Sergei Loznitsa
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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 2022: Triangle of Sadness, Magdala, The Natural History of Destruction
Triangle of Sadness stands as the conclusion of what Ruben Östlund has recently deemed a trilogy about “being male in our times.” (It will not be a quartet.) As with the middle entry of said triptych (his 2017 Palme d’Or-winner The Square), Triangle is a movie of set pieces blanketed by a shapeshifting social critique obsessed with the myriad ways in which civilization and morality distort human life. Its initial target is the modeling industry, a chapter (the first of three, Östlund’s new favorite number) dominated by cheap shots at the scene’s stereotypical superficiality and cattiness, especially its particular gender […]
by Blake Williams on May 24, 2022 -
True/False 2022: Reconvening
One of my favorite memories of attending a decade-plus of True/False is from the 2015 edition of the now-defunct Neither/Nor sidebar, annually dedicated to a small retrospective with accompanying monograph. A selection of unknown-to-me Polish cinema programmed by Ela Bittencourt structured that year’s on-the-ground experience from my first screening, Marcel Łoziński’s 1981 How to Live, as hilarious as promised by its description: “In the 1970s, young Polish couple [sic] attend a government-sponsored summer camp where they learn to become the ideal communist family.” The sidebar produced a number of related beguiling sights, not least the now very senior filmmakers in attendance […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 21, 2022 -
Cannes 2018 Dispatch #2: Donbass, Petra
Speaking of soap operas: Jaime Rosales follows Farhadi’s plunge into the vernacular of Spanish culebrones with a complementary appropriation of melodrama in Petra, an achronological chronicle of one woman’s search for truth, history and her own identity. Starring Bárbara Lennie (who, funny enough, also appears in a significant supporting role in Everybody Knows), the movie intrigues from the outset, playfully opening with a title card announcing Chapter II, along with a concise summary of the key narrative information this chapter will provide (“How Petra enters Jaume’s world”), a strategy that each subsequent chapter also employs. At his characteristically unhurried tempo, […]
by Blake Williams on May 11, 2018 -
Hot Docs 2018: The Silver Anniversary Edition
The 25th anniversary edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (April 26-May 6) marked my very first visit to North America’s largest nonfiction fest (and also to its host city of Toronto, for that matter). Since I’ve covered IDFA, the world’s largest doc fest, numerous times, I just assumed Hot Docs would be similar in setup and vibe. On the contrary, I was pleasantly surprised to find there are several key elements that make this Toronto mainstay its own exciting, one-of-a-kind event. First off, there are the unique venues. Hot Docs is the only festival I’ve ever been […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 9, 2018 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 4: Austerlitz, Planetarium, Tramps
Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerlitz, a record of tourists visiting the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, could be loglined as a movie about why it’s a transparently bad idea to take selfies at Holocaust sites, but that would be reductive and far too banal a point to need making at feature length. The film is in low-contrast black-and-white, and how could it be in color? The visual language of extant Holocaust footage is B&W, so Loznitsa maintains visual and historical continuity. The opening movement is not that far off from, of all things, In the City of Sylvia, with long shots of tourists milling about in multiple compressed planes the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 11, 2016 -
Never the Twain Shall Meet: Maidan
Our own separation of church and state is tenuous. From the Pledge of Allegiance: “…one Nation under God, indivisible…” Less official but equally patriotic are the lyrics of Irving Berlin: God bless America, Land that I love, Stand beside her and guide her Thru the night with a light from above; From the mountains, to the prairies… Church, state, soil: a trinity often muddled, collectively held sacred. Few would confuse our glib phrasings with imminent theocracy and unchecked nationalism. Pantheism aside, you might say that, if you can disregard Native Americans in the same way that our government always has, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 11, 2014 -
Cannes Day 9: France Responds to Welcome To New York, Ukraine & Azerbaijan Unite
News items of interest as the Cannes Film Festival rolls through its ninth day: • At The Conversation, Sue Harris has an overview of the furious reception Abel Ferrara’s Welcome To New York has received in France. As she points out, the casting of Gérard Depardieu is far from incidental: Depardieu’s casting breaches the fictional veneer of Ferrara’s film in ways that no other actor could. No one could be more suited to play the nation’s premier “disgraced” Frenchmen than the other principle one. And so, thanks to a volatile mix of the real and the imagined – a heady […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 22, 2014 -
Cannes Day 8: Solidarity, “Busting” Anti-Fracking Celebrities and Ukrainian Crisis
Some notes of interest from the Cannes Film Festival as it enters its closing stretch: • Programmed in the less-exhaustively covered “Un Certain Regard” section, Philippe Lacote’s Run is the first film from the Ivory Coast to play at Cannes in 29 years. In an interesting interview with Reuters’ Michael Roddy, Lacote gets into the historical particulars of his genre movie and has some words about his relationship to the festival’s most prominent African film, Abderrahmane Sissako Timbuktu. “The problem with the international festivals and with European and American audiences is this ‘vogue,’” he notes. “People in the Occident want […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 21, 2014 -
PORTENTS OF GREEK CRISIS IN IMAGES FROM THESSALONIKI DOC FEST
I’m covering the Thessaloniki International Film Festival for Filmmaker right now, and some images from the March documentary event seem prescient in the light of the hour-by-hour unfolding of events in Greece, where the fall of a government could affect all of Europe, the world economy, and by extension, filmmaking everywhere. Here are some of my photos. Thessaloniki is a palimpsest, a city written upon other cities, incarnation atop incarnation. The history of this far northern Greek city since first dredged from the sea by Alexander the Great has been one of fall and rise, of fire and […]
by Ray Pride on Nov 9, 2011
