DISPLAY UNTIL APRIL 30, 2024

PM #0040048647

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“A weird little bitch of a film and I ate it all up. God
bless the United Vapes of America!!”
- DOUGLAS GREENWOOD,

Directed by Sean Prince Williams

1
Fata Morgana
Fallen Leaves
The Human Surge 3
 INTERVIEWS N O
COLUMNS

97
12 FACE THE MUSIC 5 EDITOR’S NOTE
Hamaguchi Ryusuke on
Evil Does Not Exist 53 FILM/ART
By Beatrice Loayza Tulapop Saenjaroen
By Jesse Cumming
19 YOUR OWN HALL OF FAME
Alex Ross Perry on 56 DEATHS OF CINEMA
Videoheaven and Pavements Terence Davies
By Adam Nayman By Lawrence Garcia

29 OBJECTS OF DESIRE 59 DEATHS OF CINEMA

Rodrigo Moreno on Vincent Grenier
The Delinquents By Michael Sicinski
By Jordan Cronk
61 TV OR NOT TV
34 FROM THE VISION TO THE NAIL Joe Pera
IN THE COFFIN, AND By Kate Rennebohm
THE RESURRECTION
Dimitris Athiridis on 64 GLOBAL DISCOVERIES ON DVD
exergue – on documenta 14 By Jonathan Rosenbaum
By Antoine Thirion
80 EXPLODED VIEW
Will Hindle’s Chinese Firedrill
By Chuck Stephens
FEATURES

6 LAST OF THE INDEPENDENTS

A Roundtable on Charley Varrick with CURRENCY
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
By Christoph Huber 68 THE KILLER
By Adam Piron
16 DEEP CUTS
The First International Women’s 70 KILLERS OF THE
Film Seminar FLOWER MOON
By Erika Balsom By Robert Koehler

24 OPEN SOURCE 72 MENUS-PLAISIRS –

Some Films by Ross Meckfessel LES TROISGROS
By Phil Coldiron By Jay Kuehner

42 FILM TOURISTS IN LOS ANGELES 74 POOR THINGS

By Thom Andersen By Deragh Campbell

76 THE PRACTICE
By Haden Guest

78 PRISCILLA
By Manuela Lazic

PHOTO CREDITS: 2 Adult Swim: 61; Alex Ross Perry: 19, 21, 23; Apple: 70; BFI: 58; Elevation: 78, 79; Faliro House: 34, 37; Film Festival Gent: 56;
Filmswelike: 12, 14, 15; Grasshopper: 64, 67; Guy Maddin: Cover; Kino Lorber: 6, 9, 10, 11, 43; Mongrel Media: 46, 47; MUBI: 29, 31, 33; Netflix: 69;
Paramount: 42; Ross Meckfessel: 28; The National Library of Norway: 16, 18; Tulapop Saenjaroen: 53; Universal: 44, 45; Viennale: 73, 74, 75, 76

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
Mark Peranson
ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN
Vanesa Mazza
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Peter Mersereau
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Tom Charity, Christoph Huber,
Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman
PRODUCTION AND
MARKETING MANAGER
Kayleigh Rosien
WEB DESIGN
Adrian Kinloch
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Editor’s Note
I feel like I’ve explained enough in this space over the last year, so that announcing this is the final
issue of Cinema Scope is in no way surprising. But let me reiterate that the time has long passed to
envision a way of making this magazine sustainable financially without begging for money, or sus-
tainable emotionally without driving me to a premature death; if anything, I should have pulled
the plug in 2020, so consider the last few issues as gravy. The irony is that I have no other choice to
end this at the time when I also am soon-to-be unemployed at the behest of the German so-called
Minister of Culture and her new liege, which frees up a lot of my time. But as I don’t want to spent
the rest of my days in debtor’s prison, my decision is final. (This also allows me to get the fuck out
of the business entirely, and don’t think that isn’t an option.) Whether or not we will be able to
sustain a website and what might go on there is a question that has to be put off for a few months,
but there will be no more print issues of Cinema Scope in this form, with me in charge. I apologize
to anyone who is disappointed, and I, too, am disappointed, but I have no more energy left to fight
after almost 25 years of volunteer work.
Even with a few months’ notice, nothing was planned to make this issue any kind of requiem,
because frankly I did not have the time, nor the inclination. (I considered contacting other edi-
tors of printed film magazines to amass a kind of reflection on the necessity of this medium but,
yeah, no time.) I’m perfectly happy going out with a normal issue and don’t desire any kind of
meaningless fuss. Though I guess it is true that there are a few interesting articles that speak to
films and filmmakers important to me over the past few decades, or things that this magazine can
get away with because I’m accountable to no one. Starting with the cover, which has been kindly
provided by Guy Maddin for some Canadian content, a farewell kiss to the government funders
who supported us for all these years. Then there is a piece on two films by Alex Ross Perry that
have not screened, nor do I know when they will (we would have liked to show Pavements in Berlin
but that proved impossible). Watching Videoheaven made me think of Los Angeles Plays Itself, and
I hadn’t reached out to Thom Andersen for a few years and regretted it—this led to the chapter
from Thom’s long-awaited (at least by me) Los Angeles book. Before that there’s a long interview
on exergue – on documenta 14, the second-longest film ever made, and one of the best films of
2024, which also has yet to screen publicly (but will do so in Berlin). And, as foreshado2wed, you
are going to have to suffer through an analysis of Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick, but at least it’s done
by drunk Austrians.
Besides these exceptions, I have approached this issue in the same way as every other one,
which is to ask writers what they want to write about and dash off an editor’s note in five min-
utes. For almost a hundred issues this has been the modus operandi, as do something valuable in
this field one needs creative freedom—whether we’re talking about making films or writing about
them. I have learned this through my experience as a writer, but also from a few filmmakers, to
whom I owe just as much in terms of inspiration, encouragement, or support as I do from film
critics. Ultimately what makes me saddest about ending this endeavour is the chance that the
space will not exist for a certain kind of filmmaker’s work to be treated with the intellect and re-
spect that they deserve in print. Unlike some others, I believe that there are some internet re-
sources which provide this—or anyone is free to create one—and that the end of this magazine
does not represent “the end” of anything except killing trees. The (film) world has changed plenty
since 1999, and though I’ve done my best to try and change with it, maybe it’s time for different
voices to assume positions of authority. As I ride off into the distance, thanks to everyone who
worked on this thing, there are too many of you to name. We were all in this adventure together,
and you can never quarantine the past.
—Mark Peranson
 Last of the Independents
A Roundtable on Charley Varrick with Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
BY CHRISTOPH HUBER
Don Siegel’s superior crime picture Charley Varrick (1973) was sup-
posed to be called Last of the Independents, but that title was nixed by
Universal honcho Lew Wasserman. This probably gives even more
credence to the subversive, stick-it-to-the-system notion nestled in-
side this tale of a crop-duster pilot who has resorted to small-scale
robbery for a living because he can no longer compete against the
capitalist monopoly in his legal job.
The film begins with the heist of a backwater bank, in which
Varrick (Walter Matthau) loses two accomplices—including his wife
(Jacqueline Scott)—but makes an unexpectedly big haul. When the
amount is covered up in official reports, Varrick realizes that he and
his dimwitted surviving partner (Andy Robinson) must have un-
knowingly made off with laundered mafia money, and has to rely on
his wits to take on the syndicate, whose delegates—one businesslike
(John Vernon), one murderously criminal (Joe Don Baker)—soon
get on his trail.
Charley Varrick was originally written for Clint Eastwood, who
had just had a career-defining success with the Siegel-helmed Dirty
6
Harry (1971), but the star declined, allegedly because he found no
redeeming features in the title character. (Siegel surely relished his
riposte of inserting an Eastwood quip directed at Baker.) Matthau
wasn’t too happy with the script either—the director outlines their
arguments, with his usual dry candour, in the posthumously pub-
lished autobiography A Siegel Film—and Siegel faults the actor’s
public complaints for the studio’s lack of interest in the film. Despite
good critical notices, it was considered a disappointment at the box
office, although ironically Matthau won a BAFTA for his perfor-
mance in a film he claimed he did not understand. In retrospect,
however, Charley Varrick has come to be seen as not only a career
highlight for Matthau, Siegel, and many other participants in the
film, but also as one of the best Hollywood pictures of its era—not
least for its distinctive spin on such classic themes as the romantic
notion embodied in its original title.
That “Last of the Independents” designation is still visible above
the name “Charley Varrick” in the unusual title credits that bracket
the film: a close-up of the lettering on Varrick’s pilot jumpsuit, which
is in the process of going up in flames. This design was also long in
the running as a motif for one of the pricelessly rare Cinema Scope–
branded T-shirts, but in the end it never happened. So, I vowed that
my contribution for the (perhaps) final print issue of this publication
would be a piece on Charley Varrick, a film that occupies a special
place in my cinephilic evolution and which I looked forward to an-
other encounter with after roughly 20 years.
This time out, however, I felt that my usual essayistic approach
would yield less interesting results than incorporating actual film-
makers’ point of view. To get this broader perspective, I enlisted two
of my best friends (and ardent Siegel supporters)—the Austrian
writer-director combo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, whose
newest film The Devil’s Bath will soon be unveiled—to discuss in
depth the many pleasures of Charley Varrick. So, after enjoying a re-
watch (or, in Veronika’s case, a first viewing) that was accompanied
by much laughter and many exclamations of delight, we instantly sat
down with a bottle of wine to discuss what we had just seen.
Christoph Huber: We talk about Charley Varrick in honour of the
Cinema Scope T-shirt that never got made: Last of the Independents.
But also because it’s a film that means a lot to me ever since I saw
it many times on TV in my youth, when it was one of the films that
contributed to me discovering Don Siegel as an auteur—really one of
the first Hollywood directors that stood out for me—as well as Walter
Matthau. Clearly, this kind of crime thriller was not written for him,
but for Clint Eastwood. However, Matthau being the lead—and what
he is doing here as an actor—forms a big part of the film’s slightly
contrarian allure.
That brings us back to the Last of the Independents tagline. Charley
Varrick, the protagonist, used to be a stunt flyer, then a crop-duster
pilot, but he’s being driven out of business by the forces of monop-
oly enterprise—“The Combine,” as they call it in the movie, which
underscores the similarities of the capitalist system and organized
crime. It is interesting that an old studio professional like Don Siegel
made this movie at the beginning of the ’70s, when the younger gen-
erations of New Hollywood (let alone non-Hollywood directors)
might have considered themselves “the independents” trying to
take over the system. Siegel shows quite a different perspective on
what it means to fight for independence. Then, there is also some-
thing unusual in the way the film works with its provincial setting:
essentially, it’s a rural noir, but taking place mostly in broad daylight,
with only two big action set pieces that basically bracket the movie.
Still, it remains highly suspenseful throughout, but it achieves this
tension mostly through character work. And even its characters are
unusual, bordering on odd.
Severin Fiala: There is also a Hitchcock aspect to this, like North
by Northwest (1959)—another sunlight noir, but one with even
less action.
Huber: And there’s crop-dusting in both. Charley Varrick is based
on The Looters by John Reese, a novel I’ve never read, so I guess one
would have to look there first to find whether these are conscious
references. Generally, though, I don’t see Siegel as a particularly
Hitchcockian filmmaker; even the way he orchestrates suspense is
very different. His direction is classical, but here he is much more
interested in the characters and their idiosyncrasies.
Fiala: That makes me think of the scene where the detectives are
storming Charley’s trailer, and the way they run. With their heavy
bulletproof vests, this feels ridiculous.
Veronika Franz: It looks totally absurd!
Fiala: Yes, and that is what really interests Siegel: these quirky
touches that make people and situations different and unique.
Huber: But he doesn’t handle it just on a superficial level. The
cops in their vests look ridiculous at that moment, but they are no
idiots. Siegel treats things unlike, say, the Coens, who sometimes
tread similar territory. But they always feel the need to underline the
quirkiness, while Siegel does the opposite, thankfully.
Franz: Well, Marjorie Bennett’s hilarious trailer-park mama is
quite over the top…
Huber: But she’s comic relief in a way that stands apart, and she’s
providing a comedic view on the proceedings. And she might almost
be the trailer park’s mascot—she perfectly fits into the environment.
Franz: Which is characteristic of the locations that they have
found. That is one of the biggest assets of the film: places that are
memorable and believable. Who else would have come up with that
scene at the cow fence, where John Vernon’s mafia middleman talks
to Woodrow Parfrey’s poor bank manager...
Huber: Funny enough, Siegel singles that scene out in his autobi-
ography as one of the most difficult shots he ever made, even though
it is just two people walking and talking. He loved the location and
wanted a certain light, but it took them several attempts over a few
days to get it so that the shadow fell over the countryside just as he
wanted, and they still could finish the dialogue before they ran out
of sunlight.
Franz: He ends up with an over-the-shoulder angle that is not
something you’d normally do, but it looks stunning.
Fiala: That brings me back to Hitchcock: you have to know how
to set up a shot like this and get the timing of everything in it right.
Huber: But overall Siegel’s laconic approach is very different from
Hitchcock, even if they both may aim for maximum efficiency.
Franz: Yes! There is something magic about this laconicism. It’s
there right from the beginning. The slow opening, with these shots
of a rural idyll under the credits. Children playing. Then, this cou-
ple arrives—Varrick and his wife—taking their time looking around,
talking. And then, BANG! All of a sudden the bank robbery is under-
way. I’m not much for jump scares, but the way Siegel changes from
one register of time into another here is really impressive.
Huber: I had completely forgotten that the set-up for the robbery
is so funny already, almost a parody, with Matthau’s disguise. The
thick glasses...
Franz: And the wart! And his leg in plaster! Who would rob a bank
with a plaster cast? But Siegel makes it all work. The craftsmanship
is so outstanding throughout—we needn’t really discuss this, since
there are so many instances and it’s so obvious. But just consider the
colour of the villain’s car in the action scene at the junk yard near the
end: if it wasn’t red, you might not even notice he’s already speed-
ing towards Varrick’s biplane. Siegel seems to know exactly what the
audience will notice, and he frames accordingly. Some shots might
seem too close, but that really is necessary so that certain details
won’t be lost on the audience.
Fiala: Like the picture of John Vernon on the bedside table, when
Varrick is in bed with his secretary (Felicia Farr). It is conspicuously
7
oversized, but that’s why it stands out as a clue to the audience—and
additionally, it makes it funny.
Huber: Film is tragedy in close-up and comedy in long shot.
Fiala: As far as laconic direction goes, you probably can’t beat the
scene where they are throwing away the guns after the robbery geta-
way. Varrick is standing on this small bridge and slowly lets one gun
fall into the water, then the next, taking his time. When you think
he’s finished, he takes the gun of his partner and lets it drop in, then
he thinks of another in the glove compartment... all in that same
slow, steady rhythm.
Franz: The slowness gives it a realistic feel, the methodical as-
pect of it. And the place. I love how insignificant it looks, which is
also really funny: the tiniest bridge imaginable. And the way he just
lets go of the guns, which you don’t even see hit the water. It’s the
opposite of the dramatic fashion in which guns are usually thrown
away in films.
Fiala: That realistic aspect even extends to the quirky details.
There is also deft stylization, but it’s perfectly balanced—for every
detail Siegel purposefully stresses, he employs understatement else-
where. To get back to the Coens comparison, they make sure to let
you know how deft their handling is all the time. But Siegel lets you
notice casually, like the funny details in many of the locations, and
they seem all the more real for it.
Huber: During the heist, one of the robbers swings through
the teller’s window over the bank counter, then takes out a hand-
kerchief and wipes away the prints. This is one such detail that
feels both utterly convincing and a bit absurd, on reflection. Why
didn’t they wear gloves in the first place? It’s one of these ide-
as that are exaggerated, but only so much that you still buy it in
that moment. It adds to the excitement of the scene and makes
it special.
Fiala: And he might have looked suspicious standing outside the
bank with his gloves on.
Franz: I saw the film for the first time today, and thus was really
startled by the scene of his wife waiting outside in the car while they
go to rob the bank. When the policemen arrive and start talking to
her, I was really wondering what she would do next. There’s a range
of possibilities, but I really would not have expected her to just shoot
the cops in cold blood.
Huber: And there’s this outstanding brief countershot of a bul-
let hole in the car door—she must have been hit by the cop’s bullet!
Or was she? Because she remains remarkably cool as they drive to-
wards escape after the robbery, but soon it becomes clear she is not
well at all. She just was determined enough that they would make
it out.
Franz: I must say that all the women in the film—Varrick’s wife,
the passport forger (Sheree North), the mafia associate’s secretary,
even the trailer-park lady—are incredibly cool. They’re all fearless
and strong.
Fiala: Of course, that’s part of a certain tradition. Hawks…
Huber: Walsh, Wellman. That type of classical Hollywood direc-
tor who is automatically associated with male genres, but almost al-
ways have stronger women.
Franz: But here the women are just supporting characters. They
are not central to the plot, but still have a power that sets them apart.
8
Huber: Yet there’s the scene where Joe Don Baker’s mafia killer
arrives at the forger’s place and slaps her as a kind of foreplay. She
has to submit because she’s part of the syndicate and he’s higher up
in its power structure.
Franz: But she gives him a knowing smile! You probably couldn’t
do a scene like that anymore, but it feels almost like a BDSM mo-
ment, some kind of roleplay. Clearly she consents, and then she clos-
es the door—locking out the camera and the audience...
Fiala: At first glance you think he’s in control, but is he really?
It’s a good example of how the film is constantly turning clichés on
their head.
Franz: Let me get back to the beginning, which is actually quite
tough, when Varrick’s wife takes the bullet and dies in the car. It’s
quite something. Then Varrick starts pouring powder over her dead
body to blow up the car and eliminate all traces. But while he’s doing
it, he kisses her. And he takes the wedding ring off her finger and puts
it on his own. Again, this fascinating balance of conflicting emotions.
Fiala: He has to remove the ring so they can’t identify her.
Franz: Yes, but if it were just about that he could just put it in his
pocket. The gesture implies it clearly means something to him. The
ring then disappears until the very end, when you spot it on the dead
body of Varrick’s partner in crime lying in the trunk, so it will pro-
vide a false lead. But there is more to this than ingenious criminal
planning: Varrick really is sorry that she’s dead. There are the songs
his partner plays on the harmonica in her memory, after saying: “She
was a good driver.” The character dies early, but she’s not forgotten.
When we write our films, we often have difficulties with this sub-
ject: how do you say goodbye to a character? How can you show am-
bivalence? On the other hand, Varrick seems a cool customer, mak-
ing preparations while the viewer may not even be sure she’s really
dead yet. Admittedly, he lifts her eyelids to be sure—but I wasn’t!
And he’s already pouring the powder.
Fiala: C’mon, it’s Walter Matthau! He wouldn’t do something like
that. And that’s why it’s so great he’s the lead…
Huber: And not Eastwood, who would do all this really coolly.
Franz: Because there is always something slightly clumsy with
Matthau.
Huber: Precisely because he’s not a Superman action type is why
the film’s “Last of the Independents” theme resonates. An action
man like Eastwood or Bronson in the lead would take the sting out
of Varrick’s victory over the combine. But no, it’s our Uncle Matthau
who outwits them—one of us, and yet smart enough to beat the sys-
tem. Back then you might have believed that dream, because the en-
croachment of capitalism was felt differently, wasn’t as suffocating.
Fiala: That’s why you love him: it’s Uncle Matthau. Great casting.
Huber: Another thing about your observation that Varrick’s wife
is not forgotten. Later, we see memorabilia of the Varricks’ flying
career, including a poster announcing their most dangerous plane
stunt. It is exactly what he will perform at the end to outwit Baker’s
mafia henchman, just before the scene with the car trunk. It really
demonstrates how cleverly constructed the film is, without drawing
particular attention to itself.
Franz: This also comes back to understanding what the viewer
will accept. We often discuss this for our movies, and then Severin
will argue we have to add something so the audience will notice what
we’re getting at—like taking a picture off the wall and putting it back,
which happens at one point in Charley Varrick. It is an example of
how you guide your audience with absolute perfection.
Fiala: And still, Siegel doesn’t budge an inch in his laconicism.
And also gets away with the exaggeration and whimsical touches.
Huber: It works because everything is so grounded.
Fiala: Yes, and that’s why the humour works so well throughout.
Never nudging you or being ha-ha funny is what makes it really funny.
Huber: We all agree that the script seems exemplary, yet it’s worth
bringing up a dissenting opinion—Matthau’s! Allow me to quote
from Siegel’s autobiography:
“Walter Matthau was set to star and he didn’t like the script. He
sent me a cassette of his criticisms the moment he finished reading
it: ‘I mean, you start off with a very tough premise to swallow at the
very beginning. I think there should be a device that explains what is
happening. Since I have read it three times and am of slightly better
than average intelligence—120 IQ—I still don’t understand what’s
going on. Well, I really do understand what’s going on, but only be-
cause it was explained to me. There is no way to explain to people
sitting in the theatre what they are seeing. So why don’t we explain
it? Why don’t we have a device? For example, you could show at the
beginning of the picture a man telling this story to a story editor in a
motion picture company about what actually happened to him many
years ago. That would be Charley Varrick, perhaps ten years after the
picture starts, or maybe twenty…’”
As he rants on, Matthau even proposes that Varrick might tell his
story from a psychiatrist’s couch in Argentina!
Franz: Interesting. I had the feeling that Siegel is really a master
in conveying to the viewers exactly what he wants them to know,
something that we are wrestling with all the time. I mean, surely we
would have felt silly placing an oversized photo on the nightstand, so
it really gives me pause when I see how he does that. Or the combi-
nation of humour and suspense. Even the action showdown with the
car chasing Varrick’s biplane…when you really look at it, the confron-
tation of these two vehicles is just absurd.
Fiala: It is ridiculous—but also really exciting!
Huber: A combination that also speaks of the Matthau magic.
He was considered a comic character actor back then, but really
was mostly a comedian, what with Billy Wilder and Neil Simon. But
around that time he scored with great performances in crime films:
Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman (1973), and, of course, The
Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). It was a breakthrough for
him in some ways, and he effortlessly brought an air of comedy to
these films.
Fiala: There is also something really endearing about his charac-
ter. Clearly, things went wrong in Varrick’s life…
Franz: But he’s clever. He instantly figures out they accidentally
robbed mafia money.
Fiala: A man of above-average IQ!
Franz: What is notable is that he does not intervene like you
might expect. When his partner is killed by the mob hitman, he re-
mains hidden and does not lift a finger.
Fiala: Well, Varrick had warned his partner earlier.
Franz: And when he sees his body, he says “You called it, kid,” but
almost regretfully. If Clint Eastwood said that, it would mean some-
thing different.
Huber: “Do you feel lucky, punk?”
Franz: Yes, it would have turned into a tough macho punchline.
Fiala: With Matthau, there is also something soft.
Franz: He is a really fine actor. Think of the scene near the end
when his getaway car won’t start. It finally does on the third attempt,
and he just gives the slightest nod. It’s not even a sign of relief, more
like: “That would have been really too much…” These things are re-
ally difficult to get from an actor. It probably came from Matthau
9
himself, not from Siegel, because you cannot really signal something
like this to actors, and very few are capable of doing such a thing. I
couldn’t think of many in Austria—Georg Friedrich might feel that
in the moment, and do this little gesture. Basically, it means acting
what the audience thinks at the moment.
Fiala: But Matthau also has moments when he is consciously
playing with—and for—the audience, adding a little extra. And you
can’t help but being taken with it.
Franz: Like when he tells the secretary, “Which doesn’t mean I
won’t throw you right out that window if I have to.” It’s another
action-hero sentence, but the way he delivers it gives it an ironic
ambivalence. You believe and don’t believe him at the same time,
and that’s what’s so beautiful about it. Not that heavy Coens iro-
ny, but leaving things ambivalent. Even though it’s funny as rep-
artee, you sense something scary in there that might come true
any moment.
Huber: Speaking of scary, there’s something memorable about
the bank manager, who’s so afraid of what the mafia might do to him
that he’d rather commit suicide.
Fiala: His nervous use of the handkerchief, first wiping his fore-
head, then his mouth. You almost expect him to stuff it into his own
throat so he can wipe even more…
Franz: It is remarkable how a small character like this becomes
moving with just a few gestures and sentences. When he says, “I
found my home here,” you understand that this poor sap will not be
able to heed the advice that he should just run and hide. Actually, you
anticipate his suicide. When he’s saying “Close the door…”
Fiala: The whole scene is filmed in a way that leads up to this.
Huber: The whole film is a character-actor treasure trove. Most
notably Joe Don Baker and John Vernon, who have really great,
meaty parts as the main antagonists.
Fiala: They bring something to their roles. Siegel just needs a few
brushstrokes, and together they achieve a rounded character. You
also like them instantly, everyone.
Huber: Even Joe Don Baker?
Fiala: Especially Joe Don Baker!
10
Franz: Let’s talk a bit about the set design, as we were constant-
ly cheering certain details throughout the movie, especially those
amusing little items and signs that pop up all the time. It seems obvi-
ous to me that much of this is simply inspired by reality.
Fiala: Like the wastebasket outside Tommy’s Gun Shop saying “I
Eat Litter.” That would also be a great line for a T-shirt. Maybe the
whole movie functions as a brilliant accumulation of T-shirt slogans.
Huber: There is also something special about the rural setting,
not just because urban thrillers are more common, but the way it’s
used as a natural habitat for the characters. It was all shot in Nevada,
but I feel Tres Cruces could be anywhere.
Fiala: Siegel’s not interested in the boondocks as boondocks, but
in the people. It’s about finding the ideal spaces to illustrate the char-
acteristics of these people. It’s not about a specific place, like Ulrich
Seidl’s Rimini (2022), where Ulrich wants to illustrate Rimini as
well. Siegel’s Tres Cruces is not meant to be a concrete place—it’s a
backwater that could be anywhere in the world. And he wants to de-
scribe the characters living in that backwater.
Franz: He picks interesting locations for it, like the gun shop,
the trailer park, the car junkyard. We’ve just been in Ireland for lo-
cation scouting, and there were many trailer parks with the exact
same characteristics. Even the type of tiny lace curtains we see in
Varrick’s trailer—we immediately thought we should add those to
the script. But I agree that Siegel doesn’t want to portray a specific
village, more a provincial state of mind. The place itself is clearly a
patchwork of many places they scouted, from the junkyard to the
small bridge.
Fiala: The lace curtains are a great and characteristic detail.
Varrick trying to shut them properly in a stressful situation in this
small space becomes really absurd—it takes some effort, as they
don’t close very well. Again, this could be presented as a hoot, but
Siegel is just slightly bemused, so he manages to maintain the sus-
pense, while the audience still gets the absurdity of the moment.
Franz: It could easily slip into outright parody. The same goes for
many of the décor details we loved so much, like that hilarious squir-
rel figurine sitting atop a log in the corner of a shop. In most mov-
ies today that type of critter would get a close-up, eliciting a laugh,
but destroying the realism. Here it feels as if they really just filmed
an existing place.
Fiala: There is something very modest about the mise en scène in
that regard. I was often reminded of the casual beauty of much late-
’60s/early-’70s television, with its pragmatic pans and zooms. He
will not stress anything needlessly.
Huber: Or even compose a tableau.
Fiala: No, he’ll rather zoom past it unhurriedly, and because the
place is so naturally overstuffed you will notice all kind of remarka-
ble little things.
Franz: I love it when films take their time. Like how all the steps
are shown diligently after the robbery: changing into different cloth-
ing while still in the car, the money being stuffed into prepared con-
tainers, and so on. You needn’t necessarily show all this, but Siegel
insists on doing it in accurate detail.
There’s something else I’m still thinking about, and I’m wonder-
ing what your opinion is concerning construction and plot. There’s
the great moment when Varrick realizes they have stolen “too
much” money, which sets a whole plan in motion about how to deal
with the mafia to whom this cash ostensibly belongs, which is the
bulk of the movie. By the end, Varrick’s plan has played out ingen-
iously—but don’t you think that for a while, he really just wants to
give the money back to get off the hook? I think he changes his mind
when he has the affair with the secretary who warns him not to trust
her boss.
Huber: I think he sees the outlines of his master plan very early on
when he breaks into the dentist’s office to remove the dental records
so that he and his wife won’t be identified, and then suddenly has the
idea not to remove his own record, but rather exchange it with that of
his partner, who will become a patsy—partly through his own fault,
and not surprisingly, considering his character. As with much good
crime plotting, the whole is a bit much to take for granted, because
how can you really foresee so many details? But I like the idea of that
flash of inspiration—laconically underplayed—whose full extent you
only realize at the end.
Fiala: And it may be even earlier, when Varrick catches the tele-
vision news of the robbery, hearing that their dental records are the
only hope for identification, while his partner keeps hitting the whis-
key because, as he says, his teeth hurt. And Varrick may realize how
to get rid of a partner he can’t really trust to do the sensible thing.
With due consideration, I may have to revise my statement that you
like everybody in the movie: actually, Varrick is not a nice guy. But
you still sympathize with him, because he’s Matthau!
Huber: That is actually one of the greatest strengths of the film. I
mean, why should you like this gangster, except that he is taking on
worse gangsters? In the end, I guess you could say that everybody is
ambivalent in this movie. It’s true that you kind of like all of them,
but you also see their dark sides, no excuses.
Fiala: That’s one of the problems of contemporary cinema, and
not just Hollywood: it’s more and more difficult to get funding for
projects like this, where your protagonist is nominally evil, but his
motivations are fully comprehensible. That kind of difficult ambiv-
alence. Although I will say that the way Matthau stalks through the
landscape in his white flying suit, with the helmet and the pilot’s
goggles, did remind me of a recent great villain, played by Robert De
Niro in Killers of the Flower Moon. He also wears these kind of ridic-
ulous goggles, and is both ridiculous-funny and evil—actually, much
more malignant than Varrick could ever be.
Franz: Yes, but the balance is not nearly as impressive. And you
can’t compare the funny, which is almost consistent in Charley
Varrick. But of course, Scorsese foremost wants to make a film with
a message.
Huber: Whereas Siegel, like Carpenter, Walsh, or Hawks, is a
member of the “If I had a message, I’d send a telegram” party.
Franz: So what is the message of Charley Varrick? Maybe that is
what Matthau didn’t get. Is it against capitalism? For the independ-
ent lone fighter? In the end, it should be up to the audience; at least,
that is also what we want with our movies. Things should not be eas-
ily resolved, so that you think, “All is clear, they wanted to say this,
so they did that.” Rather, you have to look at it step by step, and each
step can have different meanings. You have to trust your audience.
11
Face the Music
Hamaguchi Ryusuke on Evil Does Not Exist

BY BEATRICE LOAYZA

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s sublime eco-fable, Evil Does Not Exist, be-

gins and ends with the plangent score by Ishibashi Eiko, played
fortissimo over an extended tracking shot facing skywards. A for-
est canopy, stark and stripped of its foliage by winter’s spell, ap-
pears like latticework through which daylight passes with an eerie
vibrancy. Riding this sonic wavelength, one is immediately locked
into the film’s peculiar pitch, a mix of awe, fragility, and horror
quite unlike the Japanese filmmaker’s previous work. Instead,
this foreboding feature hews closer to the films of Hamaguchi’s
former teacher and occasional collaborator Kurosawa Kiyoshi,
whose films strike a similarly otherworldly balance of moody con-
templation ambiguous dread (the woodlands mystery Charisma
[2000] stands out as a clear parallel).
Evil Does Not Exist, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the
2023 Venice Film Festival, is an offshoot of a separate collabora-
tion between Hamaguchi and Ishibashi, a multi-instrumentalist
and composer whose first score for the director was for Drive My
Car (2012). Gift, a silent film that Hamaguchi conceived to com-

12
plement a live performance by Ishibashi, provided the raw ma-
terials for Evil Does Not Exist, in which the familiar trappings of
a drama about ecological preservation and small-town existence
threatened by corporate sprawl are enriched and expanded by
Hamaguchi’s patient gaze.
As the film begins, cinematographer Kitagawa Yoshio’s cam-
era observes the routines of a stoical widower, Takumi (Omika
Hitoshi), a handyman who chops wood and collects stream wa-
ter to be used by a local udon shop. Often late to school pickup
for his young daughter, he is accustomed to tracking her down
in the woods she traverses on the way home—a route that is both
uneasy in its chilly solitude, and magnificent in its freedom and
arboreal splendour. It’s no place for a curious little girl, yet it’s
irresistible, too.
A pair of talent agency employees from the city arrive to lead
a town-hall meeting about the construction of a “glamping” site,
which the locals rightfully oppose. These urbanites (Kosaka Ryuji
and Shibutani Ayako, the latter of whom you might recognize
from Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour [2015]) are, essentially, corpo-
rate puppets, deeply ignorant about the various ecosystems they
intend to disrupt. Yet through them, Hamaguchi identifies the
thresholds for understanding and change. These fraught (though,
in Hamaguchi’s hands, not entirely pessimistic) human dynamics
unfold against a snowy backdrop radiating the chill of nature’s
grand indifference.
Cinema Scope: After Drive My Car and what I’m sure must
have been an extremely exhausting awards tour, I was impressed
to discover that you’d made a film—two films—so soon after.
Hamaguchi Ryusuke: I took about a half-year break. After all
the awards, I didn’t feel like doing anything. But toward the end
of 2021, Ishibashi Eiko asked me if I wanted to create some sort of
visual component for her live performance, and I agreed.
Scope: And that’s the short film Gift?
Hamaguchi: For some reason it’s being called a short, but Eiko
actually asked me to make something relatively long, 75 to 90
minutes, which I found interesting. I accepted the project, but
I had no idea how I’d make something for a live performance.
My starting point was the fact that I wouldn’t have to create any
sound, since the performance was already doing that. That’s not to
say I was thinking about it as a silent film. Then I realized Eiko was
giving me the freedom to do whatever I wanted. With that knowl-
edge, I decided I didn’t know how to make anything other than the
way I’ve always been making things. So, first I had to write a script.
Using that, I could determine what kind of footage I could create.
It was a very long-winded process.
Scope: I read that you asked Eiko permission to make a second
project out of the live performance film. What triggered you to
want to expand upon the original?
Hamaguchi: I wasn’t really trying to make it much bigger than
the first project. In writing the script, I was creating material that
would be used for the performance, but that ultimately would be
far more than what I needed for the final product. So the script
from the beginning was a little less than two hours long. When we
began shooting, I had to tell my actors that we wouldn’t be using
their voices in the final piece, but then as the process continued, I
began familiarizing myself with their voices. I thought their voic-
es were marvelous, and that people needed to hear them. Because
Eiko’s project was the origin, I asked her permission to make a dif-
ferent film, which she thought was a great idea. After that, Eiko
introduced me to some of her local friends, and with that I began
researching and building out the story.
Scope: So the story was inspired by Eiko’s community? Most
of your films take place in urban settings, so the shift to a remote,
rural location felt unique. What is the town called, Mizubiki?
Hamaguchi: Mizubiki is actually a fictional village based on
multiple towns that I went to when I was doing research. I keep re-
peating myself, but I really had no idea what I was doing or what I
could do for this project, so I needed to limit myself in some way—
to create parameters so that I could actually start creating from
some ground level. So first, I went to go see where Eiko makes her
music. I went to her studio and filmed some of her music sessions.
That’s when I realized she works in this environment that’s very
remote and surrounded by wilderness. Looking back at the foot-
age of her music sessions that I shot, I started to think about her in
relation to the landscape she was part of, and how natural settings
in and of themselves have particular qualities. There’s a constant
sense of movement, a spirit of change that’s very subtle. I felt that
matched with Eiko’s music.
Scope: What was the name of the actual place where you were
shooting?
Hamaguchi: I was researching around the prefectures of
Yamanashi and Nagano, specifically the border region between
these two areas. It’s about a two- or three-hour drive from Tokyo.
Often there are people there who pass through from the big city—
people who have country houses. There’s a lot of tourism, too.
Scope: Can you talk a little bit more about the nature of your
research and the ecological bent of the film? Was the tension we
see in the film, between commercial encroachment and the local
economy, based on a real event?
Hamaguchi: When I decided I wanted the film to be about the
natural environment, I asked myself, “How do I organically build
out themes about nature?” I began talking to locals, who shared
their knowledge about the area. They showed me where the spring
water came from, and they told me there are bakeries nearby that
use the water to make bread. So I began to see the specific ways in
which nature flows through the community.
As I live in the city, I felt a big distance between myself and
what I was witnessing. At the same time, I was fascinated by the
way the locals worked and thought about their work. There was a
strange disconnect between my own body and what I was learn-
ing. Then I learned about this town-hall meeting that actually
happened—one that’s very similar to the meeting that happens in
my film. These outsiders came in with very sloppy plans, and the
town residents trashed on them. As an urbanite, I felt that peo-
ple like myself really do come to rural areas with these sorts of
undeveloped positions—in fact, my perspective is very similar in
a way.
Scope: The community-meeting scene is terrific. Your films
often make long conversations between multiple people feel so
13
natural yet thrilling, but I wonder what you had in mind when ap-
proaching this particular scene.
Hamaguchi: In terms of how the scene was shot, it’s a lot
like what I’ve done in the past, yes, in that there’s a lot of dia-
logue, each shot is held for a long time, and I’m shooting with
multiple cameras. We shot through the entire scene multiple
times, too. Because it was like a lot of what I’ve done before,
we actually shot this scene very early in production. This par-
ticular scene was what made me realize that I wanted to turn
the original project into another film. Because I didn’t have
a great familiarity with this kind of conflict, the words I used
in the dialogue were sometimes words that the locals I talked
to used.
Scope: Like “glamping?”
Hamaguchi: I knew about glamping beforehand. And it’s not
that I have an animosity toward the glamping industry, but I think
something about the activity is about extraction and prioritizing
what’s convenient for urban people; they’re shaving off what’s
inconvenient about nature. Yet camping is supposed to be about
inhabiting nature, the good and the bad and all the difficulties that
come with living outside of civilization.
Scope: I’m not sure how it plays for a Japanese audience, but in
the US the idea of glamping is somewhat humorous—something
that people might be mocked for.
Hamaguchi: I agree. It’s very absurd and illogical. I wasn’t nec-
essarily trying to induce laughter when I was writing the parts
with the company employees, Takahashi and Mayazumi, but I was
certainly laughing in my head whenever I thought about the folly
of their project.
14
Scope: I read that Omika Hitoshi, who plays Takumi the hand-
yman, is not a professional actor, though he has a small role
in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021). I know that you have a
particular method when it comes to preparing your actors that
involves a lot of rehearsal, so I wonder if your approach was dif-
ferent with Hitoshi?
Hamaguchi: Omika Hitoshi was part of the crew for Wheel of
Fortune and Fantasy. There’s a Japanese term, uchitora, for the
idea of when a crew member appears in the same film. That’s sort
of what we were doing, knowing he was just a regular crew per-
son with no acting experience. When I was going around doing
research for Evil Does Not Exist, Hitoshi was the driver for me
and Kitagawa Yoshio, the cinematographer. So as we were driving
around, I had Hitoshi do the stand-ins. That’s when I realized he
has a great face, and shortly after I asked him to play the role.
Regarding the preparation work I do with the actors, when
I have them read without any emotions—that was something I
started with Happy Hour, which featured predominantly non-
actors. I knew that by prepping them this way, they’d be able to
stand in front of the camera with confidence. I myself had confi-
dence in this method, which I think gave Hitoshi the strength to be-
lieve he could do it well, too. I wasn’t that worried about his ability
to perform. Ultimately, I think anyone has the ability to learn lines.
If they can learn the lines, they can speak them, and if they can
speak them, then they can be worked into something interesting.
Scope: The speech in your films can be very Bressonian, in
that the delivery can sometimes seem flat but it’s actually much
more complicated and nuanced if you pay attention and listen
to the details in the delivery. The contrast between the company
employees and Takumi is pretty stark, and it particularly comes
out in how they speak, with Takumi coming off as very serious
and direct.
Hamaguchi: Omika himself is not like his character. He’s re-
served, but in a softer way, and as such he’s more malleable. When
I was having him do the stand-ins, he wasn’t acting and I wasn’t
asking him to perform: he just stood there, sort of out of focus,
with no expression on his face. In simply watching him do that,
I found that his mere existence conveyed a lot of meaning. There
was almost an animal-ness to him. Simply by looking at his face, it
makes people wonder, “What is he thinking?”
Scope: Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think
you’ve had a child perform such a prominent role in any of your
previous films.
Hamaguchi: In my early twenties, I made a very low-budget in-
dependent film in which I had a child play a rather important role.
But since then, it’s true, I haven’t.
Scope: What was it like directing the little girl in Evil Does Not
Exist? How did you approach that performance relative to the
adult members of your cast?
Hamaguchi: Generally speaking, I’m hesitant about children.
Whenever I visit friends or family members and their children are
there, I’m always wondering how best to go about interacting with
them. The actress in my film didn’t have much experience, but I
also didn’t think I needed to upend my usual approach. Once she
started memorizing and speaking her dialogue, I sort of allowed
her the freedom to just do whatever she wanted to do. By doing
that, I realized that in certain ways Japanese adults are really
bound by certain standards of speech and conduct, while children
are able to bring an authenticity that adults feel restricted from
exhibiting. That made me realize, maybe I should continue to
work with kids…
Scope: I want to go back to something you said earlier, about
feeling the distance between yourself and the rural commu-
nity you had entered to make the film, and how that aware-
ness ultimately informed the shape of the film. Did you, like
one of the company employees in the film, chop wood for the
first time?
Hamaguchi: When I was researching and still didn’t have a
firm story, I stayed in the area for two or three days—and, yes, I
chopped wood for the first time, and also helped with other physi-
cal tasks. It was a memorable experience. When you see Takahashi
chopping wood and talking about how great it feels, in a sense that
reflects my own experience. There’s a certain beauty to that kind
of labour. But what I was really drawn to about the act of chop-
ping wood is that there’s always the possibility of failure. That’s
what I wanted to be able to capture, this nervous tension implicit
in the action. Omika became unbelievably good at chopping wood,
which allowed us to shoot that one long take.
Scope: Did you collect water from a stream, too?
Hamaguchi: Yes. One full tank of water is ten kilograms. I re-
member that heaviness well. I mentioned earlier that there’s a
bakery in real life that uses water from a local stream; I translat-
ed that as the noodle shop that uses the water for the broth. I was
very moved by the experience of drinking that spring water. At
the same time, I was very conscious of myself as an urban person
simply coming in and enjoying nature in this blissful way, which I
hope the film conveyed.
15
 Claudia von Alemann and Helke Sander

Deep Cuts
The First International Women’s Film Seminar

BY ERIKA BALSOM

Lately it feels like everywhere I look obscure old films are being dust-
ed off and presented to eager publics. Even a right-wing newspaper
like London’s Telegraph had cause last November to speak of a “rep-
ertory boom” in the city where I live, deeming it “the year’s most un-
likely media trend.” Their idea of what this looks like is a bit different
than mine; not everyone is “suddenly” lining up to see Kind Hearts
and Coronets (1949). What I have in mind can’t exactly be described
as “repertory” in the standard sense, since it involves nothing like
cycling through an established set of titles. Rather than the pleas-
ures of the classics, it’s about reaching for the deepest of deep cuts.
I’m thinking of the fetish for prints with provenance, the vogue for
the unfinished and the lost, and the large number (and high quality)
of festivals and exhibitions presenting extensive historical materi-
als, far beyond the usual suspects who have been doing it forever. I’m
referring to restorations so brilliant one can scarcely believe they
had been absent from screens for so long (e.g., Bushman, 1971) and
presentations of curiosities that are, let’s face it, sometimes more in-

16
teresting to talk about than to actually watch. Witnessing this flurry
of activity, it’s easy to feel like an inversion has taken place in my lit-
tle corner of film culture. New releases now seem like a sidebar; old
films are the main attraction.
Summer was the season of blockbusters even in this bizarro
realm, where films like Barbie and Oppenheimer are scarcely rele-
vant. June brought not only the perennial embarrassment of rich-
es that is Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, a festival that seems to only
gain in popularity, but also Archival Assembly #2, which took place
at the Arsenal in Berlin. There, I saw Prem Kapoor’s Badnam Basti
(1971), presented by Shai Heredia, who informed us that we would
be watching the sole surviving 35mm copy of India’s first queer film.
If that weren’t enough, a second event presented in collaboration
with the feminist elsewheres collective remains etched in my mem-
ory months later as a highlight of the year: the premiere screening
of 109 minutes of digitized 16mm footage of the First International
Women’s Film Seminar, shot by Norwegian filmmaker Vibeke
Løkkeberg. Organized by filmmakers Claudia von Alemann and
Helke Sander, the seminar had taken place nearly 50 years before,
from November 15–18, 1973. It was the first event of its kind in West
Germany, with 45 contemporary films from seven countries shown
to an audience of some 250 people. The program addressed four
principal themes: women in the workplace; the representation of
women in the media; abortion, sexuality, and gender roles; and the
women’s movement in Europe and the US.
Løkkeberg was at the seminar to show Abortion (1971), a hybrid
film that combines documentary interviews with a fictional story
of a young woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy under the
restrictive Norwegian law of the time. While in Berlin, the director
took the opportunity to interview attendees with a view to mak-
ing a film called Myth and Media about the experiences of women
working in the cinema and television industries. The project was
never completed and for some time the footage was presumed lost,
before eventually resurfacing in The National Library of Norway in
2019. It is often said that feminist film exhibition is as much about
what takes place around the screen as what is shown on it, and yet
moving-image documentation of events like the 1973 Berlin semi-
nar is rare, making works like Barbara Hammer’s Audience (1982)
and the Vidéa collective’s Musidora: Festival des films de femmes
(1974) all the more precious. Now there is a new entry to add to this
short filmography.
I had seen Abisag Tüllmann’s photographs of the 1973 seminar; I
had read a report von Alemann and Sander wrote in its aftermath.
I had watched many of the films they chose to show, such as Elsa
Rasbach’s His-Story (1972), the Collettivo Femminista di Cinema’s
L’Aggetivo Donna (1972), or Newsreel’s The Woman’s Film (1970).
Yet it was in seeing Løkkeberg’s footage that the First Women’s Film
Seminar truly came alive for me. Not, however, because I was fric-
tionlessly immersed in the debates of 50 years before. The Arsenal
screening put time out of joint; it was at once spectral and marked
by an electrifying liveness. It transpired that Løkkeberg’s sound el-
ements had been stored separately from her film material. It took
time to locate them, and they were not ready for the screening. As
a result, her footage was shown silently, with live commentary pro-
vided by women in the audience who were described as “time wit-
nesses.” This was no doubt a literal translation from the German,
a phrase that would not typically be used in English. But it was
somehow a beautiful way of capturing the doubleness of bodies that
at once appeared onscreen and sat amongst us, bridging then and
now. Most loquacious of all was the formidable von Alemann, who
was next to Løkkeberg in the front row, responding in German and
English to the film and to questions coming from others in the room.
Spectators pointed at the screen and called out names, identifying
participants. Halfway through, Sander walked out for reasons that I
never discovered. Everyone else stayed the course, watching women
onscreen talk and talk for nearly two hours without ever knowing
what they were saying. This strange encounter seemed to me to be
to a good (albeit unintentional) allegory of how the past invariably
holds something back from us, no matter how furious our attempts
to grasp it. Fantasy and speculation took hold, mingling with the
fragmentary recollections flowing from the time witnesses. The
event was a spontaneous oral history, an unearthing of an unpol-
ished archival gem, a riotous feminist convening. It was, in other
words, sometimes chaotic but never dull.
In their 2023 collection Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of
Unfinished Film, editors Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon argue that
attending to unfinished films like Løkkeberg’s comprises a feminist
historiographical method: “Whether abandoned, interrupted, or
lost,” they write, “unfinished films are usually dismissed as unwor-
thy objects of study. They are seen as minor works, of marginal im-
portance to film history.” To do justice to the breadth and circum-
stances of women’s contributions means taking account of barriers
and obstacles, and that means widening the frame of inquiry. The
“finished” thus joins 35mm, feature length, and fiction as a hegem-
onic category that pushes important work to the margins. Chip away
at their dominance and filmographies suddenly grow larger and gaps
smaller; trajectories of life and work are thrown into relief. Beeston
and Solomon propose “a feminist transvaluation of the unfinished
film’s signs of deficiency” so as to “recast them as signs of possibil-
ity.” This is what occurred at the Arsenal in June: the muteness of
Løkkeberg’s rushes ceased to figure as a lack and became the ground
of an encounter that did not claim to reveal the past as exactly it
was—an impossibility—but which instead opened a space of negoti-
ation and imagination. When I later watched a tight 15-minute cut
of the footage with sound included, alone with my laptop, it was a
strangely deflating experience. Somehow the sense of possibility
and collectivity that radiated from the June screening had dissi-
pated—as if, in moving closer to something resembling a finished
film, some of the latent energy of the material had been spent. In
one respect, the interest in the unfinished risks dwelling in failure
and fetishizing the marginal. But seen from another perspective, it
is a way of activating the register of the “might have been” in all its
dreamy fullness.
If it is true, as Beeston and Solomon note, that academic scholar-
ship typically dismisses unfinished films, this has historically been
even more the case in the realm of film exhibition. The success of
the Løkkeberg event notwithstanding, curators may have better rea-
sons than scholars do for neglecting the unfinished: the absence of a
completed work poses real questions about how—or if—it is possible
to present the material to the public in a satisfactory way. Unlike the
17
 Vibeke Løkkeberg and Ariel Dougherty
gallery, where contextualizing materials can be displayed alongside
historical artefacts for a viewer free to roam, in the cinema the act of
sitting through a movie remains unavoidably primary and emphati-
cally durational. You really have to watch the thing—the whole thing.
Here we come to a dark cloud gathering over the pursuit of the deep-
est of deep cuts: films with fascinating backstories that don’t quite
hold up in a screening pose a problem, be they finished or unfin-
ished. This year, a curator friend and I started to wonder, only half-
jokingly, if we have reached “peak archive,” a state in which obscuri-
ty is sometimes valued for its own sake, with the curatorial desire for
rarity outweighing the intrinsic interest of the material. It would be
easy to say that this entails a rejection of the obsession with novelty
that governs the new release calendar and the regime of festival pre-
mieres, but in fact novelty prevails here too as an abiding principle,
since the logic of “discovery,” with all its problems, is generally close
at hand.
Of course, the mention of a peak suggests that decline is imminent.
Will the archive fever break and fatigue set in? Perhaps. But I doubt
the obsession with esoterica is going anywhere, and nor do I want
it to. It may well be that certain programming strategies will show
themselves to be increasingly threadbare. Yet the resources of film
heritage are far from being exhausted, and, as the present changes,
so too will what is of interest in the past. The Telegraph called the
repertory boom “unlikely,” but it shouldn’t come as such a surprise.
It has been underway for some time now, motivated by many of the
18
same forces that Hal Foster identified already in 2004 as fueling an
“archival impulse” in contemporary art: “a will to connect,” “a desire
to turn belatedness into becomingness” and thereby revive utopian
possibilities. Peak archive is inextricable from very necessary efforts
to rethink film canons and destabilize notions of centre and periph-
ery. It could also be part of a reckoning with the fact that, no matter
how many incredible films continue to be made, cinema is now an
irrevocably old medium. Rather than denying this, why not celebrate
its rich and expansive histories, especially those that have been trag-
ically underappreciated?
Less optimistically, it might also be that melancholic retrospec-
tion is a way of avoiding a bleak present. Notably, von Alemann and
Sander felt no need to show historical films, even though this strat-
egy was taken up by some other feminist film festivals at the time.
There was too much vital contemporary production that needed to
be shown and seen and discussed. Everything was ahead of them—to
be built, made, argued about. Needless to say, this is not the dom-
inant feeling today. However you parse it, this phenomenon is one
that stands with and against our contemporary moment. It both
depends on the digital and contests the glut of content to which the
digital has given us access. It is easier than ever (which is not to say
easy) to preview and program cinematic arcana; it is easier than ever
to feel overwhelmed by hyperavailable sameness, bored by the small
screen, and propelled towards something unique. The fever contin-
ues to burn. What visions are still to emerge from this delirium?
 Pavements

Your Own
Hall of Fame
Alex Ross Perry on Videoheaven and Pavements

BY ADAM NAYMAN

Two movies, both alike in indignity, in the ’90s, where we lay our
scene. Because neither Videoheaven nor Pavements—both puta-
tively non-fictional pop-culture essay films written and directed
by Alex Ross Perry—have officially been released, programmed
at a festival, or even announced via trailers or posters, it’s tricky
to write about their intricacies, either as standalone works or
in conversation with one another. Even if you don’t believe in
the scourge of spoilers, it’s different to deconstruct a movie fol-
lowing its Sundance premiere than via a Vimeo link, on top of
which a movie like Videoheaven, which unfolds as a three-hour
voiceover meditation on the cinematic depiction (and metaphys-
ics) of American video-store culture since the early ’80s, is so
dependent on fair-use laws for its excerpt-heavy contents that
talking about specific sequences feels like asking for trouble. As
for Pavements, which is more conventionally accessible than
Videoheaven yet exponentially harder to describe as a “documen-
tary”—owing to the fact that a good portion of its scenes are not,
expressly speaking, “real”—its production has been so freeform
that Perry wasn’t totally sure of what was in the version that he
had just recently sent my way.
Those who have been paying attention online about the current
status of Cinema Scope can probably understand why Perry—very

19
much a Friend of the Magazine—would have been persuaded to
jump the gun. Provisionally speaking (which would seem to be
the fairest way to go about things at this point), I can say that both
Videoheaven and Pavements are absorbing, funny and, in their re-
spective ways, rigorous works of pop-cultural scholarship whose
respective forms are appropriate to their subject matter. The
cool, academic style of the former, with its obvious influence from
Thom Andersen’s epochal Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), show-
cases Perry in big-picture film-critical mode, coolly elucidating
the inception, expansion, corporatization, and dissolution of the
VHS (and DVD) rental era. The latter, which seems indebted to
Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007), is a kaleidoscopic meditation
on the Stephen Malkmus–led ’90s indie rock outfit Pavement, or
what an opening title card refers to as “the best and most impor-
tant band of all time”—a gauntlet that’s also a wink at a self-select-
ing audience who are just as likely to laugh at themselves for nod-
ding along at this assessment as they are to chide non-believers.
What’s at stake in these movies is, on one level, nothing more
than an influential and yet increasingly obsolete cohort’s mel-
ancholic nostalgia—a look back in, if not anger, than regret at a
landscape whose pleasures were less ephemeral and whose literal
and figurative heroes and villains (including, for Perry’s purpos-
es, Ethan Hawke’s Malkmus-like slacker-heartthrob in Reality
Bites [1992] and Blockbuster-patronizing student filmmaker in
Hamlet [2000]) were more easily pegged and hierarchized along a
mainstream-versus-indie dialectic. Because Perry is a very smart
guy—a writer who thinks like a scholar without ever lapsing into
jargon—both Videoheaven and Pavements rise above the level of a
whine (or a feedback loop), and yet are wide open to accusations
of insularity; and, in the case of Pavements’ most hilarious meta-
fictional gambit—which shadows the production of an American
Idiot–style jukebox musical cobbled together out of the band’s cat-
alogue—a misanthropic shish-kebabing of millennial Poptimism
and profitous postmodernism on the same skewer.
Misanthropy—or the perception of same—is probably the
common denominator between Perry and his subjects. If it’s
rather too easy to juxtapose his ex-video-store-clerk biography
with the fast-talking (and Tarantino-ish) specimens highlighted
in Videoheaven’s deep-cut montage, it’s not a stretch to compare
him, positively, to Malkmus, whose sardonic lyrics belie a certain
tenderness—the same quality that bled through in the best parts
of Listen Up Philip (2014) or Her Smell (2018), where Elisabeth
Moss so sentimentally (and unforgettably) serenaded her child
with Bryan Adams’ “Heaven.”
There’ll be plenty of time for Videoheaven and Pavements to be
scrutinized as cultural histories (rewritten) by a very specific kind
of winner, and for critics on considerably different generational
wavelengths to assess (and likely reject) some of the implications:
to listen to Pavement’s music the way that Pavement once listened
to the Smashing Pumpkins and concede, similarly, that they could
really give a fuck. For now, the following interview will hopefully
serve as ground zero for the discourse around these handmade
(and even homemade) movies. And if it ends up being my last
piece for a magazine I started writing for 20 years ago—when I
was working at a video store and carrying around a Discman con-
20
taining Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain—it’s as good a note to end on
as any.
Cinema Scope: Would you consider these films, separately or
together, as a gesture of departure from the stuff you’ve done be-
fore? They certainly have things in common as essay movies or
analyses of popular culture. Where did the impulse to work out-
side of narrative fiction come from?
Alex Ross Perry: I suppose I’d have to consider them as such,
but only by default or maybe circumstance. I don’t think that
Videoheaven and Pavements would make for an illogical double
feature, nor would it seem like there was no clear throughline be-
tween the two. I think Pavements is more of a scripted and manu-
factured movie than it will ever seem like to any given viewer, but
that’s mostly a product of my increasing lack of interest in tradi-
tional filmmaking, linear storytelling, or anything like that.
Working on these two movies intensely and simultaneously
throughout 2023 has made them of a piece to me, for sure, and
they will always be, but that didn’t have to be the plan. Videoheaven
began in late 2014, nearly six years before I got a call to see if I’d
be interested in developing some outside-the-box ideas for a
Pavement movie—not a Pavement documentary, but a Pavement
movie. Inasmuch as I have basically culturally esoteric and irrel-
evant interests, like video tapes, horror movies, heavy metal, stuff
like that, exploring something so deeply personal to me about vid-
eo stores felt obvious. It all started when I read Daniel Herbert’s
book Videoland, and began a dialogue with him about ideas to ex-
plore a documentary about the subject. Fundamentally, the other
crucial thing here is that I have now tried and failed—twice!—to
make a TV show about video stores. One was a deeply person-
al, autobiographical show set at the end of the ’90s that I sold to
Amazon, and never went anywhere. The other was an adaptation
of the novel Universal Harvester that Jason Schwartzman and I
developed, and also went nowhere. So, throughout these two fail-
ures, this essay film was always there for me, and the more it be-
came clear that I’d never get corporate money to tell a video-store
saga, the more important it was to finish this film on my own—per-
haps the most personal movie that I will ever make!
The impulse for Pavements—or a germ present when I was first
contacted to see if I’d be interested— was that somebody on the
call said that “Stephen Malkmus feels like an Alex Ross Perry
character,” which is ridiculous, but also I understood what he
meant. He’s less overtly confrontational or challenging as a “char-
acter” in this movie and in real life than fictional characters I’ve
created, like Philip in Listen Up Philip or Becky in Her Smell. But
throughout the archive and even into the present, his behaviour
occasionally verges on my absolute favourite question of human
psychology and behaviour that is in some of those other movies:
why is this person acting this way, why is everyone around them
OK with it, and why are they so successful despite not conform-
ing to traditional standards of human behaviour? Because they’re
fascinating to watch, is always my answer. Malkmus, for over 30
years, has been and remains a fascinating character to watch,
study, and consider. That’s probably Documentary Subject-
Relations 101, but I’m new to this.
 Pavements
Scope: Can you talk about the writing process for Videoheaven?
Or maybe start with the research process? Is it fair to surmise that
it’s a bit of a homemade movie—one among many such projects
started by filmmakers during COVID? How many people were in-
volved in making it?
Perry: COVID helped, but again the movie was about six years
old by then. But it went up a full gear during 2020 and 2021, only
because the film’s editor, Clyde Folley, finally had more time to
chip away at it, because with movie theatres closed in New York,
people like us had nothing to do. He’s an editor and programmer
at Criterion—anybody who has watched special features on a disc
or on Criterion Channel has seen his editing.
Ultimately, now it is something like seven or eight people in-
volved in making the film. The two producers at the non-profit;
Clyde; an assistant editor; our source wizard, who was tasked
with helping compile nearly 200 clips in the best possible quali-
ty; Dan Herbert as an emeritus advisor, and then ultimately our
narrator. However, for the writing component, most important to
me was our other editor, Michael Koresky, who edited my un-ac-
ademic writing into something clean, logical, and perhaps even
correct. It’s a small team, with Clyde having done 90% of the total
work. We will share a title card at the end. He’s a co-author of it
in remarkable ways, something else I am enjoying learning about
non-fiction film editors.
The research was heavy at the beginning, but Dan’s book pro-
vided that road map, which ultimately became the film’s struc-
ture. It starts off very factual, statistic-heavy in the early years of
video stores, and as it moves on, the second half of the movie is
my thematic analysis on what happened after the heyday of video
stores, or what all these clips meant, or mean in retrospect. You
can’t find fault with the facts at the beginning—because Dan is a
real academic—but somebody other than me could arrive at total-
ly different conclusions about the decline of video stores and how
that played out onscreen. I guess that’s the same as academia: two
papers on the same movie, both reasonably well-argued, neither
what the filmmaker intended.
Scope: There’s a line that keeps popping up in Videoheaven:
“The movies talk about themselves.” I like this a lot, and it’s inter-
esting that a filmmaker like Brian De Palma was ahead of the curve
in assessing the symbolic or semiotic potency of the video-store
space, whereas later on it served mostly as a backdrop for roman-
tic comedies. It was a way to hint that the characters had inner
lives, and taste, but rarely to the point where they genuinely talk
about movies. It’s like a weird uncanny-valley thing: I remember
always wondering what the characters on Friends would say about
La Dolce Vita (1961), the poster for which is hanging in Monica’s
apartment, or if the version of Die Hard (1988) they rented had
actual profanity in it…
21
 Perry: Well, this is something that only people like us would
ever think about. If they rent Die Hard on Friends, but then
Bruce Willis appears in a later season as Ross’ girlfriend’s fa-
ther, in this world, is there simply a guy who looks like Willis
and has his mannerisms, and so on? And has he ever seen Die
Hard? This question is of course made text in Last Action Hero
(1993), with the Stallone Terminator 2 (1991) gag. To say nothing
of the now well-known and HD-enhanced fact that on Seinfeld,
Jerry owns Child’s Play 2 (1991) and Arachnophobia (1990)
on VHS, along with Pretty Woman (1990), which stars Jason
Alexander…I’m reading too much into all this, but so would a
De Palma character.
But the arc you’re describing is, I think, evident in the chrono-
logical story we tell. In the ’80s, in Body Double or Video Violence
(1987), the space of the store is intrinsic to the story being told.
By the ’90s, the video store was so common that it could stand in
for any neighbourhood errand, and as time went on, depictions
reveled in cinephilia a lot more. So even though a lot of the later
movies I cite are quite poor, they are almost entirely about char-
acters who seem to love movies and really, truly want to work in a
video store in the 2000s. The narrative basically shifts from the
’90s to the 2000s from being largely about customers to largely-
about clerks.
Scope: There are excerpts in Videoheaven that I found emo-
tionally powerful in your very specific context: the idea of a video
store as a social hub, or a cinephile refuge, the irony being that for
a lot of ’80s cinephiles, VHS was a suspicious, disfiguring format.
I feel like your movie is aware of that skepticism, but also sort of
tries to transcend it in the spirit of community.
Perry: That’s probably one of several thesis statements I arrive
at in the movie. The chapter about social relationships in video
stores as depicted onscreen does really show that for about ten
years, basically the entire ’90s, the video store was an inherent-
ly social space. Pre-internet, pre–message boards, like the record
store or whatever, you had to go to learn and discuss, with employ-
ees, customers, friends...
Obviously working at Kim’s on St. Marks in New York was huge-
ly social for me, but these relationships are one thing from video
stores that definitely aren’t gone. Lots of stuff is, but the culture
we’re talking about was in movie-theatre lobbies, and now is in
movie-theatre lobbies again, and online. It’s valuable wherever it
is. Maybe something like Letterboxd is the internet’s video-store
counter. I’m not on it, so I don’t know.
But this gets into the connection between these projects again,
which is of course somebody who’s getting older saying “things
were better during my formative years,” but also, hopefully, ask-
ing “Why do we think that, why do we process and obsess over
nostalgia so much, and what does that mean about shared cultural
memory, specifically as it pertains to basically the first 20 years of
my, Alex’s, life: 1984-2004?”
Scope: I was wondering if Quentin Tarantino’s legend would
hang over the movie a bit more, but then he never really literalized
that part of his life in any of his movies—he was like a video-store
clerk as auteur, rather than an auteur interested in video stores
But there is a kind of Quentin-ness to the clerk characters inven-
22
toried in Videoheaven, so there’s a chicken-and-egg thing about,
what came first: QT or the persona?
Perry: I hope we present this question. In our section on
clerks—the concept, not the movie, but of course also the mov-
ie—we see plenty of QT-esque examples, but really not many pre-
1992, when he would have first yammered his way into our hearts.
If you look at our ’80s sources, which are presented chronologi-
cally, there aren’t really any encyclopedic cinephiles behind the
counter. At the dawn of the store, in the ’80s, it was just another
middle-class retail job—one with cooler perks, but not too differ-
ent from a record store or bookstore. Plus, in most of the ’80s clips
the scenes are usually about the customers, not the clerks.
I’ll have to think about who the first, honest-to-God QT-esque
clerk was onscreen. Randall in Clerks is 1994, and obviously au-
tobiographical; Kicking and Screaming (1995) has one, but that’s
later as well. This may be unanswerable!
Scope: How important was Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays
Itself to Videoheaven? Were there other films that ended up being
similarly influential? Also, why—like Andersen—do you swap out
your own voice for a narrator, when the observations are so obvi-
ously personal?
Perry: If I’m being honest, Los Angeles Plays Itself is my favour-
ite documentary of all time…As Mark Peranson suggested to me
after he saw Videoheaven, perhaps the greatest movie of all time.
I’m constantly telling people that this project began in 2014 with
Dan’s book…well, what else happened in early 2014? Los Angeles
Plays Itself was remastered and finally re-released properly, and
I could see it over and over again. So I likely trace that re-release
back to my desire to, for better or worse, do what I’ve always done:
love and obsess over a movie, and then see if I can make some-
thing like my version of it. I guess I like Room 237 (2002) a lot as
well, because that’s very much on the pop end of the spectrum,
while Los Angeles Plays Itself is on the academic end. Hopefully,
Videoheaven splits the difference.
As for the narrator, I just wouldn’t want to listen to my voice
for three hours, nor would anybody, I don’t think. It was never a
consideration. I’m no Scorsese.
Scope: Moving onto Pavements, I guess the question is, what
the hell is this movie? Or, maybe, how close is what the movie end-
ed up being to whatever it was conceived as? There are elements
that seem to have been calculated rather than found, but you blur
those lines very purposefully. How involved was the band from
the start? Who was the point of contact, what was the plan of ac-
tion, and, basically, what happened?
Perry: Well, what do you think it is? Or, what isn’t it!? It’s a din-
ner with five entrees and no side dishes. I can answer what I think
it is, but that’s like answering what is Pavement to you. Every fan
will have a different answer, so we wanted the movie to reflect that
disparity. It’s a scripted documentary that is also a musical. Or a
non-fiction narrative movie. Or a feature film largely written and
filmed in public. And then there’s honesty woven throughout, side
by side with appalling bullshit.
But basically, I was asked to come up with an idea for a Pavement
movie. My idea was, let’s make every kind of music movie, since,
aside from your Stones or Dylan—or other Scorsese-minted
 Videoheaven
guys—you’re not getting more than one movie. So maybe that’s
the ultimate joke: lean heavily into the absurdity that nowadays,
every band gets a movie. Maybe a traditional documentary. Lots
of bands get a biopic. Some bands get a museum. Even fewer get
a theatrical show. So, wouldn’t meaning inherently be created if I
posited that Pavement, a band that has to date never sold 500,000
copies of any single album, were so monumentally important that
they had a full house of cultural appreciation? Which they do, to
their fans. So let the movie come from that reality.
And then, through the process of creating public-facing filming
stunts such as the Pavement museum and the musical, my ab-
straction that was designed for the movie’s internal logic became
something that existed, largely unquestioned, out in the world.
It became real, and the documentary that was meant to be made
about these perhaps-bogus events became a true depiction of
these very real events. Even the biopic section, if it was announced
that that exact cast was starring in a Pavement biopic for Netflix or
whoever, people would be deeply disappointed and annoyed, but
not incredulous.
So, it was about convincing the band—but really just Malkmus—
that this was a good idea. He thought it was. Everyone else cares
more about the band in terms of being in the band than about mi-
cromanaging their “legacy,” such as it is. So they talked to me a lot,
hours of interviews. I got a lot of ephemera for the museum from
Matador, and from the guys in the band who still have anything
to share.
Everything went as planned, except for what I’m saying about
making a bogus Pavement museum and having thousands of at-
tendees accept at face value that Pavement deserves a museum, so
thus my fake museum becomes real, with no adjustment. Anything
that changed over the last three-and-a-half years changed in ways
that validated some of the logical and narrative conceits of the
project in real time, and in public. Like Malkmus being referenced
in Barbie—if I said in 2020 that I would want to suggest a billion
dollars’ worth of people would hear the name “Stephen Malkmus”
in a feminist fantasia, it would have been among the most improb-
able fictions in my initial outline. And yet....
Scope: I think the Pavement joke in Barbie was interesting-
ly double-edged in a way that connects with the whole gist of
Pavement. It’s very funny and/or triggering for people who know
the band, which is a significant minority in the audience of a billion-
dollar movie, and the flip side to that is that it can also just pass
unnoticed for the majority.
Perry: It’s the sort of thing we love about classic Simpsons: ref-
erences to things you do not get, and maybe you come to under-
stand them because you want to get the joke, or you revisit it years
later and think, “How strange that there are such baffling refer-
ences to this thing I thought I discovered as an adult in this show I
enjoyed as a child.” There are Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) refer-
ences on The Critic, and I’d surmise that 0.1 percent of viewers of
that show would even know that was a real movie.
But also, Greta Gerwig references Malkmus in a montage that,
in terms of movies, also hits on The Godfather (1972). So that’s
pretty totemic, and of course the Malkmus reference is also a Lou
Reed reference, but still, neither of those guys are “the godfather
of music.” So it’s pretty clever to me, on a few levels. It does feel
like a line that could have been in Kicking and Screaming, which
in some ways is maybe kind of the movie equivalent of Pavement.
Scope: What is it about Pavement that you—as opposed to
the hypothetical viewer of this film—cares about so much? I ask
because, a bit like Nirvana, their legend seems to be very much
about caring: acting like they didn’t care, not caring about be-
ing understood, not caring about success, or sales, or so on.
But there’s no such thing as craft, music, or art without caring,
23
and no band makes music for decades together and reunites
without caring.
Perry: Similar to Videoheaven, Pavement to me represents the
signifiers, the narrative, and the history of my premium decade:
the ’90s. They formed in late 1989 and broke up in November 1999.
They frame those ten years perfectly, and if you think about the
’90s, which I do a lot, you’re thinking about alternative culture, in-
die ethos, sell-out whatever, integrity, all the stuff Ethan Hawke is
on about in Reality Bites. And no band better represents that saga
than Pavement. Not Green Day: they became huge with album
number three, on a major label. Not Weezer: they began in 1994,
on a major. Pavement were indie from the start to the end, and yet
add 20 more years, and they’re iconic beyond all their peers.
This is a central question about Malkmus: how much does he
care? Famously, in the ’90s, it seemed like not at all. But we show
now with the 2022 rehearsal sections that he has become a per-
fectionist about rehearsing these songs and performing them for
audiences who are seeing them for the tenth time, or weren’t born
when the band broke up in 1999. It’s a bizarre tension that fans
can’t reconcile, and even all this time later, the only unique insight
I have into this is based on private communication he has had on
the editing process. Which has been exactly what I expected on
the one hand, and totally surprising on the other.
Scope: The Pavement-jukebox-musical material is hilarious,
and I’m interested in the reality of it—the rearranging of all these
laconic non-radio songs into sing-alongs, or adding choreography.
Beyond the question of whether any of this is “real,” I’m wonder-
ing if the lens on this stuff is meant to be ironic or sincere.
Perry: I don’t know if you watched the version of the movie
where I myself appear as the musical’s director and posit this very
question. But that’s the central tension between the musical, the
biopic, and even this entire movie. Pavement were and are icon-
ically ironic. Seemingly. But to their most devout fans, there is
nothing ironic about admiring the poetry of Malkmus’ lyrics or
the unique musicality of the band. When any story is told, in hag-
iographic doc form or as a shitty biopic, it becomes pathetically
sincere. So the hope is that this movie clowns on all of that in the
most Pavement way possible, which is to say it’s both and it’s nei-
ther because it’s something else.
Musical theatre is sincere. The people who perform it do not do
so ironically. Pavement placed in that context is, at first glance, sort
of laughable to me, but as we say in the movie, Malkmus’ lyrics and
music are simply closer to the intricacy of something like Sondheim
than Green Day’s music is, and Green Day had a hit musical. Ditto
Alanis Morissette, to bring it back to Canada. So my idea with the
musical was that this could work, it should work, and it probably
will—if it doesn’t, that’s the unscripted part that plays out while the
cameras are rolling, at which point that becomes the narrative.
But also, this gets at the heart of how we did the musical. Staging
a single sequence in a narrative film meant to be a musical, like I
think now exists in the MCU with a Captain America musical, it
can be done well, but it’s just kind of a gag. Actually writing a show,
arranging over 30 songs into new compositions and medleys,
and sitting in the room with a dozen actors giving it their all for
24
weeks—that imbues the musical with a lived-in reality that could
only exist if we “made a musical and documented it” rather than
“made a musical sequence to be in a movie.” This is what I like
about how I made this whole movie: the amount of material on the
margins or simply not in the frame exceeds what is in the movie by
maybe five to one. There are entire songs, sequences, and dance
numbers that we don’t even see a glimpse of in the edit. But the
process of creating the whole show is more valuable to the reality
of what is onscreen than any one number.
Ditto the biopic. I wrote a lot of scenes we didn’t even shoot,
and we shot scenes we ended up not using. It’s staging script-
ed performances as though it is all documentary: let’s shoot the
whole musical, and we will figure out what we need in the edit.
Scope: I definitely thought about Her Smell, which is also about
an iconoclastic rock-star figure, and one whose paths might have
crossed with Malkmus—or someone like him—in the early ’90s. In
terms of a character that, as you say, refuses to conform, what’s
the difference between trying to dramatize that character and try-
ing to capture them? Do you feel that you’re somehow continuing
to invent the idea of Stephen Malkmus? Does that make you a col-
laborator? A fan? An enabler?
Perry: In fact, it is canon that Becky did cross paths with
Malkmus, because one of my phony items in the museum is a
flyer for a Pavement show with Something She on the bill! But
this is like the above, and why I have grown frustrated with two-
dimensional storytelling. I take as much pleasure, if not more, in
creating the backstory for the bands in Her Smell—when their al-
bums came out, when they toured together, who joined the band
last—as I do from the dialogue and blocking. Definitely more. So
with this movie, I get to inherit 30 years of that, and, to me, that is
what I want to be the 80% of story that exists outside the frame of
the movie.
“Inventing Stephen Malkmus” is a fascinating phrase, and even
a good title for a silly published biography that probably should
be in the movie. But to me, he has remained both transparent and
inscrutable about who he is and wants to be as a musician. He’s
clearly honest, sometimes even in a negative way, or at least he
was a lot when he was in Pavement. But he’s also a total mystery,
as you say earlier about how much he actually cares. So with a
non-fiction portrait, using that term loosely, it’s been amazing to
have the responsibility of showing a multifaceted character with-
out the need to explain or rationalize him, because to the audi-
ence, they know that this is a real person with friends and family
and also fans.
The biopic section is sort of about this, the way we want to
poorly psychoanalyze a real person in clichéd terms. But then we
have Malkmus himself clowning through the museum interviews,
playing along with some of my myths and fictions in ways I didn’t
even know he was doing until I saw the footage later.
Ideally, this movie raises more questions about the true nature
of Malkmus and Pavement than it answers. And hopefully people
know the answers are perhaps not to be trusted. I’d still like to see
a three-hour Edvard Munch (1974)–style dramatization of the life
of Malkmus, but even I had to stop somewhere.
 Open Source
Some Films by Ross Meckfessel
BY PHIL COLDIRON
It requires relatively little mental strain to imagine a world in
which all that can be photographed has been; it requires, I think,
considerably more to imagine one in which every possible photo-
graph has been made. I find that both of these little thought exper-
iments imply comic narratives—that is, to borrow a definition, ones
which resolve in favour of their protagonists. And who might these
protagonists be?
In the former, I suppose the answer is obvious enough: us. I mean
for this first-person plural to be understood in an adequately ca-
pacious manner that it might account for not just the human sub-
jectivity which has to date presided over the domain of picturing—
someone goes on pressing the button, moving the brush, smearing
the pigmented fat on the cave wall—but also for any and all of those
potentially autonomous technologies that, having learned from our
ways, might join in the effort of realizing some deranged Sanderian
dream. If I say that this resolves in our favour, it is as beings of lan-
guage: everything would have its perfect name. That this implies a
situation in which there is complete agreement as to the rightness
of each image comprising this taxonomic system leads our utopian
comedy just as easily into playing as one of democracy or totalitar-
ianism; in either case, the humour of the ceaseless effort required
to sustain its ongoing relevance and refinement is worthy, at least,
of Chaplin.
There is what appears to be an equally obvious hero of the second
narrative—let’s call it the visible world—but this is complicated by
the history of the art, which abounds in countless attempts at photo-
graphing what, strictly speaking, can’t be seen. In this light, it seems
that our hero is being itself. Rather than a tale of industry, here we
find something closer to romance: the medium, desperate to prove
its fidelity, sets out on a markedly more deranged quest to picture
everything that can be, from every angle. The result is a kind of
screwball comedy—the pursued, of course, is the real star—in which
the hapless lover attempts, through sheer idiot energy, to make itself
into something worthy of being loved in return, into nothing more
nor less than the equal of infinity. The shape of the narrative is hor-
ribly complicated, and its resolution hopelessly unclear. Still, per-
fect and wanting for nothing, our protagonist will triumph regard-
less, whether alone or in the astonishment of having finally found a
match of comparable brilliance.
Take these odd little cartoons as you like; I offer them, at the out-
set of some thoughts on the American filmmaker Ross Meckfessel,
as minimal attempts at articulating two of the possible justifications
for taking a photograph, any photograph, in the first place. (There
are plainly other reasons, ranging from the compulsive to the coer-
cive, with many points in between.) And if I feel the need to do so
in the context of Meckfessel’s work, it’s because he is part of a small
cohort of artists, linked by friendship and mutual admiration, whose
work seems to me acutely expressive of and insightful regarding the
textures of our image-laden world, the indefinite delights and com-
plications presented to anyone who cares to make pictures by both
what has and can be done with the art of sequenced photography
that we call the movies. Put differently, I offer these stories as poten-
tial backgrounds to the figures—the films—considered here.
***
Across seven works made in the last decade which comprise his
official filmography—and extending to the early films, some remark-
ably accomplished—Meckfessel has dwelt on a tight core of formal
elements, using them to widely varying ends. Three, in particular,
are foundational: open montage; pop soundtracks, often slowed and
edited; and rephotography.
1. I use “open montage” in its conventional sense—the term is
most famously associated with the films of Dorsky and Sonbert (the
latter preferred the equivalent, or at least adjacent, “polyvalent mon-
tage”), though its first intentional application may be Brakhage’s The
Riddle of Lumen (1972)—to describe an editing pattern in which the
field of potential form and content from shot to shot is uniformly
unrestricted. This by no means entails that the montage is arbitrary,
and it does not, in practice, rule out the elaboration of themes and
motifs. Dorsky, calling on Freud, has described it as akin to dream
language: “What are the connectives between individual images that
start to create a kind of syntax of their own?” To arrive at a viable
open montage, then, a filmmaker must above all be an extraordi-
narily sharp viewer of their own footage (perhaps before it has been
shot). They must be capable of identifying the widest possible range
of potential “connectives” within each image, and then using their
knowledge of these qualities to edit in a way that ensures the viewer
can recognize, or retrieve, its ordering—emotional, logical, didactic,
etc.—while maintaining an awareness that this ordering could move
in any direction at any moment.
2. The use of pop soundtracks, whether as emotional emphasis
or ironic commentary, is by now commonplace to the point of cli-
ché across every mode of filmmaking. But cliché is not exhaustion,
and these uses remain occasionally effective (few of us can claim to
25
be fully immune from manipulation by things about which we know
better). Still, other possibilities remain. In a move that leads nat-
urally out of his open montage, Meckfessel selects songs precisely
because of their ubiquity, and attempts to find new facets of them
through sudden, disjunctive placements—both in terms of their ap-
pearance within the overall flow of the films, and their relationships
to the images with which they’re matched. That he regularly sub-
jects these songs to heavy degrees of editing himself aligns him with
an artistic ambience of haunted ambivalence towards pop prevalent
across the last 15 years or so, and speaks to the central role that con-
trasts of mood, tonal chiaroscuro, play in structuring his films.
3. Rephotography remains a relatively underexplored area with-
in the broader field of found-footage filmmaking. While its critical
relationship to the second of our initial thought exercises had been
resolved by the early ’80s—the same image can be made an appar-
ently infinite number of times without running into the limits of
redundancy—its expressive possibilities remain an open question.
Inverting the logic of Godard’s Histoire(s), which stands as the most
sustained inquiry into the photographic absorption of film by vid-
eo (given that the transfer is a form of rephotography), Meckfessel
regularly rephotographs digital video onto 16mm, via both Bolex
and optical printer. An uneasy equivalence between the physical
and digital worlds as pretexts emerges, deepening the films’ struc-
tural openness and providing a foundation for their spooky post-
pop atmospheres.
The combination of these traits can be found, in nuce, as ear-
ly as Cheryl (2011/12), one of two undergraduate thesis films that
Meckfessel made at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Bringing together monochrome footage of friends and classmates
fucking around in the late-bohemian style that lives on, more or less
exclusively, at art schools, with rephotography of glossy headshots of
a number of conventionally attractive women—photographs which
are eventually revealed to have bleak motivations very much in the
realm of the compulsive and coercive—the film articulates, in its
rough-hewn way, Meckfessel’s enduring ambivalence towards pho-
tography itself, the inextricable joy and despair available to be felt
on both sides of the camera through the act of capturing an image.
There is no good reason why impulses towards beauty and violence
should be linked together; Cheryl forces its viewer, with surprising
maturity, to reflect on the social structures that have continued to
produce such a dynamic. It is a film productively at odds with itself.
The films in the following five years are marked by the enthusi-
astic experimentation of a young artist at once searching for and
refining their voice. Along one track, this entailed dabbling in pure
formalism: the Super 8 Invocation of Uzi (2014) plays as if Songs-era
Brakhage had made a film on the model of Portabella’s Cuadecuc,
vampir (1971), while the 16mm All My Star Wars Cards (made the
same year, though not shown until 2016) parodies the flicker film to
inventory several hundred Star Wars trading cards in the space of
just over a minute.
Along another track, Meckfessel proceeded directly out of Cheryl
towards the fully mature style he’d eventually arrive at in 2018 with
The Air of the Earth in Your Lungs. Both the Super 8 The Golden Hour
(2014) and the 16mm A Century Plant in Bloom (2017) are based
around the three formal elements introduced above; their structure
26
is less harmonious than what would soon arrive. It’s nearly impos-
sible to discuss these films in general terms, so I’ll mention a single
shot from A Century Plant, which Meckfessel has noted to me was
revelatory for his practice.
Roughly two-thirds of the way through its ten minutes, the film
arrives at a composition in which the broad leaves of a houseplant
appear in the immediate foreground, near enough to be softly fo-
cused, intruding from the top and bottom of the frame. Through
them, we can see the white surface of a tabletop; at the right of the
frame, the curve of one side of the white pot in which this plant re-
sides (its colour almost the same as the table); and, to the left of the
pot, an iPhone lying flat, its screen playing what appears to be drone
footage of a waterfall, at times showing it from a great height, at oth-
er descending along with it. Meckfessel’s camera holds steady, even
as the rephotographed footage tempts perception to ascribe move-
ment to it; there is the sound of a passing airplane on the soundtrack.
Gravity is felt and repudiated.
The decisiveness of these 25 seconds, so far as I understand them,
lay in the realization that a digital image could be made to function
not just as a unique texture within the gestalt of a film, but also as
a discrete object, as present in the world of a film as anything else.
That this presence often requires the support of a screen is not lost
on Meckfessel; on the contrary, the placement of screens through-
out modern life provides one of the compositional foundations of
his subsequent work, a choice which allows him to freely bounce
between what, to use an appropriately physical metaphor, we might
describe as various weights of image.
The Air of the Earth and its companion film, Estuary (2021), both
similarly resist summary; a practical definition of open montage is
that it is a method for producing films whose shape cannot be de-
scribed, but only experienced. As such, I’ll sample some moments of
particular significance, ones in which a trace of the whole persists,
however obliquely.
The former opens on a pair of shots that continue to emphasize
the digital image as supported by physical objects. In the first, we
see a monitor placed before an open window, a gauzy curtain draped
from its centre and falling along its right edge. Outside, the branch-
es of a single tree are flattened by perspective to appear as if resting
against the brick and concrete wall behind them. The exposure is
low enough that the warm natural light pools in the window, leav-
ing its room in relative shadow; a few small leaves in the lower left
catch a ray. They rhyme the soft glow of the monitor, a uniform field
of grassy green atop which the title of the film sits in white letters.
Wind rustles the leaves outside. The soundtrack is filled with an
electrical hum, winding down as the image cuts to black.
Then, a composition showing a young man from behind, his hair
short and his shoulders bare in a tank top, seated before a trio of ad-
jacent monitors which now bear the extreme widescreen world of a
video game. A fair amount of conventional film grammar is at play,
the montage seeming strikingly closed. The dim light of the room
signals that we are in the same space as before; a window, now cov-
ered by its gauzy curtain, is visible over the right-most monitor. The
framing, behind and slightly above the seated figure, implies that
this will be followed by a reverse shot of our gamer. This composition
holds for 30 seconds, long enough to let the distinct perspectives
blossom and collapse into a pair of dyads: there is Meckfessel and his
camera (real), and the gamer and his “camera” (virtual: the “eyes” of
a first-person game).
As the latter moves rapidly through a series of virtual spaces—a
yard, dilapidated rooms—there is again the uncanny sensation of
movement being contained by stillness at the same time as it seems
to inflect it. What emerges is a canny reversal of the precepts of clas-
sical lyricism. Given that waving the camera about willy-nilly now
likely fails to strike most viewers as a compelling expression of sub-
jective vision, Meckfessel instead uses a virtual instance of that same
vision to make his own calm presence felt through contrast. We feel
it, rather than being obliged to imagine what the moment of produc-
tion looked like. Lyricism, the possibility of a fully free perception, is
revived through negativity.
A couple of things need to be said about that last claim. The first
is that it’s nothing new. If anything, it implies that sophisticated lyr-
icism in contemporary film—and I do think that Meckfessel’s films
over the last five years have gone as far in this direction as anyone’s—
has finally found its way to “the greater degree of abstraction, re-
moval, and negative capability” that Frank O’Hara read in Keats and
Mallarmé (and which, with considerable humour, he claimed to have
discovered a route beyond by insouciantly rejecting distance—much
of the best of mid-century avant-garde film is, in this regard, a less
sexy application of O’Hara’s sensibility). But that’s just the dialecti-
cal movement of history in action; I can see no issue with the movies
someday having their Keats or Mallarmé.
The second point is that “a fully free perception” is ludicrous, at
least in our moment. I won’t claim to know how much naïveté would
be necessary to believe such a thing, but it’s certainly more than I
possess. It’s more than Meckfessel possesses, too: The Air of the
Earth spends the remainder of its 11 minutes speeding between the
various forces, both the ways of seeing and the objects which exist
to impose themselves on our attention, that are constantly drawing
bounds around perception, boxing it in, driving it towards mecha-
nisms of extraction or hijacking it towards violent ends. A series of
lateral pans tracking speeding drones gives way to shots from a train
or a car—those two great avatars of the cinema—that hurry passing
trees into abstraction, at which point the landscape itself comes
apart, mingles with its digital representation.
Now, I said that the conventions of film grammar imply that the
subsequent shot would deliver a reverse, a composition that would
anchor us in a relatable human response. This is not what we get.
Here, the montage opens as Meckfessel cuts in close, starting with a
quarter-profile over the gamer’s right shoulder, pinning him against
his gameworld, before drifting away to the right so that the virtual
landscape spills over to dominate the celluloid frame, resolving the
tension between the two levels of image. This is an openness, sus-
tained across the film, that is aware of its limits. These bounds are
knowingly testing, moment by moment, to see whether they are real
or apparent.
If The Air of the Earth responds to this situation with speed,
Estuary, as its name implies, uses the pooling slowness of a space
where flow meets repetition. It begins with the close-up promised by
the prior film: the tightly cropped face of a woman, seen from just be-
low the nose to the chin, her lips almost glassy with gloss. She turns
her head from left to right, and then back; she seems to speak a sin-
gle clipped syllable, perhaps “Hi,” in response to the voice that says
“Hello” on the soundtrack, a word which echoes before decaying into
synth tone. She turns her face down slightly, revealing her nose, at
which point Meckfessel cuts up to an equally tight view from nose
to forehead. Her eyes, as glassy as her lips, seem strangely distant;
she blinks twice. As her gaze turns directly towards the camera, it
becomes clear that this, too, is not a relatable human image. What we
see has instead the sense of a finely wrought rendering. At this point,
ten seconds into the film, Meckfessel’s frame suddenly multiplies,
layering slightly differentiated views of this face atop itself.
We remain in this uncanny space across the film’s 11 minutes. A
few dominant motifs recur, all of them signaled by its opening: the
fragile glassiness of a world in which “screen” and “architecture” are
increasingly indistinguishable; various renderings; a desire to touch
the digital, tinged with something like melancholy. This last produc-
es Estuary’s most indelible image: a close-up of a MacBook, caressed
by a pair of hands, the low light catching the greasy smudges left be-
hind through use on its aluminum body. If such touching little im-
perfections, traces of human presence, are increasingly likely to be
found in digital spaces, here we see them left right at the border with
the physical.
While Estuary pushes the openness of Meckfessel’s montage to
its limit, the monochrome Zero Length Spring, made the same year,
introduces a new degree of thematic determination. This depends
mainly on a turn towards the literary. Where language had previ-
ously been relegated all but exclusively to lyrics on the soundtrack,
here Meckfessel uses a pair of texts, one spoken and one written
on screen, to inflect even the film’s most disparate images with the
sense that they are capturing unseen, or unseeable, energies.
The written text comes from Brian Torrey Scott, a polymathic
artist who had taught at SAIC during Meckfessel’s time there, and
passed away at the age of 37 in 2013. It concerns an eccentric method
for removing squirrels from the walls of one’s home, involving the
creation, practical and ritual, of increasingly large circles of nuts.
This story is paired with a series of rephotographed still images
showing interiors and exteriors, each adorned with a white circle.
Though these circles carry a trace of indication, initially, they seem
only a graphic intervention, turning the photographs from mundane
documents into pieces of design, rhyming with the story’s narrative.
Still, they call out to the eye, which slowly finds their reason: vague
traces of presence emerge, until the flare-out that accompanies the
final image brings up the exposure enough to reveal a ghostly figure
standing in the shadows of a wood. “Miles and miles of terminal
darkness,” says the voice on the soundtrack. “Miles and miles of ter-
minal darkness.”
Elsewhere, the film’s unseen energies are not quite so haunting.
Its core is a pair of sequences showing a session of reiki healing,
gentle moments of touch and near-touch as the healer obscurely
controls the flow of qi. There is a long passage of abstraction, the
result of a layered series of celluloid manipulations—direct anima-
tion via spray paint, optical printing, and hand processing—brought
together to create all-over compositions that ebb and flow in den-
sity and activity. Though Meckfessel, who runs the small-gauge lab
Negativeland with the filmmaker Josh Lewis, no doubt knows his
27
 The Air of the Earth
way around the darkroom, there is a degree of spooky action baked
into this approach that sidelines the perfect draftsmanship of the
camera and gives over the finest details of each frame to physical and
chemical forces just on the far side of precise control.
Zero Length Spring concludes with its second narrative, this
time Meckfessel’s own, which recounts a vaguely mystical trip to a
farmer’s market. The text appears in white type at the centre of a
black screen, wiped on and off by the not-quite-metronomic swing
of a lightbulb. Tracking its rhythm, which oscillates between three
and four passes, draws out one level of hypnosis, creating feedback
with the story itself as attention moves in and out of phase. The
soundtrack, burbling and dripping water and the rhythmic chirp of
insects, adds to the atmosphere of perceptual calm. Having passed
through the bustle of the market—the story is told in the second per-
son—we finally meet a woman who instructs us to silently repeat a
number of phrases: “I make time for myself”…“My mind is capable
of growing”…“I accept my nature as a physical form.”
Meckfessel’s most recent film, Spark from a Falling Star, marks a
major expansion of his ambitions. Having worked to revive the pos-
sibility of a compelling lyricism, he now turns that success to an even
more daunting task: the discovery of a new form for the genre nar-
rative. He has made a classic sci-fi movie (albeit an oblique one), a
tale of alien abduction starring the filmmaker Carl Elsaesser and the
multidisciplinary artist Kelsey Sharpe.
An overture sets the mood, a gorgeous nocturne of spotlit trees
that makes clear how well Meckfessel has learned from Dorsky (that
is, well enough to put those lessons to markedly different tonal ends).
Following a sequence of conventional establishing shots which place
us in an empty parking lot, we come upon Elsaesser slumped in an
SUV, its door ajar. After being studied for several shots, he wakes and
shatters into layers of superimposition as a piece of found audio—a
famous film quotation, heavily slowed—enters the soundtrack and
confirms the type of story we’re in beyond any doubt. Suddenly, he
is gone.
The subsequent shot, the moment of his being carried up to the
UFO, introduces the film’s dominant pretext: those spaces of mod-
ern architecture which seem to exist primarily, even exclusively, to
28
Zero Length Spring
be photographed. In this case, that space is what looks to be a mas-
sive tunnel or shaft, glowing warm and golden, filmed through the
ceiling of some vehicle as it slowly rises. While its original in the
world is, as it happens, an adjacent mode of transporting bodies (one
which does not involve cars: an escalator, filmed upside down), this
image nonetheless produces the “connective” or “vehicle” which
allows Meckfessel to then continue the journey via car, borrowing
the Lynchian strategy of shooting frontward onto the road as he
speeds through darkness, accompanied by the sounds of heavily
slowed Enya.
With the visitors having arrived in the stars with their quarry, the
film now swerves to consider the aliens themselves. They have, it
seems, a deep concern with these image-inducing pieces of architec-
ture—a concern deep enough that one starts to wonder if they are the
architecture. (Recall Meckfessel’s early ambivalence regarding the
act of photography.) We see both rephotographed digital renderings
of cities—the kind that messianic tech idiots dream of—and actually
existing instances of the form, such as the hideous and photogenic
interior of One Vanderbilt in midtown Manhattan, whose obser-
vation deck, The Summit, consists of an array of glass and mirrors
which renders anyone who enters it so much set decoration.
I don’t take this as a hopeful film in the end; if we are to defeat
these architectural invaders, it will have to wait for the sequel. There
are consolations, though, in a pair of the most purely delightful se-
quences Meckfessel has created to date, both set to versions of the
same canonical tune. In the first, the camera tumbles through a
green filter as it views Manhattan from on high in a woozy visual
melisma. The second is more rhythmically severe: a series of shots of
lit windows viewed from outside, the editing shifting between synco-
pation and counterpoint. In both, the currents of unease, paranoia,
and melancholy that course through Meckfessel’s work are brought
into perfect harmony with the formal exuberance of his filmmaking.
Though we might well doubt the current capacity for images to act as
self-contained vessels of truth, their arrangement in the world holds
out some promise of expressing certain truths of experience. These
passages are such an expression; it is as much as I can ask of art. I’ll
leave you to sort out the comedy in that.
 Objects of Desire
Rodrigo Moreno on The Delinquents
BY JORDAN CRONK
“The problem is that it then goes off on tangents and the plot be-
comes secondary.”—A Mysterious World
Until recently a somewhat forgotten figure of the New Argentine
Cinema, director Rodrigo Moreno has, with The Delinquents, as-
serted himself as perhaps that movement’s most underestimated
talent. Moreno’s first narrative film in nine years is several times
more ambitious than anything the 51-year-old filmmaker has yet
ventured, a work as sprawling and serpentine as his previous fea-
tures were compact and unassuming. Just as telling, it’s a grand
embrace of fiction following what seemed to be a slow, perhaps
unconscious retreat from narrative storytelling.
The director’s two most recent features, the docu-fiction hybrid
Reimon (2012) and the observational documentary A Provincial
City (2017), marked a distinct tonal shift in Moreno’s work, away
from both the sullen existentialism of his solo debut El custodio
(2005) and the ironic detachment of A Mysterious World (2011)—
two films very much in keeping with prevailing art-cinema trends
of the time—and closer to the kind of modest, empathetic portrai-
ture that’s become de rigueur on the non-fiction festival circuit.
It’s easy and not entirely inapt, then, to consider a work of such
bold, unabashedly cinematic, and purely pleasurable wide-can-
vas storytelling as The Delinquents—a film that traffics in a little
bit of everything Moreno’s done in the past, while nodding to any
number of classic and contemporary influences along the way—as
something of a re-debut. Not only is it the freshest and most ac-
complished work of Moreno’s career, it’s also carried aloft at every
moment with the joie de vivre of a filmmaker bursting with energy
and ideas.
The Delinquents is at once a knowing expansion of the central
premise of Hugo Fregonese’s 1949 Argentine noir classic Hardly
a Criminal—about a lowly insurance clerk who hatches an embez-
zlement scam he knows can land him a maximum of seven years
in prison, which he proudly serves before returning to retrieve the
stashed payload—and a rewiring of its themes of greed and work-
ing-class disenchantment. Forging a continuum between eras and
traditions by dismantling the codes and signifiers that might oth-
erwise tie its story to a specific period or set of expectations, The
29
Delinquents is perhaps the most languorous, anachronistic heist
movie ever made—a genre film in love with the devices and arche-
types of genre, but uninterested in the kind of dramatic, moral-
istic storytelling that typifies your average three-act crime film
(which is an admittedly inadequate term for a movie that, by the
end, could just as accurately be called a Western).
Divided into two parts and running 189 minutes, The
Delinquents rambles where other films of its kind dispense with
pleasantries and proceed to ratchet up the tension. Moreno com-
mences the film with a wordless, city symphony–like sequence of
downtown Buenos Aires architecture that, after several minutes
of oboe music composed by Astor Piazzolla, eventually arrives
at a ’70s-stylized bank where Morán (Daniel Elías) and Román
(Esteban Bigliardi) work as tellers. One day, while depositing
a cartful of cash in the vault, Morán absconds with $650,000—a
sum, he tells Román later than evening when confronting him
with details of the crime in a busy restaurant, equivalent to the
combined salary they would earn from now until retirement. With
this shaky moral justification in place, Morán’s plan is simply to
confess to the crime, serve the sentence, and then split the money
with Román, who will hide it until Morán is released. Which is all
well and good, except Román, left with little choice but to agree to
the arrangement, can’t shake the guilt and, under suspicion due to
his frequent visits to Morán in prison, takes his accomplice’s ad-
vice and stows the cash under a giant boulder in the countryside.
Where this first chapter takes place mostly indoors—primarily
in the bank, as the branch manager (Germán de Silva, who, in a
juicy dual role, also plays a gang leader in the prison scenes) and
an outside CPA (Laura Paredes) investigate the crime and put
pressure on Román to fess up—the second half moves outside
and ushers in an attendant shift in tone, from the relatively brisk
and cloistered to the decidedly carefree and unbound. It’s here,
too, that the film evolves from a straightforward if evocative neo-
noir into an existential inquiry into the notion of freedom and
the nature of time. In a transcendent 20-minute interlude, part
two opens upon a literal oasis, as Román crosses paths with three
strangers—filmmakers, we later learn—at a lake when leaving his
hilltop hideaway. As they eat, swim, and play word games, idle
chitchat turns into quasi-philosophical musings on memory and
storytelling. “Was it a song, a riddle, or a story?” Román asks him-
self when recalling a half-remembered anecdote he once heard.
“Or was it a game?”
That the same might be asked of The Delinquents is part of the
fun, particularly in these moments when the plot either falls away
or shifts gears so completely that the initial premise can itself
feel like a vague memory. This applies most especially during an
extended flashback that upends our understanding of Román’s
relationship with one of these individuals, Norma (Margarita
Molfino), who spends much of the film’s second half involved in a
romance with Román and, we later learn, had a similar fling with
Morán before he went to jail.
Linked by more than just their anagrammatic names, Román
and Morán are each seeking the kind of freedom that Norma rep-
resents—namely, freedom from the strictures of the workaday
grind and all the social, economic, and romantic responsibilities
30
that come with being an upwardly mobile individual in a capital-
ist society. It’s little wonder that, on not one but two occasions,
Román escapes to the cinema to see Bresson’s L’argent (1983),
or that the corporate routines depicted in the early stages of the
film eventually give way to poetry reading, horseback riding, and
record-playing—one of the film’s key motifs involves the Pappo’s
Blues song “Adonde Está la Libertad,” from the Argentine rock
band’s 1971 self-titled album, a copy of which is passed between
the characters like a talisman.
Here, as throughout, it’s easy to see where Moreno’s interests
and sympathies lie, not only ethically but also artistically; indeed,
few recent films have so openly acknowledged their influences. In
that sense, The Delinquents, despite its lengthy gestation, fits in
nicely with both the current crop of Argentine cinema—particu-
larly the novelistic epics produced by El Pampero Cine, such as
Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen (2022) and Mariano Llinás’
La Flor (2018), both of which prominently feature Delinquents
co-star Paredes—and the kind of fabulist-minded fare that has in-
jected contemporary art cinema with a welcome dose of levity and
wide-eyed possibility. (If the title What Do We See When We Look
at the Sky? hadn’t already been claimed by Alexandre Koberidze,
it could work comfortably here.) Unlike a lot of films that bring to
mind as many, if not more, outside sources as they do moments
from their maker’s own catalogue, Moreno’s movie bears no anx-
iety of influence, and is all the more original for it. Like any good
rabbit hole, it’s worth getting lost in.
Cinema Scope: It’s been a number of years since you’ve
worked so directly in fiction; in fact, your films had slowly been
moving closer to non-fiction. What prompted this return to
narrative cinema?
Rodrigo Moreno: I consider myself a director of fiction films.
Even though my last film, A Provincial City, was a strict documen-
tary, and the one before that, Reimon, was an experimental fiction
starring a non-professional actress, I don’t think of the new film
as a return to fiction. To me, I’m always singing the same old song,
just with different instruments. Or, to use another analogy, those
earlier films are like nudes, and in the case of The Delinquents I
bought some clothes, shoes, and hats to dress it up.
A Provincial City, in particular, was important for me when
approaching The Delinquents, because it’s about daily life and
leisure in a small town. If I hadn’t shot those scenes of leisure in
A Provincial City, then the second half of The Delinquents would
have been more difficult for me to imagine. Because of that film, I
felt total surety and a kind of freedom from the mandates of nar-
rative to develop similar scenes of leisure in The Delinquents. And,
in a similar way, Reimon’s themes of work and play carry over to
The Delinquents.
Scope: The more languorous and observational passages do
have a bit of a non-fiction feel, as does the opening sequence of the
city. I’ve read that you approached the film as kind of a portrait of
Buenos Aires?
Moreno: When I decide to start on a film, I create my own ob-
jects of desire. In this case, one of them was to shoot downtown
Buenos Aires, which is where I was born and where I live. For the
past 12 years I’ve been working with a friend of mine, a still pho-
tographer, on a kind of portrait of the city. Every six months or so
we go downtown and shoot various things, to make an archive for
the future. It’s all observational, like those early Lumière shorts or
those early 20th-century images of the streets and people. That’s
something I wanted to bring to The Delinquents, in that I really
wanted to capture Buenos Aires.
But at the same time it’s like cropping the city, because Buenos
Aires is changing due to the economic crises, the influx of new
immigrants, and because the 21st century is just totally different.
Buenos Aires is a pale image of what Argentina was in the past,
with those beautiful buildings—the French and Italian architec-
ture. I wanted to capture the Buenos Aires that belonged to me
from my childhood. So the first images of the film are of a Buenos
Aires that both exists and doesn’t exist anymore.
Scope: You’ve worked a bit in visual and performing arts in re-
cent years. Did you bring anything from those experiences to your
work on The Delinquents?
Moreno: Not so much. My work in visual arts has been like a
game. An idea I had to have radio announcers read Karl Marx’s
Capital was selected in a visual arts market, and so I put on the
performance with the announcers reading Capital over a five-day
period. That was when I was preparing Reimon, in which Capital is
read at one moment in the film. So that subject was split between
film and visual arts, but I’m not sure about any other direct con-
nection. My films are influenced by cinema.
Scope: Speaking of which, tell me a little about the film that in-
spired The Delinquents’ central premise, Hugo Fregonese’s Hardly
a Criminal. How did you first come to learn of it?
Moreno: Many years ago I received a proposal from the pro-
ducer of my first film to remake Hardly a Criminal. At that point
I hadn’t seen the film, so I bought the DVD, and the quality was
really awful. It was hard even to understand the dialogue. But it
was interesting to me to watch how Fregonese depicts how Morán
justifies his robbery.
The problem I found was that Morán wanted to commit the
crime, confess to it, do the sentence, and after that be a million-
aire and live a life of luxury. I couldn’t identify with that desire.
But on the other hand, the way Fregonese depicts the character is
very moral. He’s a criminal, a delinquent; it’s difficult to empathize
with him. He’s not nice. So, because I didn’t like the character, I
rejected the proposal. But years later, that seed to remake the film,
or at least to have a dialogue with that period of Argentine cinema,
triggered in me a desire to come back to the project, but to deform
it, to adapt it to my sensibilities and bring it closer to my territory.
My first idea was to split the premise between two characters,
to tell of two destinies, or maybe one destiny built into two charac-
ters—hence, Román and Morán. Keeping the name Morán is a way
of recognizing the earlier film as the origin of this project. Also,
the title The Delinquents is a way of preserving the original title
of Fregonese’s film, which is Apenas un delincuente, even though
it was suggested to me that “The Offenders” would be a more ac-
curate and stronger translation of the characterizations in my
script. These references are a reminder of the history and lineage
we’re working in, because my generation was very reactive to the
history of Argentine cinema.
When we were coming up at the end of the 20th century, our
mindset was to react against any trace of Argentine cinema. We
wanted to reinvent Argentine cinema, and we did. But in some
sense I think that wasn’t fair, because we can’t negate tradition.
Sometimes, reacting against tradition is a way of continuing
those traditions. Only Lucrecia Martel assumed that tradition by
31
casting Graciela Borges, an actress from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s,
known for her work with Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, in La Ciénaga
(2001). The rest of us denied that tradition. But now I’m in my fif-
ties, and I think it’s time to look back and try to establish a bridge
with our ancestors. And this film is not only a bridge to Hardly
a Criminal: there are many gestures to Argentine films of the
’80s that I saw when I was a kid. The music, the architecture—it
may not evoke a specific film, but I hope it captures the mood of
an era.
Scope: Were you worried about making such an openly cine-
philic and referential film?
Moreno: I have no problem if spectators or critics recognize
certain traditions or histories in my film, because sometimes
I’m conscious of influences and sometimes I’m not. For example,
there’s a scene in the film where Román goes to the countryside,
and Norma takes his hand and they start to run through the for-
est. I was conscious of that scene belonging to Ermanno Olmi’s
The Fiances (1963), which is a film I really love. Later, those same
characters go to the cinema to see L’argent, another blatant ref-
erence. But within the film, seeing a moment from Bresson and
this other set of hands hopefully creates a dialogue or a poetic
echo between Olmi and Bresson. But otherwise, it’s more of a
mood I’m trying to evoke, something more general, rather than
anything specific.
What I take from directors that I love, other than those few ob-
viously stolen moments, is an attitude. There’s a filmmaker I re-
ally love, Jacques Rozier, who’s considered a second- or third-tier
Nouvelle Vague director. What I love about him is the freedom of
his storytelling, the detours he takes to follow characters and feel-
ings. It’s that storytelling attitude that I take from him. Another
example is the music I use in the film, which evokes Melville and
Chabrol, directors who were recasting film noir ten or 15 years
after the fact. Rather than directly reference them, I nod to their
influence through the way I use music.
Scope: I was surprised to learn that the film doesn’t have an
original score but rather music from outside sources, namely
Astor Piazzolla.
Moreno: At the same time that I like to be hands-on with the
editing of my films, I sometimes need to put music to scenes to
help find some pace in the cutting. I usually get rid of that music,
but it’s helpful to find that rhythm. I’ll insert some music and say,
“We’ll use something like this,” but in this case, I fell in love with
the “something like this.”
Other than probably some mainstream directors, who com-
mission music and then edit over the composed score, most film-
makers use pre-existing music as a reference and then take those
references to the musician and have them copy those references. I
wanted to avoid that. So I went directly to Piazzolla, an Argentine
musician who almost always worked with the bandoneon, an ac-
cordion that’s the main instrument used in tango. But there’s one
piece of his that we found that uses oboe instead of bandoneon,
and for me that oboe piece evokes classic cinema, whereas the
bandoneon pieces evoke Argentine cinema. Which, again, plays
into that dialogue I wanted to establish between my film and
Argentine cinema.
32
Scope: Even though this is your most referential film, I also
think it’s your most original, which may be due to the writing.
Can you describe the writing process, as it compares to your
previous films?
Moreno: I think for the first time I let myself get behind feel-
ings, characters, and situations that maybe aren’t functional in a
traditionally structured movie. I try to not ban my impulses while
writing. If something makes me laugh, I try to follow the idea to
see where it can take me. I always write like this. In this case, since
I knew that the motivation for the main character was freedom
and free time—free, non-productive time—I knew the storytell-
ing had to be non-productive as well, or else it would have been
a strong contradiction. I’m always trying to connect content and
film form. I believe the real storytelling is in the form, rather than
the topic or the content. I always begin with the form, and then
develop the storytelling. In that way, the films are cinematic rath-
er than literary.
Scope: That may ultimately be what separates The Delinquents
from other recent Argentine films that it’s frequently been com-
pared to, like Trenque Lauquen or La Flor.
Moreno: When I showed the film in Rome recently it was
constantly being compared to Trenque Lauquen, which is under-
standable: it’s an Argentine film, it’s a recent film, it’s four hours
long, and it features many of the same actors. The films are relat-
ed because of that, but there’s a relevant difference. The films of
El Pampero Cine are usually built on two levels: there’s one level
that tells the story, and a second level that comments on the story
as it’s being told. That generates a kind of distance, and a kind of
protection. The story is somehow always protected by this voice—
sometimes it’s an actual voiceover, sometimes not, but it’s always
supporting the story being told.
In my case, everything’s in the open air—the story has to defend
itself, the scenes have to defend themselves. Neither is a better or
worse approach, they’re just different. Alejo Moguillansky told
me the other day, after seeing the film, that he felt a dialogue be-
tween it and El Pampero. I said, “OK, that’s nice, but I personally
don’t think it has much to do with you guys.” My film is built from
a place of solitude—it’s very personal, a diary by other means. El
Pampero is always working collectively. When watching their
work you always feel this collectivity, this communion. Of course,
film work is a collective endeavour, and I have my regular collab-
orators, but at the end of the day I’m alone. I consider myself a
lone soldier.
Scope: Can you talk about developing the tone and rhythm of
the film’s two parts, as well as the city/country, indoor/outdoor
dichotomy that separates them?
Moreno: I knew from the beginning that I wanted to explore
the city/country dynamic, as well as the idea of productive versus
non-productive time. But the two-part structure is something
that only developed during the editing. It took us over three and
a half years to shoot the film, basically the same amount of time it
takes Morán to serve his sentence, and I was adding and subtract-
ing scenes as we shot. I was editing that whole time, but it was only
after the last day of shooting that we brought in an editor to work
on the material. It was during a three-month period of organizing
everything that a new structure emerged. I discovered new things
in the material to reorganize the storytelling, and it was at this
moment that I decided to split the film into two parts.
The main change we made was moving the scene where Morán
reveals that he had a love affair with Norma, which originally ap-
peared chronologically in the first half of the film, to the third act.
This is something that only happened in the last weeks of the ed-
iting. It was just me at home, editing at night, like playing a video
game, trying to find the film that I couldn’t find. It was when I decid-
ed to move that scene and turn it into a long, exaggerated flashback
that I found the film. This allowed the first part to be about money
and the second part to be about freedom. But not freedom as an ab-
solute concept: it’s about what you can do with that freedom. You
can ride a horse, you can swim in a lake, you can shoot a film, you
can spend the day reading poetry. That’s the concept behind the
two parts.
Scope: It’s interesting you mention the editing being like a
game, because the film itself can feel like a game at times. One of
Román’s lines stood out to me when I rewatched the film: “Was it
a song, a riddle, or a story? Or was it a game?”
Moreno: I like playing games with words, and I like filming peo-
ple playing games. I also like to film people dancing and listening
to music. These are all things that recur in my films, and in my
life. That scene you mention is for me the nucleus of the film—the
heart of the film. When Román tells that story, he says something
like, “I don’t know why I’m recalling this if it doesn’t mean any-
thing.” I don’t know why either, but for me the entire three hours
of the film are to tell this one line. It’s completely personal, but
that’s the film for me.
Scope: The Delinquents feels for me at times almost like a re-
capitulation of your work, with a few moments that even direct-
ly reference your prior films—most obviously the scene where
Román’s girlfriend tell him she needs “some time” apart, just like
the opening scene of A Mysterious World. How conscious were
you that the film could play productively as a kind of retrospective
or tour of your filmography?
Moreno: Like I said, first I create an object of desire, then I let
myself go behind that desire. I don’t follow an aesthetic program.
So it’s not that it’s important for me to recognize my prior work,
it’s not that—it’s joy and desire. It’s totally unconscious when
these things occur, these games or these scenes that in the end are
similar. But only in the end, see?
Scope: Work is a regular theme in your films. How has your in-
vestment in issues of labour or in the ways you depict it changed
since your first films, if at all?
Moreno: In some ways certain ideas about work have changed
a lot since my early films, and in other ways not so much. But the
concept of how work takes over our lives is the same. How work as
a central part of our lives hinders our freedom, and the possibility
of expanding our minds and souls and expressions.
For me, what’s changed is my way of telling these stories. My
first film, El custodio, is very solemn. Now I’m more skeptical, and
more free as a filmmaker, which has allowed me to try different
concepts and take more chances as a director. What this film al-
lowed me is a certain pleasure in filming scenes of leisure, which
is why I mentioned A Provincial City earlier. For me, that film was
a turning point in my career. It’s a film I made with total liberty.
I only shot things that brought me joy, and made me happy. And
that happiness, that bright side of life, is something I was only dis-
covering during those years.
So to answer your question: what hasn’t changed is my idea
about work as a central part of our lives, but what has really
changed is my relationship to cruelty in storytelling and filmmak-
ing. El custodio is a little bit cruel; A Mysterious World a little less
cruel, but there’s still cruelty. With The Delinquents, I’ve aban-
doned cruelty, gotten rid of it completely. I’m happy to finally offer
spectators who are used to receiving cruelty in life, in TV, and in
cinema a film with no cruelty at all.
33
 From the Vision to the
Nail in the Coffin, and
the Resurrection
Dimitris Athiridis on exergue – on documenta 14

BY ANTOINE THIRION

A teenaged girl is texting her boyfriend from her bedroom, seek-
ing compassion: “I’m just in a really bad place right now.” The boy
responds: “Oh, what are you doing in Germany?”
Many can relate to this fierce meme which appeared on social
media following the silencing of voices in Germany condemning
Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Recently, the finding committee of
documenta 16, the next edition of the German mega-exhibition
held in Kassel every five years since 1955, collectively resigned
because of the “unchallenged media and public discrediting” of
one of their members, Indian writer and curator Ranjit Hoskoté,
who had signed a 2019 anti-fascist statement which the widely
despised German culture minister Claudia Roth described, with
her usual nuance, as “clearly anti-Semitic and loaded with Israel-
hostile conspiracy theories.”
As the supervisory board is currently tasked with restructuring
the documenta selection process, the fear is that the freedom tra-
ditionally granted to the exhibition’s artistic direction will be dras-
tically constrained in order to prevent any new national “scan-
dal” the likes of which occurred around documenta 15 in 2022.
That edition, curated by Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa,
saw selected artworks removed following accusations of anti-
Semitic content, which eventually led to the ongoing overhaul of
the exhibition’s governance structure. And all this followed on
the heels of yet another “scandal” surrounding documenta 14,

34
the reasons of which were different, but also very much a product
of their time: the decision by artistic director Adam Szymczyk to
hold overlapping shows in Athens and Kassel, which occasioned a
hailstorm of political and media establishment criticism for a €5.3
million budget shortfall.
A 14-hour-long film about curating an exhibition may sound
like an ordeal, and yet what Greek filmmaker Dimitris Athiridis
has achieved with exergue – on documenta 14 is without a doubt
one the most compelling, nerve-wracking, and timely films of re-
cent years. Aptly premiering at the Berlinale in February, the film
is the definitive making-of record of the German quinquennial’s
2017 edition. Over three years, Athiridis followed Szymczyk’s at-
tempts to organize documenta 14 in both Athens and Kassel as the
Polish artistic director scouted across several countries, brain-
stormed with a team of excellent curators (including Hila Peleg,
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Paul B.
Preciado), spoke with some of the most relevant contemporary
intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers (including Douglas Gordon,
Hiwa K, Ben Russell, and Narimane Mari), negotiated with insti-
tutions, installed the works, met with politicians, answered the
press, and went through the most exciting to the most dire times.
Through its jumbled structure and precision in depicting the
curatorial discourse, exergue – on documenta 14 is the opposite of
the story of a shipwreck: it is a successful attempt to salvage what
demagogy savagely tore down. At once complex and welcoming
for an audience unfamiliar with the art world, it relies as much
on its protagonist’s wit and charisma as on the relevance of his ar-
tistic choices, which only proved to be strengthened by the global
events that shaped its context. It’s very much a process-driven
film, where the idea to bring documenta to a country notorious-
ly enslaved by debt, reverberating in the one eventually looming
over the organization of the event, allows the film to take on mon-
umental proportions in a quiet and unassuming manner.
The astonishing level of access that Athiridis managed to ob-
tain brings us to reflect upon what’s generally allowed to be pub-
lic and what’s condemned to stay private, on transparency and
opacity in the handling of political and cultural matters. And the
tremendous efforts to piece together the continuity of documenta
14’s elaboration subverts the ways by which the future is blocked
and times are pre-empted, be it due to censorship or financial
debt. It’s not the least of this film’s achievements to bring to light,
as in any exhibition, works that have been condemned to oblivion,
and to do justice to things that have been repressed.
Cinema Scope: On the documenta 14 official team list, you ap-
pear as “cinematographer.” Did the film originate from you, or
from a proposition of its artistic director, Adam Szymczyk?
Dimitris Athiridis: When I met Adam in 2015, I had this idea
of making an observational documentary about him as artistic
director of documenta 14 in the making, and I asked him. It took
him five seconds for him to say yes, and I started following him. I
was not commissioned by him or someone else. It’s a funny thing,
actually: this “cinematographer” title is an honorary one I was
given later. I “joined” this team and started following them at an
early stage, before the team grew to 200 members; there were
only around 20 people at that time. And I spent so much time with
them, all day, from the morning until late at night, sometimes in
tavernas and bars…It was like a way of life, following a mission.
One could call it assimilation, in anthropological terms, but that’s
how I understand observational filmmaking. So, I was there as an
unofficial artistic team member; it was OK, since I had Adam’s
permission. It only posed a problem when they started install-
ing and put security at the venues. I didn’t have a badge because I
wasn’t from the press. I asked, “How do I get in?” and I got a team
card, which was honorary.
When in Athens, because I’m a local, many artists or curators
were asking me for tips about things they needed: where to find
materials or a film crew or whatever, some information about a
space. I noticed that Bonaventure’s title was “curator-at-large,” so
I gave myself the title of “curator-at-small.” Adam always said that
everybody can be a curator.
Scope: You have many titles. At some point early in the film, he
calls you a souffleur, because you correct him on a Greek word.
Athiridis: There was a moment when Adam, while giving an
interview, wanted to mention the Greek term Methexis (to re-
fer to how audience participation becomes part of the tragedy),
and instead said Metohia. I usually don’t like to intervene when
I film, but since he was giving an interview, I thought this term
should not be recorded incorrectly. I did it automatically, you
know. I only did it once or twice during the two years, and I was
unsure if something like that would be in the film. But what was
interesting in the end was not my intervention, but Adam’s swift
response to it, as he gave it back to his interlocutor as an example
of participation, not a souffleur response, as I was breaking the
fourth wall. The discussion was about the audience of documen-
ta, who Adam preferred to think of as participants rather than
passive spectators.
It was also an essential moment in establishing the relationship
between filmmaker and subject. Filming Adam posed some diffi-
culties. He was doing his job and had a million things in his head;
I didn’t want to bother him, ask questions, or make him have to
think about me. He is very gentle, but not particularly expressive;
he’s always very composed, and I couldn’t tell if he was accept-
ing my presence and what my limits were because nothing was
planned, nothing was staged. I just had to be there, where he was.
If there was a meeting—and there were lots—with many cura-
torial team members in very small rooms, I had to be there early
and take a seat at the table and keep quiet and still to be able to
film. I was trying to avoid moving around and making myself too
present, or it would be annoying or intimidating for them. When
I film, I always try to look people in the eye so they see a person
looking at them, not a camera, so they forget about the camera and
see me. Filming people at such a proximity is a matter of relation
and trust. After a while, they got used to me.
Scope: Did you have any prior connection to the art world?
Athiridis: Very little. I had a vague idea about what documen-
ta was. My previous two films were character-based narrations;
I always like to start with characters instead of issues. But when
you film a character, their work, their world becomes the back-
ground, the context, which cannot be ignored. Characters are the
35
best vehicles for issues. I don’t research and meditate about what
film I want to make next. I prefer to be open, and the story comes
to me—out of luck, you meet someone. This film also started in a
peculiar way. Adam came to Thessaloniki, which is my hometown,
in June 2015. The team of documenta 14 scheduled one of their
early meetings there because they still lacked an office in Athens.
Everybody flew from different places in Europe for the opening
of the Thessaloniki Biennale to get acquainted with the Greek art
context. One of documenta’s curators, Marina Fokidis, is a friend
of mine. She said she would meet with the team in a taverna one
night, and told me to come by. I wasn’t very excited, but it was a
hot night, and at 11 p.m. I felt like going out.
When I got to the taverna, the team was around a big table. I
took a seat, and Adam was at the other end. Those were the Grexit
days—there were a lot of discussions about whether Greece
should stay or leave the European Union, Varoufakis and Tsipras
were going to the Eurogroup negotiations, and there was a heat-
ed climate. Adam was asking questions, but also seemed very
informed and knowledgeable about the Greek situation. And he
seemed to care. The next day, I googled documenta and realized
I had met this charismatic character who wants to do something
interesting, which is the start of every good story. He wants to do
a documenta in Greece: let’s see what he’ll do and how he’ll do it.
That’s how things started.
Of course, for me, this long journey was also like a learning
curve to the art world. I didn’t know much about documenta or
the art world, but I guess I know some things now. And Adam is
such a good teacher. All of them were, actually. Which is a way to
answer why I am making films in the first place: because I want to
explore something, to learn something, and to tell the story.
Scope: You must know a lot about curators by now.
Athiridis: If you study rocket science for some time, you get to
understand a bit of rocket science. Perhaps it was good that I didn’t
know the art world, because in a sense, I was fresh, I didn’t have
any preconceptions about what is important and what isn’t. I know
some things about the world, and some things about people. And
curators are definitely interesting people. Some things may have
felt odd, but I tried to understand them. Their use of language,
for example: it might feel pretentious at first, but then you under-
stand that it’s not easy to bring a certain complexity into language.
Sometimes it’s poetic, theoretical, or full of references; sometimes,
they conflate many different things, and you need to understand
what they mean. What curators do is complex—you must have very
different capabilities to deal with art, aesthetics, history, politics,
theory, artists, and money, manage a career, and be the moving
wheel of art production between reality and irreality.
Scope: You may not have known much about the art world, but
what did you think about Szymczyk’s idea to bring documenta
to Athens?
Athiridis: Of course, it was crucial timing. Greece was a black
sheep of Europe at that time, and Adam intended to bring Greece
into a different light and expose an obvious inequality axis in
Europe itself. Is there something to be learned from Athens?
The first chapter of the film is called “The Proposal.” Directors
at documenta are appointed according to an initial curatorial pro-
36
posal by an independent finding committee, and the double loca-
tion was instrumental to his proposal and to his appointment. He
spent almost all of the first year as artistic director trying to com-
municate this proposal and bring it to other people, to create the
team, find partners and people to work with, and see what kind of
discussion and responses it could generate in Greece and abroad.
The first chapter reflects what first interested me, which were
his aspirations. There were many exciting things about it. Adam
wondered how a mega–art exhibition could respond to the ur-
gency of the challenging times we’re living in. And not only from
a Eurocentric point of view, or from the established art world:
he wanted documenta to symbolically assume the guest’s role,
not only that of the host. What if documenta was not a relaxed,
well-established institution, and became a stranger, not always
welcome, without a “home” in a foreign place? What responses
would this movement activate for the institution or the artists?
There was a phrase in his proposal that art is “a cognitive exten-
sion of our existence,” which intrigued me, as it almost translates
into a spiritual goal. So, there was a political dimension and an ex-
istential one, and a charismatic character, which created so much
space for storytelling. Somewhere, there was a wish for a change,
for a better world. I liked his proposal, and I wanted to follow his
way of implementing this.
Scope: At the end of the first chapter, you’re showing some of
the suspicion coming from Greece about this project: accusations
of “parachuting a cultural institution” leading to privatizations.
Athiridis: There were many different reactions to documenta
coming to Athens. Some thought it was an excellent opportunity
to cooperate, be open, and learn from documenta, like the Athens
School of Fine Arts. Some tried to take advantage of it, and some
were fundamentally critical, or even hostile, and saw it as a co-
lonial invasion. But this was always the problem with the world
of ideas, especially on the Left. The scene you’re referring to was
filmed in an early public presentation by Adam in a grassroots art-
squat with the local art crowd, many of them academics. So, Adam
is talking about the need to respond to the global situation, and
the question is, who will respond—documenta? Adam replies that
documenta doesn’t exist as a body, which is actually true. And, of
course, he did not enjoy being identified with a German institu-
tion. He was carrying his own ideas and will to do things.
In Greece, they considered documenta to be a massive institu-
tion with tons of German money and an excellent organization,
but the reality was different. When there’s no exhibition, docu-
menta is just a few people: one CEO, one CFO, and seven lower
managers, who have nothing to do with the artistic part. Each
documenta iteration is shaped by the will of the art world and
expressed ad hoc by the selected artistic director and his team;
the institution follows. After documenta 14, there was some re-
structuring. They understood that times had changed and needed
a different, more competent administrative structure, but there
wasn’t one at that moment. So documenta is an institution, and
this is an engaging discussion: what is an institution, and, in that
particular case, a public institution?
Documenta was not always a public institution: it became one
mainly for funding reasons. Documenta is a GmbH, a formal insti-
tution funded partly by public money. Still, other layers—the in-
formal institutional layers, the players involved—make it more in-
teresting. It is something different for the city of Kassel, for which
it is a touristic, lucrative festival that happens every five years;
another thing as the German flagship of cultural politics; and, of
course, for the art world, it is historically the most important in-
ternational exhibition, almost the place where the contemporary
idea of exhibition, as we know it now, was born. It is a momentous
place for artistic dialogue and experimentation.
So, much of this institution is formed by an unconstituted tra-
dition rather than a solid corporate directive and status. You can
only organize artistic ideas around a corporate body by risking the
freedom of art. Adam meant that there’s no documenta body there
to respond, other than the artists and the curators themselves.
Scope: What about the collective that followed Szymczyk in the
artistic direction, ruangrupa?
Athiridis: Ruangrupa’s documenta 15 was a different sto-
ry, a very interesting one too in terms of controversy. I can find
analogies and similarities with documenta 14, and it could be an
intriguing topic for a filmmaker, but they were a collective. One
character and one documenta is enough for a filmmaker.
Scope: So documenta 14 is the last character-based documenta.
Athiridis: Could be, I don’t know. The question is, what is this
character, and what can he do? Everybody refers to the different
editions of documenta as Okwui Enwezor’s documenta, Catherine
David’s documenta, or Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s documen-
ta—it’s very personal, as the artistic director theoretically has, or
had, complete creative freedom to implement his vision. The role
of the artistic director or curator as we know it today was almost
invented by Harald Szeeman with documenta. He was the first to
set the concept that the product is not the artwork only, but the
curatorial concept, the exhibition itself. Then, the curator began
to have a more influential role in this industry. Ruangrupa took
quite a different direction, as a collective, to show possibilities un-
familiar from Western thought and practices. After documenta 15,
what is at stake and at question is the limits of this artistic free-
dom; perhaps, in a way, documenta 14 was the last documenta in
this tradition of curatorial authorship.
Scope: If the issue of access was never really formalized, didn’t
it pose numerous problems about when to be allowed in a room or
what stays off the record?
Athiridis: Talking about access in documentary filmmaking is a
fundamental issue. It means a lot to me as a filmmaker, but it also
reveals a lot about the subject, the person who gives the access. I
believe Adam liked the idea of an artistic process, the film, happen-
ing inside and outside of documenta 14. Furthermore, he always ex-
pressed the idea of the publicness of the institution and encouraged
open procedures, within the team and public dialogue.
I also like to think of documentary filmmaking as a “public in-
stitution”—for example, as journalism is, but with a different ap-
proach. So, allowing a filmmaker in the process also brought some
transparency to what is considered public. And to withstand such
exposure means you have nothing to hide. I began to film when I
felt that there was some connection. I don’t have a producer’s re-
flexes to secure permissions and signed releases, which, of course,
is good business practice, but you don’t build relationships with
contracts. I had the initial permission from Adam, and the artistic
director’s choices are not questioned.
But from that point on, I had to build each new relationship
individually. I always asked whether filming was OK, and then
37
I turned on the camera. “I’m here to make this documentary. Is
this OK with you?” I didn’t get signed releases because I wanted
them to trust that I could not do anything without their consent,
which I would get later. So, it was a relationship based on mutual
trust. Asking someone to sign a contract is what a producer would
do, but then people’s attitudes change. They feel obliged or con-
strained; they might not be as comfortable or be themselves any-
more; they might self-censor what they’re saying or not saying. If
you don’t have a contract, you’re just a person, and you know you
don’t have power over the situation. For a filmmaker, one must
endure a state of vulnerability, like in any relationship.
There were very few moments when someone said they would
prefer not be filmed. It was mostly when curators and artists
would meet. I would always tell the artists I was making a docu-
mentary about Adam doing documenta 14, and ask them if they
minded me filming; 95% said no problem. Some people were shy
because it’s a very crucial moment for them, of course, to have this
conversation with the person who will commission your work.
Obviously, I respected that.
Scope: I understand that there was an understanding with cu-
rators and artists, but I would expect distrust from people in ad-
ministrative positions.
Athiridis: I was mainly with the curators and the artistic team.
Of course, I was introduced to Annette Kulenkampff, the docu-
menta CEO, and she was very kind and she saw me as part of the
artistic team. But I wasn’t in administration meetings with her,
except at one or two moments when they negotiated venues.
There was no distrust, of course, because I was filming a portrait
and an artistic process, not a “scandal” in the making. People were
and felt innocent.
I followed them for two years, and it was all about art and the
obstacles of creating this exhibition. The scandal and the media
outburst only happened four days before the exhibition’s closing;
no one was prepared for that. While filming, I was trying to un-
derstand and to analyze the mechanisms of this apparatus. It was
constructive that much of Adam’s research was this exact thing:
how to understand and potentially change the current model of
art production within the mega-exhibition context concerning
politics or funding.
Scope: At what point was a production involved?
Athiridis: When I started this project, I really believed in it,
and I hoped to find a producer to support it. I eventually found
Faliro House, and I’m very proud and grateful for this collabo-
ration. In the beginning, I started to invest my own money and
kept telling myself that I couldn’t stop, because if I stopped and
waited until the funding was secured I would miss something
fundamental. These were the early stages of Adam’s research
journeys, which were important to follow. It really is a process—
that’s why they give artistic directors three years to plan a docu-
menta, not six months. Adam isn’t a curator who picks up artists
from catalogues, he likes to travel to find and meet artists. So, in
the beginning, I committed myself to this project. Then, I was
fortunate to meet Christos V. Konstantakopoulos, who liked and
supported this idea because, otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able
to continue and finish it. Again, it is about instinct and trust and
38
commitment, both for Christos and me. We go to the open and we
don’t know what will happen, what we will find, and what we can
bring back.
Scope: Did you always work alone, sound and camera?
Athiridis: Yes. I wish I had somebody, but there was no room
for anybody else. What to do when you go in a car or a tiny meeting
room? There is no space for a film crew. People were not there to
be filmed by me, they were just doing their jobs. So, I had to be
quick and agile: set up, pack and unpack in seconds, with no time
to wait for me. When they say go, they go; they don’t wait for the
filmmaker to pick up his things. You have to be very fast.
Scope: This commitment you’re talking about is what led you to
capture some of the most significant decisions of that documenta
when they started to form in the curators’ minds. You were there
when Szymczyk and French curator Pierre Bal-Blanc started
having this idea to move the collection of the EMST museum in
Athens to the Fridericianum in Kassel, a eureka moment that had
numerous consequences.
Athiridis: The EMST, the unopened Museum of Contemporary
Art in Athens, posed a difficult question for Adam and the team.
It was the most adequate place to host documenta in Athens, but
wasn’t available for political and financial reasons. There were a
lot of discussions about how to address this problem. It just hap-
pened that the solution came up while I was filming. A eureka mo-
ment on camera, exactly—that was just the filmmaker’s luck!
Scope: What was your shooting schedule?
Athiridis: In the morning I used to go to their office. I had a very
good relationship with Eleanna Papathanasiadi, the office organ-
izer in Athens, and I always asked her about the next day’s sched-
ule, where Adam would be. I never called him on the phone. Let’s
say I would decide which stories to follow. There were a hundred
venues, artists, topics, and events, so I had to choose which ones
were the most interesting or available to me. I understood that
documenta is also a laboratory of research and experimentation
by the artists and curators, so there were always parallel stories
going on: historical research on the Gurlitt case (the Nazi-looted
art collection), the 1948 currency reform of Germany, or the
Public Program organized by Paul B. Preciado, which was another
show by itself, etc. So, I made a schedule, followed what I wanted,
and just showed up. I was just there. I knew the schedule of the
meetings and what issues would be discussed.
The challenging moment came when I had to put a lapel mic
on Adam. That was not easy, because you needed to go under
his shirt, in public sometimes. It was a very intimate moment
indeed, as I tried to do it in a “by the way” manner. Adam was
really stoic. He hated it, of course, but he got through it. Adam
doesn’t speak very loudly, and without a lapel mic, I would
have to stand very near to him, which is even less ideal. I re-
member at some point there was a meeting, and I didn’t have
good sound, so I said, “Look, Adam, if I don’t have your voice, I
feel like a motherless child.” He understood and accepted it.
Capturing sound is a challenging problem in these situations. I
used three different sources that came to the camera, and had to
set up really fast. It’s not always the best sound work, but at least
there’s sound.
 One other concern was the length of these discussions. The cu-
ratorial team would meet every three or four months in Athens or
Kassel, and this was 15 to 20 people. These meetings would usu-
ally last three to five days for one discussion. And these were like
ten-hour days, so it’s like 50 hours of discussion. And you must
be there all the time, otherwise the discussion can become irrel-
evant. It’s different than going for one day and showcasing how
these people talk: you have to understand and give a proper ac-
count of a decision-making process that could last days. You have
to be there. During the editing, you have to reconstruct this long
process in five minutes for the viewer to understand.
So that’s how we ended with 800 hours of observational foot-
age, plus the 200 hours of archive material we had to go through
before the editing started. My initial idea was to make a two-hour
film, but I didn’t constrain my filming because of that. I kept film-
ing as long as I felt something was important to film. I wasn’t try-
ing to construct a story based on a script—there was no script. I
felt compelled to film. And that was what motivated me; nobody
needed me or called me.
Scope: How long did you work on the edit? What was your
method?
Athiridis: It took us one year to see the material, log it, and
think about it. Editing is like the magic moment of filmmaking.
Filming is okay—you go hunting in the woods, you also pick differ-
ent fruits and vegetables, and then you go home and have to cook.
Because now you know what you have, but you need to know if you
can construct a story with these elements and how much you miss
from the plots. The material is our only guide as to whether we can
tell a comprehensible story or not. I made exceptions for some ar-
chival material that I like. After spending one year reviewing the
material, we started editing sequences.
After one year, I went to Christos and I said there was more
than a two-hour film. It’s enormous; stories are streaming out
from everywhere. Something was happening, and it kept grow-
ing. At one point, we had a five-hour rough cut and had only gone
through one-third of the significant material. I felt, and I was sure,
that this could be a very long narration, like a series or something,
and he said, “I like it, do it.” It takes more than one “crazy” person
to begin an endeavour.
Editing is the moment of truth. That’s when I think of how I will
tell the story. It went pretty fast, although we had some difficulties
with the transcriptions, because we had to make long transcripts
for every scene we wanted to work on.
Scope: So you edited on paper from the transcript?
Athiridis: Yes, it’s paper-edited first, and then we used the ma-
terial. A 60-page discussion would have to be reduced to half a
page, where everybody had to have their point of view presented
and the scene’s premise made clear. It’s like a written script in the
end. But it’s a way to tell the story without using other devices like
voiceover narration or interviews. If it’s just interviews, then it’s
easy: you put a microphone, start asking specific questions, and
compress the needed information. However, I like stories that
carry themselves, and I primarily use observational material.
Then I work with the cinematic tools: the editing, the transi-
tions, the loose associations, the music, and the rhythm of the film.
I’m not a purist in the sense that I don’t know if it’s observational
or direct, I only believe in good narration, not in cinematic dog-
mas…but I prefer fictional narrations. In the case of documentary
narration, I practice “facting” or “faction”—that is, facts narrated
as fiction. That also helps me express how I felt or saw things, as I
take full responsibility for my subjective perspective. I do not like
to practice manipulative, so-called “objectivity.”
Storytelling is like taking somebody by the hand and walking
them through the story. I try to feel that hand. When I was young,
I remember an English teacher coming to our house to teach my
older brothers. I was too young to learn English then, but after the
lesson, she would sit down and tell us about a film she had seen the
day before. She narrated it so well I almost felt like I was living it. I
was just four or five years old; I didn’t even know what cinema was.
But she had a way of telling the story that was producing visions.
Then I started reading books, and I felt the same. Then I wanted
to go to the cinema.
Scope: With this relation to narration, this epicness, the trav-
elling involved, and the questioning of Europe’s foundations, it’s
hard not to think that this film is a kind of odyssey.
Athiridis: I really didn’t have any preconceptions about what
it would become. The material itself was generative; it’s not like
I decided that I wanted to make an epic 14-hour film. But anyway,
everything that has to do with documenta is monstrous in size
in some respect. The multidimensional, transhistorical subject
matter needs space and time. Otherwise, it would be a simplifica-
tion. Yes, I heard critiques that it could be shorter, but I don’t feel
that way. People can binge-watch simple stories about drug lords
killing each other while they sell tons of powder. It depends on
the narration.
When we started editing, I knew the story I wanted to tell or
write. I like to use the term “chapters” because, in my view, it re-
lates more to writing than to a film. I started with the text. Writing
is more creative than cinema, in the sense that you can travel in
time or space without spending money. You cannot do the same
with cinema; it is expensive, and you have to stress your creativ-
ity, especially in documentary narration. I started to put out like
five or six chapters, and then I knew I had a start. Then I went to
the end because I knew how it would end, with the 14th chapter—
which is a bit separate from the rest.
I would like to discuss it, but I wouldn’t want to spoil it. For
me, it’s a very exceptional thing. Making this film was a huge ef-
fort, physically and mentally. George Kravaritis, the first editor I
worked with, told me that Soda Kazuhiro did these epic films and
then later decided he would only make films with four days of ob-
servation material. You can make films like that. This last chapter
is actually taken out of only four hours of filming, and it’s like one
film by itself. It requires acute observation and focus.
Scope: The ratio is 4:1, whereas the rest is around 800:13.
Athiridis: Exactly. It’s my way out, also where I want to go next.
I’ve done this long film once, and I don’t know if I have the en-
ergy and the capacity to do it again. It was too much. Sometimes,
I was filming from nine in the morning to midnight, and I
lived and edited that material and information in my head for
nine years.
39
 Scope: Could you talk a bit about your editing guidelines? The
chronology is very jumbled, and more or less each episode seems
to be driven by a musical theme.
Athiridis: I have some background in music from my parents
and brothers; music is essential to the way I relate to emotions and
rhythm. I watch the footage and try to sense how people speak, the
content and the rhythm, and how I felt at the moment of filming.
I prefer to have the music beforehand instead of putting the mu-
sic after. Music helps connect and cut various observational ma-
terials, to find some sort of equilibrium between them. It’s like a
connective tissue to move forward and choreograph the editing.
As for what you mention about going back and forth in time, I’m
not really crazy about this idea, you know. I don’t use it as a device
to create suspense. It’s a film about a so-called disaster that is al-
ready known. Everybody knows what happened and how it ended.
I did not want to climax to a known disaster, so I brought up the
issue right in the beginning, and then we know what we were talk-
ing about. So, the jumbled timeline is not about creating drama,
but rather avoiding it.
As strange as it may sound, I mostly use non-linear time to help
the viewer understand the correct order of events. In an observa-
tional documentary, you cannot do exposition in the same way as
in fiction, so you have to be creative with the materials you have
and make sure that viewers understand. You can plant informa-
tion which raises a small question, then give a clue, and everything
becomes clear. It’s like little puzzles that put everything in view-
ers’ minds so they eventually understand by themselves. Because
otherwise you have to explain, and I didn’t want that. There is a
certain mental satisfaction when we understand by ourselves and
feel like we’re participating in a reverse montage process.
Scope: Some of these editing principles seem to be mirrored in
Szymczyk’s curatorial ideas. There’s a sequence where they have
to cut the budget and they set some rules, one of which being that
if an artist proposes the same artwork in Athens and Kassel, they
should just keep one location only. Szymczyk agrees, but also says
it’s at the cost of losing the idea that a double presentation could
create echoes or déjà vu—that a viewer going to both places could
see the same thing in a different context. The film seems to move
similarly by reusing some footage at very distinct moments.
Athiridis: Perhaps I was influenced…there were a lot of very
good influences from documenta 14, and it is only natural. Adam
was constantly making invisible correlations and playing with
time and place nuances, which is also clever narration from him.
There are many things in the making of documenta 14 and in the
making of this film about documenta 14 which are similar in the
sense of a very long process.
Scope: During those two years of filming, so many defining mo-
ments of the last decade happened, in Europe and outside of it.
Not only the negotiations around the debt, but numerous terror-
ist attacks, the Trump election…
Athiridis: These events were just contemporary to what I
was filming. It’s in the film, but in the sense of the epochal con-
text and how it relates to our story, not only as the zeitgeist but
rather the “jetztzeit,” a moment of time ripe with revolutionary
possibility and how this is perceived by Adam, the artists, the
40
curators. It’s still a character-based story. Very few individuals
have done documenta exhibitions and were tasked to express
their contemporaneity; barely 11 people altogether have reached
this climax of curatorial stardom. He’s one of them. I wanted to
tell his story. Not his personal life, even though, of course, by the
end you know a few things about him. I kind of love my characters
and I relate to them, but I don’t also feel the need to make hagi-
ography. Like everyone, they have weaknesses, they have charm,
they make mistakes, they have courage, and they do all kinds
of things.
In the end, I was disappointed because what happened to him
was character assassination. I felt that this fierce war against him
was unfair. Imagine seeing your face in all the newspapers and TV
journals. Character assassination is a weapon used really often
these days. We can see more and more how this weapon is used
to neutralize opinions or actions. And I don’t mean cancelling or
cancel culture which comes from the bottom: character assassina-
tion comes from the top, from the power. They can “kill you in two
days,” make you lose your job, and ruin your life.
Scope: Were you surprised about how far that “assassination”
went in Germany?
Athiridis: In the German language, debt is not only a financial
term. There is something more, I think, as debt and guilt have the
same root: Schuld. So, debt produces guilt, and a certain sentiment
within the language, a moral judgment. It’s very bad to owe mon-
ey, to go bankrupt—it means that something went very wrong in
your life. But the extent of the scandal coverage and the sensation-
al use by the media was really a matter of circumstances and very
bad timing.
Two weeks after the closing of documenta, there were gener-
al elections in Germany. So, the deficit scandal of documenta 14
was weaponized in a war between local politicians as the former
mayor, as every mayor of Kassel is the head of the supervising
board of documenta. The new mayor obviously didn’t want to
assume his predecessor’s guilt and accountability, so he charged
Annette Kulenkampff and Adam with it. If it wasn’t for the elec-
tions, maybe, you know, things would have gone differently. Most
documenta exhibitions bring deficits, this time it was a little bit
more, but it was only natural because it was a double project in
two cities. And financial reports are publicized many months after
the exhibition, not during the exhibition. Nobody took the money
in their pockets, and on the other side, nobody apologized when
they were found innocent. Such scandal coverage, a campaign to
discredit something, can be understood only as a total reaction to
documenta 14 itself.
Of course, Adam prompted such reactions, both locally and
internationally, as he raised some serious questions about the
institution, its relation to Kassel, about the economy of the ex-
hibition and its dependencies, etc. Recently, the documenta in-
stitute in Kassel was holding a symposium about documenta’s
future after the anti-Semitic scandal of documenta 15, and its
current crisis setting a finding committee for the new artistic di-
rector, and one of the questions that was raised by the organizer
was, “Who owns documenta?” But that was a question asked by
Adam, and his answer was there in the book of documenta 14,
the Reader. It was titled “Exergue.” I believe people should read
it again.
Scope: So, for you, this is the meaning of exergue.
Athiridis: Exactly. It is a term that derives from Greek.
Etymologically, it means what is outside of the work or coming
from the work or the essence of it. It is used also to describe the
inscription on a coin below the principal part of the design. This
is a way to consider Adam’s contribution to documenta—he put
his stamp on this coin, let’s say. And his own stamp, his own exer-
gue, was this question: who owns documenta? Because documen-
ta cannot be owned by politicians or the market. They would not
know what to do with it, and it would not be documenta anymore.
Scope: He paid a high price for this. At some point during the last
episode, someone tells Szymczyk not to worry, that in four years,
all will be forgotten—but that turned out to be pretty optimistic.
Athiridis: I believed that, too. It is not unusual in art history
that some work is recognized in later times. I really thought that
documenta 14 was great; for me, it was a mind-blowing experi-
ence. I was disappointed that it didn’t have such a warm welcome
from the critics or the art magazines. And it hurts me that when
documenta 14 is mentioned, they always refer to the deficit as if
it were the only thing. That is really disappointing and unfair. I
believe documenta 14 should be revisited.
Scope: Without talking in detail about the last episode, the film
seems to end at first with Szymczyk introducing Barbara Loden’s
Wanda (1970) in a small cinema in Kassel. It feels relevant to fin-
ish that thread of his journey in a small theatre, within a sheltered
ciné-club atmosphere.
Athiridis: It was really how it happened. After a mega-
exhibition with one million visitors, he ends up presenting a film
in a small cinema for ten people, and he speaks about “the individ-
ual and very private appreciation of a work of art, as art does not
act on masses but acts upon individuals.” That’s somehow contra-
ry to his initial belief that art has a soft power and can change the
course of things in society.
Scope: He says that he wanted a confrontation with politics,
and he got it.
Athiridis: Yes. I think this is a larger issue about soft power,
which he discusses at some point in the film. I am not so sure that
soft power exists: it just exists as a manifestation of hard power.
Art and culture thrived after WWII. It’s how documenta actual-
ly started. They gave this soft power to art, culture, and academia
to rebuild Germany and to put the country back in the European
context. It was instrumentalized metapolitics, but now more in-
fluential metapolitical content is created through media and so-
cial media. “Marketing” techniques have evolved so much that
art’s soft power is becoming minimal. It cannot stand up to this
confrontation. It exists on a different level, I believe, intellectual-
ly and spiritually. It can give hope, but you cannot balance poetry
with hunger. That was also a question for me doing this film—how
to talk about art not only on the aesthetic level, but also about the
emotion of it, how it moves inside us.
Cinema is always about emotions. In this film, there are emo-
tions in the sense of drama and people who are fighting, strug-
gling to overcome obstacles, and the usual emotions like fear,
anger, anticipation, frustration, joy, etc. But there is a certain
intellectual emotion that I was trying to capture. Something
like the product of the intellectual or aesthetic process, which
can also be manifested and felt in your body. What you feel
when you read a poem or conceive an idea or invent something
is also an emotion. I tried to speak about that. And Adam was
very inspiring.
41
 Transformers
Film Tourists
in Los Angeles
BY THOM ANDERSEN
This essay is a chapter from my forthcoming book, which I have called
“a continuation by other means of my 2003 video essay Los Angeles
Plays Itself, a book about how movies have represented and misrepre-
sented the city of Los Angeles.” It was written in 2018.
The directors who did the most to make Los Angeles a character
in movies and then a subject were outsiders, like Wim Wenders and
Billy Wilder, or tourists, like Antonioni. They weren’t interested
in what made Los Angeles like a city; they were interested in what
made Los Angeles unlike the cities they knew.
Just as there are highbrows and lowbrows, there are high tourists
and low tourists. Just as there are highbrow directors and lowbrow
directors, there are high tourist directors and low tourist directors.
Low tourist directors generally disdain Los Angeles. They prefer the
more picturesque city of San Francisco and the coastline of northern
California.
Appropriately, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (Simon Wincer,
2001) is the quintessential low tourist film. Along with the stand-
ard tourist spots such as Venice Beach, Universal Studios, and
Rodeo Drive, there are two living tourist sites, George Hamilton and
Mike Tyson.
Michael Bay and Clint Eastwood are exemplary low tourist di-
rectors, and they both find Los Angeles uninspiring. Bay beauti-
fully rendered Miami and San Francisco in his first two films, Bad
42
Boys (1995) and The Rock (1996); in his most recent work, five films in
the Transformers series, he has become an international tourist, from
Luxor to Stonehenge. He shot scenes for some films in Los Angeles;
in Armageddon (1998) and Pearl Harbor (2001), it was standing in for
New York. When he finally set part of a film in Los Angeles (the origi-
nal Transformers, released in 2007), he destroyed a large section of
downtown. More precisely, he destroyed a large section of what is now
called the city’s “historic core” in the climactic battle between the heroic
Autobot robots and the evil Decepticon robots.
Transformers is an anti-nostalgia movie: what’s old is expendable,
what’s new is invariably superior. Shia LaBoeuf drives a yellow 1976
Chevy Camaro, which his love interest Megan Fox calls “a piece-of-shit
Camaro.” They exchange it for a prototype fifth-generation Camaro not
yet in production. Production designer Jeff Mann chose the 1976 model
because he wanted “this to be the crummiest Camaro possible from the
worst year possible that still had chrome bumpers.” Yet nostalgia wins
out despite Mann’s best efforts: even the crappiest ’70s Camaro is cool-
er-looking than a 2007 concept prototype, which today looks like every
GM car produced from 2009 to 2017.
Nathan Lee and Vern agree that Transformers was the end of civiliza-
tion as we knew it. “Transformers is not simply a story of humanity being
attacked by a sophisticated breed of technological nihilism—it is that as-
sault,” wrote Lee in the Village Voice. And Vern wrote, “Three words for
Transformers: Ho. Lee. Shit. Not as in ‘Holy shit, I was blown away, it was
a blast as well as AWESOME!’ But as in, ‘Holy shit, society really is on
the brink of collapse.’”
Clint Eastwood adores San Francisco and the Monterey
Peninsula. The first film he directed, Play Misty for Me (1971), was
set in his adopted hometown of Carmel, and he included a low tour-
ist montage of the local sights set to a Roberta Flack song, “Killing
Me Softly.” Lt. Harry Callahan, featured in five films (only five?), is
a San Francisco police detective, and when he leaves “The City,” it is
to visit Santa Cruz, another picturesque northern California tourist
town with an old-fashioned boardwalk.
His earlier film as an actor, Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), is
Eastwood’s Vertigo. Just as James Stewart follows Kim Novak
around San Francisco, Clint Eastwood rushes around the city fol-
lowing the instructions of the Scorpio Killer.
In Eastwood’s Charlie Parker biopic, Bird (1988), Los Angeles is
where bebop goes to die. A club announces, “BEBOP INVADES THE
WEST!!!” but the club date is cut short without notice because of
poor crowds. The Dizzy Gillespie-Parker band is banned from play-
ing on the radio. As Gillespie puts it, “I guess they weren’t quite ready
to be invaded.” Dizzy and the other musicians fly back to New York,
but Parker stays on, apparently because of Audrey (Anna Levine),
the beautiful blonde sculptress who enchants him on opening night,
and he suffers a nervous breakdown during a recording session. He
is sent to Camarillo State Hospital, where he is detained for seven
months. At least he gets to catch a glimpse of his idol, Igor Stravinsky,
in the doorway of Stravinsky’s house. His 17 months in California are
covered in 14 minutes of a film that lasts 160 minutes.
You wouldn’t know from Bird that the band’s opening night was
a sensation. You wouldn’t know that they completed their eight-
week engagement at Billy Berg’s club on Vine Street in Hollywood.
You wouldn’t know that Parker later arranged a long, successful
residency at the Finale Club, 115 S. San Pedro Street, in Little Tokyo
Breezy
(Bronzeville during the war, when the Japanese were put in con-
centration camps). You wouldn’t know that he and Dizzy played
before thousands of people in two of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the
Philharmonic concerts. You wouldn’t know that he also recorded
some of his greatest records during this trip. You wouldn’t know
that Parker spent ten months in Los Angeles in addition to his sev-
en months “relaxing at Camarillo,” the state mental hospital. You
wouldn’t know that his stay at Camarillo was good for him, a needed
vacation; it restored his health and revitalized him. And you certain-
ly wouldn’t know that during part of his time in Los Angeles, he lived
with his third wife Doris Sydnor, who in the film doesn’t exist.
Eastwood’s The Rookie (1990) is set in Los Angeles, but it was
filmed in San Jose. His films that employ Los Angeles locations are
generally regarded as among his weakest—not only Every Which
Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980), his San
Fernando Valley movies, but also Breezy (1973) and Blood Work
(2002), which were also commercial failures.
Breezy reverses the sexual dynamic of Sunset Boulevard (1950):
Edith Alice “Breezy” Breezerman, played by Kay Lenz, age 19, stalks
and seduces real estate agent Frank Harmon, played by William
Holden, age 55. Thus, the woman is still the aggressor. It is Eastwood’s
Laurel Canyon film, with many shots made at the Laurel Canyon
Country Store; however, Harmon’s house, placed in Laurel Canyon, is
actually the Kimball House designed by Harry Gessner in the foothills
of Tarzana. Breezy lives from no-paycheck to no-paycheck by cadging
food and drinks and rides. It’s the Summer of Love six years too late:
her carefree lifestyle seems improbable in 1973. Breezy’s casual prom-
iscuity and Harmon’s amused diffidence, his refusal to exploit her sex-
ually, made their romance acceptable—at least to Clint Eastwood in
1973. But nothing can save it from improbability.
And there is one impossibility in Breezy: the sun rising over the
Pacific Ocean.
43
 Blood Work is based on a book by Michael Connelly (best known in which almost all the houses are well-maintained Craftsman
as the creator of Harry Bosch) adapted by Brian Helgeland, an Oscar bungalows from the early part of the 20th century. Apparently, the
winner for L. A. Confidential (1997). Retired FBI “profiler” Terry Coen brothers decided that Santa Rosa should look like Pasadena
McCaleb (Eastwood), the beneficiary of a heart transplant, tries even though it never did. The term “bungalow heaven” has been
to solve the murder of his heart donor. McCaleb does some real bestowed on one neighbourhood, but it fits many large swathes of
detective work: he even goes to a library to use a computer termi- Pasadena. Even the Ronald MacDonald House at the local hospital
nal. Searching newslibrary.com for “robbery, ski mask, shooting,” is a Craftsman bungalow.
he discovers a link between two apparently unrelated crimes: a Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock’s ultimate tourist film, integrates
simple liquor store robbery and a killing at an ATM are bizarre many attractions to become the definitive San Francisco film. Chris
targeted murders. However, McCaleb owes the key deduction to a Marker filmed a Vertigo pilgrimage and included it in his film Sans
ten-year-old boy, the son of the murder victim. The plot is too in- soleil (1983). You can follow Hitchcock’s itinerary by taking an ex-
genious, and the surprise twist at the end is too convenient. Still, pensive Vertigo location tour, or you can buy Footsteps in the Fog
it is notable among Eastwood’s films as the first one with Tom and create your own self-guided tour for less than a tenth of the cost,
Stern as cinematographer, after 20 years of working his way from although it would take more than a few days to see all the sights in
gaffer to chief lighting technician on Eastwood films. The films Hitchcock’s travelogue. Hitchcock’s single invention, according
Eastwood directed from 2002 to 2018 have looked better with Stern to Marker, was the bell tower at the San Juan Batista mission. But
as cinematographer. Hitchcock did not invent the tower, he remembered it. There was
The greatest low tourist director is, of course, Alfred Hitchcock. a bell tower when Hitchcock first saw the mission, but it was torn
After working with Hitchcock on the screenplay for Strangers on a down in 1949 because of dry rot.
Train (1951), Raymond Chandler complained, “The thing that amus- The Birds (1963) begins in a San Francisco pet store, from which
es me about Hitchcock is the way he directs a film in his head before Hitchcock emerges with his two pet Sealyham terriers, Geoffrey and
he knows what the story is. You find yourself trying to rationalize the Stanley. The rest of the film takes place in and around Bodega Bay,
shots he wants to make rather than the story. Every time you get set, an oceanside fishing village about 60 miles north of San Francisco,
he jabs you off balance by wanting to do a love scene on top of the isolated and idyllic, totally unprepared for a massive bird attack.
Jefferson Memorial or something like that.” A number of scenes are set at the Tides Wharf Restaurant; it’s still
Hitchcock set four memorable films around the San Francisco there, much expanded, and it has become a centre for movie tourism.
Bay Area; he also filmed parts of five others there. His first and But only one of Hitchcock’s 30 American films is set even partially
fourth American films, Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), were in Los Angeles. The first ten minutes of Saboteur (1942) are located
Gothic thrillers set in England, but they both included shots of the
California coastline around Point Lobos and Big Sur; the California
coast plays Cornwall and West Essex. The countryside reminded him
of England, and so he bought a ranch and vineyard in Scotts Valley in
the hills above Santa Cruz, which he made into his country house.
In 1942 he filmed Shadow of a Doubt in Santa Rosa, the county seat
of Sonoma County, 55 miles north of San Francisco, then a town of
13,000. Santa Rosa was a thriving courthouse-square town, like my
mother’s home town in Indiana, Rensselaer, where everybody (of a
certain class) knows everyone else (of that class), and it represent-
ed small-town Americana, the antithesis to derelict Newark, New
Jersey, where the first scenes of the film are set. For the “Merry
Widow” killer, “Uncle” Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten), it is a refuge.
Hitchcock chose to shoot most of the film on location in Santa Rosa,
because of wartime restrictions on set building. As Gaye LeBaron of
the Santa Rosa Press Democrat explained, “When the War Production
Office slapped a ceiling on the amount of money that could be spent
to make a movie during World War II, Hitchcock decided not to build
a town, but to find a town to build his film around.”
Hitchcock exhausted all the clichés of middle-class small-town
life: the late-Victorian two-story house; the neoclassical bank; the
neo-Gothic church; the Carnegie “free public library”; the Kress,
Woolworth, and J. C. Penney stores; the Streamline Moderne mov-
ie theater; the bar with a corny name (the “’Til-Two”). When Joel
and Ethan Coen set their 2001 film The Man Who Wasn’t There in
late-’40s Santa Rosa, they did not film there. Instead, they filmed in
Psycho
the 16-block “Bungalow Heaven” Landmark District of Pasadena,

44
in or around Los Angeles, but it could be anywhere in America where
there is an aircraft factory. The scenes were shot in the studio, and
there is nothing distinctive to the region in the sets.
Hitchcock even had Marion Crane bypass Los Angeles on her fate-
ful journey from Phoenix to the Bates Motel in the fictional town of
Fairvale, somewhere in northern California. Of course, the motel,
along with the mansion above it, was a set built on the Universal stu-
dio lot, where it is now the only actual filming site on the Universal
Studio Tour.
One scene in Psycho (1960) was shot on location in Los Angeles:
the used car lot in Bakersfield where Marion Crane exchanged cars
was actually on Lankershim Blvd., near the Universal lot.
Hitchcock also shot some scenes for Torn Curtain (1966) and
Family Plot (1976) in and around Los Angeles. In Torn Curtain, the
facade of a lecture hall at the University of Southern California in-
terrupts the perfect artificiality of the film. In Family Plot, he cut to-
gether his Los Angeles footage with scenes shot in San Francisco to
create a composite city. Consequently, he left the setting of the film
undefined, and that is one of the reasons for its failure. He filmed the
last shot of North by Northwest (1959), a railway train heading into
a tunnel, at the east portal to tunnel 28 on the Southern Pacific line
through the Santa Susana Pass, 30 miles northwest of downtown
Los Angeles.
Hitchcock was a low tourist director, but he was also a literal-
ist director. As Stephen Rebello relates in Alfred Hitchcock and
the Making of Psycho, “The Hitchcock office…had the screenwriter
[Joseph Stefano] observe the style and manner of a used car deal-
er, Ralph Outright, at 1932 Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica.
Stefano was also provided with data on every foreseeable plot point,
from the topography of route 99 (including names, locations, and
room rates of every motel) to details of the administration and phys-
ical appearance of real estate offices, from traffic citations and moth-
er fixations to amateur taxidermy.” Later, when Psycho was nearing
production, Hitchcock sent assistant director Hilton Green and a
crew on a scouting trip. Green later told Rebello, “Hitchcock want-
ed to know things like exactly what a car salesman in a small town
in the [central] valley would be wearing when a woman might come
in to buy a car. We went up there and photographed some salesmen
against a background. He wanted to know the exact route a woman
might take to go from Phoenix to central California. We traced the
route and took pictures of every area along the way.”
The interiors not filmed on location for Vertigo were reproduced
precisely in the studio. The famous restaurant Ernie’s was repro-
duced exactly on a sound stage. As Kraft and Leventhal write, “Ernie’s
second-floor Ambrosia Room, with waist-high dark wood paneling
and red velvet damask wallpaper with Victorian red-swirl design,
antique light sconces, and finely detailed wood furniture, was almost
perfectly replicated by Hitchcock’s crew. The set included artwork
and table settings from the restaurant.” Hitchcock even had Ernie’s
chefs prepare a typical meal from the restaurant for the extras to eat.
The Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel where Scottie takes Judy
dancing was also recreated precisely. Like Stroheim, Hitchcock took
pains with details no one would notice. For this scene, he brought in
ashtrays from the Fairmont.
Another low tourist director, Woody Allen, plainly expressed his
disdain for Los Angeles in his most popular movie, Annie Hall (1977).
When his best friend Rob (Tony Roberts) talks about moving to Los
Angeles, Woody responds, “I will not move to a city where the only
cultural advantage is you can make a right turn on a red light.” Like
Jack Webb before him, Allen always gives himself the last line.
Allen rarely strayed from his native milieu of Manhattan until
he fell out of favour there and began filming in Europe’s most pic-
turesque cities: London, Paris, Barcelona. Allen was the cinematic
chronicler of New York’s middlebrow middle class, the people who
believe what they read in the New York Times.
In Los Angeles, we certainly don’t believe what the Times pub-
lishes about our city. For us, ridiculing Times writers for their
cluelessness about Los Angeles is a birthright. Reid Larsen’s “L.A.
Reverential,” a guide to quiet places in the city and its environs,
“spaces of refuge and retreat across the city’s endless suburban
sprawl,” published in July 2018, was particularly hilarious. The
Times had to publish a number of corrections and an apology. Larsen
wrote, “To get downtown, I did what one normally does in a city: I
took the subway. Except the subway in Los Angeles is not under-
ground and it is, at least when I rode it, practically empty.” The cor-
rection read, “An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that
the Los Angeles subway is not underground. Los Angeles Metro Rail
includes underground lines.” So the Times is forced to admit that the
Los Angeles subway runs underground. When I’ve ridden it, the sub-
way was practically full, standing room only.
Typically, there are mistakes that could have been avoided by con-
sulting a map. The Huntington Gardens are not located in Pasadena,
as Larsen writes, but in the adjoining city of San Marino. The town
45
of Landers in the Mojave desert where he visited the Integratron the Thalia, where The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) is playing. In Los
was not wrecked by the 1994 Northridge earthquake, as he claims. Angeles, they drive past the Baldwin Theater on LaBrea (now a
Landers is 108 miles from Northridge; it was devastated by a strong- Citibank branch office), and the marquee announces a double bill
er earthquake in June 1992 with an epicenter only a few miles away. of House of Exorcism (1975) and Messiah of Evil (1974). In fact, The
The Times even felt constrained to apologize for one passage about Sorrow and the Pity did play in Los Angeles—I saw it here—and, for
Olvera Street that could be taken as racist. Larsen wrote, “I emerged all I know, House of Exorcism and Messiah of Evil may have played in
from the cavernous, Art Deco masterpiece of Union Station into a New York, perhaps on a double bill together.
strange neighbourhood where each shop seemed to be peddling only Allen made his peace with Los Angeles many years later in Café
one thing: the shop selling Jesus statuettes was next to the shop sell- Society (2016), a movie set in the late ’30s. There are no Los Angeles
ing giant stuffed bears was next to the shop selling soccer uniforms jokes this time, and the architecture is not eclectic: it is almost
for babies was next to the shop selling piñatas. It soon became clear entirely Spanish Colonial Revival. However, it’s a movie about
to me that these three blocks were the source of all the useless items Hollywood, an island on the island of Los Angeles.
in the world.” Coincidentally Café Society was released five months before a film
The editors responded, “Our Travel cover feature about retreats with the same theme and almost the same story, Damien Chazelle’s
and sanctuaries in and around Los Angeles has received numerous La La Land (2016). In both, beautiful young heterosexual lovers are
complaints from readers who found the piece dismissive of Latino torn apart by the woman’s decision to choose something safer, more
culture and clichéd in its portrayal of the city. We want to assure practical. In La La Land, Mia leaves Sebastian to pursue a movie ca-
readers that was absolutely not our intention. Readers took issue reer in Europe; in Café Society, Vonnie leaves Bobby to marry an old-
with the reference to a historic street in downtown Los Angeles that er, richer man. Against all odds, Café Society is the more moving film,
sells Jesus statuettes and piñatas as the source of ‘all the useless perhaps because Allen allows his young lovers more time and matu-
items in the world.’ We now see how it came across as offensive. We rity for reflection on what was lost, and he surrounds each of them
appreciate the feedback and know we can do better. We have long with a family. The militant communist in Bobby’s family is at first an
recognized that Latino culture and Mexican-American culture in object of ridicule, and the gangster is a source of innocent fun, but in
particular, in many ways defines the identity of Los Angeles…Your the end the tables are turned: the communist becomes the voice of
concerns are being heard, and the issues you raise make us aware moral authority, and the gangster is exposed as a monster.
that we need to do a better job capturing the true Los Angeles, which If New York has Woody Allen to live down, we can’t feel superior: we
did not come across in this piece.” have Henry Jaglom, who is even balder, even more narcissistic, even
We can only hope that the Times will never grasp “the true Los
Angeles.”
In Annie Hall, Rob does move to Los Angeles, and Woody and
Annie follow—although only for a visit. As they drive through
Beverly Hills in Rob’s Mercedes-Benz convertible, Woody is not fa-
vorably impressed. “The architecture is really consistent, isn’t it?
French next to Spanish, next to Tudor, next to Japanese,” he com-
plains. Allen’s criticism is only a pale echo of the view expressed by
another New Yorker, Nathanael West, in The Day of the Locust: “Only
dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses,
Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples,
Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of
these styles that lined the slopes of the canyons.”
The architect Richard Neutra blamed the eclecticism of Los
Angeles architecture on the movies, writing, “Motion pictures have
undoubtedly confused architectural tastes. They may be blamed for
many phenomena on the landscape, such as: half-timber English
peasant cottages, French Provincial and ‘mission bell’ type adobes,
Arabian minarets, Georgian mansions on 50- x 120-foot lots with
‘Mexican Ranchos’ adjoining them on sites of the same size.”
By contrast, New York City residential architecture has only one
virtue: its uniformity. Okay, two virtues: most New York tenements
were built in the 19th century, when, as Norval White and Elliot
Willensky write in their guide to the architecture of the city, “archi-
tecture for the lower-income population was still architecture.”
Allen’s tale of two cities becomes a tale of two marquees. In
New York, Woody and Diane Keaton linger under the marquee of

46
more solipsistic. At least he wears a hat, but he lacks Allen’s sense of
humour. The only good jokes in his movies are at his expense.
Jaglom was a New Yorker who moved to Los Angeles at the end
of the ’60s, but did not begin to shoot films here until the mid-’80s.
Like Allen, he writes or co-writes his films, and he is quite prolific (21
feature films against Allen’s 48).
Just as Woody Allen has his Louise Lasser period (1966–1972), his
Diane Keaton period (1973–1979), and his Mia Farrow period (1982–
1992), so Jaglom has his Patrice Townsend period (1980–1985), his
Victoria Foyt period (1994–2005), and his Tanna Frederick period
(2006–). These women had been their muses, as they say, wives and
lovers who also starred in their films.
Both Allen and Jaglom starred in their films until middle age.
Allen quit playing romantic leads only after Hollywood Ending
(2002), when he lost a young girlfriend—Debra Messing, age 34—but
won back his wife—Téa Leoni, age 36. At the time of filming, Allen
was 66. Jaglom bowed out earlier, with Venice/Venice (1992), at age
48, after his Patrice Townsend period.
Woody Allen is the Ralph Lauren of cinema: a stylist who does not
create new forms but has impeccable taste. (Appropriately, Lauren
received screen credit for the clothes in Annie Hall and Manhattan
[1979].) Jaglom is an anti-stylist: he doesn’t seem to care about cam-
era placement or montage. He can cut from the middle of a zoom
to a static shot. He often employs parallel editing to juxtapose two
conversations taking place in the same space. Nor does he care about
clothes. He was slovenly in his first films, and he has remained slov-
enly ever since. And so have his other characters.
Café Society
Jaglom is wealthy enough to produce and exhibit his films without
external financing. He makes films that are as distinctive as Allen’s.
You know a Jaglom film when you see it.
Whatever he may think, whatever he may intend, Allen’s films are
objectively misogynistic. Jaglom claims that he is a feminist film-
maker, and calls himself “a male lesbian.” Right or not, he makes
women’s pictures. In some of his films, Jaglom cuts in shots of wom-
en talking about food (Eating,1990), movies (Venice/Venice), moth-
erhood (Baby Fever, 1994), shopping (Going Shopping, 2005), men-
opause (The M Word, 2014), but I can’t recall women talking about
equality, patriarchy, misogyny, sexual harassment. He may be a fem-
inist, but his characters are not.
I find Allen’s narcissism tolerable because it is always mingled
with self-deprecation. Jaglom admits his narcissism, but he claims,
in Venice/Venice, “Bad narcissism is when you stop at only looking at
yourself; good narcissism is when you use your initial healthy self-love
to then turn to somebody else and try to get a sense of who they are.”
Always (1985), Jaglom’s fifth film and his first set in Los Angeles,
set a pattern of hermeticism that he has followed in almost all of
his subsequent Los Angeles films. It was shot entirely at his home,
and the actors are his friends. He is the star; his ex-wife (Patrice
Townsend) plays his ex-wife, whom he is trying to win back. When
it focuses on three couples, Always is sheer tedium, but some more
interesting guests arrive for a Fourth of July barbecue. Bob Rafelson
plays an angry neighbour who comes to complain about a car block-
ing his driveway, but stays long enough to seduce the wife of Jaglom’s
best friend. André Gregory spouts charming nonsense (“Life is like
a stone…”). The director’s older brother Michael Emil (né Michael
Emil Jaglom), always a welcome presence in Jaglom films, harangues
whomever is within earshot. It is hard to imagine any of them going
to see The Sorrow and the Pity.
We never learn what the characters do to earn a living, with two
exceptions: Jaglom’s ex-wife is a yoga instructor, and her sister’s
boyfriend drives an ice cream truck. But presumably the others hold
more lucrative jobs.
Jaglom’s next film, Someone to Love (1987), follows the same pat-
tern. Jaglom throws a day-long party for people who are alone on
Valentine’s Day at the Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica and films
it. “I am trying to find a certain truth emotionally,” he tells Oja
Kodar. She tells him, “What do you want from me? If you want from
me something that you want in front of the camera, it’s not what
I want.”
Someone to Love is probably Jaglom’s best film because of Orson
Welles (in his final film), who explains everything, and a surprising-
ly touching song over the end credits, “Long Ago and Far Away” by
Gershwin and Kern, sung by Bing Crosby. It also has two welcome
auto-critiques. First-billed Andrea Marcovicci asks Jaglom, “Who
do I have to fuck to get out of this movie?” Earlier, Michael Emil ex-
coriates this and all Jaglom films: “To me it’s all a kind of ridiculous
nonsense, and even a self-indulgent, pretentious nonsense. What is
all this stuff? They’re so interested in themselves. They’re so in love
with themselves. The whole world centres around their emotions,
you know. And they’re engaging in this pseudo-group, third-rate
pseudo-group psychotherapy.”
47
 Both Allen and Jaglom are now regarded—wrongly—as has-beens.
In Allen’s case, extrafilmic events led to his fall in public esteem:
Mia Farrow caught him sleeping with her adopted daughter Soon-yi,
and then accused him of sexually abusing their daughter. I haven’t
seen most of the films made during his exile period (2004–2015),
but I liked both Café Society and Crisis in Six Scenes (2016), a belated
auto-critique. Although I watched it on my computer, I sometimes
laughed aloud. Let’s face it: as an actor, Allen is funny, and funnier
when he doesn’t try to be charming.
In Crisis, Allen gives himself the lead role of Sidney J. Munsinger,
and Elaine May (who is actually a few years older than he is) plays
his wife Kay. They are quite credible as a couple who have learned to
live with each other’s foibles. Allen imagines what might have been
if he were a little less clever, a little less hard-working, a little less
ambitious. A failed novelist, Munsinger writes TV commercials for
useless products such as singing toilets. In the first scene, he asks his
long-time barber to give him a James Dean haircut; instead, the bar-
ber offers a devastating critique of his novels, refusing every effort
Woody makes to let him temper the insults. When he asks his wife
what movie star he looks like, she suggests Franklin Pangborn and
Elisha Cook Jr. In the next scene, friends come over for dinner and
tell him his haircut makes him look like Percy Helton: “You know, he
always played a kind of cringing, squeaky-voiced little loser.” (Helton
began in movies in 1915, but his most memorable role was as the cor-
oner in Kiss Me Deadly [1955].)
Allen’s dull suburban life is interrupted by the arrival of Lenny
Dale (Miley Cyrus), the granddaughter of the woman who became
May’s saviour after the death of her parents had forced her into an
orphanage. Lenny has become a terrorist, and she shows up in the
middle of the night because she has just escaped from jail and needs
a place to hide out.
The performance of Miley Cyrus has been much criticized; some-
how she doesn’t fit into Woody Allen’s universe. I cannot agree: if she
asked me to blow up an FBI office, I’d do it. She radicalizes everyone
except Sidney, including their regular houseguest Alan Brockman
(John Magaro)—the son of Sidney’s oldest friend, who is staying
with them while studying business administration at NYU—even
the ladies of Kay’s book club. Alan almost blows himself up building
a bomb in his bedroom, and the old women in the book club read
Mao’s Little Red Book and plan a nude sit-in at the local draft board.
Jaglom lost his appeal when his Tanna Frederick period began. In
Queen of the Lot (2010), she reads aloud a review that calls her “a tall
thing with a bushel of red hair, a wide toothy mouth, and a Second
Avenue schnozz.” Frederick is flamboyant, like Viva in Warhol
films—a kamikaze conversationalist who thrives on contestation.
She expects response, she demands it—and she gets it.
However, she is responsible for the funniest scene in Jaglom’s
work. She has a bad date with a young architect. “What kind of stuff
do you build?” she asks. “Mostly mini-malls and stuff like that.”
“Mini-malls are so great!” He is chagrined: “No, they’re not, actual-
ly. What I’d like to be doing is getting into bridges.” “You could start
with mini-malls, where you put a bridge from the hair salon shop
to the yoga studio. Wouldn’t that be great?” He nods, but explains,
“There’s not a lot of flexibility with mini-malls. They are what they
are. I don’t know if a bridge would be in the budget for something like
48
that.” “Do you use the compass and the protractor when you draw?”
she asks. He runs away.
Like many others, I find her annoying, but I admire Jaglom’s loy-
alty to her. Beginning with Hollywood Dreams (2006), he has cast her
in every film he has directed.
Allen, Jaglom? Advantage: New York.
As with bald directors, so it is with real estate developers. New
York has Donald Trump (I’ll call him the Big Donald); we have
Donald Sterling (the Little Donald). There are remarkable similari-
ties in their careers, and striking differences. The Little Donald was a
poor Jewish kid from East Los Angeles who worked his way through
law school. The Big Donald would claim, “It has not been easy for
me”: he explained that he started out with “a small loan of a million
dollars” from his father. But he took over his father’s business when
he was 25 years old.
Both built real estate empires specializing in residential high-ris-
es, both were targets of discrimination suits accusing them of reject-
ing Black tenants, and both settled the suits without admitting guilt.
“And according to depositions from former employees in discrimi-
nation cases,” wrote Sandy Banks in the Los Angeles Times, “Sterling
liked Korean American tenants because they ‘will live in whatever
conditions he gives them and pay the rent without complaining.’
He considered children ‘brats’ and he didn’t like renting to African
Americans or Latinos because black tenants ‘smell,’ and ‘Mexicans…
just sit around and smoke and drink.’”
The Donalds both established charitable foundations. In 2015,
Trump claimed that he had personally given $102 million to charity
in the last five years. Reporter David A. Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer
Prize for a series of articles in the Washington Post about Trump
charities. He couldn’t verify any gifts Trump had made to charity
during these years.
In 2006, Trump did give the State of New York 436 acres in
Westchester County that became Donald J. Trump State Park.
Trump had purchased the land in the ’90s for $2 million to develop
as a golf course, but local townships foiled his plans. When he gave
the land to the state, he claimed it was worth $100 million. The park
was never developed, and it closed in 2010.
The Trump Foundation was small, and its money was mis-
used to offset fines for questionable business practices with
charitable contributions.
Sterling publicized his charitable giving with full-page advertise-
ments in the Los Angeles Times listing the organizations he support-
ed. He placed the ads on the final page of a newspaper section and
printed them in colour to make them stand out more. He made small
contributions to many organizations so that he could fill up the page.
Both bought sports teams. The Big Donald bought the New Jersey
Generals of the United States Football League from oil tycoon J.
Walter Duncan in 1983. The USFL played its games during the spring
and summer, thus avoiding direct competition with the established
National Football League. Trump wanted to force a merger with the
NFL by playing in the fall, but his ploy destroyed the league after
only three seasons.
Michael Tollin made a documentary about the demise of the USFL
for ESPN Films, Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL? (2009), that
put much of the blame on the Big Donald. When Tollin sent a rough
cut to Trump, he got his cover letter back with Trump’s annotations:
“MIKE— A THIRD-RATE DOCUMENTARY—AND EXTREMELY
DISHONEST (AS YOU KNOW)— BEST WISHES P.S. YOU ARE A
LOSER.”
The Little Donald bought the San Diego Clippers (formerly the
Buffalo Braves) of the National Basketball Association and moved
the team to Los Angeles in 1984. The Clippers were so benight-
ed and consistently inept that the team was deemed to have fallen
under the sign of the “Clipper Curse” (not to be confused with the
“Kardashian Kurse,” which destroyed the pro basketball careers of
Kris Humphries, Lamar Odom, and Tristan Thompson, as well as the
mind of Kanye West). The Clippers were so bad that Sterling heckled
his own players from his courtside seat.
Until the 2011–2012 season, the Clippers had only two winning
seasons, and they won only one postseason series. Forward Blake
Griffin and point guard Chris Paul made the Clippers respectable,
but the Curse continued. After they traded for Paul in December
2011, they had five straight winning seasons, but they never ad-
vanced past the second round in the playoffs.
In 2012, they upset the Memphis Grizzlies in seven close games,
but they didn’t win a game against the San Antonio Spurs in the sec-
ond round. In 2013, the Grizzlies beat the Clippers in the first round.
In 2014, the Clippers managed the biggest collapse in NBA playoff
history. After beating the Golden State Warriors in the first round,
they faced the Oklahoma City Thunder. With the series tied at two
games apiece, in the crucial fifth game, they lost a 13-point lead in
the last four minutes and 13 seconds, and a seven-point lead in the
last 49 seconds.
In 2015, they topped themselves: they beat the San Antonio Spurs
when Chris Paul made an astonishing comeback from a pulled ham-
string in the final game of the series. It was regarded as “the greatest
victory in the history of the team.” In the second round, they led the
Houston Rockets three games to one. In the fifth game, played in
Houston, they were blown out by the Rockets. The sixth game be-
came their last chance to win at home, but they blew a 19-point lead
in the final 15 minutes to lose. In the seventh game at Houston, they
never led; they lost 113-100.
In 2016, the Clippers lost in the first round after Paul and Griffin
were both injured in the fourth game and couldn’t play in the rest of
the series. Bill Plaschke wrote, “After the NBA’s most haunted team
lost its two best players on the day their title hopes were at their high-
est, how can anyone continue to deny it? The Clipper Curse lives…For
a third consecutive postseason, the Clippers have gone from legiti-
mate title contenders to pitiable puddles in a matter of hours.”
In 2017, the Clippers again lost in the first round after Griffin in-
jured his toe in the third game and missed the rest of the playoffs.
They managed to take it to seven games, but then collapsed again.
“Over the last six seasons, the Clippers came to be viewed as the
most whining, complaining and grumbling team in the NBA,” wrote
Broderick Turner in the Los Angeles Times. Paul was traded in June
2017, along with two other starting players, and the Clippers started
over again.
Paul took the Clipper Curse with him when he moved to the
Houston Rockets. The Rockets already had a gifted player, James
Harden (who had himself narrowly escaped the Kardashian
Kurse), and with Harden and Paul the Rockets got to the third
round of the playoffs, the conference finals. Playing the Golden
State Warriors, they won the fifth game to take a lead of 3-2. But
Paul tore his hamstring in the final minutes of the game, and was
unable to play in the final two games. Golden State won the sixth
game to tie the series, and then they also won the final game, in
which Houston set an NBA record by missing 27 three-point shots
in a row.
That the Little Donald might achieve a notoriety outside of Los
Angeles equalling that of the Big Donald seemed highly unlikely un-
til April 2014, when the tape of a conversation between him and his
mistress V. Stiviano found its way to TMZ. He told her to avoid being
seen with Blacks at Clippers games, mentioning by name local hero
Magic Johnson. Given an opportunity to apologize on television, the
Little Donald instead lashed out at his critics, especially Johnson.
Understandably, he felt that he had been betrayed and that his pri-
vacy had been violated. But Magic Johnson is beyond criticism in
Los Angeles: when he announced that he had HIV, he did more than
Rock Hudson to make the disease respectable.
Sterling was publicly humiliated, and the NBA demanded that he
sell the Clippers. He resisted, but his wife had him declared incom-
petent and then sold the team to Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer
for $2 billion. So Sterling’s racist rant made him a billionaire.
A year later, in June 2015, the Big Donald made insulting re-
marks about Mexico and Mexicans during the course of a 50-minute
free-association rant announcing his candidacy for the presidency
of the United States. Because of his derogatory comments, NBC can-
celled his television show The Apprentice and announced it would
no longer broadcast his Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants.
According to Forbes, these cancellations cost him $125 million.
Before announcing his candidacy, Trump collected $2.4 million
a year from 19 companies to put his name on their products. There
was Trump Success cologne, even at one time a Trump urine test.
After his speech, he lost all but two. His income from branding fell
to $370,000.
But he found a new constituency among those who couldn’t af-
ford a Trump Suit or a Trump Steak, and his improbable candida-
cy succeeded for reasons I will simply call overdetermined. He won
the presidency, but he can’t go back to New York. His election was
like the assassination of John Kennedy: everyone remembers where
they were when they heard the news.
And in the end, Trump made out like a bandit: he discovered
that the presidency was more lucrative than all his TV programs
and brands. He could charge the government all the expenses for
his weekly trips to Trump resorts. Instead of branding his name, he
could now sell it directly: T-shirts and Make America Great Again
baseball caps, of course, but also beach towels, dog collars, pet leash-
es, model trucks, wrapping paper, coffee mugs, beer glasses, and
more, all for sale at shop.donaldjtrump.com.
Trump, Sterling? Advantage: Los Angeles.
Another famous New Yorker, Mike Nichols, regarded The Graduate
(1967) as “a great comic opportunity to dissect a certain stratum of
vulgar new-money West Coast culture that movies had not yet ex-
ploited for laughs, probably because so many of the people who made
them were too close to that culture to recognize anything funny about
49
 The Graduate
it.” The Graduate “would be a poisoned arrow aimed from New York
toward the heart of Los Angeles,” writes Mark Harris, whose exempla-
ry account of the film’s genesis and realization is largely based on in-
terviews with its creators, particularly Nichols and screenwriter Buck
Henry. “California,” Nichols said, “is like America in italics, a parody of
everything that’s most dangerous to us.”
In some ways, The Graduate is a mid-cult film. As Pauline Kael
wrote, “The small triumph of The Graduate was to have domesticat-
ed alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what
[protagonist] Benjamin [Braddock] is alienated from a middle-class
comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to
communicate—which is just what makes him an acceptable hero
for the large movie audience.” Ben has just graduated from college
with honours, but he has no friends, no interests, just a vague sense
that things aren’t right in the world his parents and their generation
have made. Because he’s so empty, we can read what we want into
his character. What Kael writes is plausible, although harsh, and it
corresponds to what I felt when I first saw the film 50 years ago. But
there’s more to the story.
Kael does not give Nichols credit for the casting coup of Dustin
Hoffman. He plays Benjamin as he would later play Raymond in Rain
Man (1988), that is, as an autistic mega-savant whose apparent pas-
sivity and simplemindedness hide a surprising intelligence.
While he was filming The Graduate, Nichols listened to mid-
cult folk rockers Simon and Garfunkel every morning before
he started work. He started cutting the film to their song “The
Sound of Silence,” so it seemed natural to commission songs from
them. However, Nichols didn’t like the two songs they played for
him (“Punky’s Dilemma” and “Overs,” which turned up on their
Bookends album). So they proposed a half-finished song which
Simon called “Mrs. Roosevelt.” It could just as well be “Mrs.
Andersen” or “Mrs. Tarkington” or “Mrs. Robinson.” It appeared in
four different versions in the final scenes of the film: first whistled,
then scatted (“dee di-di-di dee dee dee”), then sung (only one verse),
and finally reduced to a rhythm track that slows down and dies as
Ben’s Alfa Romeo runs out of gas. Nichols also used other Simon
50
and Garfunkel songs on the soundtrack, and thus The Graduate
became the first Hollywood movie with a music score made up
of pop songs.
The campaign against tobacco is a favourite mid-cult cause, and
The Graduate is one of the first movies in which cigarette smoking is
employed as a symbol for moral depravity. The introduction of Mrs.
Robinson at Ben Braddock’s homecoming party is unforgettable: she
is the only guest sitting by herself, and she is the only one smoking. She
comes up to Ben’s room and asks for an ashtray. He doesn’t have one,
but she lights her cigarette anyway. For her ashes, the floor will do. She
literally chain smokes her way through the movie. During his affair
with her, Ben takes up smoking, but he drops the habit after it is over.
Nichols’ vision of Los Angeles is more no tourist than low tourist.
Charles Webb’s novel is about Pasadena, to which Webb returned af-
ter graduating from Williams College in 1961, but the movie appears
to be about Beverly Hills. Pasadena, established as a winter resort
for wealthy Easterners in the 1880s, is old money; Beverly Hills, a
planned city not incorporated until 1914, is new money. In the film,
however, it could just as well be New Canaan, Connecticut. For
Nichols, Los Angeles is a mirage, not unreal exactly, but floating in
some liquid medium so that nothing can really happen. It is cursed
by its swimming pools. To find life, Ben has to run away.
The shots of Los Angeles are perfunctory. The Taft Hotel where
Ben and Mrs. Robinson meet is the Ambassador, but in the film it is
generic. There are also a few night tracking shots along the Sunset
Strip and the exterior of the Robinson house.
The most expressive architecture was the creation of art direc-
tor Richard Sylbert: the interiors of the Braddock residence and
the Robinson residence. The Braddock house is bright and “large-
ly in white and full of right angles—an environment for bright,
sunny, square people,” as Harris writes. Its most salient feature
is a small backyard swimming pool, where Ben spends his days
when not staring at his aquarium. The Robinson house is grand-
er, “full of shiny black surfaces and sensual curves, a nighttime lair
for predatory animals, with a glassed-in overgrown garden off the
living room.”
 All of the interesting locations are outside of Los Angeles. Driving
up and down the California coast, Ben takes the picturesque “blue
highways,” the back roads that are coded blue on the map, even
when he is desperately trying to get to the church in time to save
Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross) from an arranged marriage. The
“Santa Barbara” church where the wedding takes place is the United
Methodist Church in La Verne, a town in the citrus belt 30 miles
east of Los Angeles—a striking Brutalist structure with concave pan-
els made of white concrete, designed by Thornton Ladd and John
Kelsey. It can be rented out for weddings, but its severity might put
off some potential clients.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg objected to a shot of Ben driving across the
Bay Bridge on its top level: in the world of the fiction, he was driving
east from San Francisco to Berkeley, but the top level of the bridge
is actually reserved for westbound traffic. His criticism seemed
to me then like nit-picking, and it made me question my literalist
conception of cinema, but more recently I’ve thought that maybe
he was right. By showing Ben on the top level of the bridge, Nichols
could rely on a clichéd shot: the aerial shot that keeps Ben’s car in
the center of the frame. It would have been more challenging to film
Ben driving on a lower level of the bridge. Mark Harris claims this
is simply a mistake, “the movie’s one famous gaffe,” but that’s not
possible. Surely Nichols knew that Hoffman was driving west toward
San Francisco.
Although Webb’s novel had been written only five years earlier,
The Graduate feels like a period film in contemporary dress, like
Hollywood’s James M. Cain adaptations of the ’40s. Nichols, writ-
er Buck Henry, and producer Lawrence Turman could say, “We all
thought we were Benjamin Braddock.” But they were all between 35
and 40 years old in 1967, almost a generation older than Benjamin.
When Ben follows Elaine Robinson to UC Berkeley, he discovers a
school untouched by the Free Speech Movement or anti-war mobili-
zations. The fraternities and sororities still rule campus life as they
did in the ’50s.
The University of Southern California stands in for UC Berkeley.
I can’t condemn the substitution, since UC Berkeley did not allow
commercial filming then. It’s actually an appropriate choice, since
USC circa 1967 was as conservative as UC Berkeley in the ’50s.
Instead of the Free Speech Movement, USC gave us Nixon’s dirty
tricks gang, the self-anointed “ratfuckers” from Sigma Chi: Ron
Ziegler, Donald Segretti, Dwight Chapin, Herb Porter and Gordon
Strachan, who learned their dirty politics in the USC student gov-
ernment.
Buck Henry worried that the first joke of the film was too dated
to include. At Ben’s homecoming party, Mr. McGuire has some ad-
vice to offer him—privately. “I just want to say one word to you. Just
one word. Are you listening?” “Yes, I am,” Ben replies robotically.
“Plastics.” After a long pause Ben asks, “Exactly how do you mean?”
“There’s a great future in plastics. Will you think about it?” “Yes, sir,
I will.”
By 1967, plastics were no longer the future, but it didn’t matter.
The joke is still funny, thanks to the mock gravitas of Walter Brooke,
who plays Mr. McGuire; all Dustin Hoffman has to do is keep a
straight face. And Ben Braddock may be a square who wants noth-
ing more from life than to marry the daughter of his father’s partner,
a girl he barely knows, but the hysterical opposition of her parents
makes him a rebel hero by default.
Nichols made two more Los Angeles movies: The Fortune (1975),
a 1920s period piece which was dismissed by the critics and flopped
at the box office; and Postcards from the Edge (1990), Carrie Fisher’s
adaptation of her own novel.
The Fortune is certainly less ambitious than The Graduate. Jack
Nicholson and Warren Beatty play Oscar and Nicky, a team of inept
would-be Bluebeards, and Stockard Channing plays their intended
prey, Frederika Quintessa Biggard (“Freddie is fine”), a tampon heir-
ess. Oscar and Nicky are not natural-born killers, so their plans to do
away with Freddie become increasingly farcical.
The film is centred on a drab Spanish Colonial Revival apart-
ment courtyard where the trio sets up housekeeping in Los Angeles.
The only effort toward decoration is a birdbath in the centre where
Oscar and Nicky will attempt to drown the intoxicated, unconscious
Freddie in two inches of water. The grass is dead or dying; the land-
lady pretends to water it so that she can spy on the peregrinations of
her three strange new tenants. The courtyard is strangely isolated,
with only a few nondescript buildings nearby, perhaps because it was
built on a studio back lot.
The Fortune has its moments. After their attempt at drowning
Freddie fails, Oscar and Nicky put her still unconscious body into
a trunk, and then stop in the middle of a deserted bridge with the
intention of throwing the trunk over the railing. But as they strug-
gle with the trunk, the empty bridge becomes the site of a traffic jam
worthy of Laurel and Hardy, all recorded in an amazing single static
shot—a great moment in the history of cinema.
Postcards from the Edge is another “black comedy.” In the first
scene, drug-addicted movie star Suzanne Vale (Meryl Streep) ruins
a long take because she’s high. In the next scene, she is passed out in
the bed of a stranger, who notices she’s unconscious and drives her
to the hospital, where her stomach is pumped. But as a drug rehab
counsellor (CCH Pounder) notes, “addiction is not the problem,
it’s the solution; to remove the solution, you’ve got to find what the
problem is.” As she finishes the line, the problem walks in: Suzanne’s
talkative, clueless showbiz mom Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine).
The problem gets worse when Suzanne is told that, to get insurance
for her next film, she must live with a “responsible party”—that is,
her mother. “What am I, a teenager?” asks Suzanne. So it becomes
an odd-couple movie.
Postcards does get one thing about Hollywood right: the execu-
tives are chiefly concerned with escaping responsibility. In politics,
it’s called “deniability.”
New Yorker Peter Bogdanovich adopted the nostalgic tone of
the native in his very first film, Targets (1968). As horror-film star
Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff ) passes by endless rows of used car lots
in the San Fernando Valley on his way to a personal appearance at
the Reseda Drive-In, he complains, “Gosh, what an ugly town this
has become.” As he utters this line, he is passing a car dealership
designed by Paul Williams, the most successful Black architect in
Los Angeles. Some preservationists now regard it as a landmark of
mid-century modernism.
The story of the film’s gestation is legendary, and here I will
print the legend (which is probably true). Boris Karloff owed Roger
51
Corman two days of work, but Corman was too busy to make a picture
with him. So he offered the work to Bogdanovich, who had been his
assistant on The Wild Angels (1966). He told Bogdanovich he could
make any film he wanted as long as he could find a two-day part for
Karloff, use 20 minutes from an earlier Corman-directed, Karloff-
starring film, The Terror (1963),and keep the budget at $125,000.
You could tell from his first movie that Bogdanovich was here to
stay, and that he would settle on the south side of the Hollywood
Hills, where the used car lots are filled with foreign models.
Bogdanovich hated the Valley, and it shows in Targets. When he
moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in 1964, he and his then-wife
Polly Platt rented a house on Saticoy Street in the heart of the valley
for $125 a month (thus, Targets is a Saticoy Production). It wasn’t his
dream house; after he had some success with The Last Picture Show
(1971), he bought a mansion on Copa de Oro Drive in Bel-Air, across
the street from John Ford, one of his heroes. When journalist Margy
Rochlin asked him to revisit his Los Angeles residences in 2002, he
couldn’t find his Saticoy Street house, and he wanted to get away as
quickly as possible. “I’m going to get shot at here,” he complained.
Targets becomes a tale of two cities: the San Fernando Valley and
the “westside,” the Sunset Strip and Beverly Hills. The valley is the
home of a psycho killer who eats Baby Ruth candy bars (a caricature
of American normality), garage rock (supplied by the Daily Flash),
oil tanks, and square-looking teenagers. The westside is courtly
movie stars, hotel suites, room service, limousines, and good booze.
Even the TV is better. In the valley, they have Joey Bishop and Regis
Philbin trading lame jokes; on the westside, they have a rare classic
film, The Criminal Code (1931), directed by Howard Hawks.
But the westside section of the film is completely wooden, and
Targets comes alive only when it moves to the valley. The valley sec-
tion is open; the camerawork is fluid. Although their roles as writ-
ten are black holes, the actors are alive and exciting. The westside
section is claustrophobic, almost entirely filmed in a screening room
and Orlok’s hotel suite. The camerawork is classical to the point of
stodginess. The characters are predictable and dull. Bogdanovich
himself appears as tyro director Sammy Michaels, creating an un-
flattering self-portrait. A guy who cares only for his career, he is al-
ready sour and self-pitying. “All the good movies have been made,”
he says after watching a few minutes of The Criminal Code. He is a
walking encyclopedia of film lore, but about Howard Hawks, he can
only say, “He really knows how to tell a story.”
The two cities come together at the Reseda Drive-In. The kill-
er hides behind the screen and picks off the customers with his
high-powered rifle. The 80-year-old actor Orlok, who can’t walk
without a cane, faces him down and subdues him with a slap in the
face. He wasn’t so tough. It’s a victory of the old artifice over the new,
incomprehensible reality.
New Yorker Jim Jarmusch is a high tourist, so in his five-city (Los
Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, Helsinki) taxi-driver movie Night
on Earth (1991), you won’t find the Hollywood sign or the Empire
State Building or the Eiffel Tower.
Jarmusch’s portrait of Los Angeles at dusk is certainly not literal-
ist, but it is evocative, and it has aged much better than the hysteri-
cally pessimistic visions of the city prevalent in the early ’90s. As in
52
The Replacement Killers (1998), the downtown railway station stands
in for the airport. Taxi driver Corky (Winona Ryder) takes casting
director Victoria Snelling (Gena Rowlands) to “Beverly Circle.” As a
rule, such a trip would proceed north on the San Diego Freeway (now
known as “the 405,” the most congested, despised freeway in Los
Angeles), then east on Sunset Boulevard, and through the residen-
tial quarters of Bel Air and upper Beverly Hills, which have a spooky,
funereal quietude at night. (I wouldn’t live there if they paid me.)
Visually it wouldn’t be very interesting, and it wouldn’t reveal much
of the city. Instead, Corky takes what we call here “surface streets,”
and the sights glimpsed in passing are not to be found on any direct
route from the airport to Beverly Hills, with one or two exceptions.
Jarmusch concentrates on structures that some might call seedy,
but are actually just ordinary. He values a takeout stand as much as
a landmark (a virtue he shares with Quentin Tarantino). The only
landmarks in Night on Earth are the Forum in Inglewood (then still
a sports arena) and the statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle on the Sunset
Strip (removed in 2013, and now pending reinstallation at another
site on the Strip). There are also some icons, such as a car under a
tarp that recalls a famous photograph from Robert Frank’s The
Americans taken in Long Beach. Frank’s car was flanked by two small
palm trees, and Jarmusch concentrates on these iconic transplants,
which always look a bit scraggly in his movie (as palm trees often do
outside of Beverly Hills).
Most of the shots come from around Hollywood, with an emphasis
on its poorer eastern end. I recognized a Pioneer Chicken stand on
Western near Sunset (since demolished), and a mini-mall at Sunset
and Harvard (a local foodie would recognize Jitlada, a Thai restau-
rant made famous by food critic Jonathan Gold). Things change,
things stay the same: if you re-photographed most of Jarmusch’s lo-
cations today, they would be changed beyond recognition, but every
shot could be almost exactly duplicated somewhere else in the city.
And maybe that used car lot that could be anywhere is still there, and
still under the same ownership. Auto dealerships are now our most
enduring institutions.
We take Jarmusch for granted, just as an older generation of crit-
ics and fans once took Howard Hawks for granted. The pleasures
Hawks’ films provided were evident, but predictable. There is also
a female cab driver in Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946). Winona Ryder’s
cab driver is more like Cagney in Taxi (Roy Del Ruth, 1932), or John
Payne in 99 River Street (Phil Karlson, 1953), or George Raft in I
Stole a Million (Frank Tuttle, 1939). The philosophical cab driver
Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas) in Deadline at Dawn (Harold Clurman,
1946) inserts himself into the film’s action, and eventually overshad-
ows the stars.
More than any of these filmmakers, John Cassavetes stands out as
the director who most prizes cab drivers. Aside from the New York
cab driver who protects Gloria from the mobsters tailing her, there
are the Los Angeles cab drivers: one protects Minnie when she’s
drunk in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), and there is also the kind-
ly, patient driver who helps Sarah in Love Streams (1984) unload a
whole menagerie of animals that she had impetuously purchased
at a farm-like animal shelter: two miniature horses, a dog, a duck, a
goat, and a bunch of chickens.

Out of Time
The Videos of Tulapop Saenjaroen
In her 2023 book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock,
Jenny Odell writes that “at its most useful…leisure time is an inter-
im means of questioning the bounds of the work that surrounds it.”
The passage is evocative not only for the way in which it delineates
the ever contracting parameters of free time, but also for the ways
the language of temporarily is reoriented to the spatial. It feels like
an apt point of entry for the work of Thai artist Tulapop Saenjaroen,
whose increasingly ambitious video works over the past decade have
attempted to engaged with these very questions.
Few contemporary artists feel as attuned to late capitalism—and
its insidious means of extracting both our time and resources—as
Saenjaroen, whose works offer means of escape from or refutation of
these forces. However, the slippery relationship between labour and
leisure is only one of several established binaries he troubles, among
them visitor and local; narrator and audience; wakefulness and
sleep; and stillness and movement. With a background that, appro-
priately, bridges moving image and performance, and work that cir-
culates in both festivals and gallery-based exhibitions, Saenjaroen is
refreshingly nimble in his genre-bending approach, which embraces
as easily as it discards elements drawn from documentary, narrative,
video art, and more.
Film/Art | By Jesse Cumming
Nightfall
Formally, the creative use of voiceover remains one of the artist’s
most compelling and provocative cinematic devices, and across his
videos it is regularly deployed in intricate and exploratory forms.
While at times invoking the language of a traditional omniscient
narrator, it is regularly subverted or placed in dialogue with other
voices, troubling not just the idea of a storyteller, but of character,
protagonist, and subject as well. Across his projects, the perspective
of the voiceover hardly ever remains stable, instead always offer-
ing an additional or alternative layer. It feels unsurprising that he
regularly integrates 3D modelling and imagery into his film work,
as the sonic, narrative elements produce a similar sense of depth
and complexity.
This shifting vantage points invoked through the voiceover
are also present through the settings, characters, and plots of
Saenjaroen’s work, particularly the ways in which a visitor, or an
outsider, is able to reveal the palimpsestic layers present in a spe-
cific location. Whether a tourist visiting a resort, a family mem-
ber returning to their unfamiliar home, or for-hire actors re-
laxing in nature, Saenjaroen’s videos reveal the multiple, often
contradictory experiences that can unfold and coexist within a
single location.
53
 Such themes and devices are seen as early as Nightfall (2015),
which was co-directed by Saenjaroen’s regular collaborator Anocha
Suwichakornpong (By the Time It Gets Dark, 2016). Initially emerg-
ing out of a residency Suwichakornpong undertook in Singapore at
the invitation of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, the hybrid
piece assembles both composed, observational footage of the city-
state alongside staged sequences with Suwichakornpong and actor
Vel Ng in hotel rooms or navigating Singapore’s tunnels and parks.
In an extension of the Thai filmmakers’ reflection on their role in an
international cultural exchange, the voiceover incorporates recita-
tions from two related 1973 dialogues between former prime min-
ister of Thailand Thanom Kittikachorn, and prime minister and de
facto founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. “Under your able
guidance and leadership, Singapore has made a great stride forward
towards greater prosperity and welfare of her people,” the former
extols in the first, while noting his own ambitions for such greatness
in Thailand and emphasizing the importance of the countries’ bilat-
eral ties, before Lee offers prescient words about external pressures
in the region. Unspoken, and left outside of the frame of the piece,
is the extratextual information that these remarks were exchanged
less than a year before Kittikachorn’s deposal, which casts the al-
ready steely, overcast footage of Singapore under an added shadow.
While Nightfall’s palette and pacing may bear more of a resem-
blance to Suwichakornpong’s narrative features than the vivid
colours in Saenjaroen’s subsequent work, the piece introduces a
number of the latter’s signature creative techniques and concerns:
shifting perspectives in narration, the exploration of space through
the experience of a visitor, and an examination of how the present
will connect with as-yet-speculative futures. Such concerns recur,
albeit appropriately reoriented, in Saenjaroen’s breakout short A
Room with a Coconut View (2018). Set in the tourist city of Bangsaen,
in the artist’s coastal home province of Chon Buri, the piece not only
subverts the tourist gaze but also the ways in which space and narra-
tives are constructed for the purposes of locals. To borrow from the
opening exchange, a virtual hotel guide, Kanya, describes her offer
of a room with a sea view to a guest, only for the window frame filled
with towering, beachfront trees to prompt the retort: “This is not a
sea view. It’s a coconut view.”
Adopting from the language of condo or tourism promotional vid-
eos, the film’s interest in the ersatz and surface level is immediately
established, alongside cracks in that very same facade. “My name is
Kanya, I’m an automated voice that can speak Thai,” we hear. “I’m
a hotel rep who is a tour guide in Bangsaen.” Stylistically, these ear-
ly passages are laden with glittery, deliberately chintzy effects and
tropical-flavoured lounge muzak, as the tour moves seamlessly from
spaces of leisure (restaurants, pools) to typically unseen spaces of la-
bour, as a woman staff member loads an industrial laundry machine.
Before long, what we might have expected to be a fixed, unidirec-
tional monologue is met by second automated voice—that of the for-
eign tourist Alex—posing questions about the nature of images and
what they can or can’t reveal. “Is there anything not literally in the
frame that you want to tell me?” he questions. And indeed, the video
soon spirals out from its initial container, delineated by the hotel re-
sort and its accompanying tour, to reflect on the history and dynam-
ics of the town itself. Thanks to the ever-generous Kanya, we learn
54
that prior to its development in the ’40s the site was effectively de-
serted, before the self-mythologizing real estate mogul and hotelier
Kamnan Poh established the haven of leisure we now find ourselves
immersed in.
The film’s great rupture arrives at its midpoint, as Kanya falls
asleep mid-presentation and the footage we’ve seen up to this point
begins to deconstruct itself in her dreamscape, with a melee of lay-
ered and distorted images set to an equally dense and hypnogogic
soundscape. In the piece’s latter half, a third automated voice, Tessa,
introduces herself as “the narrator for this part of the film,” in which
the ever-unseen Alex unpacks both Kanya’s dream and his tourist
experience of Bangsaen. Echoing Kanya’s dream sequence, the con-
tradictions encountered by the protagonist gradually seem to trigger
a collapse of self, alongside a corresponding blur of manipulated and
neon-soaked interventions.
The inherent tensions of sites dedicated to rest and relaxation are
explored more directly in People on Sunday (2020), whose title and
content cite and respond to Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s
Weimar-era classic Menschen am Sonntag (1930), which Saenjaroen
had previously invoked in his 2013 Slade graduation project. In di-
rect reference to one Menschen am Sonntag’s most iconic frames,
the first image we see in People on Sunday is of a sleeping woman’s
horizontal face, her head resting upon a hand belonging to another,
unseen body. In the film’s early moments we’re greeted with simi-
lar extended shots with figures posed in tableaus, their suspended
movements cushioned by a soundscape of bird calls and other clues
to the ambient, natural surroundings.
As if challenging discourses of “slow cinema,” including the crit-
ical language—”ponderous,” “dreamlike,” “contemplative”—that
has accompanied the work of his nation’s most acclaimed cineaste,
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for the past two decades, Saenjaroen
here manipulates temporality and spectator experience to force at-
tention to the ways in which time is capitalized upon and controlled.
It doesn’t take long for the tranquility of these earlier, protracted
compositions to be ruptured by the revelation of their construc-
tion, as handheld shots from another angle reveal the swarm of
film labourers working hard to prepare and perform these images
of relaxation. Echoing Siodmak and Ulmer’s low-budget, set-free
shoot—particularly its initial promotion as “a film without actors”—
and with shooting limited to Sundays (given the cast’s full-time em-
ployment commitments), Saenjaroen updates some of the questions
the original raises about artistic labour to invoke contemporary self-
improvement culture. Of course, Saenjaroen makes sure to include
behind-the-scenes footage of the performers being paid cash for
their work—the labour of performing leisure.
In typical fashion, Saenjaroen’s use of voiceover is ambitious and
disorienting, variously incorporating a mock motivational audio-
book, a guided mediation, retrospective reflections on the shoot
from a non-professional performer, the internal musings of a be-
hind-the-scenes photographer, and the thoughts of an editor work-
ing with the assembled footage. Similar to the spectatorial reorien-
tations prompted by the film’s meta revelations, each voice and their
at times contrapuntal relationship to the images we see onscreen
invites us to place our own subjective spectatorship alongside that
of myriad others.
 With Squish! (2021), Saenjaroen turns from a natural shooting lo-
cation to the possibilities permitted by the controlled environments
of a studio, or—as the piece’s explicit engagement with animation
suggests—the frame itself. The work is as (deceptively?) playful as
ever, but with a style that incorporates more in-camera devices in
lieu of post-production effects. As with People on Sunday, the film
plumbs and responds to specific histories of the moving image—spe-
cifically, the little-known figure of Sanae Klaikleun, a forgotten early
experimenter in Thai animation whose ambitions to produce the
first Thai animated film came to naught. It feels notable that, in each
case, Saenjaroen is drawn to films or practices that sit at a liberato-
ry pivot point, adjacent to established industries and histories, with
each gesturing towards potential futures.
“The initial idea of Squish! is derived from my personal urge to
question how depression is usually represented on screen and how
it could possibly be done otherwise,” wrote Saenjaroen in a piece
about the film for MUBI. The central “protagonist,” who delivers
the voiceover, is a fragmented animated figure—seen through traced
silhouettes of an ear, an eye, a dog’s leg—representing the less-than-
wholeness of depression, and the suspended sense of becoming.
“My character is to be forever incomplete, because my creator has
already cancelled my future,” we hear it say. They declare them-
selves to be “innate wreckage,” before committing suicide “to enable
movement,” in an animated sequences of dots and lines that tip from
the figurative to the abstract. Eventually, the image zooms out to re-
veal a YouTube window above the heading “Leaked! An Animated
Character Committed Suicide.” A series of responses, remixes, and
other permutations follow—my personal favourite being “Animation
suicide chillaxing version.”
In both Squish! and Notes from the Periphery (2021), Saenjaroen
deploys a voiceover that is sutured to a single personage, but one
which offers space for varied modes of expression, for perspectival
lacunae, and for ambiguity. Working in a vein closer to experimen-
tal documentary, with Notes from the Periphery Saenjaroen returns
to Chon Buri, particularly the port city of Laem Chabang. As with
Squish! the artist employs tracing with markers on transparent glass,
as well as superimpositions, to abstract and deconstruct our under-
standings of these forms. Borders and boundaries are introduced and
reified through images of signs warning against swimming and tres-
passing, security guards, and footage of barbed-wire fences. Playing
with perspective, the film repeatedly introduces compositions in
which the vast but abstract infrastructure of containers, cranes, and
ships populate the background, while in the foreground manual la-
bourers fish and trawl alongside the shore. As if offering a political
intervention by means of montage, Saenjaroen at points collapses
the distance between the two realms in superimposed images, sever-
al of them corroded through the use of video manipulation.
Voiceover only emerges in the final passage of Notes (which is
one of the artist’s rare pieces driven primarily by ambient and ar-
tificial soundscapes), with its English cadence borrowed from in-
formative nature documentaries as it recites the encyclopedia
entry for barnacles. As ever, the perspective and mode of address
prove fluid, as the narrator defaults to Thai and turns the focus
from arthropods to their own life, ambitions, and future dreams.
“Wish that somehow I could export myself abroad,” they de-
clare, over distant footage of the docks. “No one knows what the
future holds.”
Which brings us to Mangosteen, Saenjaroen’s latest and longest
film to date, a work that feels like an evolution of his artistic vision
and ambition while at the same time synthesizing several of his
pre-established concerns. Shot entirely on hazy Hi8, and less be-
holden to montage and sourced material, the project hews more
closely than ever before to narrative, including onscreen dialogue in
addition to the ever-slippery use of voiceover. Here, however, narra-
tive isn’t merely a device but rather a central point of inquiry in the
film’s plot, particularly the ways stories and storytelling permit not
just alternative views of the present, but also of the future.
Having moved to Bangkok for work, Earth returns to his home in
Rayong province, where his sister Ink’s factory processes the epony-
mous fruit into shelf-stable juice (a small-scale prefab convenience
that is both future-oriented and a small contribution to a leisurely
life). While there, however, he bristles against the locale, and the
ideas he proposes to his sister—including new designs for the pack-
aging—are rebuffed, with the suggestion that they might be more ap-
propriate in a few years.
This first half of the film is guided, in traditional form, by an om-
niscient narrator that introduces and details not just Earth’s back-
ground, but also the operations of the factory itself—not unlike
Coconut View’s Kanya. “Ink and Earth do not share the same view,” it
elucidates as the siblings disagree. “To put it differently, they define
the word ‘future’ differently.” Navigating a place once familiar that
is now rendered alien, and with his sense of self threatened, Earth
retreats into writing before disappearing completely. The film is
accordingly carried away temporarily into the world of his violent
story, with the initial narrator ceding voice to this tale’s protagonist,
a former factory worker who imagines decapitating Ink. Eventually,
the narrator removes himself entirely, as Ink begins to write her own
stories, albeit haltingly. Her voice, reciting a message to Earth, com-
mands the video’s aural space.
It feels telling that, as far as Mangosteen retains a sense of nar-
rative climax, it occurs as Ink takes a ferry to the nearby Koh Samet
Island. As with many of the figures in Saenjaroen’s work, she’s now a
visitor, a day-tripper, newly able to consider her own path and place.
As she stands face to face with the seaside statue of Nang Phisua
Samut, an ogress from the Thai epic poem Phra Aphai Mani (1844)
who lulls her victims to sleep, she wonders aloud: “Can characters
from other stories help me?” and “Why am I do damn unimagina-
tive?” This crisis of imagination is so deeply felt as it remains one of
the most powerful tools that Saenjaroen’s films offer as a counter to
the unease of a future invoked (or threatened) from the perspective
of a weighty, exploitative present. It’s no surprise that Ink comes face
to face with a figure that puts other characters to sleep, as Kanya’s
dream sequence in Coconut View upsets the capitalist order of her
presentation. The fact that the scenes of sleeping in People in Sunday
are merely performances feels particularly fraught, as it means the
action is devoid of reverie. In Notes from the Periphery, the narra-
tor cautions themselves, “I shouldn’t daydream too much now.” But
the repeated occurrence of an activity in Saenjaroen’s work suggests
that, if anything, one should daydream, as a means of both departure
and arrival.
55
Deaths of Cinema | By Lawrence Garcia
Passing Time
The Sense of the Past
Terence Davies (1945–2023)
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets
56
To describe a film as being “about memory” is almost as cliché as
to say that it is “about time.” Few subjects are thought to be more
suited to a temporal medium defined by its mechanical recording ap-
paratus. Yet the films of the late Terence Davies are to my mind the
rare works actually deserving of such a description. Whereas most
films unfold resolutely in the present tense, Davies’ cinema plumbs
all the contradictions that emerge when one considers the past in all
its fullness—such as those paradoxes expressed, for instance, in the
director’s favourite poems, Eliot’s Four Quartets.
In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin famously
spoke of the camera’s capacity to embalm and thereby preserve the
present. In the cinema, Davies saw its additional capacity to recreate,
and thereby redescribe, a past supposedly out of reach. What emerg-
es in his sparse but powerful oeuvre is the conviction that the past
is not sealed off or inaccessible, but something that persists in the
present, giving form and shape to the very space in which we move
and live and have our being. If memory is Davies’ great subject, it is
because he explores not our grip on the past, but rather its grip on us.
 Davies’ own memories are front and centre in the two films on
which his reputation largely rests: Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
and The Long Day Closes (1992). Companion films of a sort, they are
transparently drawn from his childhood years in ’50s Liverpool,
where he grew up as the youngest of ten children born to work-
ing-class Catholic parents. As with any autobiographical works, the
films are shot through with the specificity that comes only through
lived experience: schoolyard taunts calling the adolescent Davies
avatar a “fruit”; the terrifying abuses of his father; an unfathoma-
bly dull classroom lesson on types of erosion which, if not quite as
scarring as the first two, evidently marked him all the same. What
distinguishes both films, however, is not Davies’ presentation of
particularity, but the particularity of his presentation: the stillness
and enclosure of his tableaux-like compositions, their burnished
lighting evocative of a lost photo album; and, especially, his stark
de-dramatization of word and gesture, which negates any sense of a
causal dramatic progression.
Similarly notable is Davies’ radical decoupling of image and
sound. It remains conventional to think of sound as secondary to
image, as a mere extension of framed, visible space; after all, as Béla
Balázs observed when rejecting the possibility of “sound framing,”
sound does not have sides. In both Distant Voices and The Long Day
Closes, however, one encounters just this paradoxical possibility.
Liberated from its dependence on the image, sound in Davies’ films
becomes primary, with locations framed around it rather than the
other way around, allowing images to float free of their usual fixity in
dramatic space. The result is works whose “present” is impossible to
place—views from no-when.
Given their liberal use of popular music from the era, it is natu-
ral to connect both films to the tradition of the Hollywood musical,
a genre Davies was no stranger to. Unlike in a Gene Kelly or Fred
Astaire vehicle, however, Davies’ use of music does not convey either
a transformation of the dramatic action or the movement of a har-
monized world; rather, like his bold appropriation of voiceover from
Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1948) in The Long Day Closes,
it serves to show how pop standards can form myriad relations far
beyond their original contexts. In the communal scenes of Distant
Voices especially, in which family, friends, and strangers gather to
sing song after aching, joyous song, we get the sense of how sheer
repetition can imbue familiar tunes with the weight of history—how
“We’re a Couple of Swells” and Doris Day’s “At Sundown” can take
on a tangible emotional life outside Easter Parade (1948) and Love
Me or Leave Me (1955). One might think here of the Vinteuil Sonata
in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, but if popular music is
uniquely suited to Davies’ explorations of what Proust called invol-
untary memory, it is because its sheer ubiquity leads it to form rela-
tions across an indiscriminate range of phenomena, however vulgar
or inappropriate the conjunctions may seem. The great power of
Distant Voices in fact derives from the violence of its transitions and
the contradictoriness of its emotions, bound together by the music
on that hieratic plane we call memory.
By the time of Distant Voices, Davies was already 43. This, along
with the undeniable accomplishment of that film, has led many to
describe him as having come to cinema “fully formed,” as if his di-
rectorial style had simply emerged like Athena springing from the
head of Zeus. To watch the three short films he made prior to Distant
Voices, however, is to see the gradual formation of a distinct sensi-
bility. Funded by an £8,500 award from the BFI Production Board,
Children (1976), the first of what is now known as The Terence Davies
Trilogy, follows a man named Robert Tucker at two different stages
in his life, cutting between scenes of him as a young boy experienc-
ing the first stirrings of his homosexuality, and as a closeted middle-
aged man working an unsatisfying job. From the perspective of
Davies’ later work, the film is most notable for its eschewal of a caus-
al dramatic progression—and I use that term advisedly, for Davies’
construction refuses the temporal asymmetry that one might be in-
clined to impose on the film, resisting one’s impulse to fix the adult
Tucker’s scenes as the stable present from which the childhood se-
quences would be merely reminiscence. Children is unique in that
it is as much premonition as recollection. Although not yet marked
by Davies’ singular use of music, it established something arguably
even more central to his cinema: the principle that the tides of time
flow backward as well as forward.
While the agonies of gay life are fully present in Children, it is the
film that followed, Madonna and Child (1980), that established reli-
gion and homosexuality as the two great banes of Davies’ personal
life. (As he later put it in his 2008 memoir cum essay film Of Time
and the City, his adolescence was “caught between canon and crim-
inal law.”) Just four years after Children, the film sees Davies fore-
grounding music to a daring degree, cutting even more liberally be-
tween temporally indeterminate events and locations, and making
use of negative space and graphic matches to control the overtonal
rhythms of his découpage. But it is in Death and Transfiguration
(1983) that one finds Davies’ “mature” style in full flower. With
even more concentrated force than the films that would follow, it
depicts an entire life as a kaleidoscopic whirl of disjunctive imag-
es and sounds, most notably the alarming, unabated death rattle
of an elderly man on his hospital deathbed, gasping for breath as
the screen fades to white. It is a haunting distillation of a remark
Deleuze attributes to Fellini, that “we are constructed in memory…
simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity.”
While the sui generis style of Davies’ early work does not lend it-
self to easy points of comparison, the more conventional genres in
which he later worked—namely the literary adaptation and the biop-
ic—arguably throw aspects of his style into even sharper relief. In the
former group is his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of
Mirth, which, for Davies at least, was an opportunity to prove that he
“could write a linear narrative in which you seed things that pay off.”
Artistic sensibility is not so easily sloughed off, however, for pace his
own assessment, what distinguishes Davies’ films is not so much that
they are non-linear, but that they are non-successive—which is to say
that, whatever their ostensible story material, they do not hew to the
cause-effect relations of conventional clock time.
This may seem a strange thing to say of what is, after all, a faithful
adaptation of Wharton’s text starring Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart,
a turn-of-the-century New York high-society woman who gradual-
ly descends into penury, social exile, and eventually death. Yet the
film is far closer to the ceremonial spectacle of Ophüls’ Lola Montès
(1955) than the viperous drama of Scorsese’s Wharton adaptation
The Age of Innocence (1993). Dissolving fluidly from scene to scene,
57

Death and Transfiguration
The House of Mirth unfolds like a scrolling panorama of enclosed,
theatrical spectacle, an impression that only intensifies after Lily
cuts herself off from the society world and the film takes on the un-
canniness of an implied dream. The perfectly composed image of
Lily on her deathbed at the conclusion creates the vivid impression
that she has staged her own end—the tragic finale of a performance
over which the curtain rose, unnoticed, some time ago.
The spectre of death likewise hangs over Davies’ other literary tri-
umph, The Deep Blue Sea (2011), an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s
1952 play that opens with Rachel Weisz’s Hester Collyer attempting
to gas herself in her apartment. In typical Davies fashion, the camera
then swirls into a heady haze of temporally indeterminate scenes,
observing as Hester finds herself caught between a disastrous affair
with a caddish air pilot (Tom Hiddleston) and a passionless mar-
riage—or, in the terms of the title, between the devil and the deep
blue sea. As in The House of Mirth, the overall impression is of a
hieratic, ritualized recreation of an already completed drama. It
is indicative of Davies’ approach that, despite a dazzlingly impres-
sionistic homage to Celia Johnson’s near-suicide by moving train in
Brief Encounter (1945), The Deep Blue Sea does not unfold as a con-
ventional love triangle. Instead, what emerges over the course of the
film is a vision of each figure grappling with the ghosts of a prior age.
The impossible predicament of the title, then, is of a woman caught
not so much between two men, but between a past she cannot escape
and a future whose unknowability she cannot bear.
The fear of the future emerges even more acutely in what are now,
fittingly, the two final features of Davies’ oeuvre: A Quiet Passion
(2016) and Benediction (2021), artist-biopics of the poets Emily
Dickinson and Siegfried Sassoon, respectively. Like his first two fea-
tures, they are companion pieces of a sort, both portraits of artistic
struggle set against the horrors of human conflict: the American
Civil War in the former, World War I in the latter. Perhaps due to
Davies’ own preoccupations and advancing age, however, both films
come across as plangent meditations on the biopic form itself, cen-
tred on the question of how to construe the significance of art in the
context of an artist’s life. How should one figure the contingencies
58
of biography in relation to art’s aspiration to the eternal—to “some-
thing permanent, unchanging,” in Sassoon’s words, or to “something
pressed from truth,” in Dickinson’s? In A Quiet Passion, this tension
between art and life is memorably, movingly depicted in a sequence
that imagines the future as a suitor mounting “the stairs at midnight,
the looming man in the night,” disrupting Dickinson’s melancholy,
isolated existence in her Amherst abode. In Benediction, by contrast,
it’s expressed in the film’s overall structure, which gradually allows
the lasting worth of Sassoon’s poetry to come apart from the circum-
stances of its creation and the person who made it.
At the time of her death, Dickinson was the author of only sev-
en published poems, all anonymous. Sassoon was better off, having
been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in
1951—though as Davies tells it in Benediction, the elderly Sassoon re-
mained bitter about his lack of recognition. The industrial precondi-
tions of the cinema mean that anonymity of Dickinson’s sort is sim-
ply not the case for Davies, but it also means that we have likely seen
the last of his contributions to the cinema. The only two films of his
that even those familiar with his work are unlikely to have seen are
But Why? (2021), a one-minute-long companion piece to Benediction
made for the Venice Film Festival; and Passing Time (2023), pro-
duced for the Film Fest Gent’s 2x25 Project, in which a three-
minute view of a bucolic Essex landscape, set to music by Uruguayan
composer Florencia Di Concilio, is accompanied by Davies read-
ing a poem of his own composition. (The latter film might well be
reckoned as Davies’ version of Bruce Baillie’s 1966 masterpiece All
My Life.) When Davies died, funding for his planned adaptation of
Stefan Zweig’s posthumously published 1982 novel The Post Office
Girl had already fallen through, joining such unrealized projects as a
romantic comedy titled Mad about the Boy and an adaptation of He
Who Hesitates, an entry in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct policier series.
But these are just the facts, the biographical contingencies of
Davies’ life, told from the viewpoint that an obituary is meant to
take: that of the artist making the art. As Davies’ own work makes
clear, though, a radically different perspective is possible—one
where relations of cause and effect, past and future, are not quite so
fixed. This is the standpoint expressed in Dickinson’s famous lines:
“Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me—
/ The Carriage held but just Ourselves— / And Immortality.” It is
the one conveyed, too, in the final scene of Benediction, where an
elderly Sassoon, sitting on a park bench, suddenly transforms into
his younger self, reading a poem, “Disabled,” that his friend Wilfred
Owen had handed him earlier when they were both confined in an
army hospital. By this point in the film, Owen is long dead, having
perished on the battlefield in 1918. Like Dickinson, Sassoon, and now
Davies, he will make art no longer. But it is in the very certitude of
his death that one catches a glimpse of that second point of view:
no longer that of the artist making the art, but of the art making the
artist. It is this perspective that allows us to peer beyond the contin-
gencies of biography, outside the ordinary experience of time as an
endless succession of nows, into a world where past and future are
gathered. Indeed, it is perhaps only in the finality of death that we
can begin to see artists no longer as persons simply living from mo-
ment to evanescent moment but rather, in Proust’s phrase, as “giants
immersed in time.”

The World in Focus
Vincent Grenier (1948-2023)
While I would never compare the end of a magazine’s run with the
end of a person’s life, there is a painful appropriateness to the fact
that I am eulogizing my friend, filmmaker Vincent Grenier, in the
final issue of Cinema Scope. Grenier’s work represents a tactile, phe-
nomenological cinema that is not very popular with current taste-
makers. It is allegedly too abstract, too unfocused, insufficiently
engagé or “relevant.” The same could be said of a number of metic-
ulously formal, poetically inclined film- and videomakers, and, in-
deed, has been said about them.
This attitude frustrates me for several reasons. For one thing, cin-
ema is a medium that is uniquely suited to interrogating our senses,
the way we see and hear. That’s what it does. When a viewer has no
interest in such questions, it’s hard to take their interest in cinema
very seriously. But perhaps more than this, the current vogue for
“content,” whether in the form of downloaded deliverables or read-
ily identifiable meaning, is a direct outgrowth of our late-capitalist
death spiral.
From this perspective, you should never spend time doing some-
thing if you are not already fairly certain of the outcome, whether it’s
money, direct communication, or a festival slot earmarked for “po-
litical film.” What William James once referred to, somewhat ironi-
cally, as “the cash-value of ideas” is now a dominant aesthetic, mean-
Deaths of Cinema | By Michael Sicinski
ing that the point of films is to tell the viewer something concrete
about some social scenario, preferably one that we have already
formed opinions about. Despite its good intentions, a lot of this “rel-
evant” work is part of what Marcuse called “affirmative culture,” the
reification of forms and ideas.
Vincent Grenier’s work was not valuable in this limited sense:
it was too subtle to have any proscriptive use. His work had a very
different cast to it, sharing much more with modern poetry and
painting than with any mode of rhetorical or narrative filmmak-
ing. Although he had a brief period in the ’90s where he experi-
mented with his own brand of video verité in a series of short doc-
umentary portraits of friends—Out in the Garden (1991) and Feet
(1994), in particular—Grenier soon moved away from this kind
of non-fiction filmmaking, despite the fact that he was quite good
at it.
But this brief period is still interesting, for a couple of reasons.
One, it marked a pointed move away from the playful late structur-
alism of Grenier’s best films from the ’70s, such as World in Focus
(1976), While Revolved (1976, revised 2022), and Interieur Interiors
(to AK) (1978). These films showed Grenier’s interest in movement
and geometry, and were particularly distinguished by the film-
maker’s droll, painterly employment of negative space. The work
59
was wry and sturdy, in the vein of his contemporaries Ernie Gehr
and Barry Gerson, and Grenier could have continued in this mode
quite comfortably.
But when Grenier turned from film to video, he took the new
medium up as a challenge, something that required learning and,
perhaps, a bit of unlearning. The short documentaries are notable
in that they reflect Grenier seeing what the video camera could do
in perfectly ordinary situations, and how video editing could take
his approach only so far. The digital work he began producing in
2000 found him experimenting with a new set of formal parame-
ters that he explored throughout the rest of his career, including
extremely controlled, temporally modulated superimpositions
and fades, dense audio mixes, and the internal constriction and ex-
pansion of the picture plane into moving verticals or overlapping,
Rothko-like horizontals.
For institutional as well as aesthetic reasons, the histories of
avant-garde film and video art have essentially remained separate
in North America, but Grenier was one of a handful of artists who
saw the widespread shift to digital as an opportunity to overcome
this division. A pivotal work here is Tabula Rasa (2004), in which
Grenier returned to footage he’d shot in the ’90s of an American
high school. This footage may have been shot with a direct approach
similar to that of Feet, but he produces thick geometric layers of
imagery, organizing the architecture into prisms and angles not un-
like a Diebenkorn canvas. Although human figures and (especially)
voices are present in Tabula Rasa, they come and go like ghosts. The
title has a double meaning, of course. Rousseau’s theory of knowl-
edge rejected Locke’s “blank slate” idea, going so far as to assert na-
ture’s dominance of nurture. For Grenier, going back to this semi-
documentary material with a medium-specific formal approach
meant a kind of return to first principles, even though the nature of
the original footage continued to assert itself. We can stop and then
start again, but we can never really start over.
After taking a position in the film department at Binghamton
University (a program founded by Ken Jacobs and Larry Gottheim),
Grenier settled in nearby Ithaca, NY, and more of his films fo-
cused on his immediate surroundings: his home and garden; his
neighbourhood; the sylvan highway commute between Ithaca and
Binghamton; Cayuga Lake and the Susquehanna River. This inten-
sive focus on the local was probably a point against Grenier for those
who demanded a more flagrant worldliness from independent cine-
ma, and while this close attention to one’s immediate surroundings
has a great many precedents in art history, that too is unlikely to
sway any skeptics.
But Vincent’s work (and I’m going to drop the formality here and
refer to my late friend by his first name) was a crystalline expression
of his personality. He was cheerful yet serious, preternaturally pa-
tient, with a quiet curiosity that occupied the mental space that most
of us cede to anger and frustration. Vincent was an attentive listener
and observer, and whether it was someone else’s artwork, a verbal
or written argument, or just an object capturing the light in his im-
mediate environment, he could always see things from a fresh, unex-
pected angle. Many experimental film- and videomakers find their
way into academia as a survival tactic, but not all are suited to ped-
agogy. While Jacobs’ ebullient, vehement teaching at Binghamton is
60
legendary, I think it’s critical to understand what Vincent brought to
the program. He understood that artwork takes time and care, and
that one must give students that same time and care in order to nur-
ture them, and allow them to develop their own visions.
Vincent’s finest films tend toward an Objectivist inscription of
that patient, careful observation. Like the modernist poets, Vincent
understood that a work of cinema is a molded thing, an entity that
both describes and reconfigures its subject. Filmmaking is about re-
framing, adding, and subtracting, treating perception as a question
rather than a limitation. The four-part video Armoire (2007–2011) is
the simple but skillful articulation of a paradox. A robin in Vincent’s
yard was confused by a full-length mirror leaning against the wall,
and by training the lens on this false, redoubled world, Vincent
demonstrates a phenomenological truth: we are all that robin, and
the confrontation between the mirror’s surface and the camera
lens restages the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, resulting
in a draw.
Les Chaises (2008) is another example of Vincent’s subtle yet
complex, ludic formalism. Occasioned by two chairs in his yard,
focusing on their vermillion vinyl back cushions, the film explores
how objects carve out space within the broader colour scheme of
the outdoors. The sun reveals different overtones in the vinyl, but
Vincent’s frequent juxtaposition of the artificial red with the natural
greens of the trees enacts colour theory as a kind of chance exper-
iment. Similar in orientation, Intersection (2015) sets up camp at a
particular juncture where the highway crosses in front of a glade of
wildflowers, producing a collision of different surfaces and motion:
the hard digital streaking of cars and trucks going by, and the green
and blue flowers trembling as the vehicles whizz past.
These films are almost defiantly modest in their aims. Over 30
years ago, Tom Gunning wrote “Towards a Minor Cinema,” in which
he described a historical shift away from grand aesthetic programs
(Brakhage, Snow, Frampton) and toward something inchoate and
termite-like. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, Gunning praises
the cinema that “begins by expressing itself and doesn’t conceptual-
ize until after.” I would say that this encapsulates my own approach
to watching and writing about film, and one of the reasons I have
felt more at home here than any other publication is that I feel as
if this has been one of Cinema Scope’s implicit tendencies: to look
at the world of film not for what it ought to be doing but for what
it is doing, and celebrating those filmmakers whose work exhibits
a similar approach.
Vincent Grenier’s cinema is comprised of a series of “minor” in-
terventions into our visual and aural comprehension of the physical
world. These films presume a particular spectatorial attitude, one
that regards ambiguity and instability as fundamental to our process
of perception, and can face those uncertainties with patience and
amusement. Where so much of our sensory input is obsessed with
identifying and enumerating things, all in order to move us onto the
next discrete thing, films like Vincent’s are polemical only in their
refusal to participate in this overly codified existence. But here’s the
secret: the cinema that insists on simplifying things into concepts,
on “being about” rather than being, always has an expiration date.
Vincent’s films, by contrast, have only just begun their work in the
world. They will remain.

Dead Slow Ahead
On Joe Pera
In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argued that mech-
anized war, industrialization, and urbanization were reorganizing
human existence on a mass scale and were, in turn, making “expe-
rience” increasingly incommunicable. The storyteller, one who has
historically made experience understandable—grounding all things
(narrative, morality, practical know-how, history, tradition, and pol-
itics) in a telling of specific experiences—was thus necessarily disap-
pearing from (Western) life. For Benjamin, where what will come to
replace experience—information—disavows context to claim to be
“understandable in itself” (all the better for its commodification),
storytelling lives in specificity, avoiding the (informational) pull to-
wards explanation. Storytellers report their own experiences or oth-
ers’; they bring tales from faraway travels or they pass on local tales
and traditions, all in the service of communicating experience. And
as storytelling fades, Benjamin writes, so too does the possibility of
being made a communal listener—of becoming one who can take in
others’ experiences and have them become their own.
Enter Joe Pera, the comedian, actor, director, writer, and pro-
ducer whose self-financed, self-produced, and self-released comedy
special, Joe Pera: Slow & Steady, dropped on his YouTube channel in
early October. Pera is primarily known for performing an exagger-
TV or Not TV | By Kate Rennebohm
ated version of himself—a soft-spoken Midwesterner (his comedy is
peppered with the word “Sorry”) who delivers lines at a snail’s pace
while sporting a bald spot and thick glasses, a protruding neck, and
sweaters with Dockers. The singularity of Pera’s creative approach
lends continued credence to Benjamin’s alarm call over the death of
the storyteller, yet Pera’s output also offers some hope that the con-
temporary moment’s chaotic brew of social-technical-political con-
ditions might be making possible the role’s re-emergence.
On the technical side, the possibilities of short, small-budget
internet productions targeted to highly specific audiences have
certainly been integral to Pera’s success. Having started perform-
ing stand-up in college, Pera later co-founded with fellow come-
dian Connor O’Malley the production company Chestnut Walnut
Unlimited, which would support the production of various shorts,
made with a roster of comedian friends of whom many would be
key contributors to his later work. The real upswing of Pera’s career,
however, followed his collaboration with the Adult Swim network,
which began with the short 2016 special Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep
(directed by Pera and Kieran O’Hare) that aired under the network’s
Infomercials programming and involved a (literally, not figuratively)
animated Pera sitting by a fire, musing on subjects designed to make
61
 the viewer fall unconscious. A second Adult Swim special that same
A CELEBRATION OF year, Joe Pera Helps You Find the Perfect Christmas Tree, connected
Pera with Marty Schousboe, who, as house director, would play a key
CANADIAN UNDERGROUND
role in developing the capacious aesthetic (alternatively droll and
CINEMA plainly beautiful) of Joe Pera Talks with You, the regular series that
the network greenlit soon after.
Remarkably idiosyncratic, Joe Pera Talks with You ran for three
seasons between 2018 and 2021. In its expansive 11-minute epi-
sodes, the show follows “Joe Pera’s” life as a middle-school choir
teacher in Marquette, a smallish city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Demonstrating what Benjamin calls the storyteller’s “orientation
toward practical interests,” the show employs a Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood–style framing device in which Pera, speaking directly
to the audience, opens each episode with a plan to talk about some-
FOR THE FIRST TIME thing particular—breakfast foods, fall drives, the Midwestern need
ON HOME VIDEO to own a second fridge, good fashion, and fireworks—which then
quickly falls into the background as the daily events of Pera’s life
take over.
The first season introduces Joe’s older best friend, Gene (played
by Late Night with Seth Meyers camera operator Gene Kelly), and
charts Joe’s developing relationship with Sarah Conner (comedian
Jo Firestone), a new music teacher at his school. (Joe at one point
excitedly describes Sarah to his beloved grandmother as “If an old
woman were young, in the best possible way!”) The second season
tracks the disintegrating marriage of his neighbours, the Melskys
WITH COMMENTARIES, (Connor O’Malley plays the father, Mike, with the comedian’s sig-
nature Trumpian man-child emotional explosions making a per-
DOCUMENTARIES,
fect foil for Pera’s calm demeanour), while Pera mourns the loss of
AND OTHER RARITIES a family member. The third and final season finds Joe pondering the
future as the mental health of Sarah, an anxious survivalist with a
stocked panic-room basement, worsens.
That Sarah is hyper-attuned to the possibilities of societal col-
lapse is only one of the more obvious ways Joe Pera Talks with You
distinguishes itself from the recent trend of liberal head-in-the-sand
“nice-core” sitcoms that have been so successfully marketing them-
selves as sidestepping political divisions. Certainly, the show offers
up qualities like patience, humour, curiosity, and acceptance as
helpful responses to the challenges of contemporary life, but it has
no interest in avoiding or denying those challenges: Joe Pera Talks
with You, like Pera’s solo comedy, fuels itself on the incongruities
that follow from constant confrontations between a kind, optimistic
outlook and the harsher aspects of the world. In an episode centred
entirely around Joe’s weekly grocery shopping trip, Joe excitedly
crosses paths with “Fred the sample guy” (Fred Firestone), a mid-
dle-aged man whose sky-high enthusiasm for his job giving away free
WWW.BLACKZERO.CA food samples and absolute joy at seeing Joe is put into relief a few
minutes later when Joe reveals, via to-camera address, Fred’s status
as a previously incarcerated person. Optimism and enthusiasm are
lovely, but not an escape or panacea.
Joe Pera Talks with You even builds such dissonance into one of
its main narrative arcs, as Sarah constantly reminds Joe (and the
viewer) of the endlessly proliferating threats to humanity’s contin-
ued existence on the planet. Midway through the first season, Joe
links Sarah’s worldview to a particular experience: as a child, he tells
the viewer, Sarah witnessed her brother being trampled to death in a

62
Black Friday stampede. Neither Joe nor the show insist on the need
to address or expel these realities, but rather speculate on how we
might maintain our sanity in the face of them. When trying to come
to terms with Sarah’s worldview, for example, a distracted Joe asks
a series of middle-schoolers what they think about the future. Their
answers, alternatively worried and assured, are striking, but no more
so than the ease with which Joe Pera Talks with You incorporates
these moments of documentary (the children, like many others in
the show, are non-actors) into its fictional narrative—a shift that de-
nies any kind of simple break between the reality of the show and the
reality of its viewers’ lives.
This fluidity of movement between different image and meaning
regimes is perhaps the most distinctive formal feature of the show,
and one that is often missed in the frequent descriptions of it as a
slow-paced and realistic (if comedically heightened) take on small-
town life. Joe Pera Talks with You frequently swerves outside of its
diegetic reality into spaces that combine Joe’s imaginings with the
visual vocabulary of corporate stock images and advertising, the
tropes of nature footage and slow TV, the sonic ambience of ASMR
videos and affect-management podcasts, and the lo-fi didacticism
or process footage of YouTube videos to provocative and frequently
hilarious effect. For instance, in the first-season episode “Joe Pera
Lights Up the Night With You,” Joe sets off New Year’s Eve fireworks
to entertain the Melskys’ five-year-old daughter (a shivering Pera
outside, before lighting the fuse: “Three, two, one—hey, it’s 9 p.m.!”)
before Joe and Kelsey Melsky’s awed, upturned faces give way to a
montage of fireworks and faces staring into lit skies. In a voiceover
that, like so much of the show, manages to be simultaneously en-
dearing and farcical, Pera narrates his theory that viewing fireworks
leads to “thinking about ex-girlfriends”—which he then does, before
meandering into an imagined Midwestern garage hangout with his
crush Sarah.
In another first-season episode, “Joe Pera Talks You Back to
Sleep,” rapping rain on Joe’s window leads the episode into anoth-
er of these reveries. As Joe wonders what other sounds are relaxing,
viewers are presented with advertising-esque shots of liquids being
poured into glasses while a Hawaiian riff plays in the background
and Pera makes comments like, “Watching liquids flow from a large
container to a small container is a delight.” Then we have a brief in-
terview with a man who pours professionally for such images, which
then leads to a montage of said pourer doing his favourite activity:
playing dominoes. It’s as if the 21st century’s rapid collapse of mean-
ing and legibility into mediated isolation and psychosis were being
surveyed and narrated by your grandfather.
Certainly, “grandfatherly” is an adjective that follows Pera
around, as much for his physical presence and a writing style that
uses minimal verbiage to maximum effect (he cites musician Bill
Callahan as an important influence) as for his penchant for discuss-
ing arcane historical and contemporary details. One early episode
of Joe Pera Talks with You has Joe attempting to woo Sarah by writ-
ing a musical for his middle-schoolers recounting “the Rat Wars of
Alberta (1950s–Present Day),” while a second-season episode pairs
a current-day evening power outage with the story of Joe as a return-
ing Civil War soldier who struggles to determine what he can offer
to Sarah, the local lighthouse operator, as he pursues a job as her as-
sistant (such positions, he tells us, sliding between times and spaces
in a characteristic fashion, were among the first federal jobs held by
women in the US).
If episodes such as these speak to Pera’s interest in passing along
local and distant histories and traditions, Joe Pera Talks with You’s
gorgeous musical score plays a crucial role in this as well. Composed
by Ryan Dann (who similarly accompanies Pera on stage in Joe Pera:
Slow & Steady), the show’s music takes its cues from early American
hymns and Shaker music; “stuff that feels timeless and solid,” in
Pera’s words. True to form, though, the show consistently punctures
any overly romantic views of the past: the last scene of the lighthouse
episode, “Joe Pera Guides You Through the Dark,” finds Civil War–
era Joe sitting by a fire with Sarah, and ends with the punchline re-
veal that she’s going to be subjecting him to a prophylactic leeching
session for at least another hour.
That the show manages to maintain this sense of offering a his-
torical vantage on hyper-contemporary matters—it seems written
by minds completely conversant in post-media-convergence life and
completely alien to it at the same time—is its defining quality. Joe
Pera Talks with You is often described as lacking in cynicism, which
is true, but this characterization fails to capture the show’s wry atti-
tude: its signaling of the historical, and thus ephemeral and poten-
tially absurd, nature of contemporary American visual, moral, and
social culture. The show celebrates the ordinary, but only by main-
taining the underlying faith that this too will change.
This quality is perhaps more obvious after watching Joe Pera:
Slow & Steady, which strips away from Pera’s joke-writing the rich
comedic vein of visual counterpoint found in the show’s free-asso-
ciating montages, while making his impulses towards storytelling all
the more evident. Filmed at the Opera House in Williamsburg last
spring, and designed around material Pera built up while touring af-
ter the cancellation of Talks with You, the pitch-perfect special (di-
rected by Schousboe) sees Pera leaning into his absurdist tangents
and using his persona to vocalize and estrange contemporary idioms
of sexuality and dating. One section has Pera thinking deeply about
a date’s comments on space law (apparently a real thing), and con-
cludes with him asking, “Why am I even trying to find connection?
I should be trying to fuck.…I want, I want, I want to own that ass.”
While Pera’s joke-writing in Joe Pera: Slow & Steady is as sharp as
ever, and his ability to relate to the crowd the way a second-grade
teacher relates to his students is deeply charming, the most mem-
orable section of the special is its conclusion. Here, directly invok-
ing storytelling, Pera sits in a cozy chair next to a lamp, reading
from a large book as he unfurls a tale about a hot summer night in
New York in which he struggles to sleep next to his partner Yoobi,
who is “basically a benevolent version of the Babadook.” The story,
which ends with a lovely paean to ice and companionship, traverses
the realms of fabrication, fantasy, and the utterly mundane, posing
the question (so consistent in Pera’s oeuvre) of where the person-
al or autobiographical begins and where it ends. That question is
less important for any answer that could be forthcoming than for
what it says about the achievement of storytelling: the possibili-
ty of making experience—real or unreal, direct or mediated, joyful
or devastating, yours or others’—communicable, and of making
listening imaginable.
63
Global Discoveries on DVD | By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Now or Never
In what will likely be my last column in these
pages, I’ve mainly tried to highlight releases
and films that I’ve been meaning yet failing
to watch for ages, following the assumption
that it’s now or never. As most of my examples
make clear, this avoidance has something to
do with the unhealthiness or pessimism these
films tend to leak from every pore.
But before getting around to these over-
due discoveries, I’d like to celebrate a couple
of “late” arrivals that are just over a century
old. Frank Borzage’s Back Pay and what sur-
vives (about 50 minutes’ worth) of The Valley
of Silent Men, both 1922 features made for
William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan
Productions, had to wait 101 years to wend their
64
The Green Years
way towards us, at least for the purposes of this
column. The former is a three-hanky sob story
adapted by Frances Marion from Fanny Hurst;
the latter is an action-adventure filmed in
Canada. They’re jointly available on both DVD
and Blu-ray from Undercrank Productions.
By recently collecting some of my literary
and jazz criticism along with some of my film
criticism, as related activities and interests
that can serve and clarify one another, I’ve
sought to avoid the routine capitalist censor-
ship that forbids this practice as an egregious
form of “cross-marketing” and insists on
keeping these arts separate; and this in turn
has guided some of my viewing habits. One of
my keenest pleasures in watching Back Pay
relates to Borzage only tangentially: rather, it
comes from feeling cinematographer Chester
Lyons’ exquisitely tinted and toned landscape
shots alternate with scene-setting intertitles
decorated with illustrations of the same scenes
and settings. The graceful transitions between
these complementary, yet distinctly different,
renditions of the same visual subjects are, par-
adoxically, very literary—even though the im-
ages sometimes matter more than the words,
because they correspond to the ways we can
imagine separate visual settings for the nar-
ratives while we’re reading or hearing them
read. Two-part inventions of sound and im-
age that play catch with one another, they’re
clearly invested in the same storytelling game.
This orchestrated polyphonic flow takes on an
even richer texture in talkies, e.g., the smooth,
bumpless relays and exchanges between spo-
ken narration, music, and onscreen dialogue
in the very literary openings of Orson Welles’
The Magnificent Ambersons and Leopoldo
Torre Nilsson’s La casa del Angel (1957), with
its similar percussive, Wellesian cadences.
Harvé Dumont reports in his superb crit-
ical biography of Borzage that, according to
Chaplin biographer David Robinson, Back Pay
influenced Chaplin’s 1923 A Woman in Paris.
(Maybe it did, but Robinson excluded this fact
from his own biography.) We’re accustomed
to regarding ourselves as being more sophis-
ticated moviegoers than our equivalents one
century ago, yet this movie periodically sug-
gests that our ancestors might have been aes-
thetically and ethically freer than us. A Wall
Street sugar daddy can be appreciated for his
generosity alongside his more guilt-ridden
and self-centred mistress—the latter played
by Seena Owen, who also plays the queen who
chases Gloria Swanson out of her palace with
a whip in Stroheim’s last silent feature, Queen
Kelly (1929).
Owen’s character here is a restless heroine
who leaves her small town and her dopey but
loyal boyfriend for New York luxury, which
she attains only by becoming a banker’s kept
woman. Her life becomes much more mel-
odramatically Hurstian after her dopey and
loyal small-town boyfriend loses his eyesight,
the use of one lung, and his life, in that order,
fighting in World War I (still a recent memory
in 1922), bringing on enough wallowing survi-
vor’s guilt to rival that of the mulatto daughter
in Hurst’s Imitation of Life.
Ozu Yasujiro’s Record of a Tenement
Gentleman (1947)—the first of his postwar fea-
tures—is included in BFI Video’s double Blu-
ray set Three by Yasujiro Ozu, along with his si-
lent Dragnet Girl (1933) and A Hen in the Wind
(1948), the second of his postwar features. It’s
also one of the few surviving Ozu films that I
hadn’t already seen. (Full disclosure: My essay
on A Hen in the Wind is included in this set’s
30-page booklet.)
I can’t fathom why the BFI—or, more pre-
cisely, someone at the BFI—has chosen to
package Ozu’s first two postwar films with
one of his unrelated silents (unless this was
prompted by the thematic persistence of pov-
erty), but I’m delighted to report that my long-
term clamouring for an English translation of
Hasumi Shigehiko’s Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
has finally been gratified by Ryan Cook and
University of California Press, with a March 12
publication date. A critical study that frees us
in the West from the manufactured exoticism
that has encrusted and distorted our appreci-
ations of Ozu, the book helps us to recognize
and appreciate some of the more authentic
mysteries that remain.
Hasumi’s book alerts us, for instance, to the
fact that Ozu’s preoccupation with seasons in
his film’s titles can’t be found anywhere in the
films themselves. This alerts me to the more
general inscrutability of Ozu’s other film ti-
tles, whether they seem to refer to obscure
and unidentified Japanese expressions (as in I
Was Born, But… [1932] and A Hen in the Wind)
or are the vaguest of referents to what the
films are about (as in Passing Fancy [1933] or
Tokyo Story [1953]). This is even more true of
Record of a Tenement Gentleman, a film about
a grumpy aging widow and the little boy, an
apparent war orphan, whom she reluctantly
adopts—not about any tenement or any gen-
tleman, much less any tenement gentleman,
as Tony Rayns points out in the booklet. I’m
tempted to conclude that this arbitrary con-
trariness may come closer to comprising the
Zen flavour of Ozu’s oeuvre than anything else.
***
A lonely night watchman at a department
store develops a fixation on one of the store’s
female mannequins. He steals it/her and
brings it/her home, where he can be with
her/it all the time. One reason why it’s im-
portant to describe Arne Mattsson’s Swedish
65
 film Vaxdockan (The Doll, 1962)—released
one year after L’année dernière à Marienbad
and 11 years after Mattsson’s One Summer
of Happiness (available now from moviede-
tective.net and myrarefilms.co.uk)—by in-
sisting on these alternate pronouns is that
the film keeps switching without warning
between a mannequin and a live woman,
thus alternately shattering and revalidating
the watchman’s fantasy.
My reason for avoiding this film for so long
clearly had something to do with my wari-
ness about approaching a sicko fantasy, but
the dual identity suggests that I might have
been wrong about this. Rightly or wrongly, I
connect the film’s ethical challenges (where-
by a “real-life” fornicating couple in the sto-
ry are made to seem far more repellent than
the innocent and tender watchman) and its
perceptual challenges (dummy or lady?) with
the fact that both a man and a woman (Lars
Forssell and Eva Seeberg) are credited with
the screenplay.
***
If style is the miscarriage of form (as I be-
lieve Roland Barthes suggests somewhere),
stylishness is surely the miscarriage of style,
as exemplified by Joseph McGrath’s joy-
less, if very stylish, The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom
(1968). I enjoyed this 55 years ago for its riot-
ously loud colours and for Shirley MacLaine,
but it’s surely significant that these are the
only elements I could remember afterwards.
Watching it recently on a Kino Lorber Studio
Classics Blu-ray, I had to deal with its hu-
mourless substance as a very mechanical farce
about adultery, which it pretends to celebrate.
Now, its unfelt stylishness makes it far less
durable or watchable than Frank Tashlin’s
un-chic yet joyful Artists and Models (1955),
which also boasts riotously loud colours and
Shirley MacLaine, but makes them both part
of its comic-book style rather than parts of its
window dressing.

***
As a teenager in the 1950s, I tended to avoid
Hugo Haas/Cleo Laine quickies after catching
a few whiffs of their sub-noirish morbidity, but
this is precisely what animated my recent cu-
riosity to explore some of them on YouTube.
Many can still be accessed on DVD and/or
Blu-ray, but a far more appropriate venue
would be to catch sneak peeks of them online
and then hopefully forget them, as one does

66

or tries to do with unpleasant dreams. At least
that’s what I attempted to do with Bait (1954)
and Hold Back Tomorrow (1955), two separate
versions of the same perverse romantic trian-
gle in which Haas, as clumsy writer and low-
budget director, drafts Laine and John Agar—
who plays both the handsome romantic lead
in the former and the ugly/nasty bully that the
filmmaker usually plays himself in the latter
(a strangler of women awaiting his execution
and/or redemption, whichever comes first).
The usual backdrop of metaphysical
doom is apparently what got Haas to hire
Sir Cedric Hardwicke to play the Devil as an
autograph-signing celebrity in the weirdly
self-referential prologue to Bait, which more
equitably co-stars Laine, Agar, and Haas (the
latter playing a crazed gold prospector bent
on messing up or murdering the other two).
What prevented me from forgetting these
grim camp mixtures of Dostoevsky and Edgar
G. Ulmer was looking up Haas on Wikipedia,
where I discovered he was a Czech Jew who
lost his father and brother to the Nazi death
camps as well as his respectable careers as a
musician, stage actor, and filmmaker before
emigrating to the American Poverty Row in
1940—all of which seemed to inform his night-
marish plots with heaps of survivor guilt and
related forms of remorse and self-hatred.
***
For some time now, diverse Portuguese
friends, hosts, and acquaintances have been
urging me to watch films by Paulo Rocha (1935-
2012), half a dozen of which have recently been
restored for the Portuguesa Cinemateca on
three no-frills DVD box sets. These represent
only a fraction of Rocha’s total output (and
don’t even include his documentary about
Manoel de Oliveira’s first film), but the two
that I’ve seen so far, A Ilha dos Amores (Loves’
Island, 1982) and A Ilha de Moraes (Moraes’
Island, 1984), are so impressive that they’ve
whetted my appetite for more. (The two I plan
to watch next are Pedro Costa’s favourites,
Os Verdes Anos [The Green Years, 1963] and
Mudar de Vida [Change of Life, 1966]; both are
also available from Grasshopper Films, and
Costa supervised their restorations.)
I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that
my former reluctance to dip into Rocha’s work
partially stemmed from a fear that readers
might mix him up with Paulo Branco, Glauber
Rocha, or any or all of the five other individ-
uals called Paulo Rocha listed on Wikipedia
(an actor, politicians from Brazil and Cape
Verde, and Portuguese and Brazilian football
players). Or maybe it was an unconscious
Yank desire to preserve my innocence about
both colonial/anti-colonial cinema and Latin
America in general and their Portuguese
branches in particular, thus banishing them to
the fringes of our awareness.
Both Loves’ Island and Moraes’ Island—re-
spectively, a fictionalized biopic and an explor-
atory documentary—are about the Portuguese
poet Wenceslau de Moraes (1854-1929), a na-
val officer in Mozambique and Macao who quit
the service to head Portugal’s first Japanese
Change of Life
consulate in Kobe and Osaka. While in Japan,
he converted to Buddhism and married a for-
mer geisha named Fukumoto Yone; when the
latter died in 1912, Morae was so grief-strick-
en that he severed all his professional ties and
moved to Yone’s hometown, where he lived
with her niece and visited her grave every day.
After the niece died, he visited the graves of
both women daily until his death.
In Moraes’ Island, Rocha’s dialogues with
people who encountered Morae aren’t inter-
views but rather relaxed conversations, de-
void of showboating and self-consciousness.
Not exactly journalistic, they are acts (not
performances) of religious piety and cult-like
devotion, but it’s never entirely clear what
the piety and devotion are for: Morae’s poet-
ry, his exile and loneliness, or his capacity to
straddle three cultures (Portuguese, Chinese,
Japanese) while living with death—express-
ing even a devotion to death that recalls that
of Truffaut’s character in La chambre verte
(1978), which is set in what appears to be
roughly the same period.
As I’ve argued previously in this column,
criticism and fandom are often activities in
conflict, yet I think it can be argued that this
film intermittently succeeds at combining
them whenever it objectifies its own obsession
with Morae. Am I suggesting that Rocha’s for-
mal shaping of the materials allows us to stand
outside this subject while recognizing its man-
ifestations in our own reflexes, regardless of
whether we’re colonialists or anti-colonialists
or (most likely) both? Yes.
67
THE KILLER
D av i d F in c h e r, U S
BY ADAM PIRON
Clocking in at a clean 47 seconds, the title
sequence in The Killer sets something like a
metronome for David Fincher’s latest effort.
Guided by the steady pulse of Trent Reznor
and Atticus Ross’ score, a montage unfolds
on details of the eponymous, nameless assas-
sin (Michael Fassbender) using his hands to
execute his trade. Each shot, none more than
a second and framed exclusively from first-
person viewpoints and close-ups, keeps to the
consistency of the music’s rhythm as an off-
beat swells in dissonance to match his increas-
ingly brutal methods.
An integral component of Fincher’s film-
ography has been title sequences, with that
for Se7en (1995) often being cited as his most
iconic. Where that opener frames the details
of a serial killer’s meticulous documentation
of his handiwork as a form of warped cre-
ative expression, that of the new film finds its
murderer dealing out death strictly as labour.
The quickest and most disarming of Fincher’s
works, The Killer seeds a precise economy of
form that the remainder of the film proceeds
to orbit.
Hidden within the interior construction
site of a Parisian WeWork office, Fassbender’s
Killer scopes out the darkened apartment of
68
his next mark. “It’s amazing how physically
exhausting it can be to do nothing,” he muses.
Days have passed with only his routine of yoga,
eating McDonald’s, and listening to a playlist
of tracks by The Smiths to help keep his focus.
Over a flow of internal monologue, the assassin
expounds on his personal philosophy about
his craft—notably, declaring himself above
that majority of humanity that is exploited
by the few, thus boastfully placing himself in
the latter echelon. Equipped with the min-
imal narrative penned by Se7en screenwriter
Andrew Kevin Walker, Fincher leans into the
sparseness of this man’s cocooned state, em-
ploying a sharp definition of perspective that
is most notable in the use of Fassbender’s voi-
ceover, a call with the Killer’s handler Hodges
(Charles Parnell), and music that is heard only
from the lead character’s earpiece.
Eventually, with a dominatrix and a secur-
ity detail in tow, the long-awaited target ar-
rives in his monitored apartment just as sleep
deprivation begins to set in for Fincher’s exe-
cutioner. For all of his introspective rumin-
ations on self-discipline, the Killer’s illusion
of control shatters along with the window he
shoots his bullet through, as he snipes the tar-
get’s sex-worker companion in error. He flees
the scene, and proceeds to navigate a circuit
of airports, flights, and airline workers—initi-
ating a movement through an interconnected
network of workplaces, paid services, and ex-
changes that allows The Killer to transcend
the tired framework of the hitman-revenge
scenario, and become a reflection on how
labour creates a web that binds together the
entirety of the humanity that the Killer fan-
cies himself an exception to.
Landing home in the Dominican Republic
under a cloud of paranoia, the Killer finds his
house vandalized and his girlfriend (Sophie
Charlotte) in hospital after surviving a brutal
attack at the hands of unknown contractors.
He later breaks into a taxi company’s office and
identifies a young man named Leo (Gabriel
Polanco) as the driver of the hired hands, and
proceeds to exterminate him the next day af-
ter extracting the intel he needs. The next stop
in this business trip from hell takes the Killer
to his self-admitted origin point: New Orleans,
where Fincher’s Man with No Name slips into
the law offices of his former professor turned
handler Hodges, and restrains both him and
his secretary, Dolores (Kerry O’Malley). It’s
revealed in voiceover that Hodges encouraged
his one-time student to ditch the study of law,
and learn instead how to skirt it. Like Dante
descending into a new ring of Hell, Fincher ad-
justs his film’s focus to the next level of work’s
hierarchy: a managerial class that manipulates
an industrial system to its advantage.
With the aid of a nail gun (a tool of manual
labour), the Killer proceeds to bite the hand
that feeds him as he punctures Hodges’ lap-
top and, then, chest, in an unsuccessful bid to
make him spill the whereabouts of the would-
be assassins and the client who paid them.
Hodges bleeds out, and Dolores pleads to be
spared a fate that would deny her children
her life insurance (a last request that is, itself,
a last gasp to milk the system in her favour).
The Killer’s “no empathy” mantra is put to the
test as he witnesses (and facilitates) Dolores’
long, pathetic march to her demise: after
she retrieves the information in her home,
the Killer stages her murder as an accident,
honouring his part of the exchange with his
ostensible co-worker. There’s a melancholy
to the affair that the Killer quickly brushes
off, but a poignancy nonetheless remains, in
that Dolores pays the ultimate price for her
employer’s mismanagement.
As the Killer moves to cross the next names
off his hit list, Fincher pushes his enforcer be-
yond the labyrinth of the market and into the
realm of his true peers in his trade. The gears
are put on him as goes up against his fellow
assassins—a Floridian musclehead labeled
The Brute (Sala Baker), and then a more
seasoned contractor known as The Expert
(Tilda Swinton), who deals in mind games.
These two represent the polar extremes of
the Killer’s own proficiencies, each requiring
him to problem-solve in real time; an oper-
ator who has found an (illusory) perfection
in the rote motions of his bloody trade, the
Killer here has the pressure really put on him
for the first time, forced to get his hands dirty
and use his brawn and brain to snuff out his
girlfriend’s assailants.
These executions push the Killer to real-
ize that his earlier-professed autonomy was
a self-delusion, and recognize his true place
as just another replaceable cog in a larger,
murderous machine. It’s what makes his
final confrontation with Claybourne (Arliss
Howard), a billionaire venture capitalist and
the original client of the botched Paris job,
all the more unexpected. When the Killer
finds out that his final hit has no real know-
ledge of what’s unfolded—that the retalia-
tory attack on his girlfriend was a mere in-
surance line item that Claybourne barely
registered—the assassin concludes that it’s
not worth taking him out. Insulated in his
high-rise penthouse, surrounded by screens
tracking market performance, Claybourne
is the living image of corporate figureheads’
ignorance of the work that they profit from
in the world below. The film concludes with
the Killer back at home on the beach with
his girlfriend on the mend next to him, re-
signed to accept his place among the many.
Many have speculated that The Killer is some
form of Fincher apologia for his oeuvre,
which, like the dominatrix who stumbled
into Fassbender’s crosshairs, barely misses
the mark. Known for his controlled style, the
filmmaker has repeatedly pushed against the
auteur label so often assigned to him, instead
crediting his work as a product of collabora-
tive design with other artisans and, at times,
of interference from clueless higher-ups. With
its unsentimental reflections on enveloping
web of labour and the progressively dissolv-
ing ego of its self-impressed protagonist, The
Killer is perhaps less a confession than a meta-
statement on Fincher’s own artistic labour,
and how it can be weighed within a system
that renders art as product. Regardless, to
echo Fassbender’s voiceover as the Killer
flees the scene of his hit gone awry: “This
is new.”
69
KILLERS OF
THE FLOWER MOON
Martin Scorsese, US
BY ROBERT KOEHLER
Despite what you may have heard from some
breathless movie critics, 2023 was a year of
further decline for American cinema. But
there was a promising inflection point: the
year marked a moment when the seeming-
ly unstoppable empire of Marvel began its
long-overdue decline even as Marvel’s Enemy
Number One, Martin Scorsese, ended the year
with the aura of artistic triumph. His long-in-
the-making adaptation of New Yorker writer
David Grann’s true-crime saga, Killers of the
Flower Moon, is the best movie he’s ever made.
The extreme thoroughness, subtlety, and
thought invested in this project indicate that,
as Scorsese moves into his Joe Biden years, he
has evolved into a more nuanced, more com-
plex film artist.
Recently, and for the first time in a while, I
rewatched Taxi Driver (1976), which many have
70
been all too willing to slot as Scorsese’s (and
writer Paul Schrader’s) early masterwork. What
I saw was an overwrought and obvious melodra-
ma held together primarily by nighttime visual
poetics and Robert De Niro’s unbridled, hell’s-
bells performance. Too often with Scorsese,
the moral argument is blunt and crude, limned
with simple takes on the running theme of guilt,
revealing a certain fear of trusting the audience
to draw its own conclusions in the way, for in-
stance, that Abbas Kiarostami rigorously con-
structed his open-ended narratives. Scorsese
has always depended on outside material and/
or a screenwriting partner (such as Schrader),
unwilling (or unable) to take on the classical au-
teurist position as sole originalwriter-director.
Starting with Goodfellas (1990), he tacked
in a new direction—non-fiction historical
sagas, sometimes with dramatic inspiration
from the Warner Bros. crime vault. These
have yielded a few brilliant movies, the stand-
outs being the Nicholas Pileggi collaborations
Goodfellas and, especially, Casino (1995),
which also derived some of its imaginative ef-
fect from Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs (1955).
For the most part, though, these films—includ-
ing Kundun (1997), Gangs of New York (2002),
The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), and
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)—have been big,
bloated projects with massive casts and ample
servings of bad David Lean: overtly self-im-
portant yet strangely impersonal chronicles,
varying unevenly in energy and imagination,
lumbering with the mechanical process of
doom foretold.
What sets Killers of the Flower Moon apart
from this company stems from Scorsese’s
well-reported failure with his first pass at
Grann’s book, which took a wrong turn so no-
ticeable that, upon reading it, the film’s star
Leonardo DiCaprio suggested to Scorsese
that he needed to start over. The book de-
tails, in chillingly granular detail, one of the
darkest and bloodiest forgotten passages in
American history: what Grann refers to as the
“Reign of Terror” took place in north-central
Oklahoma’s Osage County from roughly 1921
to 1924, where whites conspired to murder
members of the Osage Nation for their “head-
rights”—i.e., legal ownership of land contain-
ing vast deposits of oil, which had lifted the
Osage from desperate poverty to the wealthi-
est group per capita in the country.
In the book’s first section, which focuses
on the killings largely through the prism of
stalwart Mollie Kyle, who had married white
WWI vet Ernest Burkhart, Grann frames his
historical account as a mystery. At the outset,
the reader has no idea who is behind the as-
tonishing string of deaths surrounding Mollie,
which eventually claims all of her sisters and
her mother. Though some of the victims die
under circumstances suggesting murder, they
meet their respective ends by so many differ-
ent means that a serial-killer theory can be
quickly ruled out.
Perhaps seduced by Grann’s subtitle,
The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,
Scorsese was initially drawn to the book’s
second section, on how what was then known
simply as the Bureau of Investigation ulti-
mately solved the baroque case—a truly grip-
ping account of how law and order triumphed,
at least for a moment, over pure evil. However,
in emphasizing this part of the story in his ini-
tial draft, Scorsese found that this compelling
yarn of powerful bad men being finally brought
to justice backgrounded the crucial stories of
Mollie and the Osage as a whole. By eventually
recognizing this error, Scorsese and his long-
time screenwriting collaborator Eric Roth
not only properly placed their adaptation’s
emphasis on the book’s first section, but also
turned Grann’s mystery into a suspense movie
by unveiling early on the conspiracy master-
mind who Grann finally reveals two-thirds of
the way into the book.
The film opens with William Hale (Robert
De Niro), a powerfully influential white ranch-
er in Osage County, taking in his nephew
Ernest (DiCaprio), a Hemingwayesque bro-
ken man desperate to reinvent his life and all
too willing to accept Hale’s apparent benefi-
cence and patronage. The characters of Hale
and Ernest are more vividly drawn here than
in the book, where the dictates of journalism
and available facts keep Hale somewhat ab-
stract and distanced. De Niro’s Hale, by con-
trast, is commanding and fearsome but also a
serious listener and genuinely loving toward
his beleaguered nephew, even as he immedi-
ately sees in him an easy subject for his glad-
handing manipulation; DiCaprio’s Ernest,
meanwhile, bearing a lifetime’s worth of scars
and worn down by events beyond his control, is
all too easily attracted to the colour of money.
Ernest’s shades of kindness and tender-
ness emerge as he becomes a driver for Mollie
(Lily Gladstone, likewise bringing more lay-
ers to the character than does Grann in his
depiction), who gradually loses her initial
skepticism about this white man’s overeager
courtship of her and genuinely falls in love
with him. Scorsese’s films have had their
share of difficult marriages, but none as com-
plex as this one, which is made even more so
by the couple’s vast cultural differences. The
movie’s story depends on a foundational un-
derstanding that Ernest and Mollie love each
other, even despite the growing storm of death
swirling around Mollie’s family—which isn’t
simply matriarchal but infused with a power-
ful female energy that recalls Chekhov’s three
sisters (in this case, four), all of them women
of distinct individuality, strengths, and weak-
nesses that eventually lead them to their own
tragically distinctive ends.
The question that Killers of the Flower Moon
asks—can true love and genuine exchanges of
mutual care operate in parallel with a patient-
ly hatched plot of cold-blooded mendacity and
slow-burn murder?—takes the film far past
the chaotic relationships at the core of Raging
Bull (1980) or Casino and into the moral cross-
currents of Dostoevsky, who is the true liter-
ary spirit of the movie. A strange condition of
benign evil governs some of the film’s charac-
ters, lifting them beyond the confines of true-
crime journalism. One can imagine a cartoon
version of “King” Hale that could have tempt-
ed De Niro toward a caricature of pure evil, fun
to play but easily dismissed. But De Niro, along
with DiCaprio and Gladstone, take the hard-
er road, no doubt inspired by knowing that
Scorsese was determined to take his sweet
time laying the groundwork for them and al-
lowing the story’s events to properly play out.
This kind of time allows the actors to find
space for small, barely detectable expressions
and movements that can nonetheless speak
volumes about the people they inhabit. Watch
Gladstone’s steady gestures and bodily shifts,
as Mollie is shadowed by the dark knowl-
edge that she is trying to fathom. Observe the
confusion on DiCaprio’s face when he first
arrives in the oil boomtown to see wealthy
Native Americans wearing fur coats and being
chauffeured in limos, his expression contain-
ing everything the movie needs to say about
threatened white privilege. Examine De Niro’s
shape-shifting mask of smiles that conceals a
mind teeming with plots seemingly 24 hours
a day.
Having found the right course for this sto-
ry and assembled his lineup of gifted actors
from the leading trio right down to the small-
est roles, Scorsese plays his string out all the
way to the film’s glorious ending: an epilogue
brimming with both grand irony (and man-
aging an amusing dig at the media’s obsession
with true-crime sagas) and an elegant beauty
(in a bird’s-eye view of an Osage drum cere-
mony) that transcends those absolute worst
aspects of human nature that this bloody
history has laid bare. A Scorsese picture that
resolves as light as a feather, as profound
as a 19th-century Russian tale—who would
have expected that?
71
MENUS-PLAISIRS
– LES TROISGROS
Frederick Wiseman, US
BY JAY KUEHNER
At a recent NYFF talk on the trustworthi-
ness of the documentary image, Frederick
Wiseman quipped that back in 1968, having
immersed himself in a prison for the criminal-
ly insane for his first film, Titicut Follies (1967),
the logical milieu for a follow-up was that of a
high school; hence, the subsequent year’s High
School. Given the stylistic consistency yet
markedly disparate subject matter of his vast
oeuvre to date, it is curious to consider what,
if anything, constituted the precedent for his
latest film, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros,
a typically protracted look at an historically
family-run restaurant near Lyon. What can
the artist tell us about the institution when it
seems he has, from the perspective of a certain
cinema culture, become one himself?
The contemporary emergence of food as
an instrument of entertainment, yoked to
the mesmeric appeal of the innocuous pro-
cess video, has cultivated formerly fallow ter-
rain into something ripe, and counter to the
Troisgros family wisdom that “cuisine isn’t
the movies.” A film dedicated to the fastidious-
ness of culinary craft invariably calls attention
to the commensurate means of documenting
it, and even if the mirroring of mise en place
in mise en scène is perhaps too meta for the
film’s concerns, it nevertheless implicates the
presence of the camera in telling yet even-
handed ways. While Wiseman and DP James
Bishop deliberately capture patrons making
pictures of their food in our contemporary
mise en abyme of consumption—in which the
72
imaging of food has seemingly become part of
the metabolic process itself, the camera phone
another utensil on the table alongside the
well-polished cutlery—this reads more like a
wink than a concerted sociological swipe, con-
sidering there’s a cameraperson openly oscil-
lating about the dining room.
More germane is the question of how to sit-
uate the film within the dialectical lines estab-
lished by Wiseman’s ongoing inquiry between
(physical) condition and (social) place, and
from experiential to institutional, which are
always inextricable in his work. Menus-Plaisirs
operates at a comfortable remove from both—
it’s at once a document of a pastoral restaurant
(replete with shots of horses grazing in the
pasture, clouds passing, chopped wood neatly
stacked) and a chronicle of its workers (mostly
chefs bowed with purpose over their respec-
tive kitchen stations, performing implausible
culinary sleight of hand). The culinary art
requires intensive labour, much of it in the
service of pure ephemera, and thus the film’s
more intimate attention to the sheer work of
cooking proves its greatest provision.
There is no cultural or institutional polem-
ic here; Menus-Plaisirs eschews the severity
of Jean-Michel Barjol and Jean Eustache’s Le
cochon (1970), with its ritualistic pig slaughter
as stark communal ethnography, or Nikolaus
Geyrhalter’s dystopian portrait of industri-
al-scale food production in Our Daily Bread
(2005). Rather, Wiseman’s gaze assumes the
modest perspective of a stagiaire: observant,
unobtrusive, curious, obliging, loosely follow-
ing the Troisgros family in the daily operation
of their establishment (in operation since
1930, which coincidentally makes it as old as
Wiseman himself ). Now in its newest itera-
tion as Le Bois sans Feuilles, the restaurant is
about to see a fourth generation take over, as
magnanimous pére Michel prepares to hand
head-chef responsibilities to fils César (and
to a lesser extent the younger Léo, who cooks
at the affiliate La Colline). We are witness to
market visits and menu planning between the
two before ever stepping into the kitchen, in
sequences that serve as an amuse-bouche:
shots of oyster mushrooms as big as squid,
quenelles with white asparagus and almond
mousseline, caper leaves imported from Sicily.
The “action” is otherwise confined to the
family’s three restaurants (as well as a guest-
house run by Michel’s wife, Marie-Pierre) and
detours to various rendezvous with suppliers,
whose respective practices of raising cattle,
goats, and legumes reveal deep commitments
to the land and its biodiversity. These dis-
patches are affirmative, albeit expository, les-
sons on the necessity of minimal intervention
in nature, but they also lack the immersive
tendencies of Wiseman’s more cynical work
(Meat [1976] comes to mind) due to the rather
perfunctory blocking of the encounters be-
tween chef and farmer, suggesting a choreog-
raphy of content that inevitably flatters both
parties. While not hagiographic, Wiseman’s
portrait of this culinary dynasty is no doubt
conditioned somewhat by a persistent
PR apparatus.
That the restaurant staff functions like an
ensemble cast, with Michel its paternal lead,
reveals Wiseman’s subtle dramaturgic design.
There is no conspicuous narrative arc, howev-
er, only a marked rise in kitchen temperature
as the film moves from the meditative ritual of
prep to the live act of service. Extended runt-
imes feel organic as ever with Wiseman, owing
to a novelistic sense of detail by way of dura-
tion. (For Wiseman, shooting is conceived of as
a form of preparatory research while narrative
is a function of editing, hence his famous for-
mulation of “reality fictions.”) The four-hour
runtime here mimics that of a multi-course
sit-down meal, digestible in its digressions.
The peculiar slackening that occurs on ac-
count of Wiseman’s method, derived as much
from patience as a surfeit of coverage, wrests
intrigue from the inconsequential. Witness
the professional dialogue between Michel and
Léo, the latter defending the high-contrast
flavours of a dish, as it shades into a case of
the proverbial generational gap, a father-son
tête-à-tête expressed through rhubarb and as-
paragus, soy sauce and elderberry—cooking as
familial approval and challenge.
Is the becalmed mood testament to the
Troisgros professional ethos, or a selective fic-
tion of the filmmaker’s discretion? No doubt
a legion of cooks watching the proceedings
will find points of identification, but rightfully
bemoan the absence of any irremediable mis-
takes, let alone forearm burns, knife wounds,
verbal abuse, drug habits, or mental break-
downs (one cook, defaulted for his improper
bleeding of lamb’s brains, is scolded with a
deep dive in the Larousse Gastronomique).
Perhaps such histrionics are best left to cook-
ing channels and other kitchen confidentials,
but the astonishing array of technique on dis-
play here appears without palpable sacrifice,
executed by a committed brigade de cuisine
that is the film’s real subject (with all defer-
ence to those lovely rosettes of John Dory). A
brief cutaway to Léo and a fellow chef, play-
fully agonizing over a ping-pong table, offers a
telling glimpse into an unlived life; in another
interlude, César and his wife attempt to feed
their new baby as Michel looks on, a tableau
suggesting that this is where it all begins, or
rather ends.
The contrast to the rarified dining experi-
ence to which these men have devoted their
careers is, for a moment, wistfully stark. There
is a genuine sense here of cooking as a labour
of love, only to be lost to the tyranny of haute
cuisine and its exclusive audience. The open
kitchen, Michel insists, affords transparency
while also allowing chefs to put faces to their
diners, but the divide is nonetheless conspicu-
ous. Who is performing for whom in this awk-
ward embrace?
It is considered impolite to bring poli-
tics to the dinner table, but as Wiseman has
made a career of showing, it is inseparable
from the administrations of any social in-
teraction. “Food is a language we all speak,”
says one service staff during lineup, citing
author Olena Braichenko before a charity
dinner for Ukraine. Yet, as her very research
through zhakultura makes evident, it is also
a language marked by silence for many. There
is only so much the beauty of an artichoke
can do.
It was Brillat-Savarin, in his Physiology
of Taste or Meditations on Transcendental
Gastronomy, who exalted the discovery of a
new dish as conferring happiness upon hu-
manity, citing taste as definitive. “Tell me what
you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” he fa-
mously quipped. But over a century and half
later it was Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction: A
Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, who
effectively inverted the aphorism: tell me what
you are and I will tell you what you eat. Menus-
Plaisirs appears poised at the intersection of
such foodways, in which Wiseman’s ode to fine
cooking limns its very habitus, vast yet limited
in scope. In this judicious document of a very
discerning establishment, it’s regrettable that
we ultimately never get to see the dish pit.
73
POOR THINGS
Yor go s L an t him o s , US/ UK / Ir e l an d
BY DERAGH CAMPBELL
With her 1818 novel Frankenstein: or, The
Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley not only
authored a story that passed into myth, but
also invented a new type of monster that
exists independent of that story. It is the
Monster—and a familiar but shifting set of
surrounding circumstances—that has been
numerously adapted over several decades,
creating wildly varying resemblances be-
tween the original text and its propagations.
The most absolute tenet of Frankenstein’s
Monster is that he is an assemblage of parts
of dead bodies that is reanimated into life,
though in Shelley’s original text the act is
achieved by isolating the moment where de-
composing flesh gives nourishment to a seed.
When Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein immediate-
ly rejects his creation, it is not the revelation
of a violent or uncontrollable nature that re-
74
pels him, but the horror of biological creation
itself. As Frankenstein and his Monster seek
each other’s destruction “to the ends of the
earth,” this ultimately becomes an expedition
of the annihilation of the self.
In this way, the premise of Poor Things—
both in Alasdair Gray’s novel and the screen-
play adapted by Tony McNamara—arrives
as a potentially poignant advancement of
Frankenstein’s Monster. Bella Baxter (Emma
Stone) is created when Dr. Godwin Baxter
(Willem Dafoe) recovers the recently dead
corpse of a pregnant woman who committed
suicide, removes her unborn child, and plac-
es its brain in the woman’s skull, reanimating
the body to life. The unconsenting mother and
aborted child thus become a single identity,
one swallowing the other in a kind of self-con-
tained self-obliteration. This narrative con-
ceit satirizes that women in Victorian England
(and beyond) were denied access to abortion
and bodily autonomy by exceeding it and re-
news the creation of the monster as a violent
transgression. However, Yorgos Lanthimos’
film never quite honours the perversion of
its premise. As Bella negotiates her own de-
parture from her creator’s house, her journey
becomes the much more saleable enterprise
of self-realization and personal liberty rath-
er than a confrontation with her origins, and
how the freedom she seeks was violated at
its foundation.
The name “Frankenstein” has a famously
flexible usage—it is the name of the Monster’s
creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, but it’s also
been given, whether mistakenly or not, as the
name of the Monster. There is a kind of linking
of monsters where the creator and creation are
embedded together. With lead roles also in The was replaced by the use of a replica. If actors Lanthimos made a kind of Frankenstein
Favourite (2018), his short film Bleat (2022), are already increasingly compensated for their film before with Dogtooth (2009), which now
and his upcoming feature, it might be said that accrued market value for their labour, this is a feels almost like a stenciled blueprint for Poor
Emma Stone has become Yorgos Lanthimos’ step toward an actor’s image operating totally Things in its tale of a group of siblings are con-
Frankenstein. A perfect actor/monster, with independently of them, even after death, thus fined to their family home and led to believe
talent and without ideology, Stone gives her- opening up the possibility of infinite profit. in a world their father has defined for them,
self completely to Lanthimos’ world and the One of the aspects of the Shelley novel that entrapped by a set of diegetic rules and the
character of Bella Baxter (when she reaches is extrapolated through many of its cinemat- director’s authoritarian concept both. The sa-
for a cucumber to masturbate with, you can ic iterations is its positing of wealth begetting tirical fissure in this structure comes when the
hear echoes of her interviews where she said bloodlust, the need to exceed what money can oldest sister obtains a videotape of Rocky IV
of Lanthimos, “I just trusted him complete- buy extending to a desire for intimate acquaint- (1985), and, by emulating the American hero,
ly”). Emma Stone’s fans enter the film through ance with violence and death. This is illustrat- is able to break free of this oppressive system
their investment in her and her immersion ed most nakedly in Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for (even though, like Rocky, she doesn’t really
becomes their immersion. Unlike the com- Frankenstein (1973), wherein Udo Kier’s doctor win: after bludgeoning herself in the face, she
plex self-reflexivity of Harmony Korine’s cast- cum land baron penetrates the incision in his stows away in her father’s car trunk, and, hav-
ing of former Disney Channel stars in Spring pre-reanimated female creature, saying to his ing achieved freedom, presumably dies from a
Breakers (2012), wherein the actors’ cultural assistant, “To know death, Otto, you have to lack of oxygen). But neither Stone’s Bella nor
status highlighted the movie as a plane for fuck life in the gallbladder.” But even as Bella Lanthimos himself break out of the world the
commercial exchange, in Poor Things the acquires more worldly knowledge as she con- director has created in Poor Things; they’re
commercialism is subsumed into the fabric of tinues on her journey, she remains an inno- too comfortable there. After Bella confronts
the film. cent, a witness to the ills of the world rather Dr. Baxter about her origins, she chastises him
The intrinsic calculation of Stone’s partici- than a perpetrator: after being introduced to for his lies and he dies in her forgiving arms—a
pation aside, there is a playfulness, a joy of as- the finer things by her bourgeois lover Duncan sentimental twist on Shelley that absolves
semblage, in much of the rest of the film’s cast- Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), she is enlightened “God” of his sins. Bella and her group of “mis-
ing: Ramy Youssef, whose HBO show Ramy by a fellow yacht passenger that her comfort is fits” inherit his estate and live there in a social
is one of the most vital on television; Hanna built upon the suffering of others, and her face utopia (one that oddly resembles the benign
Schygulla, best known for her Fassbinder becomes a mask of anguish. By identifying with plastic universe of Barbie), undisturbed by the
collaborations; Willem Dafoe, who can make the suffering of Bella/Stone, the audience is violence that brought them there. In the final
even the most commercial of enterprises into granted a feeling of distanced pity for the op- shots, they’re shown toasting their own good
exercises in radical engagement. And there pressed—a distance Poor Things isn’t interest- fortune—an invitation to the audience to do
is maybe an intentional joke in the casting of ed in collapsing. the same.
Margaret Qualley, who recently played fet-
ish objects for Quentin Tarantino and Claire
Denis, as a kind of Bella 2.0, whose reanima-
tion seems only partially successful.
There is a meaningful coincidence in the
fact that Boris Karloff became a founding
member of the Screen Actors Guild follow-
ing a 25-hour shooting day on James Whale’s
Frankenstein (1931)—placing the most famous
screen incarnation of the Monster at the fore-
front of the fight to protect actors’ bodies
and images—while Poor Things premiered
at Venice this past summer without its cast
present, due to the prolongation of the SAG-
AFTRA strike over the Frankensteinian issue
of AI. One of the deal points the guild won in
the final agreement with the studios was that a
production must maintain consent and speci-
fy the use of a digital replica from an actor (or
their estate). But, more interestingly, actors
are also entitled to compensation at their usu-
al rate for the number of hours of work that

75
THE PRACTICE
Mar tín Rejtman, Argentina/Chile/Germany/Por tugal
BY HADEN GUEST
The latest film by Martín Rejtman reaffirms
his singular place in Argentine and world
cinema as one of the rare non-mainstream
auteurs working today, with brio and inven-
tion, in the realm of comedy. Beginning with
Rapado (1992), each of Rejtman’s fiction films
have brought new formal complexity and
philosophical depth to that broad and often
dismissed genre through wryly detached, yet
richly humorous, stories centred on hapless-
ly charming heroes trying in vain to recover
something unexpectedly lost—be it an object,
a relationship, youth, or even identity itself.
The Practice goes further by using its narra-
tive of a yoga instructor, Gustavo (Esteban
Bigliardi), re-evaluating his life while navigat-
ing a divorce and torn meniscus, to offer both
a comic portrait of late-mid-life crisis and a
76
self-reflexive distillation of Rejtman’s dead-
pan style and offbeat approach to narrative.
Indeed, Rejtman’s humorously refracted
focus upon yoga’s sustained physical and men-
tal routine could be taken as a playful med-
itation on the rigorous restraint guiding his
own filmmaking practice, which uses extend-
ed rehearsals to carefully define the precise
cadence, rhythm, and movement of dialogue,
gestures, and bodies onscreen. Rejtman’s films
make great use of repetition, echoing motifs
and dialogue to render them comically famil-
iar and strange with each return. The almost
musical cracking sound that accompanies
Gustavo’s recurrent knee injury serves this
purpose while also embodying how corporeal
selves speak directly to the otherwise carefully
understated political and philosophical levels
at work within Rejtman’s deliberate estrange-
ment of language.
As an Argentine yoga instructor work-
ing in Chile, Gustavo is humorously marked
out-of-place in a way that remains subtle to a
non-citizen of the Southern Cone: his dialogue
just slightly out of sync, despite Rejtman’s
avoidance of the most obvious idiomatic dif-
ferences between the Spanish spoken in the
neighbouring countries. From the start of
his career, Rejtman has avoided the pointed
use of slang and colloquialisms embraced by
contemporaries such as Adrian Caetano and
Pablo Trapero, instead refining a neutral, halt-
ing Spanish that foregrounds borrowed words
and mirrors the coolly detached, gently post-
modern prose of his own short stories. While
native speakers might detect a slight tonal
difference in the dialogue of the Argentine
and Chilean characters, Gustavo’s injured,
unbalanced body more vividly expresses his
displacement and struggle to adapt to his ev-
er-changing situation, advancing age, and un-
expected visits by his overbearing mother.
Film comedy in its purest form is a cor-
poreal art invented during the silent era in
narratives told by bodies gliding and falling
dexterously within and across the frame.
Rejtman’s cinema taps (in)directly into this
tradition by extending a mode of formally rig-
orous, modernist comedy best defined by Ozu
and Tati, who both drew vital inspiration from
slapstick and silent comedy. The Practice’s ex-
acting mise en scène and crisp choreography
of action and (non-)reaction also suggests
the influence of Bresson, who began in com-
edy—with his little-known absurdist short
Affairs publiques (1936)—and later made a rev-
elatory contribution to the genre with Quatre
nuits d’un rêveur (1971), an affectionate ode to
youthful romanticism. Like these filmmakers,
Rejtman gives minimal emphasis to dialogue
or any declared character motivation, and in-
stead diffuses narrative meaning across me-
ticulously staging. Language and characters
are mere elements within a larger and subtly
polyvalent world in which seemingly minor
objects and gestures exert a major presence,
and in which exits and entrances seem to have
as much meaning as the characters who pass
through them.
Rejtman also foregrounds and questions
the expressivity of the body through ubiq-
uitous signage, price tags, and the constant
movement of automobiles and other vehicles.
The places that recur in these filmmakers’
work seem to proscribe the kind of action that
can take place within them—as in Ozu’s bars,
Bresson’s cafes, Tati’s convention halls, and,
in The Practice, Gustavo’s studio, which is
marked with a laconic “Yoga” sign. Together,
the world of overdetermined meaning de-
fined by these directors’ films seems, moreo-
ver, to influence if not define human gestures
and decisions, even the most existentially
charged. For example, in Rejtman’s previ-
ous feature, Two Shots Fired (2014), a young
man’s attempted suicide is foreshadowed
by the sudden “death” of his flimsy electric
lawnmower when he accidentally runs over
its cord.
The Practice draws deeply from Bresson
and Ozu while also extending the existential
searching of Two Shots Fired and the auto-
biographical turn that Rejtman made in the
touchingly comic short Shakti (2019), his first
to feature a Jewish protagonist. The come-
dies of Bresson and Ozu, especially Quatre
nuits d’un rêveur and Good Morning (1959),
are Rosetta Stones of sorts that give critical
perspective on the larger worlds detailed by
the filmmakers’ respective oeuvres. In Good
Morning, Ozu uses the absurdly selfish protest
of two obstreperous brothers, who refuse to
speak to their parents after they are denied a
television, to look askance at the ritualistic
small talk of adults that is central to his cine-
ma. In Quatre nuits d’un rêveur, a film-within-
a-film reveals a gangster movie that sharply
parodies Bresson’s austere and unrelenting
style with a relentless violence that points to-
wards the nihilistic apogee of L’argent (1983).
In a similar manner, The Practice reflects upon
Rejtman’s own cinema, and, in particular, the
role of language and the expressive body with-
in it. By literally limiting the expressive po-
tential of the body, here in the figure of the in-
jured yoga instructor, The Practice questions
the limits and possibilities of the body as the
fulcrum of cinematic meaning, a restraint that
again echoes Ozu and Bresson by reaching to-
wards a metaphysical and even spiritual mode
of cinema.
This new spiritual direction for Rejtman
leads to an unexpected climax that takes place
when Gustavo wanders away from a rural yoga
retreat to spend the night deep in the woods,
awakening to find the forest trembling while
before him a huge bolder levitates above the
ground. Whether this vision of the floating
rock is actual or imagined is left unresolved:
upon returning to the retreat to learn that no
one else experienced the earthquake, Gustavo
keeps the vision to himself. This private rev-
elation suggests some version of samadhi,
the highest, transcendent stage of Ashtanga
yoga that Gustavo earlier confesses he has
never attained. The scene also recalls the
earthquake that opens the film as Gustavo is
teaching in his studio, resulting in one of his
female students being knocked on the head
by a folding screen and losing her memory.
That the student had just complained that
he had been giving her unwanted attention,
a charge Gustavo adamantly denies, sug-
gests this too to be, on some level, a sort of
private earthquake, and possibly a kind of
wish fulfillment.
Gustavo’s vision of the floating bolder is
also juxtaposed by the most indelibly re-
peated comic motif in The Practice, one that
comes directly from the neo-silent cinema of
Tati: Gustavo walks into an open manhole while
talking with a woman he is hesitantly courting.
Although Gustavo is taking it slow, trying for
once to define a non-dysfunctional partner-
ship, his tumbling body gives comically literal
expression to the fact that he seems, never-
theless, to be falling in love. The law of gravity
defied by the mysterious rock is confirmed by
Gustavo’s pratfall and absurd embodiment of
a fallen man reaching for enlightenment. The
sense of a deeper logic and tissue connecting the
intertwined movements of characters and ob-
jects has always been at work across Rejtman’s
films, but usually in terms of a kind of market
economy defined by the circular transactions
that animate Silvia Prieto (1999) and The Magic
Gloves (2003), two works that partially speak to
the disastrous neoliberal economics transform-
ing Argentine society. In The Practice, Rejtman
explores a different kind of spiritual connection
between his characters, who are almost all yoga
practitioners and together comprise a kind of
family of searchers and stumblers who likewise
suffer similar pratfalls and abrupt reversals
of fortune.
In fact, Gustavo’s tumble is based on
Rejtman’s actual fall into an open manhole
in Santiago, an accident that convinced him
he had to make The Practice there, his first
film outside of Argentina. The more personal,
intimate inflection of The Practice is further
signalled by its partially autobiographical in-
spiration in the filmmaker’s own decades-long
practice of Ashtanga yoga, and the uncanny
physical resemblance that led him to cast
Esteban Bigliardi as Gustavo. Taken as a
statement about Rejtman’s own practice as a
filmmaker, his new film could also be read as
a meditation on art cinema itself, which, like
yoga, is a refined discipline requiring long
study and dedication, but is also a precarious
business, dependent entirely on elaborate
financing and the resolution and vision of
its maker. That Rejtman remains underap-
preciated outside of Argentina despite his
tremendous influence over subsequent gen-
erations of directors is a stark reminder of
the Sisyphean work of the independent au-
teur, who must find a way to push huge rocks
up mountains or, simply, find a way to make
them levitate.
77
PRISCILLA
Sofia Coppola, US
BY MANUELA LAZIC
The aesthetic appeal of Sofia Coppola’s work—
baby pink and pastel colours, girly make-up
and cute clothes, soft lighting and trippy mu-
sic—belies a deeper understanding of the con-
dition of teenage girls, her favourite subject.
For the filmmaker, these formal elements
aren’t just their surface, but their very sub-
stance—the Lisbon sisters’ pink bedrooms in
The Virgin Suicides (1999) are part and parcel
of their identities. As Coppola’s young girls
begin to find themselves, the culture around
them offers options (more or less limited de-
pending on the time and place) for self-defini-
tion and self-representation. In Coppola’s lat-
est film, Priscilla, the eponymous protagonist
knows, even before meeting her future hus-
band Elvis Presley, how to apply her rouge,
tie up her hair, do her nails, and what music
to listen to (Elvis, of course). All these objects
78
shape who she is up to that point, on the cusp
of further building up her identity beyond
these borrowed signifiers, by either reclaim-
ing them as her own or disregarding them and
finding new ones. Not that she doesn’t already
have a personality; rather, it is muted by her
circumstances, which aren’t that special. For
young American girls, whether one lives on
a military base in ’60s Germany or in an up-
per-middle-class suburb in ’70s Detroit, like
the Lisbon girls, repression is a given.
Much like the song “Crimson and Clover”
by Tommy James and the Shondells that is
featured on the Priscilla soundtrack, adoles-
cence is a trip—a mix of reverie and loneliness,
where dreams and reality clash brutally and
pull us in different directions. We discover
our desire, which is at once nature and nur-
ture, coming from our bones and our media.
Perhaps more influenceable than ever, we nev-
ertheless start to assert our differences and
preferences. This growing individuality often
happens through crushes, whether they be on
classmates or celebrities we have little chanc-
es of ever meeting. “Now I don’t hardly know
her, but I think I could love her,” the song
goes—our imagination runs wild. But Priscilla
Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny), unlike most of us,
did get to meet her idol. At 15, she gets in-
vited to a party by the King himself (Jacob
Elordi), and for a while after that, her dream
was a reality. “What a beautiful feeling!” we
hear as she walks through her school halls in
slow motion, head in the clouds and Elvis in
her heart.
In Coppola’s other films, teenage emanci-
pation is introduced through a desire that is
never truly fulfilled. The Lisbons grow restless
in their domestic prison when they start de-
veloping crushes on the neighbourhood boys,
but the fascinated young men can’t see beyond
the beauty and mystique of the girls and fail to
be there for them. The arrival of Colin Farrell’s
sexy Union soldier in The Beguiled (2017)
triggers desire and a lust for life among the
school girls, but they can’t get no satisfaction.
Priscilla, on the other hand, gets her love story
and freedom from her parents on a silver plat-
ter. Coppola is at her best when she centres on
the exhilaration and pleasure of anticipation,
when thinking proves not so wishful after all.
As Priscilla enters Elvis’ party, she sees his
tall silhouette across the room, the distance
between them at once shorter than ever yet
significant—a classic meet-cute but, this time,
one between a girl and the embodiment of her
own (and the whole nation’s) fantasies.
Spaeny plays Priscilla with a quiet expres-
siveness, a seeming nobility that betrays a
learned suspicion and introversion that only
breaks when she’s alone. In a car being driven
to Elvis’ house for the second time, Priscilla
radiates a childish kind of happiness, the sort
you see on kids’ faces on Christmas morn-
ing. Like the boys in The Virgin Suicides who
imagined the girls’ glory in their heads pre-
cisely because they couldn’t get near them,
it is in those moments apart from Elvis that
Priscilla’s love for him grows. But eventually,
and rather quickly, she does get the chance to
be close to him.
Priscilla’s first romantic moments with
Elvis are the stuff of dreams, not because
they’re truly perfect, but rather due to their
ambiguity and awkward tenderness. They are
exactly the kind of impossible, almost absurd
situations a teenager would daydream about:
he invites me to his party, then we go to his
bedroom but he really just wants to talk, then
he asks my parents if I can fly to his mansion
and live with him, and he gives me a puppy!
Coppola centres on Priscilla’s bewilderment
at her luck while maintaining a certain dis-
tance, which feels faithful to the real Priscilla’s
perspective on these events today (as an adult
writing the memoir the film is based on, and
with oversight on the project). Much has been
said of the height difference between Spaeny
and Elordi, and it is true that this exaggerat-
ed, neck-breaking contrast emphasizes the
charismatic and material power that Elvis
holds over his teenage girlfriend. Spaeny’s
petiteness also accentuates Priscilla’s isola-
tion and vulnerability in Graceland’s gigan-
tic rooms. Wearing cute dresses selected by
her beau and the make-up he prefers, the
young girl still doesn’t look like a woman,
but rather like Alice in Wonderland—and
she too is at one point drugged, a sleeping
beauty venerated but treated like a fun doll
to play with—except for Alice, it really was
just a dream.
The claustrophobia and forced arrested de-
velopment that Priscilla experiences as Mrs.
Presley echo the stifling overprotection that
the Lisbon girls went through. Like them,
Priscilla isn’t allowed to evolve beyond her
“pure” innocence, as Elvis calls it, and is obli-
gated not only to be stuck in her own childish
fantasy, but also to remain one for the King,
who prefers cheating on her than helping her
lose her virginity. In just a few scenes, Elordi
manages to reveal the broken, lonely, used
child under the hypersexual and flamboyant
young man, and the initial tenderness be-
tween the couple feels genuine. But fantasies
are meant to be transcended, not just realized:
Elvis himself, like many celebrated artists
before and after him, struggled with seeing
his dreams come true and moving past them.
After a while, Priscilla’s doll life at her idol’s
side isn’t enough for her, and both their fanta-
sies curdle, as if they’d been let out in the open
air for too long. Elvis’ behaviour becomes er-
ratic and violent, and Priscilla wants more out
of life. Perhaps Coppola could have done more
to show the young woman’s growing dissatis-
faction, but the lightness of the ending feels
more like an emerging out of a cloud than a
rude awakening, which ultimately seems more
realistic. The film’s considered and compas-
sionate perspective suggests that, in the years
since she left Graceland, Priscilla has arrived
at her own understanding of her story—one
probably informed by today’s morals and sen-
sibilities, but also by the adult she was finally
able to become.
79
Exploded View | By Chuck Stephens
Pale Shibboleth
Will Hindle’s Chinese Firedrill
“There is a metaphor recurrent in contem-
porary discourse on the nature of conscious-
ness: that of cinema. And there are cinematic
works which present themselves as analogues
of consciousness in its constitutive and reflex-
ive modes, as though inquiry into the nature
and processes of experience had found in this
century’s art form, a striking, a uniquely direct
presentational mode.”
—Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow,”
Artforum, 1971
The greatest film ever made that you’ve in
all likelihood never seen, Will Hindle’s 1968
short masterwork Chinese Firedrill is a rare-
ly screened, never-digitized chamber piece/
psychodrama about memory, consciousness,
involution, set design, comic/cosmic perfor-
mance, and the inscrutable experiments and
sublime experiences of photo-chemical cine-
ma as it was just a little over half a century ago.
80
It’s a movie of a very particular sort, granular
and expansive, gloriously unknowable, a rel-
ic and a revelation…and an altogether fitting
place to bring this magazine to a close.
Chinese Firedrill is still what movies used to
be, back when Amos Vogel published Film as a
Subversive Art: something that you may have
to work for years, and end up being in just the
right place at the right time, to see projected
only once—left afterward with only the lumi-
nosity of your memory. (You can’t download it,
and you could probably count on one hand the
number of times it’s been publicly exhibited
in the last decade.) Professor Michelson was
speaking of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967)
in her protean entry into early ’70s “theory”
above, but it strikes me now, 50-some years
on, that she might well have been contemplat-
ing Chinese Firedrill, in which a shaggy dream-
er (Hindle, in a flamboyant wig and occasional
bearskin) awakens in a small and mysterious
place that is almost certainly the shanty of
his own mind. The walls are inexplicably cov-
ered in written-backwards graffiti: “New
Brunswick,” “Dachau,” “Hairy Place,” “Japan.”
Attempting certain strategies for organizing
his clutter—sorting IBM cards, spilling them
again, shovelling them about the hovel—the
shaggy dreamer contemplates what might be
his memories. Superimposed flurries of glow-
ing fragments flood in: mother, violence, cere-
monial candles, shards of coloured glass. The
film is his process of making, beautifully and
ever-elusively, his interiority available for all
to see.
Shot in San Francisco, Chinese Firedrill is
scored with sonar pings, warbly film-score
exotica, and a run-on reminiscence in a ram-
bling voiceover that evokes wartime, father,
family, ethnicity, and nomadism, all in a
sketchy Eastern European accent that might
be a comic riff on Jonas Mekas (who’s said
to have taken it personally). Figures appear:
a boy bathing in a tiny tub, a shaggy doppel-
ganger and a woman Saran-wrapped in glitter,
comingling just beyond the space’s sole glow-
ing aperture. Each visual is at once entirely
specific, lustrously photographed, and limit-
lessly unstable. Is that bottle-shaped portal
large or small? An escape hatch, a membrane,
or a blockage? “Pale Shibboleth,” announces
a backwards slogan on the wall; on another,
a torn bit of a poster for Masumura’s Manji
(1964). Everything is legible, nothing makes
sense. “Chinese Firedrill is a romantic, nos-
talgic film,” wrote Gene Youngblood, one of
Hindle’s greatest contemporaneous champi-
ons, in his epochal Expanded Cinema. “Yet its
nostalgia is of the unknown, of vague emo-
tions, haunted dreams, unspoken words, si-
lences between sounds. It’s a nostalgia for the
oceanic present rather than a remembered
past. It is total fantasy; yet like the best fanta-
sies—8 1⁄2, Beauty and the Beast, The Children
of Paradise—it seems more real than the cold-
est documentary.” Alas, documentary takes
time, and we have none left here, so please re-
fer to my earlier Cinema Scope columns on St.
Flournoy (1970) and Billabong (1969) for more
details on William Mayo Hindle (1929–1987)
the man, artist, and iconic/ethereal filmmak-
er. Hindle’s legacy, only 11 some films, each of
them rarely, if ever, seen, remains emblemat-
ic of just how expansive and exquisite 20th-
century cinema truly was, and of just how deep-
ly into that legacy we’re all still eager to go.
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