Interviews
Interviews
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“Images are Moving Away From the Eye”: Dane Komljen on Afterwater
The opening minutes of Afterwater, Dane Komljen’s second feature, might fool viewers into thinking they know what they’re in for. At a university, a young man sketches varieties of fishes preserved in jars of glass. A young woman attends class in a lab with microscopes on every table. They don’t speak, their expressions remain impassive. We observe them in static and meticulous compositions, as if they themselves were specimens. When a character reads from a book about limnology, i.e. the study of lakes, and the word “microcosm” cues a shot of Berlin’s central train station bustling with commuters, the cut […]
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“After a Promising Beginning, The Producer Absconded”: Dominik Graf on Fabian: Going to the Dogs
Erich Kästner’s Fabian: The Story of a Moralist (republished in 2012 by New York Review of Books as Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist), though less known in the West than the contemporaneous Berlin Alexanderplatz or the works of Mann and Rilke, was highly regarded in Germany in the aftermath of World War II for its depiction of life in Berlin just prior to Hitler’s rise to power. That life—as Kästner sees it—is degraded by sexual promiscuity and economic depression, and although Kästner uncritically reflects his protagonist’s tendency to dismiss the escapades of men as humorous and […]
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“… A Person Deprived of a Legal Status is Further Denied a Voice and an Image”: Philip Scheffner and Merle Kröger on their Berlinale-Debuting Europe
World-premiering in the Forum section (February 13) at this year’s Berlinale, Philip Scheffner’s Europe is a work at once as simple and complex as its title might imply. “Europe” is the name of a bus stop in Europe (specifically in the small French town of Chatellerault) where the main character Zohra, an Algerian citizen, catches a ride from her housing block flat to her job sorting secondhand clothes at an NGO-run warehouse and also to various doctor and physical therapy appointments – her reason for coming to France in the first place. Fortunately, the numerous surgeries and treatments for her debilitating scoliosis […]
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“I Believe that School Defines Who We Become as Adults”: Director Laura Wandel on Her Astonishing School Bullying Drama, Playground
Opening today at New York’s Film Forum before, next week, rolling out to additional theaters across the country, is Laura Wandel’s Playground, an astonishingly immersive and nuanced drama that plunges the viewer into the complex childhood dynamics of school bullying. It’s Wandel’s debut following well-received shorts, and the film’s seeming simplicity belies a pre-production that had to be handled with incredible sensitivity. (As we discuss below, Wandel worked extensively with her young lead, using devices such as finger puppets to walk her through the emotional arc of her character as well make clear to her the “make believe” element of […]
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“We Joke About it, But I Get Very Anxious When Guys Get Hurt”: Set Medic Eloy Lara on Jackass Forever
By the time of the new Jackass Forever, some of the series’s performers have neared or surpassed age 50. Their bodies remain sturdy, if marked by 20 years of unnatural trials. To extend their infamous game of indecent brinkmanship, the crew has endured a brand-new omnibus of freak obstacles and some reimaginings of past favorites. Beekeepers use a queen bee to attract a hive to Steve-O’s (47) phallus; Danger Ehren (45) sustains countless blows to the groin in an exhaustive series of “Cup tests”; Johnny Knoxville (50) re-contends with a particularly mean bull in a ring; series newcomers (“Poopies,” “Jasper,” […]
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“Often We are Communicating Without Words”: DP Daniele Massaccesi on The Matrix Resurrections
After more than 25 years of making movies alongside her sister, Lana Wachowski’s first solo feature revisits the siblings’ most famed creation with a new installment of The Matrix, The Matrix Resurrections. Daniele Massaccesi knows something about making movies with family. The Matrix Resurrections co-cinematographer grew up on the sets of his father, Aristide Massaccesi, a cult figure in the 1970s and 1980s Italian exploitation era who often worked under the pseudonym Joe D’Amato. Daniele Massaccesi eventually graduated from lugging batteries and lens cases on his dad’s Italian Mad Max and Conan the Barbarian variations to become a sought-after Steadicam […]
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“120 Years of the Male Gaze On Our Backs”: Nina Menkes on Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
“Perception is not whimsical, but fatal.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Movies turn viewers into willing participants looking to break through the screen—the “fourth wall”—and temporarily adopt the POV of the camera and taking on its surveying gaze. Your own emotional response may vary—excitement, titillation, utter boredom—but the camera’s eye is your own, if only for the duration of the film. In her landmark essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” written in the 1970s, scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the “male gaze,” arguing that the camera’s eye was inherently male and could often be misogynistic in its depiction […]
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“You Don’t Need to Wait for Permission to Create Art”: Celeste Bell and Paul Sng on Their Doc, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Celeste Bell and Paul Sng’s terrific and deeply moving documentary Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché casts a hand-hewn spell; much like its subject, the artist and musician Poly Styrene (1957-2011), it conjures a collaged world that is alternately intentional and reflective, yet steeped in the search for a certain liberating transcendence from the impositions of identity, family and memory. Born Marian Elliot, in Bromley, Kent to a white British mother and Somali father, and raised in Brixton, Poly made art from an early age. She wrote, drew, made her own clothes, and formed the band X-Ray Spex at 19. The […]
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“How Do We Make This Feel Like It Needs to be Longer?” Carey Williams on Expanding Emergency From Short to Feature
They admit it looks bad: with plans to indulge in a legendary night of partying, college buddies Sean and Kunle (RJ Cyler and Donald Elise Watkins) briefly stop in at their apartment and come across an unconscious white girl passed out on their living room floor. Either extremely drunk or maliciously roofied, the girl suddenly regains semi-consciousness, only to vomit everywhere and pass out again. Along with their other roommate, video-game obsessed stoner Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), Sean and Kunle panic as they weigh the pros and cons of helping a person they do not know in such a compromised position. […]
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“A Movie Should Only be Understood by Watching It”: Michel Franco on His Tim Roth-Starring Psychological Drama, Sundown
Obsessively examining crisis in terms of its navigation and interiority, the films of Mexican director Michel Franco confront common human behavior amidst extraordinary events. In the face of his characters’ often truly confounding decisions, Franco’s interest in the indistinct, in the prevarications of men and women in conflict, and in the disparate realities posed by wealth and class divisions, affords him a distinct place in the contemporary cinema. Since his 2009 debut Daniel & Ana, the preoccupations of Franco’s output appear consistent, even as they may at times suggest a cloying violence, which in all its sundry forms, emerges as […]
