Authors — Vadim Rizov
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The (Approximately) 30 Movies of 2021 Shot on 35mm
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 18, 2022 -
DOC NYC 2021: The Mole, Life of Crime 1984-2020 and Mr. Bachmann and His Class
Mads Brügger’s feature directorial debut, The Red Chapel, took a Tom Green-via-Sacha Baron-Cohen approach to infiltrating North Korea, with the director finagling himself and two comics — both adopted from North Korea, one with spastic paralysis — into the country. Given that it’s not hard to make an actual absurd environment appear absurd on screen, he emerged with fairly pointless cringe comedy: plenty of awkwardness all round but no real surprises. So it’s interesting to hear Brügger admit at the start of The Mole (initially a three-part series, shown at DOC NYC in its presumably final two-episode form) that The Red Chapel, while an […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 19, 2021 -
Bun B on the Houston Cinema Arts Society, Criterion Laserdiscs and Squid Game
In May of 2015, legendary rapper and Texan Bun B joined the board of directors of the Houston Cinema Arts Society—first conceived in 2007, with the first edition of its annual film festival held in 2009. This Friday sees the start of the 13th Houston Cinema Arts Festival, including centerpiece and closing night screenings of Bushwick Bill: Geto Boy, a documentary that allows the late artist to tell his story in his own words. Bun B will be moderating the latter Q&A, which is far from the first time he’s gotten out and pushed for the organization. My job, by definition, does not […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 11, 2021 -
Socks, Scope and 35mm Projection: Mia Hansen-Løve on Bergman Island
Filmmaking couple Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) arrive at Fårö Island to begin a real-life residency for artists who wish to work in Ingmar Bergman’s former home. “All this calm and perfection, I find it oppressive,” she says; “soothing,” he counters. Mia Hansen-Løve’s seventh feature, Bergman Island, sets up a number of binaries, most directly in the film’s bifurcated structure: the first half is a third-person POV of Chris and Tony’s time on the island, the second a film-within-a-film of the project Chris is writing and recapitulating for Tony. (For schedule availability reasons, the second half was shot first, while […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 13, 2021 -
Reflect What You Are: Jim O’Rourke Interviews Todd Haynes about The Velvet Underground
It’s 1963: High-minded Welsh musician John Cale participates in a concert of Erik Satie’s Vexations—per the composer’s intent, 840 piano performances of the same piece, totaling 18 hours—alongside experimental luminaries like John Cage, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. Later that year, Cale appears on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, where guests are grilled by a panel that tries to determine what their particular secret might be. Cale’s performance of the Satie piece is eventually established as his in front of a slightly disbelieving host and audience. The not-so-politely implicit question: Why would anyone do something so […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
NYFF 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Benedetta, Il buco
Given what it took to arrive back at this point, anyone who introduced the first press and industry screening of this year’s New York Film Festival would have gotten a nice round of applause—I too am excited to be back at the Walter Reade Theater, my favorite NYC auditorium on a sheer projection quality/screen size/audio fidelity basis. But all politics is local, and NYFF’s significance relative to the larger festival landscape shouldn’t obscure the specific context of this year’s edition. With its union chapter recognized, Film at Lincoln Center’s staff are now attempting to negotiate and ratify a contract. The […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 24, 2021 -
TIFF 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Earwig
Lucile Hadzihalilovic*’s Earwig is, in broad outline, synopsizable with the same sentence as her first two features, Innocence and Evolution: a child (or group of children) grows up in deliberate isolation from the wider world under the watchful gaze of ambivalently motivated custodians, themselves operating under the direction of obscure masters. Intentions are unclear, but the fundamental fears—of puberty, parents, the body and its sexually-tinged conditioning for adulthood—remain clear and similar. The visual approach is always that of horror’s visual language without its traditional jolting sonic components—i.e., long walks down sinisterly lit hallways or down stairwells, no suddenly violent sounds. When I asked Hadzihalilovic […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2021 -
Venice Film Festival Critic’s Notebook 2021: Dune and The Card Counter (An Oscar Isaac Double Feature)
Two of this year’s high-profile Venice premieres, Dune and The Card Counter, are auteurist works recognizable by multiple of their makers’ signatures. Both star Oscar Isaac and arrive as pandemic-affected productions that (try to) bear no trace of that circumstance. Dune finished principal photography before COVID-19’s global spread, while The Card Counter was 3/4 of the way through production when it hit; Isaac completed its rescheduled remainder before flying to Hungary for Dune reshoots. Optimistically subtitled Part I (this covers the first of the novel’s three volumes)*, Dune arrives with the unplanned burden of attempting to make the case for the Big Screen Experience—Denis Villeneuve’s been very […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 3, 2021 -
“Unfortunately, I’ve Always Been Seen as Very Earnest”: Hayley Garrigus on You Can’t Kill Meme
I first saw Hayley Garrigus’s feature nonfiction debut, You Can’t Kill Meme, in 2019 as a work-in-progress cut. As I wrote last year, Meme is bookended by the unnerving image of an CG-animated Pepe the Frog cradled like a baby in a man’s arms before slowly turning his head. Meme branches out from 4Chan’s infamous r/pol board to interview subjects who include online meme warriors on the left and right, a self-described “lightworker” who hosts workshops at her home and R. Kirk Packwood, whose 2004 book, Memetic Magic: Manipulation of the Root Social Matrix and the Fabric of Reality, codified how memes might […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 12, 2021 -
Parody Pilgrimmage: Five Notes on Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity Hallway
1. After 15 months in pandemic NYC, with no trip out of town longer than six hours during that time, it was imperative to leave and go elsewhere—anywhere—as soon as possible. The easiest way to do this was to pay a visit to James Hansen, a friend who teaches experimental film at Alfred University, logically located in the previously-unknown-to-me town of Alfred, NY. Getting to Alfred, however, is not super simple, so I needed a ride to get from the halfway point of Binghamton to my final destination. Because I try to maximize the value of every visit I take, it […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 19, 2021
