Angeles and started hanging around the living room of a teenager named Terry Jennings who was a backup musician for Ornette Coleman. Terry and Dennis Johnson were recording music that would essentially become the first full-fledged minimal recordings. A discovery of Dennis Johnson’s November helped rewrite the history on how minimalism began. There was this period when these records were being reissued in the 90s, things by Tony Conrad and Terry Riley and Henry Flynt. Those records durationally affected us so heavily and so we wanted somehow to see if we couldn’t capture those feelings in cinema but not in abstract ways which would have been too easy but through fiction which seemed harder.

…often people use this Beckett quote, “fail, fail again, fail better,” but for us it’s very important that you fail, fail again, and you fail worse—or at least worse according to the dominant culture so that we can make films that maybe can work emotionally or critically but fail as capital.

What you’ll also notice is there’s a kind of built-in failure in our work, at least by the classical model of doing things. This is really important to us because it’s a matter of economics, of failing according the predominant economic model, often people use this Beckett quote, “fail, fail again, fail better,” but for us it’s very important that you fail, fail again, and you fail worse—or at least worse according to the dominant culture so that we can make films that maybe can work emotionally or critically but fail as capital.

Lest this get too serious or high-minded, there are other people using duration in ways that we think are effective, like, for example, Gilbert Gottfried’s rendition of the aristocrats joke which was delivered four days after 9/11 and is a masterpiece, and Norm Macdonald’s moth joke. Those speak to us in ways of insistent durational failure that remind us of certain kinds of music that’s important to us like Loren Connors’ Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations or The Shadow Ring, for example. They have this kind of unrelenting failure to satisfy by the conventions of the dominant sphere. And we think those kind of things are important. Because, in a standard distribution of ideas, we’re not just looking for ideas from some fat right tail of excellence. It’s important for us for things to have a lifeblood and that they have a sufficient amount of stupidity, and thinking in these kinds of ways is a way to get at some of that. For instance, there are a number of fart jokes in the film. They’re not there to be snide or flippant, they’re there because that's the most basic kind of joke, and much of what we're interested in getting at is the fundamentals and the basement reality of making something.

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