Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab
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The Top 10 Movies, in Their Own Ways, of 2014
I’m not much for year-end listmaking — the release calendar variables for potential inclusion are pretty limited, so it feels like a pointless exercise in rearranging the same 20 pieces as everybody else, and I’ve probably written about the movies in question enough for the time being by year’s end. It is, nonetheless, the tail end of the season where people put out their lists and justifications, so I’ve laid out ten arbitrary categories that allow me to tout some titles, released in the US in 2014 unless otherwise noted. Best DTV Casualty Few people have reshaped the multiplex landscape as much in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 12, 2015 -
Manakamana and Nonfiction’s Power of Contextualization
Yesterday, the upstanding people at Cinema Guild decided to release their catalogue of DVD supplemental essays online. It’s an embarrassment of riches: Amy Taubin on Beaches of Agnès, J. Hoberman on The Turin Horse, Haden Guest on Cousin Jules, to name a few. At my first, tepid perusal, however, it is Robert Koehler’s essay “Sweetgrass and The Future of Nonfiction Cinema,” that merits the most attention. Koehler begins by addressing the myth of the “death” of cinema in the new digital environs, countering that we are in a peculiar renaissance of the documentary. He considers the newfound multiplex popularity of the form, with films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size […]
by Sarah Salovaara on May 8, 2014 -
Phantom Rides
Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s mesmerizing Manakamana is the kind of film that pushes us to confront the basic reasons we go to the cinema in the first place — and what compels us to stay and stare at a screen for two hours. Most of us go to be transported in one way or another; Spray and Velez’s film certainly delivers in this respect, both literally and figuratively. Set entirely within a cable car floating above the Nepali jungle, the camera trained on visitors journeying to a mountaintop temple, the film never stops moving. It’s an action movie about […]
by Paul Dallas on Apr 28, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Manakamana
Ahead of its April 18 release at New York’s IFC Center, the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab’s latest outing, Manakamana, now has a proper trailer. Directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, the documentary captures several 10-minute tram rides to the titular Nepalese shrine through a fixed camera, mounted before the passengers. Spray spoke about the extended metaphor in a wonderful profile on the Lab in Boston Magazine. In the article, the reticent founder Lucian Castaing-Taylor also talks his plans to make a narrative-doc hybrid about sex and cannibalism. If it looks anything like Leviathan, it should be interesting.
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 28, 2014
