January 1, 2024

Favourite Films of 2023

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Bollywood, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of China, Cinema of France, Cinema of India, Cinema of Russia, Cinema of Spain, Roundup | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Each passing year seems objectively, measurably worse than the one before, at least on a world-historical level, unveiling new lows for evil, stupidity, hypocrisy and tyranny across the globe. I’ve done nothing to change any of it, but I’m glad that, unlike me, there are people who aren’t desensitized, wilfully blind or paralyzed by analysis fighting the good fight. More power to them.

The blog hasn’t been terribly active this year. In February, I started a curatorial section on the site to showcase work from up-and-coming filmmakers, but I haven’t been able to keep it up at a rate I would like. I hope I can resume the section in 2024, even if at irregular intervals.

The primary reason for the inactivity is that I made my first foray into festival programming this year. I was on the South Asia selection committee for the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October-November 2023) as well as the upcoming Berlin Critics Week (February 2024). Both assignments meant six months of intense, non-stop film viewing. A revelation from my time on the MAMI committee is that South Asian cinema is absolutely exploding, with crazy, ambitious works emanating from unlikely corners of the subcontinent, made by passionate individuals with little institutional or industry connections, with private resources unrelated to traditional channels of funding. It was truly an eye-opening discovery. Exciting times ahead for South Asian cinema.

For the first few months, however, I had a voluntary, almost systematic immersion into the history of avant-garde film, especially works from North America. I watched over 700 titles, long and short, canonical and lesser-known. I complemented this with reading books on the subject: Sheldon Renan, Amos Vogel, P. Adams Sitney, A.L. Rees, Stephen Dwoskin, William C. Wees, Jonathan Rosenbaum. But the single most instructive source was Scott MacDonald’s A Critical Cinema (1988-2005), five volumes of magnificently detailed interviews with avant-garde filmmakers from across generations and geographies. These exhilarating, demanding months of watching and reading truly felt like a substantial phase of my cinephile education.

It was also the year I published by second book, Moving Images, Still Lives, a lavishly illustrated monograph on Amit Dutta’s film Nainsukh (2010), published by Artibus Asiae of the Museum Rietberg Zurich. (Readers in India may consider buying a copy off Amazon, where a very, very limited number is on sale.) This book was an opportunity for me to undertake a different kind of writing — less spontaneous but more scholarly, with arguments propelled more by citations than passion. Also, until now, my references in visual arts were almost entirely European and American. Writing on Nainsukh meant researching into Pahari miniature painting and the world it issues from — an exposure I’m really grateful to have gotten.

I had no greater experience this year than watching Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam (2022), a work I would without hesitation count among the ten or so finest films ever made in India. Heck, had I seen it a few months earlier, it would’ve made it to my ballot for Sight & Sound’s all-time poll. With age, I encounter fewer and fewer films capable of shaking me up the way Pellissery’s masterpiece has. It is one of the great spiritual works of the cinema.

I didn’t see as many commercial releases as I would’ve liked, and the ones I did weren’t too inspiring. I’ve consistently had problems with Martin Scorsese’s films set in cultures foreign to him, and despite the thrilling opening hour, Killers of the Flower Moon felt crippled by the same respectful distance that hamper Kundun (1997) and Silence (2016). I found Oppenheimer and Barbie equally tedious, both movies arriving with their own halo. Among Indian releases, I found things to like in several works, such as Thankam, Maaveeran, Kaadhal: The Core, Chithha, Jigarthanda DoubleX, Animal, Viduthalai Part 1 and Haddi, but few were convincing in their entirety. So the list below is entirely composed of titles I saw at festivals or as part of my programming work. They all had their world premieres in 2023 at the festivals mentioned. Needless to say, this is a somewhat arbitrary list, and I can count about seventy other films that could be here instead. But I’ll spare you the hand-wringing. Happy new year.

 

1. Kayo Kayo Colour? (Shahrukhkhan Chavada, India)

Rare are Indian films centred on marked Muslim characters, and rarer are those that don’t employ these characters primarily as objects of violence and social injustice. In Shahrukhkhan Chavada’s tender, trailblazing Kayo Kayo Colour?, Muslim bodies exist in an existential autonomy, untouched by dramatic aggression and capable of accessing a whole range of human experience. Chavada’s film depicts the everyday life of an extended working-class family in a Muslim quarter in the outskirts of Ahmedabad on a historic day. We see a woman waking up early to do household chores, her husband trying to procure funds to buy an autorickshaw, their children playing gender-segregated games. Public spaces come alive with shrieking middle-schoolers, a mother folds clothes with a daughter who has made it out of the ghetto, a girl sleeps over at her grandparents’ place—routines that become electrifying expressions of communal life. With striking passages of dead time and non-narrative digressions, the film creates space for its characters to breathe freely, to simply be. This is a work that opens up a new way of looking at life in India. In its wonderous gaze at the world, in its incredible generosity, in its profound humanity, there’s little I’ve seen of late that comes close. [World Premiere: International Film Festival Rotterdam]

 

2. Mr. Junjun (Niu Niu, China)

In a masterpiece the world is sleeping on, Niu Niu forges a simmering, Dardennes-style character study of a middle-aged taxi driver on the brink of explosion. A fifty-year-old single man responsible for a recalcitrant, semi-paralyzed father, Mr. Junjun must recover his debts to get out of a deep financial hole, but every effort he makes in this direction pushes him further towards the point of no return. The cruel pleasure the film offers is in prolonging Junjun’s moment of rupture through a series of secondary errands that he must run order just to stay afloat: the picture of life passing by even before you can get a hold on it. And yet, this is no mean neorealist melodrama. We have very little access to the inner universe of the bespectacled Junjun, who is a pure man of action, filmed from behind, moving purposefully through the world if only in order to stay where he is. You sense that this man will break down any minute, yet there is tremendous tenderness and grace in him — and in the film, for him. Prepare to be knocked down by the most sublime ending of the year. [WP: Pingyao International Film Festival]

 

3. Slow Shift (Shambhavi Kaul, India-USA)

The work of Shambhavi Kaul, which has a knack for transforming real landscapes into otherworldly vistas, finds its perfect subject in the medieval city of Hampi in Southern India. The seat of the Vijayanagara Empire in the fourteenth century, Hampi is today a World Heritage Site attracting tourists from across the globe. In Slow Shift, Kaul crafts a spectral, non-narrative travelogue of the site that unearths its historical, mythical, geological, ecological and cultural layers. Weaving together images of stately rock-cut monuments, precariously posed stone clusters and an army of langurs taking over the depopulated site, the film forges a post-human space eerily resonant with the barren cityscapes that became common during the pandemic years. In a manner reminiscent of Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculptures, Slow Shift strikes a precarious balance between majestic stasis and imminent collapse. By combining moments of instantaneous change in the landscape with more long-term transformations as evidenced by Hampi’s weatherworn structures, the film evokes the different time scales simultaneously at work in nature, reminding us that even the mightiest empire will turn to rubble one day. It’s truly a planet of the apes, and we’re only squatters. [WP: Toronto International Film Festival]

 

4. Fauna (Pau Faus, Spain)

Aging shepherd Valeriano lives with his herd on the outskirts of Barcelona. With his children away and with a debilitating orthopaedic problem that requires him to hang his boots, he struggles to keep his profession alive. He supplies sheep to a high-tech laboratory next door, which runs tests on them as part of its research to develop a vaccine for the Covid19 virus. Except for animals brought in through carefully controlled doorways, the lab is hermetically sealed from all biological intrusions, while Valeriano makes periodic visits to the city hospital for his therapy. From this incredibly rich scenario, Pau Faus’ Fauna weaves an extraordinary, complex examination of the ways in which science, ecology and tradition prove inextricably linked in contemporary life. “I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction,” these words from Georges Bataille form the epigraph to Faus’ deeply moving, frequently heartrending observational documentary. With equanimity and wit, the film shines a light on humankind’s curious tendency to accelerate change while also fighting it, to master nature and technology while also being overwhelmed by them. Fauna creates ample space for reflection and critique, but supplies no easy answers. [WP: Visions du Réel, Nyon]

 

5. The Film You Are About to See (Maxime Martinot, France)

Maxime Martinot’s short essay is a brilliant investigation into the ways in which cinema exhibition and spectatorship are mediated by paratexts within and outside the films. Repurposing a range of verbal material intended to set context for viewing — disclaimers, introductory warnings, fourth-wall breaking intertitles, notices from theatre management — the film examines the fraught, slippery nature of the relationship between text and image in cinema. Systematically interspersed with these title cards are excerpts from across the history of moving images, arranged more or less in chronology. The Film You Are About to See cogently demonstrates the extent to which such title cards serve to fix the meaning and affect of images, and to counter, as Roland Barthes put it, “the terror of uncertain signs.” The disclaimers we see in the film have a striking resemblance to modern-day trigger warnings that seek to shield viewers from presumed psychic assaults. However, in its savvy assembly of ambiguous movie clips, Martinot’s film suggests that this is an ultimately futile enterprise, for images will always find a way to escape domestication and remain polysemous in the face of texts that seek to pin them down. [WP: Cinéma du Réel, Paris]

 

6. Valli (Manoj Shinde, India)

Valli is a man forced to be a Jogta, a living deity with a female form, believed to be capable of blessing those who worship and honour her. When he isn’t in his Jogta form, though, Valli is bullied by the village men for his feminine ways. The premise prepares you for an overwrought, sentimentalist work, yet Valli is anything but. Manoj Shinde’s stellar film is less about an individual trapped in a body than about a body trapped in a role, deified and debased, outcast and central to the social fabric at once. Valli takes an ultra-melodramatic subject and drains it off all excess, at times with the grace and wisdom of Hou-hsiao Hsien. The lead character is subjected to abuse and insult, but what we see as his reaction is defiance, contempt, indifference, anger, humour — everything that assures us that his dignity and integrity can’t be taken away. Vast passages of non-dramatic action allow the individual to just be. Delivering what is for me the screen performance of the year, Deva Gadekar is phenomenal as Valli, infusing every frame he is in with astounding bits of non-narrative magic, his androgynous body and its gratuitous gestures becoming transfixing without being fetishized. [WP: Singapore International Film Festival]

 

7. Camping du Lac (Éléonore Saintagnan, Belgium-France)

“I’d like to tell you an odd thing that happened.” So begins Éléonore Saintagnan’s gentle shape-shifting epic that metamorphoses from an understated fable to an absorbing myth to an startlingly immediate ecological parable. There will be no shortage of odd things in this one-of-a-kind film that revels in the power of invention and storytelling. Éléonore, played by the director herself, is stranded in Brittany, France, after her car breaks down on the way to the ocean. With little choice, she decides to lodge at a camping site by the Lake Guerlédan while her car is repaired. As she observes a host of characters at the camp, the film itself embarks on strange and beautiful narrative excursions. Together, these quaint detours, whose significance remains tantalizingly elusive, impart a starkly spiritual dimension to Saintagnan’s film, a sense of wonder at the various realities around us, visible and invisible. A gorgeously shot exploration of isolation and community, Camping du Lac may ultimately be about the ways we are (or fail to be) in communion with the mysteries of the world, and in that regard, this is a work wholly in tune with our times. [WP: Locarno International Film Festival]

 

8. Mithya (Sumanth Bhat, India)

After the sudden death of their parents, eleven-year-old Mithya and his young sister are taken by their aunt and uncle to their home in Udupi, much to the exasperation of the boy’s paternal relatives back in Mumbai. While the two clans fight for custody, Mithya struggles to find his moorings in a new environment, his growing sense of security undermined by a creeping feeling of re-living his original tragedy. Engineer-turned-filmmaker Sumanth Bhat’s supremely assured first feature makes us intimate with the experience of its young protagonist while also keeping us at a critical remove from his thoughts. A work that trusts the audience’s capacity for imagination and empathy, Mithya equally respects the complexity of a bereaved child’s inner world, never giving into facile poetry or genre convention. The adults, too, are invested with great dignity even when they are flawed individuals; Mithya’s uncle gets possibly the most piercing line of dialogue I heard this year, one that reveals an entire childhood. With its magnificent child performances in long shots, bold sense of ellipsis, delicately sketched character motivations and unnerving editing associations, Mithya is a virtuoso work end-to-end, an exemplar of honest, personal filmmaking. [WP: MAMI Mumbai Film Festival]

 

9. Dreams About Putin (Nastia Korkia & Vlad Fishez, Russia)

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the widely reported phenomenon of people dreaming about Vladmir Putin found a new life, with Russian citizens turning to social media to describe their nocturnal encounters with their dear leader. In Dreams About Putin, Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez put together a hypnotic anthology of such dreams, recounted by interviewees to the camera and subsequently rendered as oneiric mindscapes in a 3D video-game engine. Periodically woven between these animated passages are archival clips of the real Putin delivering a Christmas address, atop a glider or going on a hike. Are the interviewees dreaming, or are they being dreamt? A work perfectly reflective of a world of tinpot dictators, lopsided wars and generative AI, Dreams About Putin presents a stunning look into the deliriums of those in power and the powerlessness of those who can only be witnesses to it. Korkia and Fishez concoct a bleak vision of a Russia trapped in a megalomaniac’s nightmare in which even live-action footage of Putin’s macho outings acquires a thoroughly surreal quality. Simple, funny, entrancing, with an end sequence that is the most glorious dream of all. [WP: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam]

 

10. Berlin (Atul Sabharwal, India)

Few Indian filmmakers have a firmer command over vernacular genre filmmaking than Atul Sabharwal, who is at the top of his game in Berlin, a scintillating spy thriller revolving around sign language (!) in which we become, as one character puts it, outsiders who feel like insiders. 1993, New Delhi. The Indian Intelligence Bureau has arrested a deaf-mute man suspected of plotting the assassination of Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who is in the country to renew diplomatic ties after the fall of the Soviet Union. They recruit Pushkin, a sign-language instructor, to help them with their interrogation, but the translator is soon nudged out of his neutrality by a rival governmental organization. Berlin, named after a café that was a safe trading post for spies of all stripes, finds Pushkin, as well as India, at a moment of swaying allegiances. A masterclass in staging what is essentially an extended, talky interrogation, Sabharwal’s super-smart, giddily plotted film sweeps us into a treacherous terrain of self-preserving intelligence agencies competing for legitimacy in a new world order. Come for the spectacle of Rahul Bose chewing scenery, stay for an exquisite treatise on the slow demise of the Non-Alignment Movement. [WP: Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles]

 

Special Mention: The Other Profile (Armel Hostiou, France-DRC)

 

Favourite Films of

2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009

 

April 1, 2023

The Film You Are About to See (2023)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Review | Tags: , , , |
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Premiering at the 45th Cinéma du Réel in Paris, Maxime Martinot’s short essay The Film You Are About to See (Le Film Que Vous Allez Voir) offers a brilliant investigation into the ways in which cinema exhibition and spectatorship are mediated by paratexts within and outside the films. Repurposing a range of verbal material intended to set context for viewing — disclaimers, introductory warnings, fourth-wall breaking intertitles, notices from theatre management — the film examines the fraught, slippery nature of the relationship between text and image in cinema. In doing so, it also throws light on contemporary institutional outlook towards problematic works from film history.

The texts that Martinot gathers greatly vary in their tone, style and function. A number of them are pre-emptive disclaimers about the films not being representative of the real world (“merely an ancient fable”), forestalling perceived slight to such institutions as the police, the Red Cross and the Catholic church. A few extend the language of publicity, hard-selling the provocations of the film or preparing the audience for the experience to follow (“not a detective genre movie”). Yet others instruct the projectionist to keep an eye out for spectators pirating the film, while one intertitle registers a feeble protest against the censors: “In its original version, the film ended here, but the censorship demanded an optimistic ending as you are about to see.”

Systematically interspersed with these title cards are thirty-two excerpts from across the history of moving images, from Jules Janssen’s Passage de Vénus (1874) to Angus MacLane’s Lightyear (2022). Arranged more or less in chronology, these images often have a dialectical relationship to the intertitles, which, for their part, are presented in a reverse-chronological order, culminating in slides preceding magic lantern shows in the seventeenth century. This historical regression of the title cards goes not only against their anticipatory function and forward thrust within their respective films, but also against the increasingly slick, sophisticated images on display.

The Film You Are About to See cogently demonstrates the extent to which such title cards serve to fix the meaning and affect of the images, and to counter, as Roland Barthes put it, “the terror of uncertain signs.” Taken together, these paratexts attempt to tame the image and protect the audience, cautioning them about the kinds of violence that the images could subject them to: nausea, dizziness, motion sickness, temptation to vice, even moral outrage. One intertitle reproduces a notice that a theatre in Oklahoma had put up to alert the viewers of Lightyear about “scenes of gender ideology,” assuring them that a same-sex kiss will be fast-forwarded as soon as it appears on screen.

In this regard, the counter-chronological arrangement of intertitles and filmic excerpts also evokes regressing cultural attitudes to potentially disturbing films, the atavistic fear of the power of images. The disclaimers we see in the film have a striking resemblance to modern-day trigger warnings that seek to shield viewers from presumed psychic assaults. However, in its savvy assembly of ambiguous movie clips, Martinot’s film suggests that this is an ultimately futile enterprise, for images will always find a way to escape domestication and remain polysemous in the face of texts that seek to pin them down. In this and its fixation on the perverse detail, The Film You Are About to See comes across as a quintessential work about cinephilia, that illicit passion for smuggling personal significance into curated, tamed images.

 

January 1, 2023

Favourite Films of 2022

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Australia, Cinema of Austria, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of China, Cinema of France, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of India, Cinema of Iran, Cinema of Russia, Cinema of Switzerland, Cinema of the USA, Lists | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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2022 witnessed the demise of several towering figures of cinematic modernism, none more iconic than Jean-Luc Godard. With their passing, it really feels like the end of a chapter in the story of film, one in which cinema was the privileged artform to interrogate history and the world. But their death also registers as strangely liberating in a way, like a clearing in the woods produced by fallen trees that allows us a new, privileged view. Let us hope that the work of these giants will continue to guide filmmakers and critics in their thought and practice.

In August this year, I was lucky to attend the 75th Locarno Film Festival, my first fest outside India. Basking in the gorgeous summertime scenery of Ticino and soaking up the equally sumptuous Douglas Sirk retrospective was an experience to remember, but I’m most grateful for the chance to get to know some terrific people from around the globe, among them cinephiles, curators and critics I’d known online for years but had never met. I’m truly grateful for their insight and company. Mistake: not reaching out to Luc Moullet when I was in Paris after the festival.

In a year that saw the world return to some semblance of normalcy,[citation needed] my own moviegoing habits seemed to have changed for good. The Locarno festival notwithstanding, I went to the theatres, I think, no more than four times this year (Vikram, Ponniyin Selvan: I, Kantara (all 2022) and the 50th anniversary re-release of The Godfather (1972)), which is four more than the last year. Ominous signs. That said, I was fortunate to watch three silent films on 35mm with mesmerizing live piano accompaniment at a King Vidor retrospective at the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation in Paris in September: The Sky Pilot (1921), Wine of Youth (1924) and The Crowd (1928), the latter screening a highlight of my cinephile life.

Although I saw more films this year than any other in my memory, I didn’t watch as many new productions as I normally would, especially from India. Despite the absurd overvaluation it has been subject to in the West, I haven’t see a finer action movie in the recent past than RRR, which felt like a masterclass on how to imbue action with emotional-moral stakes, the missing soul of so many contemporary blockbusters. For all its saturated spectacle, RRR is a minimal film in the way it weaves the fewest of narrative elements in different combinations to emphatic, expressive ends. Gehraaiyaan was a compelling piece of slick, professional filmmaking, as was Jalsa. I’ve always admired the streak of self-sabotage in the career of Gautam Menon, and his superb gangster epic Vendhu Thanindhathu Kaadu harnesses that impulse productively, channelling it through screenwriter Jeyamohan’s touching, tragic vision.

A good part of my viewing this year consisted of a dive into Iranian cinema, which, I can say for certain now, is my single favourite national cinema. Among the 200-odd auteur and genre films (from native as well as expatriate Iranian directors) that I watched, there was very little that I disliked, scores of great works and at least two dozen masterpieces. I hope to publish a list soon. In the meantime, check out Another Screen‘s formidable programme dedicated to Iranian/Iranian-origin women filmmakers, which ends on the 4th of January.

Other personal discoveries this year were the films of Costa-Gavras (Picks: Family Business (1986) and Music Box (1989)), the mid-tier features of Boris Barnet (on whose Lyana (1955) I wrote a text for the amazing Outskirts magazine) and the astounding, hyper-caffeinated anime of Masaaki Yuasa (essay coming up). Without further ado, my favourite films of 2022:

 

1. Matter Out of Place (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Austria)

If researchers a few hundred years from now were to try and understand how humankind lived in the year 2022 AD, they would do well to turn to Geyrhalter’s spellbinding Matter Out of Place, an expansive survey of foreign objects littering the remotest nooks of the earth. Filmed in a dozen locations on different continents, the film traces the planetary movement of human-generated waste, the great paradoxes shaping its production and the massive efforts needed to manage its proliferation. Garbage doesn’t just cover the landscape in Geyrhalter’s film, it becomes the landscape. With cheeky visual rhymes, astute sound design, proto-Lubitschian humour and a subtly psychoanalytic approach to the physical world, Matter unearths the repressed material unconscious underlying the enticements of consumer society and international tourism. But the film offers no easy answers, presenting instead a universe whose horrors and beauties are inextricably linked, one which evokes awe and terror at humanity’s godlike capacity to create and destroy. In its firm belief that the secrets of the world reveal themselves to the questioning camera eye, Geyrhalter’s work possesses a spiritual dimension directly sdescending from the writings of André Bazin, and his new film elevates the sight of rubbish into a religious epiphany.

 

2. Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, Canada)

Somewhere in the dematerialized wastelands of Cosmopolis (2012), overrun now by the vacuous celebrity culture of Maps to the Stars (2014), lives Saul Tenser, an “artist of the inner landscape” who grows new organs that are surgically removed by his partner Caprice during their feted public performances. Saul is a conservative in denial of the rapid transformation the human body is undergoing—a Clint Eastwood of the New Flesh—who would rather excise his new organs than embrace his true, deviant self. As governments and corporates look to quell the insurrection triggered by a cult of anti-Luddite ecoterrorists who sabotage not technology but the human body, Saul must decide whether to remain at the mercy of the algorithms or take the evolutionary leap. The most rewarding way to approach Cronenberg’s stellar, career-capping new work is to take it not as an allegory of current political debates, but literally. In Crimes of the Future, the body is indeed the final frontier, the last repository of all meaning, the sole means to spiritual edification or revolutionary change—a truism already in our Age of the Body. Filled wall-to-wall with dad jokes and dumb exposition, Cronenberg’s silly, sublime, supremely stylish treatise on corporeal capitalism is the most thought-provoking film since Pain and Gain (2013).

 

3. A German Party (Simon Brückner, Germany)

Politics is dirty, and electoral politics doubly so. Few filmmakers possess the curiosity, intellectual mettle and good faith—leave alone the necessary access—to examine the unglamorous negotiations and compromises that are fundamental to the democratic process. Made over three years, Simon Brückner’s magnificent fly-on-the-wall documentary about the workings of the far-right German outfit Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) immerses us into the party’s operations, ranging from cool deliberations of executive meetings to high-temperature grassroots confrontations. The result is a markedly composite picture that offers a sense of the heterogeneity of an organization popularly considered an ideological monolith. Over six illuminating chapters, A German Party presents a political body fully caught up in the dialectical process of self-definition, an organization trying to identify itself through differentiation. The need for the AfD to go mainstream, to form alliances and influence policy runs up against the image that it has built for itself, namely that it represents a force outside the establishment. The most intriguing suggestion of Brückner’s film may be that rightward shift of the party, far from signalling the formation of a coherent ideology, may actually be the fruit of a lack of clear identity. Whether the AfD is the elephant in the room or a paper tiger, A German Party leaves it to the viewer to judge.

 

4. Stomp (Sajas & Shinos Rahman, India)

The Rahman brothers’ boundary-smashing formalist work is nominally a documentary about a theatre group named the Little Earth School of Theatre. For the most part, the film showcases the troupe’s preparations for an upcoming performance at the annual function of a middle-class housing association in Kerala. We see the company’s rehearsal in considerable detail, their work on gesture, movement, voice and cadence, but the nature of their play is sketchy and elusive, like pieces of a puzzle that never fit. Rejecting literary and psychological explanations, Chavittu subverts the conventional artist profile, supplying no commentary on the meaning or significance of the rehearsal and complicating it with absurd interludes. What the filmmakers offer instead is a bracing procedural work intently focused on the physicality of its subjects, emptied of emotional life and operating together as a consummate professional unit. The sensuality that the film radiates comes not through dramatic or formal devices, but from the raw presence of young, athletic bodies populating the frame. Even when it places this performance within a satirical, self-reflexive social context, the film remains gentle, focused on the troupe’s single-minded artistry in the face of indifference and marginalization. Chavittu is all grace.

 

5. Nazarbazi (Maryam Tafakory, Iran-UK)

The problem with film censorship, as Judith Williamson pointed out, isn’t that it rids movies of objectionable matter, but that it makes everything else seem dirty. Drawing images and sounds from almost a hundred Iranian films made since the 1979 revolution, overlaying them with evocative fragments of citations and original text, Maryam Tafakory’s ambitious, enrapturing video collage Nazarbazi illuminates how the Islamic regime’s censorship codes, specifically its restriction on showing men and women touching each other on screen, displaced this repressed sexuality onto other sensations, objects and aesthetic elements. An astonishing example of film criticism as an artwork in itself, Tafakory’s exhilarating, tactile montage locates the erotics of cinematic art in fluttering fabric, clinking bangles, slashed wrists, breaking glass, aromatic food, sweeping camera movements and, of course, the play of glances. Supressed desire finds a way to manifest not just in filmmakers’ cunning paraphrase of taboo actions, but simply in the ontology of the medium; sensuality in cinema is revealed not just as what artists express, but as what they can’t help but express, thanks to the inherent voluptuousness of moving bodies, caressing textures and resonating sounds. Watching Iranian films after Nazarbazi, you might find yourself asking the same question as Diane Keaton in Love and Death (1975): can we not talk about sex so much?

 

6. Footnote (Zhengfan Yang, USA-China)

Terror floats in the air in Footnote, not just due to the pandemic, but also because the film’s soundtrack consists entirely of police radio communication from Chicago city. The incoming complaints are by turns petty and serious, ranging from minor disagreements with neighbours to drive-by shootings, and officers are tasked with everything from delivering a lost pet home to checking on isolated senior citizens. Seemingly gathered over a year, these excerpts reveal an extremely busy, probably understaffed police force grappling with the tensions of a diverse, multicultural city. The image, meanwhile, comprises wide-angle shots of open spaces filmed from a higher vantage point— intersections, highways, beaches, parking lots, rooftops—almost always featuring ant-like, solitary human figures animating the frame. Thanks to the thrillingly dialectical relation that Footnote sets up between sound and image, these calming panoramas become vehicles of anxiety, with human bodies turning into agents of both biological and criminal threat. Widening the chasm between the home and the world, the radio chatter colours the images with a feeling of alienation and paranoia. In the way the airwaves convert ordinary window views into something akin to CCTV footage, pregnant with dramatic incident, Footnote might be tapping into a fundamental psychological condition of life in America. Also, the finest Hitchcock remake in ages?

 

7. The Plains (David Easteal, Australia)

The Plains channels the spirit of Jeanne Dielman into Andrew Rakowski, a middle-aged lawyer who leaves office every evening just past 5 P.M. to drive home to suburban Melbourne. Easteal’s cyclical road movie formalizes this routine, filming Andrew’s commute over eleven different days of the year with a fixed camera from the back seat of his car. On some days, Andrew offers a lift to his colleague David (Easteal himself), probing the reticent young man on his private life while also generously talking about his own: relatives, career, romance, wealth, mental health. Literally compartmentalizing work and life, the commute creates a transitional zone where Andrew can view each as an escape from the grind of the other. It provides a moment of unwinding, freedom from roleplay that both life and work demand. Yet, for all the me-time the drive home affords, there is an eerie silence whenever Andrew isn’t chatting away or the radio isn’t on, as though this non-place, non-time were forcing him to reflect on Important Things. Despite the apparent sameness, every day brings small deviations that threaten Andrew’s reassuring routine, all accumulating into a powerful meditation on aging and the passing of time, a view of life’s parade from the wheel of his car.

 

8. Red Africa (Alexander Markov, Russia)

Rivalling the best work of Sergei Loznitsa, Alexander Markov’s resplendent found-footage project samples propaganda and reportage films that the USSR made during the Cold War to strengthen its ties with newly liberated African states. In this gorgeous Sovcolor assemblage, we see Soviet Premiers and African heads of state visit each other amidst ceremony and pomp, exhibitions showcase the latest in Soviet culture and technology to the African public and students use the knowledge they have gained in Moscow for the betterment of their countries, whose exported resources return as value-added products from behind the Iron Curtain. It’s a poignant glimpse into a nascent utopia, a world that could have been, which hides as much as it reveals. With cunning visual associations, Red Africa recasts decolonisation as a formal process that concealed fundamental continuities between the departing Western powers and the Eastern hegemon. Uplifting notions of bilateral ties between Africa and the USSR are belied by the strictly unilateral flow of influence and ideology. In its attempts at creating a new world order, Markov’s sharp film demonstrates, the Soviet Union espoused anti-colonial struggles in fraught areas of the globe even as it held sway over its diverse republics—a tragic irony made apparent when the chickens came home to roost in 1991.

 

9. The DNA of Dignity (Jan Baumgartner, Switzerland)

Jan Baumgartner’s moving, loosely fictionalized documentary The DNA of Dignity follows the patient, heroic work of individuals and organizations involved in identifying victims buried in mass graves during the Yugoslav wars. Along with bones, volunteers retrieve articles of clothing, toiletries and other knickknacks, all hinting at stories to be told of those they have outlived. With witnesses passing away each year and new structures waiting to be erected over these burial sites, the excavations are truly a race against time, fighting both political amnesia and nature’s complicity in the oblivion. In their quest to rescue war victims from anonymity, forensic scientists assemble excavated bones into skeletons, carry out DNA tests to ascertain identities and hand over the remains to grieving families, who haven’t had closure despite the end of the war and who confess to no longer being able to enjoy landscape without being reminded of what it hides. Baumgartner’s film obscures political and institutional details to focus on the scientific process, offering a fascinating, inspiring picture of the how the abstractions of science eventually coalesce into human stories. Its success lies in finding the right tone and distance necessary for a subject as grave and delicate.

 

10. Animal Eye (Maxime Martinot, France-Portugal)

Martinot’s funny, free-spirited, quietly radical Animal Eye features a 30-year-old Breton filmmaker discussing his next project with his producer in Lisbon. He isn’t very articulate, but knows that the film will be an “autobiographic animal diary” about his dog Boy. “Films are filled with humans,” he says, “all liars.” Animals, in contrast, are not aware of the camera—or don’t care about it—and as chaotic beings of “pure present,” they evade the signifying operations of the image, emptying it of meaning and intention. As the muddled filmmaker slowly “hands over” the project to his smart, wry producer, the film’s central theme crystallizes: in neither owing anything to imagemakers nor expecting anything from them, the filmed animal offers a way out of the crippling egocentrism of artistic creation. In being just an image, the filmed animal becomes a just image. Animal Eye takes the first tentative steps towards the faint understanding that a “cinema of animals” shouldn’t consist of simply filming the world from their eyes, but filming as them, whatever that might entail. Chaining together clips of dogs from across movie history—subject to sadistic torture, sentimentalism and signification, locked out of the human realm—Martinot’s film embodies a rousing rallying cry on behalf of a “deanthropocentrized” cinema. In its own modest way, Animal Eye marks a milestone in anti-speciesist filmmaking.

 

Special Mention: Saturn Bowling (Patricia Mazuy, France)

 

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