In March I celebrated my birthday, and our anniversary in April. I ate my first blood orange. To be honest, I’ve been feeling extremely young ever since. Seeing the return of last year’s tulips makes me feel still very early in my life cycle on Earth.
Movies:
Porto of My Childhood (Manoel de Oliveira, 2001): A conversation on Jonathan the 188-year-old tortoise (the oldest terrestrial being) steered me towards the films of Manoel de Oliveira. Considered the world’s oldest living working person and the oldest filmmaker at the age of 106, Oliveira’s career started in the silent era and ended in the digital age. Porto of My Childhood presents a fictitious sliver of his circumstantially epic life. de Oliveira methodically divulges very little about himself that could be proven as true. Instead, the remembering narrator acts as a witness to great art, happy enough to have been there. From the compositions of his reenactments and his selection of archival footage, we glean the lessons learned from watching the construction of modernist architecture, attending nights at the opera, and reading the poetry of Fernando Pessoa—an eye for the graceful curvatures formed by chairs and tables, the romance of diffused colours.
Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, 2005): May 1968 turns to 69, and a poet (Louis Garrel) tries to write verses for his new lover (Clotilde Hesme). His grief moves in many directions: for those already gone (whether by death in the riots or through later disappearances) and for those soon to be lost, as well as a part of himself that he’s too afraid to identify. The poet manically wrestles his fate with a straight face. Occasionally, grace intervenes. The court releases him from the military draft because his poetry seems promising enough to bring honour to France. His girlfriend, a sculptor, promises to support his writing. Her offer falls through when she sells out, seduced by the promise of art world glamour in New York City. Nonetheless, Garrel is too tenderhearted to blame any individual for their mishaps; instead he details with perfect precision the psychological warfare levied by the state in the aftermath of revolutionary movements. Police appearances only bookend the film, but surveillance-induced paranoia (worsened by opium addiction) shrinks the city’s crevices into miniature nightmare realms reminiscent of Méliès.
Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964): Directed by a 75 year-old Dreyer, Gertrud ends with the image of a closed door, a firm assertion of privacy at the end of a satisfying life. Love itself, divorced from sex and faith, frees the elderly Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode), who appears at the start of the film during the bright-eyed and youthful phase of her fifties. She reaches the end alone with no loose ends and no men by her side. The camera moves us, her final guests, further backwards until the door is shut. By contrast, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman ends with a man (Robert De Niro) in forced seclusion, having been abandoned by a family that fears him and a handful of friends that he murdered. He requests that the nurse at the retirement home leaves the door slightly open while he sleeps, hoping for at least one more visit to his loveless domain.
Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle, 1994): Wallace Shawn is my celebrity crush, so I only have good things to say about this one, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play “Uncle Vanya.” Staged as a rehearsal directed by André Gregory (who plays himself), the film takes place on a professor’s estate managed by the relatives of his late wife, including Vanya. For decades, they’ve toiled as the old man fails to produce any new work. Vanya compares two sets of interpersonal dynamics between the director and his cast (and among the actors) and between the professor and his estate (and among the servants). The strength of the former (established by the warm glances of cast and crew around the craft services table, the wordless but kind direction of Gregory), bolsters the critique latent in the latter, which skewers the aging intellectual as a supreme waste of resources and a washed hoarder of worship.
The Cat of the Worm’s Green Realm (Stan Brakhage, 1997): The microscopic scale of this film recalled for me Charles Darwin’s final book, Earthworms. After observing thousands of worms, Darwin concluded that despite their seeming insignificance and lack of intelligence, the effects of their movements reverberated throughout the earth:
When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms. It is a marvellous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms.
Brakhage cuts from tree to grass, from cat to worm. Though the cat and the worm are both terrestrial beings only the worm digs beneath the soil. Coated in flecks of jewel-like dirt, it pulsates like a vein and conducts the levelling of the ground upon which the cat stands, and upon which it becomes domesticated (as indicated by its name tag). Brakhage’s worm is fully alive, taking in moon and sun with its graceful slinking about. Darwin points out that the worm takes extreme pleasure in the basic activities of eating and mating—Jonathan, that fossil of a tortoise, spends his days doing about the same. The film contains a similar voracity towards the sumptuous bursts of colour found in trees and the sky.
Readings:
“If the only thing I read in 2020 were film criticism, I would get a very skewed understanding of the pandemic era.” Published in early March for Berlin Critics Week’s magazine, Abby Sun’s essay on the infrastructural paradoxes of film criticism and film festivals is an essential text ahead of the summer festival season, where an in-person Cannes Film Festival—and the dual threat of Leos Carax’s musical Annette and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch—lies ahead.
You should be able to read Hyun Seong Park’s article, “South Korean Cine-Feminism on the Move,” online. Beginning with Park Nam-ok’s film The Widow in 1950, the article assembles a history of Korean feminism within its national film history.
Laura Marsh’s review of Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth biography is a perfect textual analysis that, in taking to task how Bailey frames Roth’s exploitation of the women around him, establishes the basis for ongoing charges against Bailey for preying on his eighth-grade students.
Recent writings:
I contributed a few words on Francina Carbonell’s documentary The Sky is Red for Berlin Critics Week’s magazine. I also wrote an essay on Zack Snyder’s Justice League for Notebook.
Stan Brakhage, The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm, 1997.