Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) A Film by Melvin Van Peebles

Of Melvin Van Peebles’ furious but short-circuited cinematic sojourn I’d only seen The Watermelon Man until now, which looks practically clinical and anonymous compared to the impassioned energy of the much more down-and-dirty Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. That so many have objected to the film on the grounds of its prioritization of technique over all else is a frustrating confirmation of the exact same dominant white man's aesthetic bias that Peebles is aggressively rejecting with this movie (walking out of the screening, friend and fellow critic Jake Mulligan astutely pointed to the discussion in Something in the Air about the extent to which revolutionary ideas must be expressed with revolutionary aesthetics, rightly implying that Peebles’ film lands on the side of the mad young radicals). Progressive intentions aside, though, it's clear that Song is expressing its ideas through discursive stylization rather than classical notions of narrative, character and theme, and it’s absurd to hoist upon it conditions which it doesn’t even set for itself.

Peebles’ gamble is more about destroying any sense of pleasantness, coherence (temporal or spatial), or fluidity from his film’s surface in an attempt to harass the cultural hegemony that habitually subjugates black expression. The movie’s violent layering of beats—a mash-up of various 20th century African-American musical heritages such as funk, jazz, spirituals, street folk—is the gutsiest move and achieves the most tremendous effects, as a cacophony of clashing sound escalates into a sonic mess that wages war with the buffoonish hollering of the white pursuers. Peebles complements this aural disarray with a splatter of visual excess: snap zooms covering the entire spectrum of some of the longest zoom lenses available to 16mm guerrilla filmmakers, in-camera superimpositions, prismatic filters, disorderly handheld work and an onslaught of staccato cuts to traveling shots, all filtered through a quintessentially 70s palette in which the sky’s more burnt orange than blue. This overabundance works best when Peebles’ own character (a fugitive escaping from the largely white police for typically dubious reasons) is on the go, less so when making pit stops at his whorehouse for inert vignettes of awkward missionary sex. Fortunately, Song’s final movement into the desert is relentlessly peripatetic, and it’s where the style crescendos to a primal scream of outrage. Who, during a sequence of such phenomenally grating sensory bombardment, would be foolish enough to go looking for “dramatic content”? Vincent Canby, that’s who.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken (2015) A Film by Daniel Alfredson

"Before long, Heineken and an anonymous piece of human bait have been holed away in windowless, soundproof rooms, at which point the movie stops dead in its tracks—though, to put it more accurately, the undisciplined chop job that is the central kidnapping sequence does little to build momentum in the first place. Without committing to any particular narrative focus, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken devolves into something like an interminable newscast of the actual events, intercutting perfunctorily between the clumsily scheming captors, their confused loved ones back home, and the increasingly delirious prisoners." Reviewed here.

Sabbatical (2015) A Film by Brandon Colvin

"As middle-aged philosophy professor Ben Hardin (Robert Longstreet) endures an existential nosedive, Sabbatical responds by redirecting that void on the audience through stylistic deprivation. Director Brandon Colvin shoots in a restrictive 4:3 aspect ratio and never moves his camera. Generally, his shots run parallel to a wall or some other flat surface, and his characters, rarely moving drastically, exist in geometric relationship to that surface..." Full review here.

Young Bodies Heal Quickly (2014) A Film by Andrew T. Betzer

"Suiting its self-consciously strange, decidedly non-commercial bent, Young Bodies Heal Quickly aims to function more as provocation than big statement, but its lack of dramatic specificity places it in a precarious middle ground between exacting character study and ethereal parable. Like so many road movies before it, the plot jerks into motion with a murder, the accidental result of just another day horsing around in rural Maryland. The older brother picks a fight with a pair of young female four-wheelers, and the younger brother, attempting to stop the violence, lands a wooden bat on the backside of one girl's skull. It's an arresting scene in its sense of ferocious randomness, captured with more deliberate handheld sloppiness from seasoned low-budget DP Sean Price Williams, but what follows quickly reorients the movie's approach, shifting it from vérité to Bressonian remove." Full review at Slant Magazine.

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) A Film by Billy Wilder

"In the credit sequence of Billy Wilder's scathing sex comedy Kiss Me, Stupid, the chauvinist performance of tipsy swing vocalist Dino (Dean Martin) is intercut repeatedly with a group shot of male bartenders laughing hyena-like at his sexist jokes. The message—men are a predatory and cowardly bunch—is clear and the tone-setting mode of address even clearer: caricatured, repetitive, and pitched right at the threshold of burlesque humor and discomfort. (It takes a small cognitive leap to consider how David Lynch, an admitted Wilder fan, took this approach and ran with it in his own discomfiting suburban nightmares.) Things get pointedly faker from there." Full review of Wilder's misunderstood flop and Olive Films' new Blu-Ray release of it is over at Slant.

Old Fashioned (2014) A Film by Rik Swartzwelder

"As polemic, the film is obnoxiously diagrammatic, but it's no more tolerable as a love story—the mode it settles into once recent divorcée and spunky free spirit Amber (Elizabeth Roberts) rolls into town and leases an apartment above the antique shop. It's hard to imagine a less desirable prince charming in recent memory than Clay, a stiff prude with an undisciplined mop of dirty-blond hair and a rotating gallery of baggy sweatshirts that would have made him quite the heartthrob in seventh grade circa 2003. (His defining past indiscretion is heading up a bootleg Girls Gone Wild-esque enterprise, which squarely figures him—and Swartzwelder's feel for the zeitgeist—as unfortunate relics from the turn of the millennium.)" Contemporary cinema may need a team huddle after this to figure out how to collectively recover. My report from the front lines can be found here.

Timbuktu (2015) A Film by Abderrahmane Sissako

"In Timbuktu’s sand-swept expanses, you’re either willfully complicit in the butchered standards of the Muslim authorities or you’re a dangerous dissident. Via a loose, ensemble-based, anecdotal narrative style, the film’s undertaking is to pinpoint scenarios in which this binary proves incompatible with living a pleasant (no sports or partying) or even functional (mandatory gloves for females, even those selling fish) life." Continued here.