Tired Moonlight and the 16mm Vogue

"In general, shooting on 16mm in a world where digital is far more readily available means accepting—or, in these filmmakers’ case, embracing—roughness. This is all well and good; like many cinephiles who’ve grown into a landscape where the opportunities for such pleasures were already diminishing, I enjoy admiring the textures of cheaper celluloid stock, particularly if a perfunctory use of slick HD is the alternative. But what I’m starting to suspect is that the materiality of this medium (which, tellingly, is on the brink of extinction) is taking precedent in this wave of narrative films over how it’s being put to use through visual language. To say that these filmmakers are choosing 16mm and calling it a day aesthetically is definitely overstating it, but I do wonder if there’s not a certain degree of slackness seeping into the process—a disregard for the craft of artificial lighting or a wily-nily approach to framing, for instance—in lieu of simply admiring the way the medium is capturing reality." For MUBI's The Notebook, I wrote about the recent surge, spawned by Sean Price Williams, of 16mm production in independent filmmaking, a trend that informs Britni West's new Montana community portrait, Tired Moonlight.

The Cut (2014) A Film by Fatih Akin

"Transnational displacement is common subject matter at this point for Fatih Akin, so it's odd that despite repeatedly dwelling on the emotional ramifications of such separations, he still hasn't managed to convey a sense of the sheer size, scope, and diversity of the planet. That becomes something of a crutch in The Cut, his decade-spanning, continent-hopping look at the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, because the film's narrative requires that its embattled protagonist, a refugee named Nazaret (Tahar Rahim), navigate a whole slew of unknown territories and political ideologies over the course of a few decades in the early 20th century." Full review at Slant.

Swept Away (1974) A Film by Lina Wertmüller

After a prelude aboard a ship full of Italian literati quarreling about politics somewhere in the gleaming Mediterranean, Swept Away takes the path not travelled by L’Avventura, imagining Antonioni’s narrative absence—the vanished beauty—as the focal point. Whatever ambiguities the earlier film left dangling with regard to the relative value of the privileged classes are swiftly bulldozed over by director Lina Wertmüller’s gambit of teaming up the materialistic heroine (Mariangela Melato’s Raffaella) with the working-class ruffian (Giancarlo Giannini’s Gennarino) tasked with manning her personal motorized rowboat—a trip intended as an easygoing afternoon sojourn that goes awry when they lose track of their home base. It’s a facile setup—capitalism and communism forced to collaborate!—that Wertmüller takes glee in probing from all sides, then picking apart until the central dichotomy evaporates and reveals sedimentary layers of power relationships. Right off the bat, Raffaella’s shrillness as a bourgeois caricature makes it easy to side with Gennarino’s barked indictments of her cultural ignorance, as well as to applaud his reflexive ability to enter survival mode against her preference for hysterics and constant cosmetic self-interest. But when the duo stations on an island, the rocky geography of which offers Wertmüller ample opportunity to encode power shifts as high-low spatial dynamics, Gennarino’s rhetoric and behavior abruptly veer toward the sadistically authoritarian—his perceived righteous vengeance for the accumulated sins of the upper-middle-class enacted on the Good People of Italy.

Swept Away’s action gets progressively thornier (Gennarino’s revenge fantasy goes unchecked, basically), and with it the angle of the film’s attack deepens. What begins as a takedown of materialism evolves into an expose on the horrific means and ends of masculine power, then a broader critique of the perils of having authority in general, then ultimately the deduction that the implicit codes of society itself are the greatest evil. As Gennarino wills Raffaella under a spell of carnal lust and the two arrive at a perverted but strangely effective co-dependence, Wertmüller’s implication is that the pair has devolved back to a nascent, animalistic state, composed in part of Adam and Eve’s spiritual purity and Neanderthalian barbarity. (A lengthy close-up of the impassioned lovers framed against the roaring glow of a fire in the background christens the mythical mood accordingly.) But even in this newfound harmony, Gennarino’s glaring misogyny persists, while Raffaella never gets a comparable chance to own any persona other than subservience. If Wertmüller’s recurrent staging of Gennarino looking down on Raffaella either mid-coitus or from atop a rocky perch are meant to taken ironically, there’s no leavening impression of Raffaella ever gaining agency as an individual (the closest the film gets to elevating her out of servility is the suggestion, wrung out in a series of high-angle shots of the characters wrestling in sand, that both characters have become equally debased).

In the uncivilized utopia that Swept Away posits as an alternative to the corrupted societal infrastructure, women still play second fiddle to men, a strange proposition coming from a female filmmaker but one that seems aligned to the more regressive extremes of the era’s radical politics. It’s possible that the final sequence—which finds Gennarino, now rescued and reunited with his wife, attempting to escape again with Raffaella only to be thwarted by her last-minute departure by helicopter—is meant as an indication of the victory of the female over the oppressiveness of the male (as well as an amusing comment on the luxuries of the capitalist, always able to just phone in expensive transportation to ascend above a situation literally and figuratively). But that reading is dissolved by Wertmüller’s decision to spend the last few minutes of the movie with the mopey and reproachful Gennarino, a misplacement of empathy that lands the final blow to this adroitly cynical but ultimately wrongheaded experiment in allegorical melodrama.

Navajo Joe (1966) A Film by Sergio Corbucci

"In no small part because of Reynolds's centrality, Navajo Joe feels like the first installment of a no-nonsense action franchise that never materialized. It's got a big-name star whose presence supersedes his fictional character, a theme song that renders its title and central character a jingle, and a barebones plot with broadly sketched good guys and bad guys. It's easy to imagine the central conceit—bandits slaughter members of Joe's tribe, and Joe seeks revenge on them—accommodating theoretically endless and interchangeable iterations. Perhaps Joe, after ridding the southwest of the unruly Mexicans in Mervyn 'Vee' Duncan's (Aldo Sambrell) gang (there's more than a hint of conservative border-policing implicit in the scenario), would attempt to seek peace with his people up north, only to encounter more amoral outgrowths of manifest destiny. The thematic root of Navajo Joe—righteous Native American indignation at the seizure of their land and the killing of their people—is a simple enough narrative engine to generate countless grindhouse plots of merciless pursuit and vengeance." Reviewed a new Blu-Ray of Navajo Joe from Kino Lorber for Slant Magazine.

She's Funny That Way (2014) A Film by Peter Bogdanovich

"Peter Bogdanovich's She's Funny That Way, like They All Laughed before it, is set in a hermetic Manhattan where charming extroverts are always just steps away from hailing a taxi, their budgets for doing so seemingly without ceilings, and no more than a few minutes away from any given destination among a small cluster of self-curated urban hangouts. In one comic set piece that plays like an insider callback to an almost identical scene in the prior film, the entire ensemble ends up, serendipitously, in the same upscale bistro for dinner, having all decided on their own to attend after parting from the same Broadway audition. While it's tempting to fixate on the facets of modern Big Apple life that are missing from this decidedly concentrated portrait (racial diversity, cost-of-living stress, the hassles of urban time management, the subway system), it's more fulfilling to look at what is there: a vision of the privileged class as a comically insular world, and its recognition of the idea that the paths taken by the privileged to reach their seemingly perfectly upheld lives haven't necessarily been any less fraught with self-denied compromise and regret than those of less fortunate city dwellers." Full review at Slant.

The Front Page (1931) A Film by Lewis Milestone

"Key to the 1930s newspaper comedy is the disjuncture between the hermetic bubble of the press room, where typists fire away at their machines and local stories get barked back and forth, and the vast, abstracted, presumably filthy world that lies outside it. The Front Page, the film that many credit as the subgenre's catalyst, puts this internal/external split front and center. Lewis Milestone's direction emphasizes the closed-off quarters of the Chicago news office to such a stifling degree that the camera almost never leaves. On the rare occasion that it does, a preponderance of frames within frames—shots through car windows, compositions that place concrete walls all around the subjects—underline the idea that the newspapermen who work in this 'round-the-clock industry can never really escape it. In a telling shot that gets repeated throughout, the team of fast-talking reporters reacts to something on the street below their elevated office and Milestone tracks from inside to outside, at which point the men are seen boxed in by the window frames." Full review of a new Kino Classics Blu-Ray of The Front Page available at Slant.

Meru (2015) A Film by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

"What drives a man to embark on the dangerous quest of climbing the most complicatedly vertiginous Himalayan peak in the world, all the while filling their loved ones with unimaginable emotional anxiety? It's a fundamental question that Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi's Meru, a chronicle of three climbers' enduring mission to conquer the titular mountain, is oddly disinterested in. Instead, Chin and Vasarhelyi prefer to focus on concretes: the discipline that such a mission requires, the angular shape and varied terrain of the mountain itself, the tragedies that befell the climbers in between their two expeditions, and the various forms of calculated and uncalculated risk involved in big wall climbing." Full review at Slant.