Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Cannes 2024: Caught by the Tides, Misericordie, Grand Tour
Like Jia Zhangke’s Ash is Purest White, Caught by the Tides is a multi-decade triptych beginning in the early aughts and ending in the present, its past emerging from a sort of video diary practice he maintained up through 2006’s Still Life. As he explains, “I got my first digital video camera in 2001. I took it to Datong in Shanxi back then and shot tons of material. It was all completely hit-and-miss. I shot people I saw in factories, bus stations, on buses, in ballrooms, saunas, karaoke bars, all kinds of places.” There are numerous other similarities with 2018’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 29, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: Oh, Canada and The Shrouds
For decades, Paul Schrader’s taste in cinema has been widely known, particularly the Bressonian proclivities he’s repeatedly worked over—and, especially since becoming a Facebook poster, he’s provided an open invitation to make his problems ours as well. Watching Oh, Canada knowing of his recent health scares, my guess was that the topical draw of Russell Banks’s source novel Foregone was death; indeed, after several hospitalizations for long COVID, Schrader told himself, “If I’m going to make a film about death, I’d better hurry up.” Thus Oh, Canada, which reteams Schrader with his American Gigolo star Richard Gere (the writer-director jokes […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 24, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: The Damned, The Invasion
Introducing The Damned at its world premiere, Roberto Minervini stated that the film began from a desire to “deconstruct the precepts in war cinema,” e.g. good versus evil, “hyper-masculinity” and heroism. In the press kit interview, Minervini goes further, stating that there’s never been a war movie “that I would call humane […] Even films that depict tragedy and self-destruction emphasize martyrdom and sacrifice.” Has there really never been a true anti-war film? The existence of Come and See seems to contradict that, and noting that “good versus evil” isn’t real isn’t a breakthrough either, which may be why The […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 20, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: Megalopolis
Now that Megalopolis has premiered, nothing has actually changed. The film is a self-consciously impractical act that few would care nearly as much about if it weren’t very publicly known to have cost $120 million of Francis Ford Coppola’s personal money. That’s the kind of extravagant gesture you don’t get to ever see on this scale, and hence destined to be praised for being willed into existence amidst a sea of algorithimically conceived risk-aversion—or, alternately, decried as a hubristic folly in the trades with a palpable subtext of “how dare he?” Megalopolis is praiseworthy for mostly predictable reasons: lavish eccentricity, […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 17, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: This Life of Mine, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
At dinner my first night at this year’s Cannes, a friend asked our waiter if this was his restaurant’s busiest time of year. Not even close; that would be MIPIM, “the world’s leading real estate market event,” taking place in March and drawing 26,000+ people—a number handily dwarfing the 13,000+ market attendees, plus assorted press and filmmakers, at last year’s festival. It was a useful perspective check: if Cannes is roundly conceded the status of world’s biggest film festival when all components are accounted for, that doesn’t mean too much in the global scheme of things, where cinema, as we […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 16, 2024 -
Jeonju 2024: Walker, A Chronicle in Spirals, Puan
“I’m so happy,” producer Park Tae-joon said at the Jeonju Cinema Project awards, one of the ceremonies indicating the festival was drawing to a close. “Every day I drank […] festival drinking.” Park’s admission was funny and honest, the kind of thing no one on-stage at an American festival would say even/especially if it were true (bad optics). But in fact, Jeonju was one of the most temperate festivals I’ve ever attended, with official parties ending by 10:30 or 11 and many choosing to go back and sleep after that. They could, if they liked, go to Soseul, unofficially dubbed […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 13, 2024 -
Jeonju 2024: Cinema Projects Past and Future
It’s not necessarily that, in a pathetic version of Henry Hill’s childhood desire to be a gangster, I’ve “always wanted to attend a pitch forum.” But I’ve admittedly been curious to see how this particular part of the festival-film apparatus works and never had ready access; impelled by both that and ties of friendship, I went on my third day at this year’s Jeonju International Film Festival to the Jeonju Cinema Project pitching panel. Fellow Filmmaker writer and pal Blake Williams was one of the seven projects—four Korean, three international, with one finalist selected from each category—selected to pitch at […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 9, 2024 -
AI, UHD and 35mm: Arbelos Films’ David Marriott on the Present and Future of Film Restoration
Launching in 2017 with a reissue of The Last Movie, Arbelos Films grew out of co-founders’ David Marriott, Dennis Bartok, Craig Rogers and Ei Toshinari’s experiences working at Cinelicious Pics. Since then, their slate of reissues have included Sátántangó, whose restoration opened up a relationship with the Hungarian National Film Archive that’s led to further Hungarian films being put out by the company, including Son of the White Mare and Twilight. In addition to Arbelos, Marriott has now started a second company with Jonathan Doyle, Canadian International Pictures, specifically focused on his native country’s cinema. Invited to the Jeonju International […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 7, 2024 -
Visions du Réel 2024: The American Way and Other Options
Having living abroad for 19 years, music critic Philip Sherburne recently described the culture shock of returning home and trying to navigate an American supermarket: “the self-checkout machine accuses me of stealing and runs back video of me while calling for an employee to come intervene. Every time you turn around, it seems like a corporation is trying to screw you out of yet more money via another hidden fee. It’s no wonder Americans seem pissed off all the time. It’s a fundamentally hostile environment.” For me, some of the fun of attending Visions du Réel, a Swiss festival focused […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 24, 2024 -
“With a Documentary, It’s More Difficult to Find Humor”: Martín Rejtman on Riders
A decade ago, I interviewed Argentinian filmmaker Martín Rejtman for an hour, walking through the general scope of his career before discussing his then-most-recent feature, Two Shots Fired, which may help flesh out the parts of this interview relating to his first feature, Rapado. Rejtman’s new film, Riders, is only his second documentary. As I wrote in my dispatch on Visions du Réel 2024, where the film premiered, Riders kicks off in May 2020, with extended global lockdown fatigue ramping up; after an opening rally of delivery drivers protesting their horrible conditions (“It is inadmissable to normalize the bodies of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 24, 2024
