The sound of ocean waves links the first two images of Dora García’s Segunda Vez: a crowd of people, standing and watching something unseen in interior darkness, then an ocean cliffside—a “reverse shot” of a totally different space. The waves dissolve into room tone as the third shot cuts to a young man and woman silently regarding each other in a waiting room, then an elderly hand firmly gripping a cane and, finally, an enormous wall clock. None of these seem to share a common space or time; I assumed all would be clarified sooner or later and didn’t worry about it […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 27, 2019Todd Douglas Miller’s Apollo 11, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, originated from the simple idea of using archival footage to revisit, in time for its 50th anniversary, the first moon landing. For those who’ve grown up watching the same images trotted out over and over—Neil Armstrong bouncing on the moon, a burning ring of fire propelling itself backwards toward Earth as Apollo leaves the planet—the premise seems tedious and redundant, an ossified staple of Baby Boomer montages regularly intercut alongside clips of Woodstock and the Vietnam War, now freshly recharged by nationalistic rumblings about a space force. And as […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 14, 2019Where Brett Story’s previous feature, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, interrogated the US’s carceral system in twelve formally and thematically distinct segments, her new film The Hottest August approaches climate change, in its broadest sense, through a freeflowing diaristic chronicle of a summer month. Over August of 2017, Story and her crew traveled to all five boroughs of NYC, capturing a broad polyphony of voices that, pleasingly, refuses to stay strictly on-thematic-task. The film just premiered at True/False before proceeding to SXSW; the first screening there is today. Over FaceTime Audio, I spoke to Story about working with a small crew, redefining […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 8, 2019Claire Simon’s The Competition is a sometimes painfully funny documentary about a subject that doesn’t seem humorous at all: the rigorous admission process, heavy on interviews in front of panels, for La Fémis, one of France’s premiere film schools. Its alumni include Claire Denis and Arnaud Desplechin, and its teachers have included Simon herself. One of France’s premiere documentarians, only with The Competition is Simon finally receiving a US release for her work—it’s the first film to be put out by the newly established Metrograph Pictures. Simon follows the process from beginning to end, with students and their interviewing juries speaking in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 26, 2019Editor’s note: with The Plagiarists opening at Lincoln Center this Friday, we’re reposting Vadim Rizov’s interview with its creative team. Note that since the Berlinale premiere, it’s been confirmed that Peter Parlow is a fictitious person. On one level, The Plagiarists is a two-part comedy about a ceaselessly fighting couple, the first half of which takes place in winter. Anna (Lucy Kaminsky) is a novelist, at least aspirationally—completion of her first novel is a ways off, so she pays the bills as a copy writer. Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) is a filmmaker, but doesn’t think he can call himself that—he’s written a script, but that’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 14, 2019Let’s talk about empathy and documentary for a moment. A few years ago, during a slack midday period, a pair of young men made me an offer: $10 for 20 minutes of my time. This seemed fair, so I entered a small room and put on my very first VR helmet. For four and a half minutes, I watched a 360 short about the refugee crisis. There was a camp, and I could swivel around in my chair to see all of its dimensions while sad music played over onscreen statics; at the end, I think there was a URL […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 6, 2019Learning that two documentaries on Steve Bannon would be dropping within half a year of each other didn’t bring to mind face-offs like Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano so much as a dire combination of Michael Apted’s Up series (an endless series of check-ins as Bannon ages in real time) and the pre-McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible franchise, in which each installment would be a chance for a different documentarian to render their own personal Bannon. First came Errol Morris’s American Dharma (which I wrote about here), which has yet to receive distribution; Klayman’s film was picked up by Magnolia prior to its Sundance premiere. Morris’s premise was flawed […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 30, 2019Gearing up for its 16th edition, the True/False Film Fest has announced the first components of this year’s programming. Filmmaker Hassan Fazili, director of the just-premiered-at-Sundance Midnight Traveler, and his family, will receive the True Life Fund, awarded to documentary subjects. Click here to read our interview with Fazili. This year’s True Vision Award will be presented to Spain-born, Mexico-based filmmaker Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda. Following on the heels of past recipients such as Laura Poitras and Claire Simon, Ibáñez Castañeda—whose films include 2013’s excellent The Naked Room, a harrowing look inside a therapist’s office counseling abused children—will receive the award along with a retrospective […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 30, 2019I’m not at Sundance this year but, thanks to a generous smattering of pre-screenings, still playing along from home. Of the six titles I saw in advance, I was most curious about what kind of reception Mads Brügger’s Cold Case Hammarskjöld would receive. Based on his first two films, I’d pegged Brügger as a sort of more self-serious Sacha Baron Cohen; both blur the lines between journalist and satirist, parachuting themselves into definitely nerve-wracking, potentially dangerous situations under false pretenses in service of (at least aspirationally) a larger social agenda. Both Brügger’s The Red Chapel and The Ambassador placed the undisguisably Danish-accented, seemingly unflappable director/”star” in, respectively, North […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 28, 2019I only met Jonas Mekas once, briefly, in the most technical and unimpressive sense of “met”: I was coming out of Anthology Film Archives, emerging from a press screening and grimly proceeding to the nearest USPS branch. He asked why I wasn’t smiling, for which I didn’t have a good or succinct answer, and turned tail. I blew it! He didn’t identify himself and didn’t need to: Mekas’s status as an East Village institution and NYC film legend was imprinted on me long before I moved to the city. Artforum‘s obit puts it succinctly: “His output, which spans seven decades […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 23, 2019