I haven’t given an update in about five or six months. (!!) Quickly, quickly: there were film festivals, immigration papers, eye exams, and a lot of cooking… I spent all of autumn and soon all of winter developing new habits for my health, so I’ve been very preoccupied. I wish everyone a happy belated new year and a very warm and safe winter!
(1) From November:
Fat City (John Huston, 1972): The dinner that a loathsome retired boxer cooks for his not-really girlfriend: a gritty chunk of beef, a spilled can of peas, and a puddle of ketchup. It is a wretched meal. It’s all of the care he has to offer, stacked on a chipped plate. He hates himself and hates her less. In ignorance of the others who love him desperately he hopes this toppling over could be called love.
Little Forest (Yim Soon-rye, 2018): After the first viewing I made a large pot of beef bourguignon (many steps to the butcher and back in the rain, lots of waiting). After the second viewing I enjoyed a meal of leftovers: white rice seasoned with yukari, roasted yams, blanched and seasoned spinach, spicy dried squid (no steps, no waiting). Yukari dyes white rice a thin purple, the viewing experience was about the same—purifying, a delicate stain.
(2) Journal entry from October:
For a long time now my desktop background has been the 1943 painting “Haircut by the Sea” by Milton Avery. If you’ve ever held a tuft of someone else’s hair between scissors you’ll recognize that same texture in the grass, the leaves, and the pleat of the pants. I’d read that you can find strands of hair stuck to Agnes Martin’s paintings. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art I squinted hard to see if I’d find any. No such luck.
In A Moveable Feast, there is a chapter entitled “Secret Pleasures” in which Hemingway writes about having to get a haircut to go on assignments across Europe. Once he decides to quit newspaper work he vows never to get a haircut again. His wife Hadley then proposes that they grow their hair to the same length, referring to one of their secret pleasures. A footnote includes the memory she’s referencing:
“When we lived in Austria in the winter we would cut each other’s hair and let it grow to the same length. One was dark and the other dark red gold and in the dark in the night one would wake the other swinging the heavy dark or the heavy silken red gold across the others lips in the cold dark in the warmth of the bed. You could see your breath if there was moonlight.”
(3) Note from September:
Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997) and After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998):
Making movies to claim your life and seize immortality. If the one memory you choose to relive forever is to be on set, making movies with your crew, then you're forever in the possibility of making. Living in all the memories you didn’t mention, those you haven’t remembered yet, and those you will make. In other words it is a wish for more wishes.
(4) Highlighted text from August:
“Martin was unyieldingly, and successfully, opposed to talking about her life, withholding details even from those who considered themselves good friends. As she saw it, art was impersonal and universal — and mental illness was something that didn’t need to be discussed at all. In any case, friendship was a complicated undertaking for her, subject to firm constraints and beset by unpredictable lapses. She seems to have had the gift of mirroring back to people their own best self, while guarding her own identity. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t capable of engaging deeply with others, and her impact on people was often enormous.”
Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art
Tsai Ming-liang, Days, 2020.
My tendency to never finish the books I start is now an annual public announcement. Here is a list of titles scattered around the house and on my computer: I’ve been going through essays in Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk and Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader. I’ve also returned to E. San Juan Jr.’s writings. San Juan Jr.’s “Beyond Identity Politics: The Predicament of the Asian American Writer in Late Capitalism” and Darryl Chin’s “Multiculturalism and Its Masks: The Art of Identity Politics” are two essays that I reread often over the year.
I’ve only read a few chapters of Dong Hoon Kim’s Eclipsed Cinema: The Film Culture of Colonial Korea, but I’m already very humbled and challenged by its reframing of questions about colonialism, national cinema, and film historiography, so I’m trying to savor the reading experience. By the bed sits Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, a terrifying thing that I’m inching through.
And I did finish Ray Cronin’s cursory but enlightening text on painter Alex Colville, available for free at the Art Canada Institute website.
(5) In chronological order, favorite viewings of the year. Films not from 2021, including rewatches.*
The Baker's Wife (Marcel Pagnol, 1938)
Birthright (Oscar Micheaux, 1939)
Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
Aimless Bullet (Yu-hyun Mok, 1960)*
Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978)
Philip Guston: A Life Lived (Michael Blackwood, 1981)
The Home and the World (Satyajit Ray, 1984)*
Gagman (Lee Myung-se, 1989)
Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard, 1990)
Mo’ Better Blues (Spike Lee, 1990)*
Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992)*
Crooklyn (Spike Lee, 1994)
Lucky Chan-sil (Kim Cho-hee, 2019)
Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2013)*
Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013)*
Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)
After the Storm (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2016)*
The First Lap (Kim Dae-hwan, 2017)*
The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio, 2019)
Days (Tsai Ming-liang, 2020)
Writings, some recent:
A brief assessment of Space Jam 2 and its theme of parent-child communication.
A historical overview of queer Korean cinema for Notebook. I wanted to recommend two additional films by the documentary filmmaker Lee Young, Lesbian Censorship in School (2005) and Out: Smashing Homophobia Project (2007), which are two of the first feature-length South Korean queer documentaries.
A report from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
An interview with Payal Kapadia, whose documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) follows several years of student-led protests across India.
An essay on Dennis Hopper’s recently restored Out of the Blue (1980).
An entry in Notebook’s annual double features poll on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021).
A review of Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections.