What is a sound if only you can hear it? And if you heard such a sound, would you think it came from outside, somehow bypassing everyone else as it enters your brain? Or would you think it emanated from within, never escaping your own field of perception and thus becoming your own private mystery—or, as Memoria director Apichatpong Weerasethakul writes, your own “sonic companion?” The Cannes-premiering Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton and now in release from NEON, originated from the director’s musings about his own auditory disturbances, a series of enormous bangs that erupted in his sleep and would put […]
As I began, for the eighth year in a row (!), to research the year’s U.S. releases shot in 35mm1, the two movie events I was personally anticipating didn’t primarily revolve around that format. One was Anthology Film Archives’s pandemic-delayed retrospective of Canadian experimental filmmaker, multihyphenate artist and all-round hero Michael Snow—initially scheduled for March 2020, finally screened in December and finished just before Omicron started surging around me. Most of his films were shot and shown on 16mm, making the few 35mm inclusions startling for their comparative, immediately perceptible sharpness and sheer volume. I went all in, taking a […]
According to Box Office Mojo, our contemporary plague ended on June 14, 2021—the last day the label “COVID-19 Pandemic” was included on its daily box office reporting. But don’t tell that to anyone trying to release a film in the second half of 2021, as viral variants spread widely across America, plunging the hopes of many filmmakers and distributors. Welcome to Pandemic: Year 2. The merciless persistence of the coronavirus and its wide-ranging impact on theatrical moviegoing and home viewing habits became more entrenched over the past several months—with indies on the losing end of the stick. Struggling to gain […]
“What we’re selling is freedom,” says a digital media executive played by Demi Moore, of the promise of virtual worlds in Disclosure (1994). “We offer through technology what religion and revolution have promised but never delivered: freedom from the physical body; freedom from race and gender, from nationality and personality, from place and time.” Based on a Michael Crichton novel, the movie explores in classic Crichton fashion a theoretically possible but highly unlikely scenario—in this case, a 32-year-old single woman who sexually harasses her married 50-something male subordinate; it is also one of a number of features from the 1990s […]
“With the passing of the years, each neighborhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life,” said French novelist Patrick Modiano in his 2014 Nobel Prize speech. Modiano was speaking of Paris, the setting of most of his novels, but his words resonate with the work of Norwegian director Joachim Trier—specifically, his loose “Oslo trilogy,” which culminates with the […]
As a young woman, Tanya Seghatchian remembers laughing, crying and suffocating through Jane Campion’s early work, a cinematic compass she had internalized by the time she began her first job for the BBC—researching a two-part TV documentary about John Ford, pioneer of the American western. Over the years, Seghatchian’s trajectory expanded across genres and scales, from coproducing the first two Harry Potter films and executive producing more than 20 episodes of The Crown to producing Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love and Cold War, the latter of which was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film, in […]
There is a moment early in The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s extraordinary debut film as writer/director/transgressive character whisperer. Leda (Olivia Colman) is on a solo summer vacation in Greece, lost in a reverie, walking on a rocky path. Then, something—a pinecone? a slingshot?—falls from above and pierces her back. Is this intrusion a piercing of persona, of psychic armor? Is it a portent of indignities to come, or perhaps, is it the shock to the system that triggers Leda’s ensuing momentum of memory? The occurrence speaks to everything and perhaps nothing at all. Leda is a British-born academic who has […]
“When I work on sound for Joe’s films, it’s very similar to meditation,” says Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, sound designer for all of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work since Tropical Malady (2004), including his latest picture, Memoria. “I need to be super focused on every detail. Because it’s like meditating when you watch them, we need to mix the film in a kind of line”— here, on a Zoom call, he makes a slow, horizontal motion with his right hand—“so it’s not too much.” Despite the fact that sections of Memoria, which is about a Scottish woman in Colombia attempting to understand mysterious explosions […]
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