Featured
“It Had to Show How We Rip Each Other Apart”: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia on His Vertical Class-Warfare Netflix Dystopia The Platform
The Platform
Access to food serves as the most basic representation of wealth in Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's The Platform, a dystopian allegory for economic inequality in which a vertical prison pushes people to the edge of their humanity. Inside the Vertical Self-Management Center (Centro Vertical de Autogestión)—as the facility is formally known in the fiction—two individuals are housed per level, and each is allowed to bring one personal item with them. They receive sustenance once a day on a floating platform. Those on the higher floors fill their bellies with disregard for the unfortunate ones below. But once a month each pair wakes up on a different level, a twist that evidences how quickly the oppressed become victimizers. As explained to Goreng (Ivan Massagué), the protagonist of… Read more
“It’s a Pretty Unambiguous Condemnation of a New Age Answer to Life’s Problems”: Writer/Director Todd Haynes on Safe
Safe
With Todd Haynes's classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we're reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross's interview with Haynes. -- Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one day gets sick and never gets well. Her doom is first her own unique physical condition. But her "action" is to be… Read more
DAFilms, DocAlliance’s Streaming Service for Seven European Nonfiction Festivals, Launches in the US
A Campaign of Their Own
DAFilms is a VOD platform run by the DocAlliance, which (per their press release) is "a creative partnership between seven of the major European documentary festivals." Those seven are CPH:DOX, Doclisboa, Millennium Docs Against Gravity FF, DOK Leipzig, FIDMarseille, Ji.hlava IDFF and Visions du Réel. As of March 30, America-based streamers can start streaming for the site for $6.99/month (or $4.99/month with an annual subscription, with individual rental fees for certain titles). While the exact catalogue has yet to be determined, the plan is to showcase some of the best titles from these festivals, both old and new, with future collaborations with American festivals to be determined. Already available to browse: a good amount of Agnès Varda's filmography, a selection of… Read more
Quarantine Reading: I Am My Own Woman and Never, Ever Ever, Coming Down
Iván Monalisa Ojeda in The Voyage of Monalisa
As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we've reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. Today: Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on two trans autobiographical books turned into doc films. — Vadim Rizov Every book-to-film adaptation requires new aesthetic frameworks to address questions of emphasis and the new relationship between the viewer and text/image. With documentary… Read more
Canon Reformation (1): Yi Yi, Ghost World
The view from the apartment balcony in Yi Yi
I'll keep the establishing premise brief: all articles on every platform are coronavirus-predicated for the unforeseeable future, so no need to belabor that prompt. I almost never watch movies at home: with a tiny attention span, I need the screen to be bigger than me and erase peripheral vision—and in NYC, until very recently, I had the unbelievable luxury of a plethora of big-screen rep viewing to choose from. Now I'm bunkered in a roommate-emptied apartment, pursuing my chosen viewing path for maximal self-soothing distraction: rewatching a personal canon of (mostly) obvious titles I haven't seen in ten to 20 years which imprinted over a formative stretch. Yi Yi premiered at Cannes in 2000, started its platformed US release that October, arrived… Read more
Quarantine Reading: Michel Faber’s The Book Of Strange New Things and Undying: A Love Story
Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin (Photo courtesy of A24)
As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we've reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. First up: filmmaker Audrey Ewell (Until the Light Takes Us, 99% — The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, Memory Box) on two works by Michel Faber. -- Vadim Rizov In Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, a… Read more
All Rights Reserved A Publication of IPF