Never Coming to a Cinema Near You - Arthouse Cinema 2015

Latest Lav Diaz leviathan gets a NY showing Sunday

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/from-what-is-before

not really feeling it. Labuza:

...the problem with Diaz is rarely the length, but always the failed drama. So this is par for the course: a masterful 3.5 hours of time, nature, only occasionally punishing, before it turns into a movie where everyone just decided to become evil and kill each other. Good looking digital black and white though.

didn't notice before i pasted Frederik's last title the double "cinema". So damn European.

Sorry... The Diaz is quite good, but his best film of 2014 was clearly the documentary Storm Children.

aw, i was gonna call this thread "everything that doesn't have a raccon in space"

The Diaz is quite good, but his best film of 2014 was clearly the documentary Storm Children.

showing at NYC MoMA this weekend, not sure I can get to it

It was my favourite film from 2014 seen in 2014. Won't be #1 on my list now (STRAY DOGS!) and it's the kind of film that might play completely different on a rewatch, but the memory of it keeps growing in my mind.

8 hours of Diaz in a weekend... That would be intense. I still don't know what I think about him, I'm not completely unsure he isn't a charlatan with occasional flashes of brilliance. Wasn't a huge fan of Norte, but man, was I tired.

i'm skeptical of the Slow Cinema & New Miserablism or whatever it is. not a big fan of Pedro Costa either.

but i guess it depends, i like lisandro alonso & (sometimes) tsai ming-liang.

'Slow cinema' surely covers Hou, Edward Yang, Straub & Huillet and many others - so I'm often on board w/it but its not always going to work, which it shouldn't.

This was also linked the 2014 thread (this is late, or slow :-)):

Harun Farocki season @ Goethe in Feb:

http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en13760253v.htm

Two programmes of Straub-Huillet in March:

http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en13760246v.htm

Some Duras coming along, unfortunately I have another thing to attend the same eve:

http://www.institut-francais.org.uk/cine-lumiere/whats-on/special-screenings/marguerite-duras-two-films-on-voice-image/

well i guess the /category/ "slow cinema" includes those guys, but they aren't all willfully difficult and opposed to the mainstream in the same way. Straub&Huillet are godfathers of this trend, I suppose. Hou birthed "Asian Minimalism" I suppose but his work seems to stand apart -- there's such so much going on.

I don't love it because it's slow or miserable. I love a film that plays out like a world, I love really getting to know a place, and the practices needed to make it work. I think that's why I love documentaries like Slow Children, or the new Harvard SEL thing Iron Ministry, or Wang Bing's stuff like Til Madness Do Us Part, or perhaps even Maidan. It's why In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, tracking Fontainhas and it's replacement buildings, function honestly quite a lot better than Horse Money, who's world seems too fake (though it did play better on a rewatch) I guess it's also why I can't stop thinking about the first half of From What Is Before, where it's world is sloooowly assembled, while I, when I think about it, have to agree that the second half might not be that good.

Straub-Huillet is at this point kinda like the holy grail for me, the filmmakers that I've heard the most fascinating, interesting things about, while never having been able to see one of their films. Farocki's Still Life is the only of his I've seen and it's very good. And I'm looking forward to hearing what people get out of Jauja. For a Dane, it's a pretty unique experience...

STORM Children, not Slow Children.

So what Costa does for me in Colossal Youth is to talk about immigration and displacement of people into poor areas. I suppose the thing is to then talk about how 'slow' adds or detracts from that. Similarly Tarr's films are always set in utter misery - but its a misery borne out of utter corruption.

I found Diaz in Norte to be surprisingly accessible if you compare this Dostoevsky to what the Straubs are doing in Conversations in Sicily or The Moon and the Bonfires.

Also iirc Touch of Sin had a couple of 'slow' moments integrated into the rest of the film.

What I've convinced myself I find riveting about Colossal Youth is the way it's use of light and shadow and digital imagery illustrates the fleeting nature of both the transitory immigrant experience as well as the painful, ghostlike, but also longed-for past. I don't know about the slowness, but I think many of the scenes needed to be quite still to make the shadow-play work.

I have a DVD but only watched it once - I need to see it in the big screen :-(

I think emotionally works when you see the worn down faces - Ranciere (who has written about this film) talks about the people as almost in a zombie-like state.

Thinking this could be analogous to Still Life by Sohrab Shahid-Saless, and that is from '74. That last shot and what Costa is doing isn't a million miles apart at all.

Yeah, there's an essay by Ranciere in the booklet to the MoC version of Colossal Youth that I have. Reread it a few days back, as I'm jotting some thoughts on Costa down at the moment, especially on his camera and on nostalgia. I'm thinking about him a lot. I would love to see the two first digital films on a big screen, but they are only available on 35mm and I honestly don't know if that's optimal. It might be too warm. I've seen Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia twice on the big screen, once on DCP and once on 35mm and I honestly think it played better in digital.

Sohrab Shahid-Saless is copied to my list, then. Though - thread connections! - I don't have a list.

still life is a really beautiful film, as his the previous saless, a simple event. very hard to see, but I have copies if anyone is interested. i also have some really cruddy-looking copies of the some of the films once he left iran for germany (and in fact, one film is an iranian-german co-production) but i haven't the heart to watch them.

saless died young in chicago, but i don't know how he ended up there.

frederik are you french? there are several sets of straub-huillet films released on DVD in france, albeit with no subtitles save for French ones (on their films that are in Italian and German).

i have violently mixed feelings on Straub & Huillet. some of their radical posturing is almost laughable, frankly (that is, it's hard to take seriously the idea that their intensely forbidding/austere films contribute anything to the revolution) but there is often something very commanding, even hypnotic, about their best films.

i think of saless's two iranian features are basically carrying on from the premises of neorealism but pushing further in the direction of narrating non-events. kiarostami's work seems to stem from a similar premise at times, although his work is more eclectic. (though i have seen part of an early saless short that almost plays like something from sesame street, it's very different from the features.)

I'm Danish and my French is pathetic. Better than my German, though. It's one of my bigger failings as a very pro-continental European that I speak nothing but English.

I just bought the New Wave set of three Straub-Huillet films, though, was amazingly cheap on amazon. Apparantly, it's kinda a rubbish version, but oh well, the price was right.

Just so when we feel like talking about this again.

ILX Official Slow / Contemporary Contemplative Cinema Thread

I thought to compare Shahid-Saless to Costa because the 'character' seems very much phantom like. Costa's work in the Lisbon projects is neo-realistic too.

My favourite S-H is Too Early, Too Late.

But I saw Still life about five years ago on a late night showing on TV so..

Panahi wins the Bear! Prizes out of Berlin:

Golden Bear – Taxi by Jafar Panahi
Jury Grand Prix (Silver Bear) – The Club by Pablo Larraín
Alfred Bauer Prize (Silver Bear) – Ixcanul Volcano by Jayro Bustamante
Silver Bear for Best Director
- Radu Jude for Aferim!
- Małgorzata Szumowska for Body
Silver Bear for Best Actress – Charlotte Rampling for 45 Years
Silver Bear for Best Actor – Tom Courtenay for 45 Years
Silver Bear for Best Script – Patricio Guzmán for The Pearl Button
Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for Cinematography
- Sturla Brandth Grøvlen for Victoria
- Sergey Mikhalchuk and Evgeniy Privin for Under Electric Clouds
Best First Feature Award – 600 Miles by Gabriel Ripstein

wow -- actor and actress a nod to the stylish sixties and seventies

I'm really hoping that Panahi's Taxi is a remake of the Queen Latifah remake.

It seems to have been a really great Berlinale this year, which is great for me, since Berlin is the only big festival before CPH:PIX, which means I get to see them soon! Many many of these I really look forward to. Also, I'm just going to go ahead and link to (a translation of) what I wrote about Closed Curtain in 2013.

I'm really hoping that Panahi's Taxi is a remake of the Queen Latifah remake.

― Eric H., Saturday, February 14, 2015 3:52 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i just hope there's a cameo from reverend jim

makhmalbaf's the president deserves more attention than it's had IMO. i put it as no. 1 in my ballot for the film poll on ILE.

hasn't shown up in the US. The Gardener barely did.

makhmalbaf's the president

(Hopefully) At yer local arthouse in '15

Did Panahi employ Brazilian models for Taxi remake?

Saw From What Is Before yesterday, which is maybe even better than Norte. The quote of the top of this thread is a cretinous and inaccurate caricature of the film's actual content. It's partly about a country hurtling towards a social/political 'cataclysm', so a sense of foreboding and impending tragedy is present almost from the start (like Dumont's L'il Quinquin, it also uses cattle mutilation to signify something rotten in the body politic) and given the historical backdrop - the declaration of martial law by Marcos in 1972 - it's not exactly unexpected that things end pretty unhappily for most of the main characters, or that economic and political oppression makes many of them act 'badly' (or at least unwisely).

I quite like the fact that Diaz is something of a divisive figure, but his eye for landscape, his ear for the sounds of nature, seem to me undeniable, and not the work of a bullshitter or a charlatan. His credit at the end reads Produced.Directed.Written.Edited.Photographed - so I think he means it, man.

re: Diaz. It seems - from a couple of reviews I've seen - that people are trying to reconcile themselves to the fact he is not going to be making eight hour plus epics that cannot be screened anywhere but festivals anymore. And I'm guessing that if you are someone who is making things that are much shorter that certain elements yer bog standard art house reviewer is expecting to find will be missing. Looks like Diaz is also challenging himself by doing this although I haven't read any interviews.

Certainly look forward to seeing more.

also uses cattle mutilation to signify something rotten in the body politic

This was used quite often in art cinema in the 70s wasn't it? I was trying to get a list of these for an ILF poll.

The Straub link above didn't have its programme published when I linked. I thought it would be old films but its actually Straub's new film (programme 2) so really looking forward to catching it.

What I wrote about From What is Before in january.

I don't think the quote at top is entirely untrue, what I can't forget of FWiB is def the 'masterful 3.5 hours of time, nature'. The way all the characters come together in the first part, some of them wandering out of the wilderness, like wandering out of pre-history, while others - religion! - arrive by boat from the outside. That shot where the healers come wandering along the mountain. And the dancing!

Coincidentally, I finally got that Straub-Huillet dvd I ordered due to this thread. Haven't had a chance to watch it yet. Isn't that exciting information?

Sissako's Timbuktu is certainly worth seiing, but i don't find the filmmaking as forceful as it should be at times. The violence only does upsets once or twice.

sorry about my mangled autoedits

There's Harvard SEL films at DAFilm until March 29th. Manakamana! Iron Ministry! Leviathan, apparantly, at some point.

http://dafilms.com/event/203-sensory_ethnography_lab/

Also, Copenhagen Architecture Festival, where I work, begin this thursday, if anyone happens to be in Copenhagen... We have a clash I'm pretty proud of, showing Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth, Jonas Mekas' As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty and a talk on West-African cinema with short by Djibril Diop Mambety at the same time. Now, I'm 'proud' even though it's not me that have curated it, but still. That's some good films showing at the same time in Copenhagen!

things get serious in NYC this week: Jauja, Amour Fou, La Sapienza all opening.

Yeah, that's a good week. All of those are must sees, btw. Especially Amour Fou.

i don't have time for all 3 in one week(end), so two better run awhile.

OK, Amour Fou might be the best new film i've seen in a year and a half.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFZ51k96r4U

whew!

This has already been released on disc in the UK. I must've missed whatever theatrical run it had here.

I was one of about 3 people laughing in the theater at the best joke.

Ward, It was on the GFT for a few showings immediately prior to the GFF

really need to see amour fou

would love to hear what you thought of the eugene green, frederik; i liked it but remember leaving the theatre just overwhelmed by what digital had done to his style

& congrats on your programming, too. seeing as i was moving ahead in a theatre was really revelatory for me; are you pitching it as having a pronounced architectural bent? i can see it.

jed - thanks, then I definitely missed it - think I was annoyed that it wasn't a new print of Rivette's Amour Fou!

Missed it too :-(

This is a free screen of it @ the austrian cultural institute, might be my last chance to catch it in a screen that is bigger than a laptop.

http://www.acflondon.org/film/cineclub/amour-fou

Amour Fou is also running in LA... and opening in Miami, Seattle etc next month. Looks done in NY after tomorrow tho, which would be atrocious.

http://www.filmmovement.com/theatrical/index.asp?MerchandiseID=400

(Hausner's 2010 film Lourdes is also well worth seeing, but didn't prepare me for this.)

Well, I haven't seen It Follows, but from what I've heard it's a straight up horror film. Girl Walks Home is only horror the same way something like Bande a Part is a crime flick. It's all about the pictures, and the sexy young people, and the dancing. It's not the best film ever, but it's cool.

it follows is a fakeout horror film. Girl Walks Home is a drama with a vampire. hard to be a god is snorting pixie stix while someone dangles chicken feet in front of your eyes.
all three aren't flawless but all three are well worth seeing.

Haven't seen them yet but Hard To Be A God and Tale Of Tales are firmly in the "Finally! Something for me!" zone. Even if they end up boring me a bit.

Hard To Be A God actually looks a bit like Zulawski's On The Silver Globe.

Sounds good with Tale of Tales! Looking forward to that one.

Hong Sang-soo wins Golden Leopard. Zulaswski Best Director. Script and Actress goes to Japanese five-hour film Happy Hour.

http://www.pardolive.ch/pardo/pardo-live/today-at-festival/2015/day-11/LOC68-Palmares/palmares-2015.html

on the Hong film (hope to see it at NYFF)

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-locarno-2015-hong-sang-soos-right-now-wrong-then

He has sorta been on a roll this decade. Though I wasn't as big a fan of Hill of Freedom as many others, and prefer him when he's at his most loose and least willfully experimental. But Our Sunhi and Nobody's Daughter Haewon were great examples of that as well.

Last three Leopard winners: Albert Serra, Lav Diaz, Hong Sang-soo. That's pretty good. Much better than any of the big three festivals, imo.

Neil Young points out on twitter, that Hong has made three films with jury-member Moon So-ri. Locarno has been accused of nepotism before as well. But they consistently award great films, so I guess I'm ok with it.

I recommend The Mend, one of the livelier films ever about adult brothers -- kinda True West in whitepeople Harlem -- men together, acting in utterly disgusting primal ways. Also a career performance by sex machine Josh Lucas!

http://www.slantmagazine.com/features/article/interview-josh-lucas

Queen of Earth was...I'm not sure what it was, but it ruffled my feathers slightly.

just saw a v funny pan on Letterboxd that put me off watching it, for now

Which one?

it was Simon Abrams'

I wish Perry was able to synthesize his influences into something that didn't feel like a collection of neat stuff. And good god, stop it with the fucking extreme close-ups. We get it, Cassavetes is your homeboy.

Alternatively: WORST GRIM AND GRITTY WHAT ABOUT BOB REBOOT EVER!

I mean, seriously, how do you fuck up a film that, on paper, could be described as "Elizabeth Moss plays Klaus Kinski in: Daughter of Repulsion and Deathtrap?"

No red flags in that review for me.

but those are not favorable comparisons he's offering.

(admittedly none of that stuff rings my bell particularly except a couple JC films, and i have to see What About Bob)

Just watched Hard To Be A God. As impressively realised as the world is (which makes it worth watching, it really is a big achievement in this aspect), I did find most of the duration quite dull but always visually interesting enough.

Hey, has anyone seen Time Out of MInd starring Richard Gere and written/directed by Oren Moverman (screenwriter of I'm Not There, Rampart, The Messenger, Jesus' Son)?

It's showing at a suburban arthouse near me and I hope to catch it, especially after reading these reviews:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/time-out-of-mind/Film?oid=19116458

Richard Gere stars as an elderly man forced out on the streets of New York City. There isn't much more to the story than that, but for the talented writer-director Oren Moverman (The Messenger, Rampart) it's more than enough. Like no other movie I've seen, this communicates the nothingness of being homeless: the empty days, the banal conversations with fellow losers, the crushing tedium of walking the streets or riding the subway with nowhere to go. The movie was a passion project for Gere, who's had a rough time in Hollywood since aging out of the silver-haired-romance parts; he delivers a sober, subdued, resolutely unglamorous performance. Ben Vereen shines as the Gere character's cagey street buddy of necessity, and there are unobtrusive cameos from Steve Buscemi, Kyra Sedgwick, and Michael Kenneth Williams.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/09/movie-review-time-out-of-mind.html

It's on pay per view but haven't bothered b/c Gere is homeless.

CPH:DOX is showing Wang Bing's West of the Tracks during the festival, and I can't make it :( But other than that, there's the new films by Miguel Gomes - all three parts of Arabian Nights will be shown in a row on a saturday - Zhao Liang, Guerin, Loznitsa, Gitai, Castaing-Taylor, Rivers, Anderson and Wiseman. As well as old stuff by Denis, Rivette, Weerasethakul, and loads of others. I'm unsure how I'll ever fit in all the good stuff, but yeah.

Saw Field Niggas last night in Brooklyn. Remarkable hourlong doc/street portraiture shot entirely at 125th & Lex, keep an eye out. (Given a boost by the True/False fest and erstwhile ILXor Tape Store last spring; see interview below.)

http://nymediacenter.com/events/event/?id=E970FD8D-3799-449C-A91854CC81923AB4&slugid=ifp-screen-forward-presents-field-niggas

http://truefalse.org/news/stimulating-life-a-conversation-with-khalik-allah-of-field-niggas/

the times loved it; i'd really like to see it.

Ilx needs to see the new Porumboiu, I think a lot of you would love it. Exactly the film I needed from him after his last two nearly collapsed under their layers of meaning; this time it's just an exquisitely filmed yarn which refuses to give up it's idleminded yarniness. And the final sequence is sheer perfection, in such an ilx way.

I've also seen the other big Romanian film of the year Aferim! which is also very good and beautiful. A black and white western but otherwise quite typical Romanian...

v hyped for the treasure! seeing next week. interesting hearing you describe the last as collapsing; it felt so diffuse & wide-ranging as to just be like pleasant and absorbing, for me, like just kinda zen & spacious.

I did def like When Evening Falls on Bucharest, but it had so much going on, meta-layers, discussions, film style that did or didn't live up to what the director said, that it was almost too much for me. It was quite a short film for so much information. And coming after a four year wait, I would have been disappointed if that was his new style. The Second Game was just crazy, a single metaphor - rules of football = rules of society, as also seen briefly in Police, Adjective - explored through the most boring example ever... Porumboiu is probably my favorite youngish European director right now, and I love how each of his films adds so much to the discussion of his themes, but I needed a breather, I think. These last two were also bordering on self-parody, and I think that this latest proves that he was in on the joke all along. It's just a lovely film, basically.

field niggas = kind of film i would have to book online to avoid saying the title at the desk.

saw quite a few really great little movies at the london film fest this year - kothnodi, paulina, chevalier, others i cant think of right now. evolution, im not sure about. i think she ran out of ideas and padded a lot of it out TBH. but it had some lovely moments. they were just nearly all stretched to the point of boredom. and she didnt quite explore the concept enough either. bit dissapointing. johnnie to's the office, also looked stunning, started off brilliantly, but then seemed to lose it (or me at least) as i started to get very confused about WTF was going on and to whom and why i was meant to care. started to dart all over the place and end up in sort of lazy sentimentalish territory. or maybe i was just too tired.

looking forward to seeing gaspar noes love in a few weeks too.

FN is the kind of film that will likely be booked at single-screen cinemas/museums.

its only at the ICA in london. title seems like a shortcut to provocation TBH.

The Glaagow Film Theatre has a small season of new French films this month - any recommendations among these?

- All About Them (Bonnell)
- The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (Sfar)
- Diary of a Chambermaid (Jacquot)
- Tokyo Fiancee (Liberski)
- A Perfect Man (Gozian)
- Standing Tall (Bercot)
- The Anarchists (Wajeman)
- Macadam Stories (Benchetrit)
- Microbe & Gasoline (Gondry)
- The Sweet Escape (Podalydes)
- All Cats are Grey (Dellicour)
- The Measure of a Man (Brize)
- Family for Rent (Ameris)
- Wild Life (Kahn)
- SK1 (Tellier)
- My King (Maiwenn)

I really want to see The Measure of a Man, but that's all I can say, have seen none of them.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, CPHDOX showed Rabin, the Last Day yesterday. Has anyone seen it? I don't really know what to say, it's a powerful story, but I'm not sure the drama-scenes doesn't take away from the power of it. Also, Benjamin Netanyahu comes off spectacularly awful in it, I have a feeling that Amos Gitai probably knew what he was doing, with that.

wild life was really good.

I saw all three parts of Gomes' Arabian Nights yesterday. That is one wild and weird experience... Overlong and boring in parts, but heartily recommended.

this indie western w/ Kurt Russell, Richard Jenkins came and went in a flash in NYC... showing on VOD

http://filmmakermagazine.com/96324-if-you-move-in-a-hasty-manner-ill-put-a-bullet-in-you-s-craig-zahler-on-bone-tomahawk/

looking forward to the new jafar panahi film, which im going to see tomorrow... i thought this is not a film was somewhat overrated (if accurately evaluated in its title ho ho), but this one looks good, if only because i doubt you can go wrong with the format.

i liked it better than his last one.

I think Taxi is merely good. The girl drove me mad.

Good, as in better than Girlhood.

The little girl in Taxi is wonderful, and really the key to the whole film ("sordid realism").

I recommend this humble indie tree-selling dramedy, Christmas, Again (shot by the ubiquitous Sean Price Williams):

http://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1598?locale=en

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZGHw3uJJAk

Pinkerton on Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven, a tale of rehabbed junkies set in “Passaic, New Jersey 1990” (when i lived there!)

http://www.artforum.com/film/#entry56672

Bone Tomahawk was really good!

seeing that at MoMA in 2 weeks w/ director q&a

finally caught The Lobster, which turned out to be essentially Animal Farm meets OKCupid. Considerably funnier and less oppressive than I was expecting

should we have a 2016 thread?

Sissako's Timbuktu is certainly worth seiing, but i don't find the filmmaking as forceful as it should be at times. The violence only does upsets once or twice.

― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Monday, March 16, 2015 1:57

Finally saw this and also saw it on some year-end top lists (Bob Mondello, NPR & others). Worth seeing but main characters still didn't seem fleshed out enough.

that gunshot in the marsh though

terrible and heartbreaking even if one saw it coming. People buried in sand and stoned was pretty upsetting too.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35220419

The US National Society of Film Critics has named Spotlight the best film of 2015.

Timbuktu, by Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako, won best foreign language film.

I've never seen Sissako's earlier effort: "Bamako", mentioned below--

http://www.alternet.org/culture/2015-years-best-movies-classic-screen-romance-ghosts-auschwitz-delusional-tv-stardom

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

Yes, African director Abderrahmane Sissako’s wry, rich, tragic and spectacular tale of life under the rule of Islamic militants in northern Mali’s legendary “library city” was nominated for the foreign-language Oscar last year. (It didn’t win, but I don’t begrudge “Ida” the prize.) That’s because the academy’s rules make no sense; “Timbuktu” did not play anywhere in the United States until late January of 2015. I have previously argued that a confluence of talent and circumstance have rendered Sissako — who was born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, educated in Russia and now lives in France — a figure of unique cultural importance. Far more to the point, he’s a great artist: Watch “Timbuktu” and then “Bamako,” his outrageous Brechtian assault against the Western banks and financial powers, and find out how his films speak to the mind, the heart and the spirit all at once.

I saw Tale of Tales yesterday and it's pretty amazing. So many beautiful shots. And it has a nice light touch when it comes to any interconnections between the different stories.