Authors — Christopher Small
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“My Zombi is Not Like Other Zombis… It is Someone Between Life and Death”: Bertrand Bonello Talks Haiti, Day for Night, and his New Zombi Child
A clear standout in Director’s Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Bertrand Bonello’s mystifying, euphonious headfuck Zombi Child finally drifts onto North American screens this week at TIFF. Among other pleasures and singularities, Bonello’s work has long employed a meticulously curated soundtrack to bridge internal gulfs in subject matter both historical and cultural. In his House of Tolerance, set in a brothel late in the Belle Époque, the (at the time, at least) scandalously anachronistic soundtrack featured rare soul and blues records that exemplified the spirit if not the letter of what was on-screen—namely, the pained, Henry Miller-like alternations […]
by Christopher Small on Sep 9, 2019 -
“If the Co-Producer Disappears, Our Company is in Danger”: Komplizen Film’s Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach
Toni Erdmann, A Fantastic Woman, Western, Tabu, Syndromes: Each bears the name Komplizen Film as either primary or co-producer. Founded in 1999 by Maren Ade and Janine Jackowski at their Munich film school, Komplizen has gone on to produce a body of work that displays a keen and consistent intelligence, is distinctive to their own tastes and avoids the whiff—evident even with many fine arthouse production houses—of the cookie-cutter. Komplizen has produced Ade’s three films to date, providing a backbone to their experiments in other fields and giving them the confidence to draw other directors and co-producers into the fold. […]
by Christopher Small on Aug 29, 2019 -
Il Cinema Ritrovato 2019: Forgotten Fragments and Technicolor
“A whole week of fun,” reads a prominent advertisement in the background of the final scene of Henry King’s State Fair (1933), as Janet Gaynor and Lew Ayres slip out of frame in a lovers’ embrace and “The End” unfurls behind them on a billboard. This happened also to be my final image, projected in 35mm on the screen before me, of Il Cinema Ritrovato, the blissful, week-long festival in Bologna, Italy that each year offers itself up as an event of seemingly endless Elysian splendour. But of course, like the Iowa State Fair in King’s movie, it had to […]
by Christopher Small on Aug 1, 2019 -
An On-Set Education: Graham Swon on The World is Full of Secrets
When The World is Full of Secrets showed earlier this year at a festival for debut films in remote Khanty-Mansiysk, Siberia, its director, Graham Swon (a 25 New Face of Film in 2016), briefly became almost as much of interest to the public audience and critics there as did his hypnotic cinematic spectacular. That I was there as the only international journalist in attendance to witness Swon fielding eager questions from this newfound audience of intrigued Siberian spectators strikes me now as a fluke of wondrous good fortune. The movie’s long, discursive monologues, in which 15- and 16-year-old girls narrate […]
by Christopher Small on Jun 14, 2019 -
“That’s Thirty Years of Footage I’ve Accumulated”: Kidlat Tahimik on BalikBayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment and His Pioneering Career in the Philippines
One of the pioneers of independent cinema in the Philippines, Kidlat Tahimik has been tinkering away on his latest film since 1979. Like much of his output, the pugnaciously titled BalikBayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment, Redux IV (2017), resembles as much a collage of moods, periods, film stocks and video formats as it does any kind of coherent movie. Working from an original 33-minute cut assembled in the early 1980s, the film is in part about Enrique of Malacca, a slave who accompanied his master Ferdinand Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the globe. What showed at Play-Doc, the small […]
by Christopher Small on Apr 16, 2019 -
The Thumb-Route: Dispatches From Poverty Row
“I drifted into PRC and couldn’t get out.” — Edgar G. Ulmer In the early 1930s, a wave of prominent directors fleeing Germany had found success at the major or second-tier studios; only rarely were they forced to make films at the low-budget studios found on the so-called Poverty Row. The next generation was too late—if Fritz Lang thought RKO was squalid, it was because he had little idea of the depredations suffered by, for instance, an István Székely (later Steve Sekely, emigrated to the US in 1938-39), a Franz Wysbar (later Frank Wisbar, emigrated in November 1938), or, briefly, […]
by Christopher Small on Mar 27, 2019
