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Lloyd's of London (King, 1936) / Jesse James (King, 1939)

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5/3/23, 128 P. Vũ Miên, Yên Phụ, Tây Hồ, Hà Nội

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The End of a Love Affair (Pedro Costa, 2003) / The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1951)

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...experiments...

4/27/23

128 P. Vũ Miên, Yên Phụ, Tây Hồ, Hà Nội

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Desperate Journey (Walsh, 1942)

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The Blackbird (Browning, 1926) / West of Zanzibar (Browning, 1928) / The Devil Doll (Browning, 1936)

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It's late at night—early in the morning—and three young women find themselves twisting and turning as they attempt to get in touch with one of their beaus in an effort to find out if he's being unfaithful or at the very least deceitful. The year is 1931 so getting in touch means sneaking into the switchboard room and connecting all the right cables and making the call themselves, which they are only able to do because one of them previously had a job working the phone lines. The cords go in and out, a connection is made, a new connection is asked for, and more cords go in and out. The process repeats and the women's anxiety amps after a young woman answers the phone instead of the expected beau.

It's an oft-experienced moment—in movies and in real life, then and now—and Arzner perfectly captures the fear involved in making this kind of a call, shooting it almost like a horror film, the three women huddled in the corner of a room, behind an ornate grate, three figures of light in an overwhelming darkness that explodes with an impending doom.

What makes the scene work so well is the time, the process. Arzner highlights all that goes into making the call—the physicality of actually connecting one phone to another—and in turn, the women have to wait, have to wonder, have to imagine the worst.

Time, in many films made in the pre-code era, is a sneaky bitch. How the films manage to be so short while spending so much time honing in on details, on stray objects, on how things actually get done, on the full range of motion.

Arzner begins many of her crowd scenes up close, focused on one person, before slowly pulling out to reveal the festivities on hand. Time is again transformed. The moment feels slow but somehow moves very quickly—the singular moving towards the plural instead of the other way around.

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Working Girls (Arzner, 1931)

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Anthology did a Lorenza Mazzetti show last night to go alongside Another Gaze's book release. I had never seen any of her films before. Very weird. I really liked the second one they screened, TOGETHER. I didn't read any synopsis beforehand and genuinely had no idea what was going on because there was almost no dialogue, just music and some diegetic sounds, including a beautiful moment when the two main characters went to a pub and suddenly you could hear this very drunk many singing. Mostly you get to look at real people, which I loved. There was also a beautiful scene where a drunk woman sits next to the drunk main character and they fondle each other's hands... feeling each other out. It felt very real to how drunken bar hookups actually happen, a moment that most filmmakers skip to go straight to the bedroom, missing the eroticism of those first points of contact.

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Together (Mazzetti, 1956)

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Taris (Vigo, 1931) / Hail Mary (Godard, 1984)

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 "Laisser tomber les pâtes Panzani pour s’occuper de Vertov ou d’Ozu me semble être une bonne stratégie de résistance en ce moment."

(Dropping Panzani Pasta to deal with Vertov or Ozu seems like a good resistance strategy to me right now.) 

-Yve-Alain Bois

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A Sixth Part of the World (Vertov, 1926)

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"Down the coast 300 miles in Hollywood, they have a contraption that can wash a car in 3 minutes. In Europe, they say this is America. Weston likes it, he thinks it's fun, but he doesn't think it's America. Machines and gadgets are convenient he believes but they cannot do our living for us. He won't let himself be used by them. He tends to weigh their value against what he has to give for them in terms of freedom or self-respect."

from Williard Van Dyke's portrait of Edward Weston, THE PHOTOGRAPHER (1948)

"That is the hardest part of an apprenticeship to art. To open our hearts so that we can feel freely, to clean up the clutter of our minds so that we can think freely."

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There's very little breathing room in Preston Sturges's HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO (1944). In fact, the only two real moments in which you might even dare exhale come at the very beginning and the very end of the film.

It opens in a bustling bar. A woman is dancing. People are drinking. The camera tracks down the well-populated bar, passing person after person, until there's a break, an empty section, at the end of which is Eddie Bracken's Woodrow. He sits alone, wallowing in his beer.

Soon after he is surrounded by a ragtag group of marines and from that point on the frame is rarely empty or even calm. It's continually filled to the brim with crowds and calamity until the very last shots of the film.

After the hilarity and hijinks have been ironed out, the marines hop on a train to leave town and it slowly pulls away. As it does the camera also pulls away from the crowd. Sturges cuts between the crowd—growing smaller and smaller—and the marines—growing smaller and smaller—and the space finally opens up, offering relief.

That that relief is encased in this extremely patriotic moment brings with it an undeniable sense of happiness and pride towards America, which likely seemed normal (and even good) in 1944 but in 2023 made me quite sad.

HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO (Sturges, 1944)

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The Pale Blue Eye is a perfectly mediocre film. The actors are great, the script is good, but the filmmaking is somewhat basic, never allowing the story to have a real impact. Cooper makes strange choices—often deciding to go at things from the side, from a medium shot profile, rather than letting his incredible cast (Christian Bale, Timothy Spall, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Gillian Anderson, Robert Duvall, and more) take us further. It all feels very perfunctory...or better yet, since it's a murder mystery, very procedural. Christian Bale has one of the most expressive faces I've ever seen on screen, he can go big or small but he always brings you in. Here, his gruff visage is often obscured or hidden in the corner of the frame and the turmoil of the character is only known, not felt.

This is generally fine. It's a good yarn. It's the kind of movie you might catch on TCM at 3pm on a Tuesday. You watch it, enjoy it, and never think of it again. The problem, of course, is that movies cost so much more to make these days and there is so much more competition when it comes to where we get our entertainment. In 1946, the year John Brahm's The Locket was made, the average movie cost $665,000, which is equivalent to about 10 million dollars today. The Pale Blue Eye had a budget of 72 million... In 1946, the only way you could watch a movie was to go to the theater.

What then is the answer for a movie like this? Where can it live so that it can be a somewhat financially sound endeavor?

The Pale Blue Eye was made by Netflix but I saw it on New Year's Eve in a movie theater. And while the filmmaking wasn't anything special, it was a beautiful movie. The candlelight was achingly beautiful, especially in the context of the dark and gray and snowy exteriors. I wanted more of Bale but when we did get to see him, it was extraordinary—he's actually allowed age onto his face and the lines of time looked heavy on him (he looked older than Robert Duvall in some ways). Those two things, which gave the mystery story its needed weight, would be lost on one's brightly lit television.

All I can think is that we need to be incredibly inventive with small amounts of money. We need to pull rabbits out of hats and reinvent. We need to play, need to experiment. How do we tell good stories with craft and care but without massive budgets?

Edgar Allan Poe is a character in The Pale Blue Eye and the title itself comes from The Tell-Tale Heart. It strikes me that in this moment of cinema Hollywood is not unlike the narrator of that story. Their greed and capitalistic methods killed what was special about going to the movies—35mm film projection—away. Then they made too much entertainment accessible in our homes. They killed the experience and buried it beneath the floorboards.

And we all hear it beating nearby.... It won't leave us be.

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"What's My Age Again?..."

2022 was a big, messy, mostly incomprehensible year. It feels weird to consider its ending when I have no memory of it ever beginning. But the calendar tells me that it did begin and that in a few hours it will end, so here we are.

I spent half of 2022 running around the city in a five-dollar mylar gold hoodie with my phone flailing out in front of me shooting a movie in an effort not to go insane. While I can make no claims on my sanity, a movie has been shot and I spent the second half of the year—after a needed break—starting to make sense of the footage that was lovingly captured with my friends.

In between the moviemaking, there was a mad flurry of change…

I started working for The Film Foundation and over the past 12 months helped launch the Restoration Screening Room—an online space that screens a TFF restoration for free once a month.

DUELLE published more podcasts and film criticism before Carolyn and I dove headfirst into movie-making, something we are both very excited about. There will be more from us soon about our projects and purpose.

I banned together with my fellow workers at Anthology Film Archives and fought for a better contract via a 1-day strike that brought our community out into the streets in a very inspiring and fun way.

I threw in the towel of my almost 20 years as a vegetarian and adopted a come-what-may diet that doesn’t fit into a box of any kind outside of my making an effort to eat locally and organically whenever possible. I still love vegetables and prioritize them but my god, pepperoni pizza and roasted chicken!

I went to Barclays with Marie and David to see THE CAVS IN A PLAY-IN GAME!! (before this new system they would have simply been in the playoffs but I digress....) Watching this team brought me so much joy this year.

Alongside some beloved friends and very special artists, I presented a few of my films at The Roxy Cinema—it was so great to share our vision of filmmaking with an audience of new faces at a truly fun movie theater.

I visited my dear friend Madeleine in Snow Creek, CA and she took me to Pioneer Town (Roy Rogers! Gene Autry!) and Joshua Tree, helping me to inexplicably usher in a new decade alongside some supportive bunnies. The day after my birthday I awoke at sunset in a yurt outside Joshua Tree and went outside to greet the day and found myself face to face with a coyote and ever since then I’ve been trying to channel that energy.

I left the Upper East Side (Goodbye Donohues!) for Ridgewood (Hello Pizzeria Panina!), majorly downsizing and in turn creating more time in which I can make work and read and walk and cook and see friends.

As soon as I had moved, I was on a plane to Greece, headed back to the Temenos after 10 years away. I ate so much good food and drank so much good wine and saw incredible images and hung out with dear friends who don’t live in NY, spent quality time with NY friends who I don’t see often enough, and met so many amazing people. On my way out of Europe, I rolled through Bologna to see some beautiful films and film-lovers.

I reunited with the beaches of New York City and my soul was (in those moments) at peace.

With Flo and Dan, I helped put together a new NYFF program of Revivals that I was deeply proud of and then was able to share the films with so many wonderful friends that came to town for the festival.

I shot the shit with Paul Schrader for an hour for a NYFF Talk. He complimented my boots and laughed at my jokes and it was perfect.

I watched the Guardians win many games despite no one expecting them to. In particular, I will always remember the final game of the Wild Card series on October 8th, which saw me starting the game in Ridgewood and ending it sitting outside of Lincoln Center next to Dorota and Sofia screaming as we finally got a run in the 15th inning.

We all said goodbye to Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub…. Their passing continues to haunt me and to call into question how we make films, how we love films, and how we live as artists in the world. Also.... cigars <3

Related: I saw an insane amount of great movies! WOW! The programs that were nearest and dearest to me: Imageless Films @ Anthology, Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset @ Il Cinema Ritrovato, NYC’s Movie Renaissance @ Film Forum, Robert Downey @ Anthology, William Klein @ Anthology, Hugo Fregonese @ Il Cinema Ritrovato + MoMA, George Miller @ Anthology, Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller @ Anthology, Kinuyo Tanaka @ FilmLinc, Owen’s programs @ The Roxy + FilmLinc, Essential Cinema @ Anthology, Beth B & Scott B @ MoMA, + Everything @ Light Industry. + a special shout-out to Bradley Eros’s MAYA + COLOUR THEORY.

I took in the written word in a more piecemeal kind of way this year but the books I did actually finish have stuck with me: Sylvia by Leonard Michaels, Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin, Airships by Barry Hannah, What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt, The Other Emily by Dean Koontz, John Huston by Lillian Ross, & The American Cinematographer issue devoted to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Listening to Harold Budd, Cocteau Twins, Chihei Hatakeyama, Fred Again, Fleetwood Mac, Sinead O’Connor, Cleveland Orchestra, David Bowie, Mitsuko Uchida, Burial, Hercules & Love Affair, Blink 182, Lana Del Ray, Billie Eilish, Joan Baez, Smashing Pumpkins, and more got me through many a day.

I shared so many wonderful meals with wonderful people

I’m thankful to have seen shows featuring the work of Antonio Lopez, William Eggleston, Sharon Lockhart, Wolfgang Tillmans, and more + The American Folk Art Museum’s incredible MULTITUDES show.

I spent a bunch of time with a happy dog named Buddy and a beautiful fatty named Moonshine

I struggled with how to use social media and not go insane. In turn I started this tumblr LOL.

The past three years have, for me, functioned like a snow globe… In March of 2020 everything was uprooted, shaken up, and ever since has, ever-so-slowly, been finding its way back to the ground. If the pieces have finally landed, which it seems they mostly have, everything is still there but nothing is in the same place. It remains disorienting and at times, tbh, kind of like an unending hangover. I did a lot this year, but years are long and in-between the memorable moments above was a tremendous amount of uncertainty and anxiety. I continue to oscillate between excitement at the change and the possibility therein, sadness at the change and all that has been lost, and massive fear of the change, especially in the context of our world. It’s a motley mix that makes for strange times and I’m sure even stranger ones ahead.

But there are a lot of us on this godforsaken journey and even if I’m walking down the street crying, which I often am, I’m so deeply thankful for all the amazing people in my shit show of a life.  

Come and get me 2023!

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Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear @ MoMA

12/5/22