Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

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domino harvey
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#101 Post by domino harvey » Fri Apr 20, 2018 10:36 pm

But I'm a Cheerleader used to air all the time on either IFC or Sundance, back when those were non-commercial, non-commercial movie channels, so that may have helped its post-theatrical awareness as well-- it's certainly where I saw it first


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bottled spider
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#103 Post by bottled spider » Sat Apr 21, 2018 3:55 pm

A drug-fueled Friday night:

Jesus' Son (Maclean, 1999). Holy crap! Picaresque, hallucinatory, funny, melancholic, sometimes harrowing, and ultimately, um, heartwarming.

The Anniversary Party (Leigh, 2001). This may or may not make my list, but barring some false notes, The Anniversary Party certainly stood up to a return visit. If nothing else, the film captures the experience of doing e quite well: the sheer fun of it, the inanity of it, the pseudo-insights that go along with occasional authentic insight and honest communication. On the whole, a well-paced, well-structured evolution of an all-night party.

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bottled spider
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#104 Post by bottled spider » Sat Apr 21, 2018 4:21 pm

On the topic of lesbian romcoms, is Better Than Chocolate any good? It makes me feel like a good citizen if I watch a Canadian film once a year.

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Satori
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#105 Post by Satori » Sat Apr 21, 2018 6:59 pm

It's not bad- it's a bit ahead of its time in dealing with trans issues (although I suppose this was around the same time as Boys Don't Cry) and there are some fun nightclub scenes. I also like that a lot of it takes place around an LGBT bookstore.

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Kirkinson
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#106 Post by Kirkinson » Sat Apr 21, 2018 9:48 pm

Anybody know anything about a director named Leida Laius from Estonia, or Kamara Kamalova (also spelled Qamara Kamolova) from Uzbekistan? I came across their names last night when I was thumbing through Lynn Atwood's Red Women on the Silver Screen and I became especially interested in a film by Laius called The Stolen Meeting, so of course that seems to be the only one that has never had any kind of video release. It looks like all her other films are at least on DVD in Estonia, and you can find them all on YouTube as well, but unsubtitled, of course. As for Kamalova, who is actually interviewed in the book, again, I found a couple unsubtitled films on YouTube, but nothing else. It's both frustrating and fascinating how obscure Central Asian cinema is — the amount of effort involved even in finding basic information about it is staggering sometimes. IMDb is missing at least three of Kamalova's features, including one of the Soviet films I found on YouTube and her most recent, Unutma meni (Do Not Forget Me) from 2013.


The Lonely Hunter (Keti Dolidze, 1989)
Keti Dolidze has been a larger-than-life presence in a lot of the reading I've done about Georgian cinema, but this is the first time I've watched one of her films. Sadly, I think it's kind of a mess. In a strong prologue, the protagonist, Andro (Zurab Kipshidze) goes up to his girlfriend's apartment to find it's been broken into and she's just been raped. From there the plot jumps forward seven years: the couple is now married, and she is unable to conceive. For that and other reasons, the aftermath of what was done to her has put an immense amount of strain on their relationship, and we're thrown into it right at the breaking point. This, it turns out, is one of the film's most recurring problems. For the full first half, almost every scene involves Kipshidze having an argument with someone — his wife, his sister, his father, etc. Every one of those arguments escalates to screaming almost instantaneously, and every actor has to scream pages and pages of expository dialogue, as if we've been dropped into the third act of each conflict and the characters have to fill us in on what happened in the first two.

Dolidze and her writers (one of whom was Nikita Mikhalkov) also feel it's necessary to remind you in almost every scene how much Andro wants children. Again and again we see Kipshidze mournfully watching some parent cradling their child or something, to the point it almost becomes a running gag. In one scene there's a whole damn children's choir sitting in an airport and we get gauzy close-ups of every one of them. By the time the second half of the plot kicks in, in which Kipshidze leaves his wife and decides to track down her rapists for revenge — a plot thread introduced by a bafflingly upbeat training montage! — I was honestly starting to question whether this movie was actually a comedy and I had missed it the whole time. A sudden, out-of-nowhere fantasy epilogue seems to suggest this entire plot is actually some kind of nationalist metaphor.


Heat (Larisa Shepitko, 1963)
An interesting, competently made debut, but not much more than that. There are some fleeting moments of greatness, an intriguingly oblique score, a tremendous performance by Nurmurkhan Zhanturin as the bitter and grizzled antagonist Abakir, and some excellent photography. There's some interesting interplay of foreground and background action, and the "heat" is really felt by making the sky such a huge, imposing presence in the wide shots that it often looks like it'll crush the characters at any moment.

Yet much of the film is rather inert, and scenes that are otherwise very potent dramatically are undercut by some awkwardly inserted reaction shots, particularly from the young hero. Indeed, his performance is pretty lacking overall, and it was not a surprise to find out he was not really an actor (he is in fact Bolotbek Shamshiyev, who would go on to become one of Kyrgyzstan's most prominent directors). The rest of the film might have been elevated with a more compelling lead.

For me the most dramatically effective part of the film was Abakir's relationship with his younger lover, Kalipa — a toxic, abusive relationship on which she is nevertheless tragically emotionally dependent. The scene in which Abakir humiliates her just for momentarily considering defying him is gutwrenchingly cruel. Again, though, it is weakened by some mugging inserts from Shamshiyev.

An interesting curiosity, and a fine film, just not a very exceptional one. If Criterion had given Wings or The Ascent a mainline release, this is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to find there as a special feature.

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bottled spider
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#107 Post by bottled spider » Sun Apr 22, 2018 2:44 pm

zedz wrote:Two Friends (Jane Campion, 1986) - Campion's first feature is a little rough around the edges, but it shows just why hers was such an exciting new voice in the 1980s. It's the tale of the dissolution of the friendship of two schoolmates. This is not a spoiler, because the story is told in reverse, starting when they're near-strangers and working its way back to when they were eternally inseparable. It gets the fragility and intensity of young friendships exactly right, and the antipodean '80s details are so on point I was cringing at times. There's also a delightful, purely Campion sequence in which the long letter Kelly is writing to Louise during various classes is imagined as semi-animation. Highly recommended.
I'm trying to squeeze in a few of the more fervent recommendations of this thread into the curriculum I've set for this project. Unfortunately the worse-for-wear rental disc of Washington Square skipped past endurance. Better luck was had with Two Friends, a pleasant discovery. Besides the one you mention, there's another epistolary scene I really liked, which should probably be spoiler tagged:
SpoilerShow
Louise is silently reading a letter from Kelly, which we hear as voice over. But when Louise abandons the letter only half read, and sits down to play the piano, the voice over continues reading. The effect is startling!

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domino harvey
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#108 Post by domino harvey » Sun Apr 22, 2018 6:01 pm

Two high concept failures:

Les créatures (Agnès Varda 1966)
I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, but until this movie I had not seen Michel Piccoli furiously beat a gaggle of peasants with the corpse of a dead cat, so there is that going for this film. And only that. While it is true that I find Varda wildly overrated both during the New Wave and after, I was still surprised at how lousy this was. A sloppy and ill-conceived sci-fi-ish crock about controlling humans like game pieces (which mostly just seems to involve color-coded filters), I was not surprised to learn Varda herself was never at peace with the material, as it shows. A film with a premise as bold as this needs a confident hand if it has any chance of success, and the discomfort of the director with this material is quite obvious to the audience. Fundamentally, there is no point to the belabored mechanations or a larger message being served here. Wow, people would sure interact differently with each other if someone else could control all they said and did for a minute! Really makes you THINK!!! A quick perusal of unconvincing attempts to defend this film make claims for it being about the creative process, but I’d use that argument for a work that more astutely employs it.

Vražda Ing. Čerta (Ester Krumbachová 1970)

A woman’s boorish dinner date eats literally everything she serves, and so of course she falls in love. As future dinners come and go, her slovenly man’s hunger finds him eating not just all her food, but also her plates and table legs, and she comes to believe he may be a demon. I found this late entry in the Czech New Wave quickly tedious, as the stale satirical barbs of exaggerating gluttonous excess and mindless takings from a man of a woman in a relationship are not enough to sustain the one-note whimsy here. For such an outlandish premise, the film remains content to explore precious little of it in favor of extended scenes of a gross dude eating a lot while his gal swoons.

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knives
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#109 Post by knives » Sun Apr 22, 2018 9:23 pm

I managed to get into my own sort of high concept hell this weekend as well (I haven't seen your two films though).
The Tempest (Dir. Taymor)
Unfortunately this one is only about as good as its reputation suggests. I really do think Titus one of the best Shakespeare adaptations ever committed to film so it is disheartening to see this one fail in such a weak voice. The biggest problem on display is the astonishing number of great ideas undermined by half measures. Nearly every choice made in the film could have turned out a unique and great adaptation, but Taymor resists to explore them fully leaving a lukewarm feel to each frame. The most obvious example of this is Mirren as Prospero; an idea so ingenious Taymor has to make an effort to have it seem like a bad choice. A lot of Taymor's choices would have succeeded just as well keeping her as Prospero and not fiddling around with the dialogue. Instead though the script switches about the gendered phrases to make this a Prospera. That decision really only serves to mess with the beat of the dialogue having inorganic interruptions into the poetry. Taymor does the bare minimum to accomplish a female character not dealing with the thematic possibilities that suggests so that we just have a lessening of the texts.

In terms of half measures there are two other particularly bad choices that neuter the film into mediocrity. The lesser of the two is with Caliban. Taymor decides to go in the ballsy direction of accentuating the historical discomfort his character poses not only by casting Housou, but also giving him make up to emphasize his race and having him play Caliban in the style of the worst minstrel shows. At first it is a rather shocking thing that has a Brechtian effect of asking how we enjoy Shakespeare, but quickly Taymor moves on from that by emphasizing Caliban's intelligence over his two cohorts making him just another character. Titus played with the issues of race in a more consistently daring fashion and makes this weak sauce attempt just feel all the more toothless. The most galling half measure though is with the entirety of the aesthetic. Based on her other work I assumed that this would be a totally bonkers show with only Greenaway as a potentially more active filmmaker for this story. Instead Taymor pars down her style so that it takes place in the noticeably human world. That's a tantalizing idea in many ways. Taking one of the most fantastic stories in the english language and playing it toward a sort of realism, or if one wishes to be especially daring a Pasolini type minimization, opens up a world of possibilities. Instead though Taymor keeps enough of her CGI tricks to make this just seem like a watered down version of her insanity rather than a new stylistic avenue. It is bland in other words.

One last point of complaint, one I almost didn't bother with since it is such a common problem in Shakespeare in general. The casting of the central lovers as such Jared Leto-esque black holes of interest as to completely sink what value the film does have in their scenes.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
It's a bit weird that we are at the point where we have two Iranian ex-pat '80s horror tributes focused on the role of women in their old country and filmed in local dialects. This is a lot more cool an flashy than Under the Shadow, but feels a lot less effective and is frankly not as good as a result of that CalArts sheen that Amirpour shows. The aesthetic shows a lot of raw talent, but also gives the constant feeling of advertising something or being a music video these cool techniques have been used that way so often. The aesthetic also seems to be yelling influences (primarily Carpenter and Near Dark) without putting them to terribly good use whereas Anvari while aiming lower (there's a light Poltergeist and People Under the Stairs flavor from him) reaches much higher giving a film that seems to exist in a '80s that exists beyond the frame. Amirpour's characters don't seem to exist beyond the frames they appear in. There's enough talent here I want to give it the benefit of the doubt and say these are deliberate techniques, but there's nothing in the film itself to suggest we should take the narrative as anything except as hipster sincere. To focus on this sincerity there's a lot to suggest theme here. Not only having the film in Farsi, but using the iconography of oil pumps and hijab suggests a discussion on elements of Persian society. The film in all its sleekness never goes beyond suggestion though with the pumps functioning as non-sequitur and the Islamic imagery sort of just being there. This is less a movie in need of any of its parts to function then a calling card to show everything Amirpour can do. To end on a positive note the scenes (particularly their second meeting) between the girl and Arash are nice in a way that really gives me a lot of excitement for where Amirpour will go if she follows through on those instincts.

The Babdook (Dir. Kent)
Now here's a high concept film that succeeds tremendously due to having just one very simple goal: to be as scary without showing anything as possible. The film retains a simple aesthetic and story that gives fabulous flashbacks to Bernard Rose's early stuff (I thought at first this was an English film it has so much in common with that horror sensibility). If there is one complaint I have it's that the kid is so annoying. Him being dreadful is definitely part of the point, but the extent Kent goes to make that point is overkill.

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#110 Post by zedz » Mon Apr 23, 2018 4:33 pm

Thanks to the Ubuweb reminder above, I've been catching up with some old favourites:

Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (Tracey Moffatt, 1990) - Stylised within an inch of its life, this is a tremendously formally assured work from a still-novice filmmaker. It's a wordless drama about an isolated aboriginal woman caring for her dying white mother, and everything (house, desert, ocean) is filmed on a soundstage, with art direction reminiscent of Eiko Ishioka's work on Mishima. Moffatt's lush saturated colours and smooth tracking shots recall '50s Hollywood melodramas, while the colour coding of the scenes refers back to silent film tinting conventions. Impressive sound design, too, and Jimmy Little singing Christian platitudes is a perfect encapsulation of the film's theme of internalised, domestic colonialism.

Go! Go! Go! (Marie Menken, 1964) - Another major talent that completely slipped my mind. This delightful short is NYC@100MPH, a pixellated vision of a metropolis in overdrive. Menken's approach in this film sounds on the surface similar to Jonas Mekas', but in practice and effect it's completely different. Menken is much more rhythmically supple, and she brings a great eye for abstraction (e.g. patterns of traffic at an intersection viewed from high above) and sense of pace (gliding vessels on the water are a graceful respite between bustling pedestrians).

Lights (Marie Menken, 1966) - New York again, pushed even further into abstraction. By shooting at night, Menken renders the city as splashes and speckles of gaudy colour against an inky void. The beginning of the film takes in the lights of a gigantic Christmas tree, then about halfway through, the camera speeds off into the night on a neon joyride, the movement of the camera or its pixellation turning the city lights into sparks and swarms, ending on a freeform, found version of Len Lye's Free Radicals. Beautiful and delirious.

Fuses (Carolee Schneeman, 1967) - Erotic, explicit, psychedelic - this is an experimental film for the ages, and one that's no less startling now than when it first appeared. Schneeman and her partner fuck and flex, and their fucking, flexing bodies repeatedly dissolve into shots of nature, solarization and distressed emulsion. Kitch the cat looks on. This is supposed to be silent, but the version on Ubuweb includes sounds of waves, which are generally unobtrusive, and appropriate enough for Schneeman's oceanic presentation of sex and sexuality, but become a bit distracting when you hear the odd seagull!

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swo17
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#111 Post by swo17 » Mon Apr 23, 2018 4:38 pm

FYI, Go! Go! Go! is on the Treasures IV set and Lights is on Index's Notes on Marie Menken DVD. The latter will certainly be making my list.

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Kirkinson
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#112 Post by Kirkinson » Tue Apr 24, 2018 10:33 pm

I managed to acquire subtitles for two more Dinara Asanova films as well as two Leida Laius films, and my deep dive into Soviet obscurities finally yielded an actually great movie. That's especially gratifying considering I had never heard of it before and might not have come across it otherwise.


The Key That Should Not Be Handed On (Dinara Asanova, 1976)
I enjoyed this a lot and it has many of the same qualities as the other two Asanova films I’ve now seen. The story is again very loosely structured, tying up the more immediate plot threads but leaving most of the major conflicts intriguingly unresolved. As usual, she’s at her best simply filming teenagers hanging out and constructing sequences out of the way they fight, laugh, and dance together. Almost all the kids (and the adults too) give realistic, down-to-earth performances. That said, there were a few key scenes in the last 20 minutes in which the auto-translated subtitles I was using failed me not just in nuance and precision but in basic comprehension, and I don’t think I can say much more about it without a fuller understanding of what was being said.


Tough Kids (a.k.a. Boys)* (Dinara Asanova, 1983)
This one is really good! A remarkably well-observed film about a labor and sports camp for delinquent and criminal teen boys, and the former sports star who runs it. It’s better than what that description might have just conjured in your head. Closer in tone to The 400 Blows (but less pretty) or Manic (2001) (but much better). It opens with doc-style interviews with several of the characters, and they’re so authentic (and, it turned out, mostly populated by people who were peripheral to the main storyline) that I suspected they were the real deal before I confirmed it elsewhere. Lots of the teens in the movie really had been in trouble for petty theft and other small crimes. The way Russian articles talk about it (as far as I can tell from Google Translate) makes it sound like some of them were more or less sentenced to work on the film. The plot is another loosely structured ensemble piece, mostly concerned with everyday life at the camp. For some characters it’s practically paradise. While they have to weed fields and demolish walls and do other hard work, they also get to goof off, dance, sing, and just generally run around in a more stable, positive environment than most of them have at home. There’s a more raw, intimate, unselfconscious shooting style than in Asanova’s earlier teen dramas. Lots of close, handheld camera work. Numerous and frequent close-ups on all the characters’ faces, which fill the Academy ratio frame.

There are some sequences of cruelty and violence among the boys that seem to have been rather shocking at the time. It’s hard for me to place it in context now, but this film is credited with breaking several taboos and having a major influence on the youth-social-problem films that would flood Soviet theaters over the next few years (like the one I write about at the end of this post). Many of these scenes seem tamer now than that reputation might suggest, but for a film ostensibly aimed at kids the same age as the protagonists, it's still fairly brutal stuff. The film ends with a fascinating sort of socialist inversion of the ending of The 400 Blows in which every kid in the camp runs down the street to intercept a runaway character before he does something that could doom his future forever. It’s a beautiful moment of solidarity — and a fleeting one, probably, if the story were to continue — but as with Antoine Doinel, everyone’s fate remains uncertain.

* While “Tough Kids” seems to be the English title this film has gone by internationally since it was first released, I believe the Russian literally just translates to “Boys,” which I think is a better title. You could infer that the film is making a broader point about the state of masculinity in the USSR, which seems true. "Tough Kids" collapses that meaning somewhat.


Ukuaru (Leida Laius, 1973)
Gorgeous black-and-white scope film about a woman in pre-Soviet Estonia doggedly determined to build a life for herself, who meets setback after setback but always perseveres — even if the film itself is surprisingly ambiguous about whether all of that perseverance was worth it! I've read that when this script was submitted to Goskino, they required the ending be made more optimistic. But if what's in the film is the more optimistic ending, the original must have been brutal, because this still seems pretty bleak to me. Life is a struggle and the world can break in and destroy everything you've worked for (but don't worry, because now you get to struggle as a Soviet!).

Anyway, this movie has a great Arvo Pärt score, it looks amazing, and the actors all turn in fantastic performances, especially Elle Kull in the lead. And there were several points at which I thought the plot was heading in a really predictable direction and it ended up surprising me. All the same, though, I have to say I never really felt any of it very strongly, at least not until the last 10-15 minutes. I'm very glad to have seen it and it deserves to be better known, but it still didn't leave a very strong impression on me.


Well, Come On, Smile (a.k.a. Games for Teenagers) (Leida Laius & Arvo Iho, 1985)
Wow, though...this one fucked me up. Mari, a runaway from an orphanage, is rejected by her father and attacked by some boys late at night in an attempted rape. The assault is thwarted by a group of girls who rush in to stop it, but it’s the girls who end up being arrested. Mari is sent back to the orphanage, already struggling to re-adjust to life there, when her would-be rapist shows up. Named Robi, he is also a runaway from the orphanage (from before Mari was there, evidently) and he is revered by the other kids, especially the little ones, as a lovable goofball. He’s also the cousin of Mari’s cool-headed crush, Tauri.

The film progresses slowly and delicately. Mari is a loner clearly struggling with depression, though this is not spelled out and all the children at the orphanage are obviously dealing with their own struggles in their own way. It’s striking that while many of these kids are orphans in the traditional sense (no parents whatsoever) and many of them have negligent or incarcerated parents, a handful of them, like Tauri, also have perfectly capable, well-off parents who simply have no interest in raising their children. As with many glasnost “social problem” movies, the filmmaking feels very bare and stripped down — shot in full frame, with unfussy, often handheld camera work, and little in the way of scoring (though Lepo Sumera’s music is used spectacularly well when it does show up). The Soviet-era architecture is crumbling, all the paint on the walls is peeling, the air is almost always gray, streams and ponds are dirty, and the orphanage seems to have almost no staff on hand to guide or supervise the kids — or to prevent abuse.

The story’s impact sort of snuck up on me. Mari’s relationship to Tauri and Robi develops with confounding levels of moral complexity. In a setting that seems devoid of hope, Robi is responsible for many of the fleeting moments of joy and levity most of these kids (and the film itself) get to experience, but he remains an angry and unpredictable presence. Tauri’s cool-headedness, meanwhile, masks other underlying issues for him. Our view of the mean girls who harass Mari also morphs from something purely antagonistic into something more tragically sympathetic. There are no lessons here, except perhaps in empathy. And what makes it especially great for me is the portrayal of Mari’s mental health, which strikes me as both authentic and very sensitive. The way she tenses, freezes, and shuts down in some key moments of social anxiety felt extremely familiar to me from my time in high school when my social anxiety, panic attacks, and depression were all at their lowest point.
SpoilerShow
Robi eventually saves Mari from a tense, unbearable situation, but the panic and desperation she feels as a result leads to a suicide attempt. I think it's handled with a great deal of care and intelligence by Laius & Iho. In the aftermath of this incident, Mari starts to warm up to Robi, and after Tauri incites a fight that gets Robi in trouble, she lies to the authorities about Robi's previous assault on her in an attempt to keep him out of jail. They share one very complicated romantic moment — a truly astonishing, disquieting, and heartbreaking scene that somehow mixes joy, childlike playfulness, and the threat of sexual violence all at once — before he is picked up and taken away in a police car. It's a scene of such depth and complexity that on its own it could probably stand up to an entire college course of rigorous analysis if it wasn't so painfully and traumatically difficult to watch.
If this movie were more well-known it would almost certainly draw some righteous ire for what I wrote above, but such ire would only point to a complete failure at attempting to understand what is going on in Mari’s mind and in the world around her. While watching it I also felt extremely uncomfortable with where I worried it might be headed, but nothing about this movie can be boiled down so simplistically. It’s disquieting because the lives it portrays have no easy answers, much less correct ones. That these kids are not emotionally equipped to deal with the circumstances set before them and make problematic decisions as a result is entirely the point.

And it’s a minor miracle that even after all this pain and trauma the movie manages to end on a small gesture of possible hope that actually feels organic and not tacked-on.

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bottled spider
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#113 Post by bottled spider » Thu Apr 26, 2018 11:31 am

The Moth Diaries (Mary Harron, 2011) Apart from a few deaths, a little sex and drugs, and gallons of blood, this is like a children's movie, a Nancy Drew mystery or summer camp movie pitched for ten to twelve year-old girls. One might guess the source novel to be a good quality work of Young Adult fiction. There's a certain charm to the juvenility of The Moth Diaries, whether Harron was going for that effect or not. It's an atmospheric and very attractive film, mild in its horror, and quite watchable as a disposable entertainment.

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Satori
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#114 Post by Satori » Fri Apr 27, 2018 9:02 am

One of the real pleasures of this project is that it gives me an excuse to revisit many of my all-time favorite films. Here are three that will be figuring near the top of my list.

Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia (Ulrike Ottinger, 1989)
I saw this for the first time during the last ‘80s project and quickly fell in love with it. Repeated viewings over the past three or four years have only deepened my appreciation, making it easily one of my favorite films of all time. It is often read as a hinge point in Ottinger’s filmography in that it combines the maximalist queer aesthetic of her previous films (such as Madame X or Dorian Grey) with the slow documentary/ethnographic style inaugurated with Taiga in 1992. Indeed, the first hour or so takes place on a cramped train using a purposefully artificial and baroque style before the film shifts to a documentary-like final hour and a half in which seven characters from the train visit a Mongol village during a summer festival.

The two sections of the film are radically different in their aesthetic style and also suggest a set of cultural oppositions between the European/American travelers and the Mongol tribe lead by a princess named Ulan Iga. It is precisely these cultural oppositions that the film will work to deconstruct, however. We might begin with the Transmongolian Express, the train the travelers are riding when they are stopped and taken to the Mongol encampment: the train is always in motion, endlessly traversing the barrier between the “west” and “east.” The train moves in both directions, not only carrying the western women to the east, but—as we learn later—the Mongol princess herself spends part of her time in Europe. Moreover, it is constantly moving, providing a figuration for how Ottinger’s film conceptualizes identity: always undergoing transformation, never remaining static.

One of the film’s major narrative and thematic strands is the women’s transformation throughout the course of the film. The four main characters are given archetypal characterizations: Lady Windermere (played by Dephine Syrig, was also in Ottinger’s Dorian Grey, but this time she gets to inhabit the character named after an Oscar Wilde text) is an anthropologist who has an encyclopedic knowledge of tribal myths and a deep respect for cultures different from her own; Ms. Mueller-Vohwinkel (played by the great Fassbinder regular Irm Hermann) is an extraordinarily uptight school teacher who lugs around a book of “facts” and is suspicious of anything different; Fanny Ziegfeld (Gillian Scalici, in her only theatrical film) is an American Broadway performer; and finally, Giovanna (Inés Sastre) is a carefree young backpacking adventurer who Lady Windermere takes under her wing. The way in which these characters change over the course of the film is one of the central pleasures of watching the narrative unfold.

Also along for the trip are the three Kalinka Sisters, musicians from the train who attend the Mongol festival but are not given a sustained amount of focus. I would suggest, however, that—like Fanny—their identities are already fluid and open: they refuse individual characterization, taking on a collective identity that is based around their musical performances. As developed in the underworld section of Dorian Grey (and elsewhere), performance is for Ottinger the central way in which our identities undergo transformation. Not only should we always think of our identities as a kind of performance in itself, but actual staged performances allow us to break out of our static identity concepts. This is why performers like Fanny or the Kalinka sisters are so easygoing about trip to the Mongol encampment while Mueller is so resistant.

It is this idea of performance that will end up linking the two sections of the film and complicating any strict dichotomy between them. Each half of the film contains an extended performance-based set piece: in the dining car of the train, the Kalinka sisters, Fanny, and a traveler named Micky Katz (Peter Kern, who also pops up in a Fassbinder film or two, notably Fox and His Friends) entertain the car with a series of wonderful musical numbers. Yet “performance” is not limited to these overt examples: Lady Windermere also gives a performance when she recounts a mythical tale to a rapt Giovana and Micky, a Russian officer tells a story about an ancestor that is punctuated by him taking shots of vodka, and Mickey Katz’s elaborate food order is as much of a conceptual art piece as an actual meal. The sequence also blurs the boundaries between spectator and participant, not only in the final musical number in which several of the characters join the Kalinka sisters on stage (including the waiter and chef, who turn out to double as musicians), but the act of watching becomes infused with a performative pleasure. Mirrors are everywhere in the dining car, allowing Ottinger to focus on both the performances themselves and the attention of spectators. While Giovana and Ms. Mueller do not directly participate in the storytelling or the musical numbers, Windermere’s story is addressed to Giovana—which becomes part of the performance, giving it an additional erotic charge since the two of them become lovers—while one of Fanny’s songs is directly addressed to Ms. Mueller. Towards the end of the film, the Mongol Summer festival repeats this performance-based structure, this time incorporating the seven women from the train as participant-observers. The rituals—including horseback riding, art, music, food preparation—should be seen in a continuum with the rituals performed in the dining car. Ottinger is not suggesting that these rituals are the “same,” but she is also refusing an orientalist west/east binary by showing the essential fluidity between cultural practices and kinds of performance. If Dorian Grey is her most dystopian work, Johanna D’Arc is her most relentlessly, beautifully utopian.

Jeanne Dielman (Akerman, 1975)
Since this is an obvious masterpiece that doesn't need a defense, this is more a series of observations from my last viewings than any kind of extended analysis.

For me, the film not only works on the structural level—the precise camera placement, how certain shots repeat and others rotate, the temporality of her daily tasks—but there is something so emotionally engaging about Jeanne’s slow breakdown. Seyrig’s performance is heartbreaking, especially her interactions with her son, who seems to be every bit as cold and mechanical as her daily routine. The brilliantly awkward dinner scenes, her with nothing to talk about and him not sharing anything about his day. But what exactly would Dielman have to say? What would any woman trapped in a cycle of repetitious household labor, with no friends or hobbies, have to talk about? That is the real tragedy of the film.

Akerman making her a sex worker is brilliant: it underscores the economics of housework by juxtaposing Dielman’s paid and unpaid labor. This is a film about labor: the labor time it takes to make veal or meatloaf, to skin potatoes, to clean the bathtub.

Then, as her robotic movements in the first part of the film give way to the slips and accidents of the second half, we sense a possibility for something to change. Has any film ever made a character going into a room and forgetting why she’s there seem so apocalyptic? Because we are attuned to the film’s temporality, the smallest deviation from her routine is as suspenseful as anything in commercial film.

Then, finally, the end and the final shot.
SpoilerShow
What I love about the final shot is that Seyrig’s face systematically works through all the possible readings of the killing. Is it a tragic mental breakdown? An act of revolutionary violence? A logical extension of messing up dinner? We are allowed time to contemplate each possibility, projecting our preferred interpretation onto Dielman.
Old Joy (Reichardt, 2006)
One of the rare films that rivals Ozu in its perfection. Like Ozu, Old Joy is about change, with macro-scale changes registered through micro-scale social interactions. “End of an era,” Kurt proclaims over a gorgeous shot of old buildings and ancient trees. The film asks us to consider what, precisely, has ended? Industrialization? The ability to retreat into nature without technology? Or just a record store in the Pacific Northwest where Kurt hoped to sell some old records?

By the end of the film, we realize one thing that has changed is Kurt and Mark’s relationship. The film is about how certain old friends no longer fit into your life. We realize this through perfectly pitched moments: “Should’ve been there,” Kurt tells Mark after going on about a night of dancing to drums in the wilderness with an old roommate who stiffed them on the rent some years back. The look on Mark’s face tells us that he is no longer at a place in his life where he could share such a night. This realization is developed early in the film and we are allowed the time to contemplate it through extended car tracking shots while the beautiful Yo La Tango score plays. Like Ozu, Reichardt respects the audience enough to slow down and let us soak it all in.

The film deftly walks a thin line with Kurt, affording him respect but not taking him seriously. There is no profundity in his rant about string theory, and yet his image of the universe as a falling tear is unspeakably beautiful. So too the confused and meandering “notebook store” story he tells at the Hot Springs, which ends with his dreamed revelation that “sorrow is worn out joy.” This observation emotionally re-centers the film, turning the sorrow of them drifting apart into evidence of their past joy. The era might but over, but the awareness of its passing speaks to its significance.

Kurt’s story also provides a clue to Reichardt’s narrative structure: a series of moments are strung together without direction or solid meaning but they nonetheless produce moments of moving poetry.

The exact nature of their relationship is also left up to us. There is evidence that Kurt was or still is in love with Mark: his awkwardness about sharing the tent, the moment he breaks down by the fire, and the massage. Reichardt wisely lets this possibility simmer below the surface of the film. I think that Kurt himself probably doesn’t know. What is certain is that something passes between them at the Hot Springs. There is eroticism—especially the shot in which Mark’s hand slides into the water from the side of the tub—but also something even more profound that the film can only hint at. Is this an awareness of change? An acceptance that they no longer fit into each other’s lives? If there is an epiphany here, how long will it last? The shots of Kurt wandering the streets in the film’s closing moments suggest that it has already faded.

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Kirkinson
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#115 Post by Kirkinson » Fri Apr 27, 2018 8:06 pm

Thanks for reminding me there's a Kelly Reichardt film I still haven't seen!


Brief Encounters (Kira Muratova, 1968) - What zedz said! This is actually the first Muratova film I’ve seen. I had been saving her work during this project until I felt like I got to the end of all the other Soviet films I could find, and I'm glad I did because it really throws her specialness into sharp relief. It’s abundantly clear less than a minute into this that she’s operating on a very different wavelength from her contemporaries. Zedz notes her style isn’t even fully formed here, but all the same, everything from the framing to the lighting to the casting of the actors is completely distinctive.

I’m not sure the drama totally works for me in the end (just in terms of my own emotional investment) but there’s so much to love here. In addition to what zedz already covered, the most striking aspect for me is the attention Muratova focuses on touch and gesture, the way her characters almost seem to take these little moments to learn what a wall or a window feels like. Some of these end up having some serious narrative weight:
SpoilerShow
like the way Nadya touches Valentina’s fingers when they first meet—we don’t yet understand that she knows their hands have touched the same lover
but sometimes it just seems like an authorial gesture on Muratova's part. Anyway, I was very into it and I'm excited to continue.


Long Farewells (Kira Muratova, 1971) - This time everything clicked for me! What a great film. The first thing that struck me was the audacity of Muratova knowing her previous film was banned but nonetheless doubling down on all of her stylistic idiosyncrasies. The odd framing and shot choices continue here, but their execution seems smoother and more purposeful. I don't mean that as a dig at Brief Encounters, just that here it seems less experimental and more like a display of confidence in one's choices and instincts. And I also see now the repetition zedz was talking about, not just in the way she will sometimes repeat a short snippet of a take, but in the way characters sort of replay dialogue from early in the film (and the scene in which Evgenia imagines what the nice night out at the theatre would have been like after she has just given it up — like she's replaying the way she thought things would go, replaying a scene that didn't happen). I love the way she uses music, too — more for rhythm and structure rather than emotional reiteration. I love the occasionally chaotic sound design, like that great moment toward the end of the film where diegetic and non-diegetic pieces of music are thrown together in total cacophony. And Muratova again pays a great deal of attention to the way her characters touch and feel material objects. She pays a lot of attention to the objects themselves, too. Inserts of wine glasses, plates, stuffed animals, etc.; objects in a scene's location seem to get "reaction shots" rather than inserts, as if they are observers, characters themselves rather than simply props.

Most importantly, though, all of these strange stylistic ticks that sound kind of ridiculous and overwhelming when I write them down actually serve the drama somehow. Because this time, it really landed. This story of a mother who can't bear the emotional or physical distance of her aloof teenage (?) son, who is considering moving to live with his estranged father, really affected me. They are both complex, flawed people, who at various times I loathed, loved, or pitied. It's beautiful, really, and its banning is even more inexplicable than that of Brief Encounters, except insofar as, like other suppressed films such as Otar Iosseliani's Pastorale (a very different filmmaker, but like Muratova, a total outlier in Soviet cinema) it tells a story with no inherent socialist value in an overtly individualistic and formalized way.

Not I'm *extra* excited for The Asthenic Syndrome (I have Passions on deck, too, but I've heard less about that one).

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Kirkinson
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#116 Post by Kirkinson » Sat Apr 28, 2018 12:21 am

Kirkinson wrote:This was a good time to discover that Kira Muratova's The Asthenic Syndrome is on demand from Amazon for just $0.99, though I haven't watched it there and have no idea how it looks.
Well, now I know, and I just want to give everyone else a heads-up that this version looks atrocious. It's pretty much identical to this YouTube upload, though Amazon's subtitles are at least in sync. Basically the same thing you would get on backchannels, but with even more compression artifacts.

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Kirkinson
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#117 Post by Kirkinson » Sun Apr 29, 2018 1:37 am

The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova, 1990) - Well, maybe it’s just the fact that this movie had attained such legendary, near-occult status in my mind for 15 years as this one-of-a-kind, impossible-to-see, brutal and uncompromising masterpiece, but...I felt a little underwhelmed by this? Trying to talk about it with regard to my reaction might be difficult, because it seems likely that if I came to this with no preconceived notions, or without having seen any other angry, late glasnost or early post-Soviet screeds, I might have done a better job approaching the film on its own terms. It’s fed-up, cynical, and relentless, but it felt like 2½ hours of turbulence without the apocalyptic crash I had been bracing myself for. Other near end-of-the-union films like the aforementioned Well, Come On, Smile, Temur Babluani’s Sun of the Sleepless, or even Abuladze’s Repentance or the half-hour or so of Nijolė Adomėnaitė’s Coma that I tried to watch untranslated, all left me feeling far more scorched. I don’t think all these films are necessarily better, but based on Asthenic’s reputation I expected something that stood out from other late Soviet cinema a little more than I think this actually does.

One thing I will say that this movie has that maybe those others don’t is a clearer and more consistent sense of personal style. This is still unmistakably Muratova’s film; by this point she has honed her repetitions, doublings, prop inserts, counterintuitive music choices, and chaotic soundtrack layering into sharp, effective tools. At the same time, it’s interesting to see how the aesthetic convergence that seemed to happen across the USSR during glasnost also seeped into the work of a director as individualistic as Muratova. It seems like almost everyone by then was shooting in 4:3 with mostly handheld cameras, wide-angle lenses, stark lighting, lots of tracking shots, and long sequences of black-and-white, sepia, or near-monotone, and it’s intriguing to watch Muratova’s take on that (especially as she may actually be critiquing that style in the film’s first section). The curious framing and somewhat off compositions of her earlier work seem scaled back here into something just slightly more conventional.

For me, the most surprising thing about this film was how funny it sometimes was. I thought the twist that happens 40 or so minutes in, which I somehow managed not to have spoiled for myself (or had forgotten about), was laugh-out-loud hilarious, and there are a handful of other surprisingly charming moments, like the bench poet’s ode to cats or the teacher practicing her trumpet. (There’s probably no significance to this, but this is the second glasnost film I can think of in which “Strangers in the Night” gets a major scene devoted to it — Leo Gabriadze sings it to distract some guards in Kin-Dza-Dza!) This humor helped me better appreciate some of the metaphors that seemed more heavy-handed to me — citizens are sleepwalking through their lives; love is dead; society is a mental ward; older generations are stuck on a train to nowhere (or possibly to hell); etc. At the same time, I feel like the film’s darker, crueler humor, which is far more pervasive than the lighter moments I cited above, ultimately chipped away at my interest rather than bolstering it. But I will fully admit this may just be a cultural issue for me: this story is told in the attitude of a bitter joke, in a way that strikes me as very, very Russian, and thus probably perfectly pitched to its intended audience, which was not me. (Maybe it says something that all the other Soviet films I’ve mentioned favorably in this review were made by filmmakers from Baltic or Caucasian republics....)

I'd like to revisit this at some point, possibly even before this project is over, if I have time. And I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from checking it out, especially since my opinion seems to be an outlier.

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knives
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#118 Post by knives » Sun Apr 29, 2018 6:51 pm

Satori wrote: Old Joy (Reichardt, 2006)
One of the rare films that rivals Ozu in its perfection. Like Ozu, Old Joy is about change, with macro-scale changes registered through micro-scale social interactions. “End of an era,” Kurt proclaims over a gorgeous shot of old buildings and ancient trees. The film asks us to consider what, precisely, has ended? Industrialization? The ability to retreat into nature without technology? Or just a record store in the Pacific Northwest where Kurt hoped to sell some old records?

By the end of the film, we realize one thing that has changed is Kurt and Mark’s relationship. The film is about how certain old friends no longer fit into your life. We realize this through perfectly pitched moments: “Should’ve been there,” Kurt tells Mark after going on about a night of dancing to drums in the wilderness with an old roommate who stiffed them on the rent some years back. The look on Mark’s face tells us that he is no longer at a place in his life where he could share such a night. This realization is developed early in the film and we are allowed the time to contemplate it through extended car tracking shots while the beautiful Yo La Tango score plays. Like Ozu, Reichardt respects the audience enough to slow down and let us soak it all in.

The film deftly walks a thin line with Kurt, affording him respect but not taking him seriously. There is no profundity in his rant about string theory, and yet his image of the universe as a falling tear is unspeakably beautiful. So too the confused and meandering “notebook store” story he tells at the Hot Springs, which ends with his dreamed revelation that “sorrow is worn out joy.” This observation emotionally re-centers the film, turning the sorrow of them drifting apart into evidence of their past joy. The era might but over, but the awareness of its passing speaks to its significance.

Kurt’s story also provides a clue to Reichardt’s narrative structure: a series of moments are strung together without direction or solid meaning but they nonetheless produce moments of moving poetry.

The exact nature of their relationship is also left up to us. There is evidence that Kurt was or still is in love with Mark: his awkwardness about sharing the tent, the moment he breaks down by the fire, and the massage. Reichardt wisely lets this possibility simmer below the surface of the film. I think that Kurt himself probably doesn’t know. What is certain is that something passes between them at the Hot Springs. There is eroticism—especially the shot in which Mark’s hand slides into the water from the side of the tub—but also something even more profound that the film can only hint at. Is this an awareness of change? An acceptance that they no longer fit into each other’s lives? If there is an epiphany here, how long will it last? The shots of Kurt wandering the streets in the film’s closing moments suggest that it has already faded.
Going to have to firmly disagree here. This a real rough watch and if I hadn't already seen all of her subsequent films I would probably be scared off by this one. Rather than Ozu the film made me think of Something existing between early Jarmusch and Linklater philosophical minimalism and mumblecore comic melodrama on a budget. The plot structure is essentially My Dinner with Andre of the west By that description this film should be cat nip for me and there are a few things I did enjoy. Oregon's eastern side is undoubtedly beautiful and the use of the radio is fairly brilliant in a way that renders this film completely distinct from the many similar ones out there. Where the film does not work for me to the point of making me dislike it is with the characterization particularly of Oldham's character who is so grating man to, man, ruin this film for me man and cause, man, the film, man, to feel like, man, it is going on forever, man, which, man, is bad for a 75 minute picture man man. The central story that these two friends are standing at a point in their life where their friendship doesn't work is a pretty old story that can be told a lot of ways and of all the ones to choose from I'm surprised that Reichardt essentially went with the same one pursued in Old School with about the same level of emotional success. Likewise while the philosophical ramblings in Linklater's films work mostly because the characters delivering them are inherently interesting we are left here with skinny Luke Wilson and the most annoying hipster in the world. The content of their speeches don't add up to much and don't really speak well to the type of characters they neither investing them with interest nor pathos. Instead they're just some annoying guys at a party.

Unlike you I found nothing beautiful of the tear drop speech which just rang as a hollow man being afforded to speak longer than respect really calls for. That same dynamic is in the Malle film, but the key difference is that Andre does offer things that at least appear to have depth so the wool is much more catching while Oldham is plainly a joke here too old to be doddering away like some 23 year old searching to be the next Ken Kesey on their parents' dime.

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#119 Post by zedz » Mon Apr 30, 2018 4:53 pm

Long Farewells (Muratova, 1971) - I saw the three banned Muratova films all together when they were finally liberated in 1990, and managed to see Brief Encounters and The Asthenic Syndrome again afterwards, but I'd only seen this the one time, and my memories of it were a little scrambled by age and the other two films. Basically, I remembered the main characters, most of the settings and a few distinct scenes, and an overwhelming impression that it was stylistically thrilling. That last one, it turns out, is kind of an understatement, with Muratova building her idiosyncratic style out of a magpie's nest of techniques: disorienting close-ups, jump cuts, radical rack focus shots, compositions obscured by out-of-focus foreground objects, Altmanesque zooms, non-naturalistic blocking, repetitions (micro- and macro-), prattle and cacophony, subjunctive sequences that question the reality of the narrative (there's a particularly brilliant example of this when a banal encounter gets intermingled with Sasha's erotic co-option of the same event - a perfect cinematic representation of teenage horniness). Perhaps most striking of all is Muratova's bravura cubist editing, where actions are broken down and repeated from different angles or takes, or entire sequences replay themselves, often while appearing to continue chronologically. Sometimes it's like the characters are desperate to try again at an interaction that goes badly, but they're doomed to repeat themselves. There aren't many other films that are this startlingly original in purely formal terms that also work exactly as planned. I'd suggest Daisies and The Cremator, but none of these films is much like the other.

Despite all the stylistic pyrotechnics, it's a solid, relatable story: a young man passive-aggressively trying to get out from under an overbearing mother. There's no acrimony or particularly high drama, just a slow, cautious dance of little deceptions and hurt feelings, with the thin-skinned mother feeling unfairly assaulted on all fronts (yet again, Muratova makes a mature woman and her work central to a film).

I'm not sure of the official reason the film was banned for nearly twenty years. Muratova's radical style certainly wouldn't have helped its chances, and it really was a bold act of defiance to make this film in the face of the shelving of Brief Encounters. The scene in the street where Sasha perfectly models rebellious behaviour to a local party official would have provided a good excuse for the authorities, but maybe it was just the inclusion of decadent Western pop music?

Pandora's Box (Ustaoglu, 2008) - Yesim Ustaoglu made the powerful Journey to the Sun (which I'll definitely be rewatching for this project), and this is the only other one of her films I've seen so far. She's a subdued, intelligent visual stylist, tending to withdraw into long shot for moments of heightened emotion. This is a rather conventional story - three squabbling siblings struggle to deal with their cranky mother, who has developed Alzheimers and keeps wandering off, and the alienated grandson who hardly knows her is the only one who actually cares - but it's made compelling by good character observation and the restrained style. Gorgeous landscapes and a solid sense of place in Istanbul. If you liked, say, Uzak, you'd probably enjoy this.

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knives
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#120 Post by knives » Mon Apr 30, 2018 10:55 pm

Humpday (Dir. Shelton)
This hits home a lot of those points I was stewing on with Old Joy while having a mass of its own mublecorey problems. This changes the formula on the My Dinner with Andre story in a way that is really satisfying. It's also a really obvious choice moving the story to the Wallace Shawn character's turf to really show why his point of view is so likable. The Gregory character likewise is surprisingly friendly never really saying that the picket fence is awful for everyone, just so for him. This reformulates the story into one where a question of sublimation of the viewpoints is the main point. Admittedly the story is an outlandish example for sublimation, but the porn vid is more a mcguffin than anything else which allows the movie to have fun with the question of having fun. So while Shelton, whose later film Laggies is genuinely excellent and worth searching out, doesn't deliver as beautiful a film as Reichardt lacking her lyrical-political goals she does give a more satisfying film that comes across as more mature and interesting to be honest. That's not to say this is some miracle film though. While not as bad as a Swanberg film this does have a little bit of that rambling mumblecore scene development style going on that's just annoying. Also the DV is really bad with everyone looking like they have a sunburn.

For Ellen (Dir. Kim)
Nothing in this film works in exactly the way you'd expect. A special shout out deserves to go to Dano's character who is simply the worst with an annoying characterization that makes you just want him to drown himself. John Heder as John Heder as a lawyer is weirdly the highlight though and I'd much rather see a movie of his character.

Fire (Dir. Mehta)
This is a film that really needs to be talked about with two hands given how significant it is for India and what major challenges it presented for its society and for what the movie actually is. With that first hand this is a great and important film that earns a lot of respect. On the second hand though I have to admit I found it only okay. The story is fairly basic and hits its key notes as necessary, but doesn't rise beyond the newspaper facts it tell to give a more intimate sense of the characters, their situations, or their desires. For a film about the dousing of the fires of passion the movie comes across rather lukewarm.

Swept Away (Dir. Wertmuller)
This is an interesting one to come to after seeing Ritchie's version. I actually liked that one okay, but this is also a real improvement. Despite being a half hour longer it feels significantly shorter. Actually that is how it is with most things. The film is pitched as a similar farcical level, but in the context of crazy Italian overacting rather than Hollywood overacting things are just slightly funnier and work better. That's helped also be the face that Wertmuller really uglies up Gianinni with a stupid beard and huge Marty Feldman eyes. He really does look like some poor fisherman dug up from Sardinia which helps to make the sex stuff of the second half less about sexiness and more about the master slave dynamic. That and the rest of the film's politics are handled with Wertmuller's usual political sense and is about as effective as the rest (though Summer Night is still my favorite). The lead is such a terrible person that it can sometimes get lost how clearly this film plays as a critique of the left. The hits against Stalin in the beginning are very legitimate even as their source is not with the second half proving her right in a certain way by having the switching of positions still creating an abusive power dynamic, just not with the oppressed suffering Stockholm Syndrome. Certainly the film isn't for everyone, but for me it really works.

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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#121 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Apr 30, 2018 11:33 pm

Ounie Leconte's (partly) autobiographical debut feature, A Brand New Life waas quite fine. It recounts a young girl's abandonment (to an orphanage) and her painful (and some positive) experiences there. I find "based on true story" films typically totally unconvincing. This is an exception. Leconte gets a spectacular lead performance from 9 year old KIM Sae-ron.

Anne Fontaine's The Innocents is another powerful, based-on-a-true-story film, recounting the story of a French woman (RED Cross) doctor in Soviet-occupied Poland who discovers a convent of nuns raped by Soviet troops (allowed by their superiors as a "reward" for "liberating" Poland), many of whom are now pregnant -- and in deep denial of their situation. Very harrowing, and well-performed.

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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#122 Post by zedz » Tue May 01, 2018 3:45 pm

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) - I remember being very impressed with this film when it was first released, and it remains an unusual and ambitious first feature. It's not just an immersive exploration of a world that I don't think American cinema had touched on before (or since?), but it looks at it through a massive cast of characters, most of whom aren't formally introduced. The audience is left to infer the relationships and back stories that provide the individual inflections of the very straightforward overarching narrative (the family is migrating to the mainland: who will stay behind?) Dash's elegant style, full of dissolves rather than hard cuts, sustains a dreamlike atmosphere that often feels like you're drifting into flashback (a sensation aided and abetted by the unfamiliar milieu) or some other dimension, and the film does actually go there a handful of times. The film is remarkable for sustaining an atmosphere of suspension throughout. But it's not perfect. A lot of the 'action' takes the form of extended speeches, which lends the film an interesting presentational flavour, but hampers the organic drama. And much of the music in the film is simply dreadful, and applied with a trowel. It's very easy to imagine a more sympathetic score elevating everything considerably. There's no earthly reason why the Sea Islands in 1902 should sound like a tacky cocktail lounge in 1983.

Also saw Yesim Ustaoglu's short ethnographic documentary Life on Their Shoulders. A solid piece of work, looking at isolated Turkish mountain communities where women (including very old women) do the heavy labour. Each year sees an exhausting cycle of migrations to higher and higher altitudes, ending up at an amazing stone town in the clouds, so the film takes the form of a continual climb, septuagenarians negotiating slippery logs over swollen rivers, with bundles of firewood larger than themselves tied to their back. They'll 'rest' for a time in a temporary settlement, carrying a range of different burdens in their daily grind, then begin another climb.
Last edited by zedz on Tue May 01, 2018 3:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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knives
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#123 Post by knives » Tue May 01, 2018 3:52 pm

I don't know about cinema, but at least according to a sister of mine the TV show Underground has tackled it at least somewhat.

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#124 Post by zedz » Tue May 01, 2018 4:03 pm

knives wrote:I don't know about cinema, but at least according to a sister of mine the TV show Underground has tackled it at least somewhat.
I did a search on the ever-fallible IMDB, and the only other thing that seemed to deal with the Gullah culture was a kid's TV show from the 90s.
A different take on Daughters of the Dust

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knives
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#125 Post by knives » Tue May 01, 2018 4:46 pm

Oh I remember that. It was cute. Had a weird mute Barney though. Here's a relevantish clip from that show I mentioned.

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