Authors — Vadim Rizov
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True/False Film Fest 2024: Creative Subjects
“Are you getting what you want, bitch?” Philly Abe, the focus of Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons, repeatedly offers similarly styled examples of “director-subject negotiations,” in which the latter grumbles before giving the former what they want, now with the added gift of self-reflexive dramatic tension. Director-subject relations are currently an especially fashionable topic (cf. the recent, clearly-titled film Subject); at this year’s True/False Film Fest, Flying Lessons provided its most interesting treatment. Abe is presented first as a representative of a vibrant and unprofessionalized ’80s downtown NYC arts scene but has an equally important relationship to the filmmaker, whose presence […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 20, 2024 -
Doc Fortnight 2024: The Axis of Big Data, Preemptive Listening, Small Hours of the Night, Silence of Reason
MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight begins as the Berlinale winds down, allowing the fest to grab freshly premiered titles from there, Rotterdam and Sundance (from the latter, opening night selection Realm of Satan, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and Black Box Diaries). This year’s 23rd edition has 13 features, six shorts and three “evenings with”; I was able to sample about half of the work one way or another. Days after Zhou Tao’s The Periphery of the Base Berlinale premiere, his conceptually immaculate The Axis of Big Data makes its North American premiere here. The milky grey background of the opening […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 22, 2024 -
Sundance 2024: Devo, War Game, Girls State
First you get radicalized, then you get professionalized—a familiar trajectory Chris Smith’s Devo retells in a familiar idiom. After sitting down with dour conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert for 2009’s Collapse, the American Movie director didn’t make a feature for eight years. He returned to begin his populist doc era with 2017’s Jim & Andy, which made generous use of previously unseen videos of Jim Carrey acting like a maniac “in character” as Andy Kaufman on the set of 1999’s Man on the Moon. In present-day interviews, Carrey described his dilemma: having given a performance at a relatively young age that confirmed […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2024 -
Sundance 2024: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Nocturnes
Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’s first feature, 1997’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, intertwined news footage of plane hijackings with voiceover readings of passages from Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Mao II—he’s no stranger to rendering sweeping diagnoses within unorthodox historical frameworks. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat re-examines the assassination of Patrice Lumumba; the Soundtrack portion of the title points to the film’s other main strand, the political roles of American jazz musicians during the period, ranging from unwittingly complicit—Louis Armstrong performed a show in the Congo unaware that he was providing cover for CIA actions—to actively dissident, with the film bookended by vocalist […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 23, 2024 -
Sundance 2024: A Different Man, Realm of Satan
There’s a story about a Soviet commissar who, upon seeing Solaris, proved that he both completely understood the movie and didn’t understand it at all by indignantly demanding to know what the point is of humanity going from one end of the universe to the other if they bring all their emotional shit with them. That’s not far from the moral of Aaron Schimberg’s third feature A Different Man, the story of a man who gets radical plastic surgery only to find out he still has to live with himself. Containing elements of Seconds (plastic surgery with unintended consequences) and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 22, 2024 -
Sundance 2024: Presence, A Real Pain
An experiment in shooting a movie entirely from a first-person POV, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has conceptual precedents but no meaningful ones in terms of the camera’s weight and the operator’s resulting physical relationship to it. 1947’s Lady in the Lake tried nonstop subjectivity with a bulky 35mm camera; 2009’s Enter the Void eliminated the embodied camera in its second half of weightless drifting. More recently there’s Hardcore Henry, which strapped GoPros to its protagonist’s head for a bouncy embodiment of a stuntman’s hardest workday. In Presence, Soderbergh’s longtime practice of acting as his own cinematographer and operator takes on an […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2024 -
Sundance 2024: Between the Temples, Seeking Mavis Beacon
It’s rare to see a comedy immediately get going in its first shot as Between the Temples does—no credits, throat-clearing establishing shots or slow unveiling of protagonists, instead a slow zoom out introducing cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) being cornered at the dinner table by his moms Meira (Caroline Aaron) and Judith (Dolly De Leon). The two mothers lovingly hector him (this movie operates at dizzying levels of Jewishness), saying it’s time to seek out a doctor for his problem: following the death of his alcoholic novelist wife, Ben is a cantor who can’t sing. This gives Temples a surprisingly normal […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 20, 2024 -
Sundance 2024: Stress Positions, Veni Vidi Vici
Amidst diminishing film coverage and uncertainty about the future of arthouse theatrical distribution, Sundance offers movies arriving with distribution a near-guarantee of concentrated response while also implicitly making the case for elevating those works from the content mill and going to see them in a theater if/when general audiences get a crack at them. With three features apiece, NEON and A24 are tied for most features premiering here this year, a step down from last year’s six [!] last year in the latter’s case. The first NEON title to screen is writer/director/co-editor/co-star/composer Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, a debut feature that […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 19, 2024 -
The 29 Features Shot, In Whole or In Part, on 35mm in U.S. Release Year 2023
During the NBA playoffs this year, a Miller Lite commercial unexpectedly compelled my attention. The frames’ edges were rounded, the images’ scratches conspicuous—this was either shot on film or trying very hard to look like it. Further digging confirmed the spot (title: “You Never Forget”) was shot on 35mm, perhaps in keeping with its nostalgic world of bars with CD jukeboxes and cathode-ray TVs. I’d often read over the past decade that commercials and music videos have been using celluloid with increasing frequency; collating this year’s (tenth!) annual edition of U.S.-released features shot in whole or part on 35mm [2014, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 15, 2023 -
FILM FEST KNOX 2023: A Fest is Born
Introducing Time of the Heathen on day two of the inaugural FILM FEST KNOX, artistic director Darren Hughes teased that “75 minutes from now, you will be among the hundreds—or perhaps thousands—who have seen this movie.” Access to something otherwise difficult to view is at least part of the premise for any film festival; in the case of 1961’s Heathen, Hughes noted that this might be not just the North American premiere of the restoration (following Il Cinema Ritrovato) but possibly of the film itself. Despite its very regional American origins (the performance of Milton Babbitt protege Lejaren A. Hiller […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 17, 2023
