Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

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bottled spider
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#126 Post by bottled spider » Tue May 01, 2018 6:05 pm

zedz wrote: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.
A film I would likely never have heard of (or felt any inclination to watch) if not for this list project. It's a keeper all right. As you say, imperfect, but it seemed like a film that could be watched several times with deepening appreciation. All those beautiful shades of white!

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bottled spider
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#127 Post by bottled spider » Wed May 02, 2018 11:49 am

An Angel at my Table (Campion, 1990). A cheerful account of a harrowing life. For all the sadness of much of Frame's history, the film is never bleak, and never disjointed, as fragmentary as the telling of it is. A perfect moment (one of many) that perhaps epitomizes the entire film:
SpoilerShow
Janet Frame stepping into her recently deceased father's boots and mimicking a beloved gesture of his.
The Criterion commentary track is very good.

Marie Antoinette (Coppola, 2006). I liked the ringing wine glasses, surely an echo of the cable snapping in The Cherry Orchard.

The film ends with them leaving Versailles, apprehensive, but not aware of what the viewer well knows will follow. I thought this idea might have been taken further by ending the film even before the storming of the Bastille, at some nightmarishly happy moment.

Palo Alto (Gia Coppola, 2013). I gave up after twenty minutes. I suspect the short stories on which this is based are the problem.

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#128 Post by zedz » Wed May 02, 2018 4:30 pm

The Order of Myths (Margaret Brown, 2008) - A really great documentary on Mobile's Mardi(s) Gras and associated traditions that doubles / triples as a superb study of race and class in America. It's consistently engaging, colourful and startling, but Brown's real achievement is preserving the messy complexity of the issues she addresses when it would have been so easy to present a string of gotcha moments that would have made the film much more sensational and, presumably, saleable. Highly recommended.

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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#129 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed May 02, 2018 4:50 pm

zedz wrote: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.
Gary Moss's Gullah Tales was an interesting 28 minute short telling two stories -- the first an animal tale (involving a rabbit outsmarting a whale and an elephant) and then a story of slave life (about a slave winning freedom for himself and his family by similar trickery). Apparently no home video version of the full film (telling both stories) or even of the abbreviated version of the film.

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#130 Post by zedz » Thu May 03, 2018 4:55 pm

bottled spider wrote:
zedz wrote:A film I would likely never have heard of (or felt any inclination to watch) if not for this list project. It's a keeper all right. As you say, imperfect, but it seemed like a film that could be watched several times with deepening appreciation. All those beautiful shades of white!
Interesting tidbit from the commentary: all of that gorgeous cinematography was achieved with natural light. No electric light whatsoever, just a masterful use of reflectors. One of the reasons for this was to present the shades of skin colour as accurately as possible, but no doubt all those different shades of white look much, much better with this subtle approach too.

Two biggies watched yesterday:

I Can't Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994) When Chocolat came out, I thought it was fine, but it didn't strike me as the arrival of a major new talent, and after that Denis seemed to vanish from the radar, like all too many promising new female directors. Then this film came along six years later and it was a stunner. It's an interlocking portrait of various immigrants in Paris - some long-established; some newly arrived; some on the brink of returning home - and their casual connections. It's also a serial-killer movie, with the city plagued by a string of murders of elderly women that only glancingly impacts on our main cast until an hour in.

It already has Denis' wonderful dreamlike realism down pat: ordinary places and interactions transformed by a keen observational eye and ear. The photography is intimate and visionary - this is one of the best filmic depictions of back-street Paris (the real, multicultural one, not the Disneyland version). It was Agnes Godard's first feature with Denis, and only her fourth overall (and I was shocked to discover that the wildly accomplished Jacquot de Nantes had been her first film as DOP). They'd go on to form one of the great teams of modern cinema. Denis' distinctive editing rhythms and use of music (the Tindersticks role is here fulfilled by D.C. Basehead) are already fully mature. This is also her first feature with editor Nelly Quettier, who would prove nearly as constant and essential a collaborator as Godard.

It's going to be tough deciding which Denis films to leave off a list of only twenty-five, but this one is surely a keeper.

Le Camion (Marguerite Duras, 1977) - The first and only other time I saw this, which must be more than twenty years ago, it struck me as a brilliant, erudite gag: a defiantly uncommercial director assembling all the components of a commercial narrative feature, but refusing to combine them into a satisfying commercial whole.

There's a script, with characters, a central mystery and a beginning, middle and end.

There's a three act structure, which even has a flashback in it, featuring a big-name actor.

There's a hero, locations, music and action.

But each of those descriptions represents a different, isolated level of the film. The script, characters and narrative are a literal script, being read by Duras and Depardieu in a living room. It's that reading, in which the pair never move from their chairs, which has the three-act structure: the position of the two of them (and, indeed, of much of the decor in the room) changes abruptly after 20 minutes, and again at the exact halfway point of the movie. Each act has its own variation on the setting, its own timeframe (night or day) and its own syntax. The second act is broken in the middle by a tracking shot into the pair at the table, a violation of the established style that's thrilling in context, and which is completed at the very end of the film by a flashback - a flashback to nothing happening. In the third act, Duras and Depardieu are rigorously given separate frames for most of its duration, finally being united at the hour mark.

The eponymous hero of the film is introduced in iconic fashion at the very start of the film, and the third layer of the film concerns his exploits, dashing dynamically, photogenically and pointlessly around France's liminal spaces. These shots could be the truck, tiny and blue in a background of fields and forests, or could be point-of-view shots of motorways. In one unique instance, it's a circular pan of the empty cab. They're all rather gorgeous and, in the context of the rest of the film's austerity, in a strange way vapidly exciting.

The film's narrative, which only exists on the soundtrack, in the form of the script read and explained by Duras (and occasionally Depardieu), is a subjunctive one ("the woman would be. . .") and only gradually sheds the extremely abstract nature it has at the start of the film. The presentation is deliberately lulling, but the characters, themes (including antisemitism and a general disillusionment with Marxism) and motivations of the narrative very slowly come into focus, and are resolved towards the end of the film.

It's extremely tempting to see the various components of Le Camion as it exists as the deconstruction of the subjunctive film which Duras describes within the film. This would be a neat and tidy 'solution' (i.e. the truck we see is the truck that would appear in the film, driving the roads on which the narrative would be set; Depardieu would presumably play the truck driver, and the "lady of a certain age" is a stand-in for Duras) but it's one which Duras deliberately defies. The film she describes would be black and white, for instance, and the location of the script is along the coast, with repeated evocations of a sea we never see in Le Camion's 'action' shots.

Coming back to this film after so long was an unexpected delight. Its extremely cerebral nature is offset by a weird sensuality, and the audacity of the whole thing is fun and funny on a conceptual level. (Available subbed on YouTube).

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Kirkinson
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#131 Post by Kirkinson » Fri May 04, 2018 3:44 am

For Fun (Ning Ying, 1993) and On the Beat (Ning Ying, 1995) - Two very good films with very similar qualities. For Fun is about a longtime “utility man” at the Beijing opera who is forced to retire and in his boredom joins up with a group of amateur opera singing retirees he meets in the park. He founds a club for them, but starts taking it so seriously that it sucks the pleasure out of it for everyone (including himself). On the Beat is about a police department tackling a rabies scare in their precinct after a handful of stray dog bites. Their response is increasingly overeager and sometimes absurdly draconian. Both films feature non-professional actors and feel very down-to-earth and authentic. For Fun is almost worth seeing just for its collection of unique and unforgettable faces. Both films also make fun of Chinese bureaucracy, very lightly in For Fun and a little more caustically in On the Beat. They’re both interesting and very enjoyable films.

I also tried watching one of Ning Ying’s more recent films, The Double Life (2010) but I’m sad to say I gave up after 20 minutes. It’s hard to believe it came from the same filmmaker. Still looking forward to I Love Beijing, though.

July Rhapsody (Ann Hui, 2002) - What a wonderful film! Many thanks to Michael Kerpan for recommending it, I might have passed on watching this on YouTube in 240p if he hadn’t said it was on of his favorite Ann hui films. For starters it’s just really beautifully made. It matches the poetry that occasionally punctuates the story without ever overreaching or repeating the same kinds of images over and over again. I love the way the backstory unfolds gradually, how the drama hits you softly and slowly but nonetheless emphatically. And how it plays with time — a character begins telling a story, the film cuts to earlier events, but not the events that correspond to the story, yet there are also legitimate flashbacks, etc. — but it all has a sort of thematic linearity and feels totally natural. It’s impressive, too, how Hui manages to portray a relationship between a high school teacher and one of his students in which the student always has agency and is never reduced to victimhood, but neither is the teacher’s position ever excused or rationalized. I may have to track down the DVD — I gather it won’t look amazing, but it would be great to watch this in a sharp enough image that I could at least reliably see the actors’ eyes in medium wide shots!

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bdsweeney
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#132 Post by bdsweeney » Fri May 04, 2018 10:04 am

Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman 1985) Please excuse my drunk posting but I enjoyed this film a great deal. Nothing to write home about narratively, but it’s so so obvious that Seidelman isn’t interested in the plot mechanics anyway. Instead, enjoy the elasticity of the way it delves into characterisation and the looseness of the way it delves into the delights of escaping the day to day drudgery of routine. While its mechanics seem strictly rote, it nevertheless excites in the way it captures attention through fun performances and never ending visual excitement. Though it precedes both, it reminded me a fair bit of the generosity of Demme’s best and the visual dynamics of Wong Kar Wai’s work in the likes of, say, Chungking Express.
I’ll admit it’s not quite up to the standards that Wong etc. sets, but it at least breathes the same air as it. The cinematography is something else, while Seidelman has a neat way with visual gags that show her talent with extending beyond the constraints of the basic storyline.
With a terrific soundtrack on top of all this, it’s a very neat way to spend a Friday evening after a long week.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#133 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri May 04, 2018 4:17 pm

Glad you liked July Rhapsody. Kirkinson!. If I had to pick a very favorite Hui, this would be my pick. ;-)

Just watched Hui's recent Our Time Will Come, which balances a personal story against a wartime action story. It centers around the anti-Japanese resistance movement in Hong Kong over the course of several years. A very fine cast -- and wonderful cinematography by Nelson YU Lik-Wai (who also routinely works with JIA Zhangke). Not perhaps as perfect as July Rhapsody, but I found it very satisfying overall.

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#134 Post by zedz » Sun May 06, 2018 5:02 pm

In one of those weird bits of synchronicity, the day after I watched Le Camion, I watched:

Rules of the Road (Su Friedrich, 1993) - Which is in many respects a shorter, sharper, funnier remake of Le Camion. It has the same division of action / location footage (also focussed on a vehicle and largely devoid of people) and soundtrack narration. Instead of the director chatting with Gerard Depardieu, we get the director playing solitaire. But in every other respect, this is about as far from Marguerite Duras as you can get: a joyful, melancholy personal memoir of a relationship gone south and the car that embodied it. Friedrich can't move in New York without being confronted by its avatars. A definite inclusion on my list, even though it will have to share it with at least one other Friedrich film. To wit:

Sink or Swim (Su Friedrich, 1990) - A brilliant experimental work that combines structural filmmaking, found footage, personal memoir and biopic into a seamless whole. This was a partner film to Friedrich's The Ties That Bind (1985), in which she interrogated her mother, and focuses on her father. It's far more elaborately constructed as a narrative, and he is not a participant in the film as her mother was in the earlier one. The film is divided into 26 chapters, which proceed in forward-biographical / reverse-alphabetical order (Zygote, Y-Chromosome, X-Chromosome etc.) Almost every chapter contains a brief voiceover narrative (read by a young girl) and is illustrated by found footage. The relationships between the chapter title, narrative and imagery is very fluid, and sometimes cryptic, adding additional layers of mystery and complexity to what is already a very complex film. But on the other hand, the narrative is straightforward and emotionally engaging, a portrait of a remote father casually revisiting his own personal scars on the next generation. Fantastic film, easy top ten.

Getting to Know the Wide World (Kira Muratova, 1980) - Continuing my trawl through available Muratovas, this is a much less remarkable film than its two banned predecessors - which is presumably why it actually managed to get a release. It's an amiable social realist film about - here comes Le Camion again - a truck driver who picks up a couple of hitch-hikers and becomes involved in their lives. There's an informal visual bravura in Muratova's found surrealism - a komsomol wedding in which the landscape is overwhelmed with dozens of brides in white, a vast building site where banal interactions take place in cavernous architectural spaces, or while showers of sparks play in the background - but in general what I found most interesting about the film is they way in which Muratova's stylistic idiosyncrasies are present in tamer, veiled forms. Dialogue is repeated, but with naturalistic alibis (Mikhail the truck driver partially repeats a story out of nervousness; Lyuba rehearses a speech; tannoy announcements and wedding chants are of their nature repetitive). Disruptive inserts (a close-up of a bride in mismatched sunlight) receive a delayed rationale (she soon reappears in a montage of kissing newlyweds, with the lighting progressively tamed to match the dusk of the main narrative). Out-of-focus foreground objects are there, but as part of standard mise-en-scene (a shot through the truck window has the frame in the frame). But there are some wonderfully eccentric moments of pure Muratova madness: a tracking shot behind a train's wheels masks an arbitrary switch in positions of Mikhail and Lyuba (who are back in place for subsequent shots); Lyuba's mention of her friend Galya singing at a club causes Galya to briefly infect the image and soundtrack. It's as if Muratova, even on her best behaviour, can't resist poking through the screen and whispering: "I'm still here!"

An Old Mistress (Catherine Breillat, 2007) - This is easily my favourite film by Breillat. The constraints of the historical drama really work in her favour, with her characteristic transgressions less florid and narcissistic than usual and more potent because of the restraints of the genre. In a similar way, Asia Argento's rough, feral acting style works really well in the context of so much formality. But regardless of all that, this is a real triumph as a historical drama, with decor, costume and even jewellery carrying an outsized narrative weight.

The Mourning Forest (Naomi Kawase, 2007) - A pleasant, sometimes very beautiful film, but there was a kind of slackness that kept it from being first-rate, kind of like it was a short film that got promoted to feature length. It felt to me like a really promising first feature - but Kawase made her really promising first feature ten years earlier, and it (Suzaku) was a lot better than this. I fear this is doomed to be my response to Kawase's films.

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knives
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#135 Post by knives » Sun May 06, 2018 7:22 pm

Hannah Arendt (Dir. von Trotta)
This cribs from the Life of Emile Zola handbook so heavily that anything I say here might as well as be taken from anything I said there. Like that film this one takes a significant writer/ thinker and sees how their preoccupations played out while covering a criminal trial. On the story end of things that the defendant is guilty is the biggest difference. The film is a bit more unique on the aesthetic level. It mixes in some actual footage of the trial into its staging with no attempt to make it organic which fits well with the film's point about how the trial might not be just in an absolute sense. This depends on Eichmann being Eichmann in the way Clooney needed McCartney to be McCartney. Any actor would render him a cartoon that could not be believed to a sensitive point. Speaking of, I'm glad this didn't just go the way of the banality of evil. There's a lot of that here, but it also emphasizes the ethics of trials in heat which is frankly a more interesting way to approach Arendt anyways. Staying with themes for a second, it's interesting how ignorant von Trotta assumes her audience is of the Holocaust which were it not for recent studies I'd take as an excessive insult to the audience. There is a lot of hand holding with reams of straightforward exposition that only hints at the themes rather than just laying ground.

Orlando (dir. Potter)
This is just a whole lot of fun with its text obvious enough it doesn't seem to call out for a in depth examination. Rather Potter delivers an experience in that odd British style of dryly comic dramas of severe aesthetic playfulness. It is a film that makes it easy to proselytize just by giving lines or describing shots. Even the most basic description of Tilda Swinton playing an eternally youthful gender changing immortal seems too fun to bother further elucidation (though the gender swapping element is surprisingly late occurring). It all also risks being too cute the way some Greenaway or Jarman threatens, but for me at least that never takes up with the film maintaining a sheer delight throughout thanks in part due to the brevity the film knows it requires.

Axolotl Overkill (dir. Hegemann)
This is a fairly generic teens behaving badly film that outside of a few moments (the fuck you dinner) doesn't really have the style to support what little character it has. There's really nothing else to say.

The Love Witch (dir. Biller)
The idea of an HGL movie told with deliberation and real artistic intent sounds wonderful and for about a half hour it does work, but then it dawned that this did not take the one lesson from HGL that is the most important: brevity. This is really a 45 minute film stretched agonizingly over two hours. I don't care how pretty your film is in that case, this story isn't strong enough to engage for this long. That Biller fills up the extra 75 minutes with some teenage girl's live journal rants on feminism from the Bush administration doesn't help at all.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#136 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun May 06, 2018 8:53 pm

zedz -- If you haven't seen Kawase's An (a/k/a Sweet Bean), you might want to take a look. Definitely my favorite since Sharasojyu. A bit more focused.... ;-)

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#137 Post by zedz » Sun May 06, 2018 10:34 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:zedz -- If you haven't seen Kawase's An (a/k/a Sweet Bean), you might want to take a look. Definitely my favorite since Sharasojyu. A bit more focused.... ;-)
I have that in my to-watch pile. Has Suzaku ever had an English-friendly release?

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#138 Post by zedz » Sun May 06, 2018 10:42 pm

knives wrote:The Love Witch (dir. Biller)
The idea of an HGL movie told with deliberation and real artistic intent sounds wonderful and for about a half hour it does work, but then it dawned that this did not take the one lesson from HGL that is the most important: brevity. This is really a 45 minute film stretched agonizingly over two hours. I don't care how pretty your film is in that case, this story isn't strong enough to engage for this long. That Biller fills up the extra 75 minutes with some teenage girl's live journal rants on feminism from the Bush administration doesn't help at all.
Pretty much my thoughts on this: a fun stylistic exercise that just never seems to end, or go anywhere particularly interesting. And yeah, you realize that after about half an hour and then have to deal with the dawning realization that the film is just going to plod on and on in the same little circles for a loooong time.

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Satori
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#139 Post by Satori » Mon May 07, 2018 6:18 am

zedz wrote:Sink or Swim (Su Friedrich, 1990) - A brilliant experimental work that combines structural filmmaking, found footage, personal memoir and biopic into a seamless whole. This was a partner film to Friedrich's The Ties That Bind (1985), in which she interrogated her mother, and focuses on her father. It's far more elaborately constructed as a narrative, and he is not a participant in the film as her mother was in the earlier one. The film is divided into 26 chapters, which proceed in forward-biographical / reverse-alphabetical order (Zygote, Y-Chromosome, X-Chromosome etc.) Almost every chapter contains a brief voiceover narrative (read by a young girl) and is illustrated by found footage. The relationships between the chapter title, narrative and imagery is very fluid, and sometimes cryptic, adding additional layers of mystery and complexity to what is already a very complex film. But on the other hand, the narrative is straightforward and emotionally engaging, a portrait of a remote father casually revisiting his own personal scars on the next generation. Fantastic film, easy top ten.
Indeed, this is a masterpiece, and one of the great films about memory and childhood. The temporal tension that you note (the backwards running alphabet juxtaposed with a linear series of autobiographical recollections) works to disrupt a cohesive understanding of the past and its effect on the present. The individual letters have their own rhetorical and thematic resonances—for example, when she inserts footage of the sitcom Father Knows Best right after her father leaves them, exploring how our expectations of our parents are shaped by media constructions—but also accumulate to give us a bigger picture of her life, her father, and a better understanding of how memory works.

Rules of the Road is great, too, but I think that my second favorite Friedrich is Hide and Seek (1996), which once again takes up Freidrich’s questions about how we can narrate our childhood memories. The film asks a pair of questions: Can we draw explicit links between our childhood memories and our lives in the present? Or are we always imposing narratives on our past? The case study is a group of lesbians who talk about their childhoods and how they adhere to or differ from stereotypical depictions of “lesbian childhood.” The film mixes this documentary footage with a fictional narrative about a young tomboy growing up in the 1960s who is dismayed to find that her close female friends are suddenly interested in talking about boys and clothing. The film forces us as viewers to think about how we are reading these fictional scenes; whether we read her actions as queer. We thus participate in the film’s own interrogation of the past and the present.

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bottled spider
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#140 Post by bottled spider » Mon May 07, 2018 12:09 pm

Never Steady, Never Still (Kathleen Hepburn, 2017). Living on the coast of northern BC, a relatively young middle-aged woman is barely surviving an advanced stage of Parkinson's. Her twenty-year old son works the oil fields of northern BC, but he's not quite tough enough for the job or the roughnecks. A heavy going film, obviously. Like Polley's Away From Her, there are a couple minor lapses into the educational. But it's also lyrical. The settings are a pleasure in and of themselves. And there are some interesting moments where the film relaxes its gritty, objective realism and enters into a character's point of view. I feel ambivalent toward the film as a whole, yet I'd be tempted to watch it again if the opportunity arose.

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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#141 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon May 07, 2018 4:31 pm

zedz wrote:Has Suzaku ever had an English-friendly release?
Just a very mediocre HK VCD, probably long out of print.

I think I managed to find a fairly nice French-subbed DVD (not sure of its status, as it was also from long ago).

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bottled spider
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#142 Post by bottled spider » Thu May 10, 2018 12:13 am

The To Do List (Carey, 2013)
A novel experience for me: I literally spat by sympathetic reflex during the one real gross-out moment of this movie. Carey should have listened to her better angels, as the gag was too strained anyway to be worth its off-puttingness. The incident is loosely connected with a sub-plot of the main character getting hazed as a new employee at a swimming pool. While the movie presents the hazing as harmless fun, and the protagonist takes it well in stride, it's unpleasant to watch. In such a likable, good-natured film, I wish that aspect had been milder.

Those two reservations aside, this is one of funniest and warmest comedies I've seen in ages. Not to mention the educational value. My word, the things people get up to.

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knives
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#143 Post by knives » Thu May 10, 2018 6:22 pm

Beyond the Lights (dir. Prince-Bythewood)
Love and Basketball is one of the best romances of the post studio era so coming into this I was excited, but also was expecting more of the same. While there is some overlap in narrative form this reworking of Roman Holiday tonally is something completely different and much harder to stomach. Just as that earlier film conformed completely to being a basketball game this one becomes the poisonous world of modern pop music to the point where for the first 15 or so minutes I was tempted to turn off the film with its uncomfortable vibes and gross lead. It seemed like such a weird turnaround from a film I loved to this. Then the big moment that jump starts the romance occurs and the film reveals itself to be a much deeper and more beautiful thing then I could have imagined. The film not only becomes a genuine, full throated romance of star crossed lovers, but it also steps beyond the cliches of the story it seems to be telling by having her lover be a mirror of her. This allows an exploration of political realities without getting bogged down by actual politics. It makes the film seem ahead of its time in a lot of ways by equating the political circus with the lowest of pop culture entertainment. The Obama era gleam makes that a slightly more optimistic comparison than it seems now, but the absolute darkness of entertainment side of things gives the film the connective tissue necessary to understand the Trump era.

The use of parents here, as well, makes for a depressing comparison to Love and Basketball. The ideas of dynasties and show parents and forced destinies just makes me wretch. There's no sheen and prettiness with that here as Minnie Driver and Danny Glover force and limit their kids in ways that may give them a sort of material success, but limit them as people so that they are stunted and not ready to be people. That gets at Mbatha-Raw much more since she has already hit the high point of her field and been pushed further to the edge, but you can see how that arrested development could seethe into Parker as well. He might not go full Ted Kennedy, but that sort of stress already shows itself a little here. The extremes of Mbatha-Raw have an extra edge to themselves in part because of Driver's casting which adds an extreme racial element to the film that is otherwise not really called into. Driver really seems to see her daughter less as a person than a product to be sold even forcing her to be nude for the success and pushing her to be with the white rapper rather than the black police officer. That sentence alone has a ton of layers that I have no ability to properly delve into. As subtext for the African American community though it couldn't be more clear what the film seems to be working on.

This makes the film sound like this dreary mess I'm sure, but in truth the darkness just makes the central romance all the more a light and gives the film a true beauty that without the darkness of the spotlight it would not have. Throughout the darkest passages of the film as the love blossoms it becomes a means by which to live by. It turns some of the toughest decisions Mbatha-Raw makes into a possible logic. while also giving a utility to the romance. The film doesn't become this sort of pure romance until after a sort of eye of the storm moment which leads to the beach. Those scenes by the beach offer an amazing serenity and hope that finally the film isn't having love be a lifeline, but a beautiful end onto itself. Whether that really is the end is a whole other problem for the film to work through.

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#144 Post by zedz » Sun May 13, 2018 5:59 pm

And for my next trick, I decided to recreate, as far as possible, a programme of hardcore arthouse / experimental feminist films I saw in the late eighties / early nineties. It was a real eye-opener at the time, both in terms of the film practice (none of these films were like anything I’d seen before) and in terms of audience reception. The programme, at the local art gallery, was, as I recall, rather innocuously presented as “films by women” or some such neutral formula, and the audience was 90% women activists and academics, 10% cinephile. Some of the films were received enthusiastically, some with white-hot hostility, and it was one of the first times I realized that progressive politics and progressive aesthetics don’t always go hand in hand. It was a pretty remarkable programme, looking back on it. I don’t think any of these films except for India Song have been screened here since then.

India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975)
Film About a Woman Who (Yvonne Rainer, 1974)
Je Tu Il Elle (Chantal Akerman, 1974)
Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity (Anthony McCall / Claire Pajaczkowska, 1979)
Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey / Peter Wollen, 1977)

I think there might have been another film I’ve forgotten, as Sigmund Freud’s Dora is only mid-length and might have been paired with a sixth (short) film, though I’m pretty sure it screened on the same evening as Riddles of the Sphinx. That’s the only film I haven’t been able to rewatch, too. No idea if it’s floating around in the ether.

India Song – This was received with almost rapturous reverence by a large crowd. I don’t know if people were already familiar with the film or if its reputation preceded it. I knew a little about it, but was shocked and delighted by its formal rigour and intensity, even as I was struggling to keep up with the narrative because of its radical presentation.

I saw it again several years later, by which time it had relaxed into an exquisite formal puzzle, and this third time around it was even more accessible and carried an additional emotional kick. Its presentation is brilliantly conceived and tremendously offputting when approached from the basis of conventional film narrative. The camera glides around the grounds and rooms of an abandoned mansion in Calcutta, in the dusk and dark, while two narrators gradually approach the narrative in the form of a catechism – one woman asking vague questions, the other giving vague answers. As the answers become more concrete, a narrative gradually comes into focus, both in terms of the text and in terms of the images. At the moment – well into the film – that the central character is finally named (“Anne-Marie Stretter”) human figures finally appear in the frame. And the film’s weird, hypnotic evolution continues. Scenes play out, other voices surface on the soundtrack, and the characters’ dialogue is eventually heard, though not in direct sound. I don’t believe there is any instance of direct sound, or its illusion, in the film. Even when two characters are having a conversation that we hear on the soundtrack, their lips don’t move.

The actions we see are formalized and chaste, while the narrative is one of lust and madness. Almost everything significant takes place outside the frame, and that’s something we’ve been primed for from the very outset, with the trance-like, ritualistic sound and image regularly punctuated by the screams of a mad Laotian woman somewhere in the house’s grounds. In a brilliant dramatic coup, late in the film her screams are replaced by those of a different character, still off-screen. The additional voices on the soundtrack – not those of the narrators or the characters – are of people gossiping about the events of the narrative, and that’s kind of the key to the film and it’s eccentric narrative structure. This is one of those stories that does not have an ‘official version’, but which is pieced together from second- and third-hand reports. We have to listen carefully and sift though the aural evidence to complete the picture/ image, which is resolutely decorous and has no space for the disruptive passions that drive the story. We’re watching people in formal dress dance in front of a mirror, or lounge around smoking languorously, but somewhere off-screen, close by, somebody is screaming.

It’s a haunted house film par excellence, the gossiping voiceover summoning the ghosts of the characters, who go through their motions like obedient figures in a music box. Colonialism is as much the target of Duras’ critique as patriarchy.

Film About a Woman Who - This is the film I remembered least well over the years, though it’s also the only one apart from Freud’s Dora that I had only seen once. It’s a very bitty film, with some remarkable sequences and some that don’t work so well. Like the Duras – hell, like a lot of experimental film by women – Rainer is fascinated with disrupting narrative and separating the image from the soundtrack. In this film, the text moves incessantly from the soundtrack, to intertitles, to superimposed text, to in one instance pieces of typewritten paper stuck to a character’s face. And the text is, itself, often interrupted with ellipses, like the one in the film’s title. When the film finally resorts to sync sound in the middle, it’s so the on-screen characters can critique the film in which they’re appearing.

The main theme is about relationships (and particularly the happy family) as performance. Some of the sequences deal with this economically and powerfully, as when a series of family snapshots incorporates faux-snapshots in which mummy, daddy and child are staying rigidly still until they break and then assume another living-statue pose for the camera. Some of the other sequences are more abstract, but similarly lovely (the darkened figures dancing with a ball at the end of the film), and some are verbose and ungainly (though not as ungainly as a brief moment of very unpleasant homophobia). Lots of food for thought, but lots of downtime as well, and alongside a film as meticulously structured as Riddles of the Sphinx it comes off a distant second.

Je Tu Il Elle – This was the film I really loved in the programme. I found it funny, bold and hypnotic. The audience detested it. Out of an audience of 50+ at the beginning, only six of us were left at the end. People started leaving about fifteen minutes in and were still leaving ten minutes from the end. I don’t know what was setting them off, but it must have been something that wasn’t in any of the other difficult films in the programme. I still love the film. The first section is a pretty funny depiction of banal cabin fever, with, yet again, a provocative disconnect between narration and on-screen action. When she finally leaves the house, it’s like a grand adventure beginning, which then immediately deflates when she hitches a ride with an oafish truckie. They watch American TV shows in greasy diners, she sleeps in his couchette, he babbles on about how sexy his twelve-year-old daughter is (yikes!). It actually IS quite action-packed compared to the rest of the film! In the final act, she knocks on the door of her (ex-)girlfriend, convinces her to let her stay the night, and they fuck. A happy ending, I guess?

Akerman’s deadpan formalism is as well-suited to this scrappy, semi-comic anecdote as it would be to the slo-mo meltdown of Jeanne Dielman. The next Akerman I would see was one of her much more mainstream 80s films, and I was really disappointed, then I saw and loved Story of a Young Girl at the End of the Sixties in Brussels. Then it was D’Est, which I found formally admirable but intellectually dishonest. My relationship with this director has been a real roller-coaster ride.

Riddles of the Sphinx – A smart, palindromic film in seven parts. After three framing sequences, which will be mirrored by the three sequences at the end, the meat of the film consists of a narrative told in thirteen shots. Each shot is prefaced by an incomplete text (the inaccessible, complete version presumably telling the ‘whole story’ of Louise), and each shot is a slow 360 degree pan of Louise’s environment(s). Louise is the mother of a young girl, Anna, and through the thirteen tableaux we observe her gradual self-actualisation, defining herself, in turn, against her husband, her child and her job. In the first circling shot, she is too close to the camera to see clearly, and her thoughts on the soundtrack and a disconnected series of words, as if she were free-associating. As the story progresses, we see more and more of Louise within the shot (it’s not until the fourth or fifth shot that we finally see her face), and her narration becomes more and more articulate and complex. The shots themselves become more complicated too, and several of the later ones are bravura pieces of filmmaking. In one, the slowly rotating camera is placed within a car driving around a large roundabout; in another, we begin the shot on a stark white wall, and the shot is later plunged into total blackness when a film is projected (on that same stark white wall). In the film’s most brilliant shot – and one of the most brilliant in cinema – the camera turns slowly around a red-draped room filled to the brim with mirrors. We see the two characters in various places, at various distances and from various angles, sometimes through three reflections, eventually directly. At no point do we see a reflection of the camera until the very end, when all is revealed. It’s an exhilarating climax to a formally exhilarating film.

Lots of common themes amongst these films, and a genuine stylistic unity of women questioning the hegemony of sync sound and integrated narrative and action. All the women here are breaking down the traditional structures of cinema and coming up with their own. Some are highly formalized and organized, like those of Duras and Mulvey, others kind of scattershot and anarchic, like Rainer. I think what I responded to the most positively about the Akerman was that it was the most instinctually, organically reactive of the bunch.

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#145 Post by zedz » Sun May 13, 2018 6:18 pm

Two more from the weekend:

Among Grey Stones (Muratova, 1983) - A more interesting and characteristic film than her previous, socialist realist outing. Here we're for the first time in the kind of heightened, fever-dream irreality in which a lot of her subsequent cinema would reside. Muratova can easily tip over into this realm and become heavy-going, but when she strikes the right balance it's bracing. In this film, there's a bit of a lurch between the main subject (a young boy coming to terms with the death of his mother) and the grotesque, carnivalesque world he sometimes inhabits (with an alleged general and disenfranchised functionaries parroting catchphrases and his mother's hacking cough from beyond the grave occasionally adding to the cacophony). The film works best when it balances between the two and the boy is interacting with only a few characters. It's kind of a kaleidoscopic treatment of grief and a pointer to more unruly films ahead.

Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, 1985) - A really important film of its time, and it's held up reasonably well, perhaps because of its period setting. It all seems a little tentative for quite a while, but when the story calls for intimacy it pulls out all the stops and steps things up. It might look like a modest indie drama nowadays, but this was brand new territory in the mid-80s, and Deitch and her crew made a lot of smart decisions back then so that the film continues to work on its own terms - the whole point being to make a 'regular' romantic drama out of the love between two women.

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swo17
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#146 Post by swo17 » Sun May 13, 2018 6:24 pm

I wish some of Muratova's films could be grouped into trilogies so Arrow would put them out.

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zedz
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#147 Post by zedz » Sun May 13, 2018 6:52 pm

swo17 wrote:I wish some of Muratova's films could be grouped into trilogies so Arrow would put them out.
Well, the three banned masterpieces (Brief Encounters, Long Farewells, Asthenic Syndrome) had a common destiny and all surfaced internationally together, so that's a really obvious starting point, and surely not a bad marketing hook.

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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#148 Post by knives » Wed May 16, 2018 5:23 pm

In Darkness (dir. Holland)
If this had been perhaps the first film dealing with the holocaust this might be an impressive feat, but after decades of this stuff the only element that doesn't feel tired and used up is the cruelty which seems to have been imported from Chuan's City of Life and Death. It also has a really gross feeling given the recent happenings in Poland covering up their complicity in the war crimes. This film couldn't be a better piece of propaganda for that even if it was made with that goal in mind. Only the Germans are shown to be purely villainous, you have a Polish woman giving a speech very much of the contemporary perspective that Jews are human, and our Schindler story doesn't even give lip service to the selfish element so that the guy seems plainly heroic. Surely Holland didn't mean to support a form of holocaust denial with this, but she does pose a film only with easy truths until it becomes disgusting to facts.

Mustang
It's been a million years since I've seen The Virgin Suicides, but if my memory is holding this comes across as a less fatalistic and more elliptical telling of the same basic idea. In the reappropriation of that story to Turkey not much seems added though what is is pretty interesting. The virginity test with its rural superstition confronting modern knowledge is a fantastic scene shot with such a mundane impatience is a really brilliant moment that rises all of the scenes surrounding it beyond the cute fable form most of the film holds. For instance the soccer match scene has the flavor of a simpler variant of Panahi's Offside, but its conclusion is too cute by half. One consistent and major benefit the whole film has is the location which is beautiful, but also isolated in a way that kept me in awe and discomfort. The movie itself doesn't seem to me to be that brilliant, but it definitely offers the prospect of a major talent (though in the same breath it offers the possibility of a much more boring road well traveled that the reception to her followup seems to have yielded).

American Honey (dir. Arnold)
I have to admit that the run time nearly scared me off and I'm not entirely sure if that wouldn't have been a better option. At first it looks like it is going to be a very British take on American reality. That's something that seems needed right now. Instead it turns into a version of Kafka's Amerika replacing his ties to Yiddish magical realism to an obnoxious self obsession. There's a lot to this film I should love and even as I write this I'm smiling over those well performed elements, but so much of the film is predicated on such annoying characters that it was for me borderline impossible not to just turn off the television. I can't think of any argument to redeem this film from its dumb set of roadies.
Last edited by knives on Fri May 18, 2018 4:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#149 Post by Satori » Thu May 17, 2018 11:08 am

Ida Lupino

Not Wanted (1949) is a film that Lupino took over after the scheduled director became ill on the third day of shooting. It is a social problem film about unwed motherhood, but it has some quite interesting formal elements that make it well worth watching. First, the flashback structure is a variation on Mildred Pierce: we open with a woman named Sally being arrested for attempting to steal a child and then sitting in her cell while thinking back on the events that led her to this point. The film even somewhat repeats Mildred Pierce’s visual opposition between its “noir” and “melodrama” parts: the darkly lit hallway through which Sally is led to the jail cell is quickly replaced by an ironically bright day as her flashback begins. Indeed, the narrative raw material of the flashback in Not Wanted is pure melodrama: Sally has a stifling home life, her piano playing boyfriend ditches her after they sleep together, and then she realizes she’s pregnant right after she meets a decent guy she is falling for. The crucial difference between this film and Peirce is in terms of subjectivity: while Mildred’s statement is an objective confession the police are pulling out of her—the film’s “correction” to her false admission of guilt—Not Wanted’s flashback is purely taking place in Sally’s mind. As such, Lupino gives us the film from her perspective. Two virtuoso scenes bear this out: first, Sally is out with her new boyfriend and watches a merry-go-round. The camera moves out of focus to signify her vision blurring before we get a rapid montage sequence juxtaposing a closeup of her face with the rapidly increasing merry-go-round. It is right after she collapses that she learns that she is pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s child. There is another incredible sequence right before she gives birth: she is being rolled on a stretcher, the camera giving us slow tracking shots from her POV of the long hospital hallway, its dark shadows echoing the prison hallway from the opening of the film, although now shot from her perspective. These shots are intercut with closeups of her scared face. When she finally reaches the delivery room, we get POV shots of her giving birth with menacing-looking doctors and nurses standing over her, moving in and out of focus. These two sequences—two of the most emotionally charged in the film—place us firmly within her subjective perspective. These sorts of moments elevate the film’s basic narrative material into something much more interesting and show off Lupino’s skill.

Her next film The Young Lovers (1949) is unfortunately a bit less interesting. The “young lovers” are a dancing team whose career gets put on hold when she is diagnosed with polio. While she tries to recover the use of her legs in a physical therapy rehabilitation center, he works briefly as a realtor and their relationship slowly comes apart. There are a couple of interesting moments: for example, the sequence in which she first gets ill uses an out of focus POV shot to signify her blurred vision in a way that recalls some of the subjective shots in Not Wanted. There is also an impressive use of depth staging in a sequence in the rehabilitation center: after she breaks down in tears of frustration, we cut to a shot that keeps her crying in the background while a cheerful patient cheerfully shows a young boy a funny drawing, creating an opposition within the frame between their different ways of coping with their illnesses. After the boy leaves, the cheerful patient slides back to comfort her without the camera cutting. The problem with the film is its overt sentimentality and insistence on how positive thinking can overcome any difficulty. This severely undercuts the film’s focus on her psychological disintegration, which is by far the most interesting thing here.

Outrage (1950) is Lupino’s first masterpiece, a powerful film about the traumatic aftershocks of a woman’s rape. While the high contrast lighting in the opening credits and an early incidence of sexual harassment foreshadow the crime, the first section of the film mostly just establishes Ann’s normal life and daily routine, especially her relationship with her parents and fiancé. By showing us Ann’s happy, normal life, Lupino is able to set up a chilling contrast with life after the attack. The attack itself is a stunning passage of cinema that effectively uses some of the subjective techniques Lupino establishes in her first two films. The sequence begins with a disturbing shot with the stalker in the foreground of a deep focus shot of her walking down the stairs of her workplace. We then track behind him as he catcalls her. These early shots from his perspective—establishing the threat—quickly shift to shots from her perspective that emphasize her terror and helplessness. For example, the track forward from behind the attacker is mirrored by a backwards tracking shot of Ann quickly walking towards the camera. After he whistles, both she and the camera freeze until he appears in the background before Lupino cuts to another setup. There is no music in the sequence until the very end, emphasizing the sounds of footsteps and her horrifying cries for help. Lupino uses high contrast lighting to create deep, threatening shadows and long shots that emphasize the empty streets and alleyways. Right before the attack, we get a POV shot of him standing over her, slightly blurred, before the camera cranes back and up, ending the sequence with him walking toward her. The tone and visual look of the film completely changes at this point; when she returns home, it too is filled with dark shadows, as if the alleys have invaded her house. When she recounts the attack to the police, Lupino keeps it in a single shot, the camera positioned behind her bed so that the bars of the headboard cut across her face as if her own room is now a prison.

The rest of the film develops the aftereffects of this trauma, keeping us within her subjective position. There is a brilliant sequence in the office in which she flinches after a co-worker pats her on the back. The film then crosscuts between her traumatized face and closeups of a guy stamping papers, the noise of the stamping greatly exaggerated, giving us a subjective soundtrack. Mala Powers gives a moving and devastating performance as Ann, oscillating between a Bresson-like blank face and explosions of expressive fear and pain. The character’s body language is completely transformed, changing from calm and confident to skittish and small, especially when around male characters.

The film isn’t perfect: there is a reverend introduced in the second half of the film who not only tries to force Ann to get better but also gives a misguided courtroom monologue towards the end that seems to blame sexual violence on the fact that there are too many insane people because the courts can’t handle them all. This shifts the film a bit too much into “social problem” territory, displacing the centrality of sexual violence with vague attempts to diagnose society’s ills as a whole. While it is possible to read these moments as critiques of religion and the courts as complicit with rape culture, they take the film away from its powerful, incisive look at trauma. However, the film is still essential viewing for its unflinching exploration of Ann’s subjectivity and how the violence of her attack colors the rest of her life. It is a stunning, phenomenal piece of cinema.

Hard, Fast, and Beautiful (1951) is a more traditional melodrama about a young tennis player and her ambitious mother who ends up using her daughter’s tennis prowess as a way of escaping from her dreary middle class life. The daughter Florence (played by Sally Forrest in her second starring role in a Lupino film) is wonderfully spunky in the first half but is quickly overwhelmed by the pressure her mother places on her once she falls in with a slick promoter who uses Florence’s tournament wins to set up shady “invitational” matches through which her mother gets payoffs and free stays at fancy hotels. Meanwhile Florence’s fiancé wants her to give up her tennis career and get married, leading to a fight between them. Like all great melodramas, the film’s narrative structure is centered on an irresolvable contradiction: she can either have a “normal” home life by giving up the game she loves or she can continue to play but lose her fiancé and be driven deeper into shady business deals. She can either get married or go on a European tour and fulfill her dream of competing at Wimbledon; her attempt to do both are rejected by her fiancé. Key to the film are all the conversations other people have about Florence, especially between her mother and the sleazy promoter. Nobody seems to care what Florence herself wants to do. While not as formally interesting as Lupino’s previous films, there are still some great sequence, notably the powerful closing shot of an empty tennis court with trash blowing across it

The Hitchhiker (1953) is Lupino’s best known film, although it is a bit of a thematic departure for her as the first film she directed without a major female protagonist. However, the incredible use of chiaroscuro lighting in her previous films obviously makes her a great choice for one of the toughest, nastiest potboiler noirs ever made. The no-nonsense plot is boiled down to its essentials: a guy and a gun and two helpless saps who have to try and outwit him while the police rather ineffectively try to track him down. The obvious point of comparison is The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947), which also starts with a killing and the hitchhiking murderer getting picked up. Unlike that film, however, the innocent victims here know right away that he is a murderer, replacing the ironic tension (in which we know more than the characters) with the buildup of pure terror as they try to prevent their imminent murders. The sequence right after they pick him up is brilliant: a shot from the front windshield keeps his face in the shadows until we cut to a close up of a gun, after which his face comes into the light but the rest of him remains enshrouded in darkness. The claustrophobic camera setups in the car are occasionally punctuated with a long shot from outside, emphasizing the barren desert and how alone they are.

There is another key difference with The Devil Thumbs a Ride that makes this film thematically richer: whereas Lawrence Tierney’s character in the earlier film was self-assured and overconfident, William Talman’s portrayal of Emmett Myers is cut through with anxiety, much of it revolving around masculinity. There is an important scene early in the film in which he shoots at but misses a rabbit, prompting one of the men to remark they “won’t be having rabbit for dinner.” Myers immediately needs to prove to them that he’s a great shot, organizing a shooting match in which he will force one of them to shoot at a can being held by the other. Myers is also insecure about his intelligence: he belligerently demands that they only speak English when encountering a Mexican storeowner, afraid that he will be outwitted by a superior intelligence. Indeed, like in the shooting match, he tries to displace this anxiety on the more working class of the pair, remarking that his friend is “the smart one.” This insecurity about his masculinity and intelligence makes him all the more dangerous, of course, and adds to the tension of the film.

The Bigamist (1953) is a pretty fascinating film in its representation of the main character, although I don’t find it as formally interesting as most of her work. A private investigator for an adoption company discovers that the traveling salesman he is investigating has secretly married a second wife after she gets pregnant. The narrative unrolls in flashback, similar to Not Wanted. There is a key moment in which the investigator tells the man that he “can’t make up his mind about him,” suggesting the judgement-free ambiguity the film is going for. There is also an intriguing critique of how society would have winked and turned the other way if he kept the second woman as his mistress; it is only be doing the “right thing” and marrying her that he is condemned. The film does have some problematic elements, though: for one, it seems to suggest that one of the reasons that he turns to a second woman is because his first wife is so good at her job that she is “distanced from him.” So while the film is really good at not placing moral blame on the bigamist, it seems to weirdly place a bit of blame on his first wife for better at work that producing children (she is infertile). As a whole, though, the film is remarkable for its attempt at just presenting the events of the story without moral judgement. It is a rather interesting little curio of 1950s cinema.

No. 5 Checked Out (1955). As Lupino did most of her directorial work for television, it seems fitting to nod toward it with this episode of Screen Director’s Playhouse. This short film has a pretty great cast: Teresa Wright plays a young deaf woman left alone to tend her father’s isolated motel when criminals Peter Lorre and The Hitch-Hiker’s William Talman take up residence in cabin five. Talman is a decent guy who was driving the getaway car, not expecting the robbery to turn into a murder. He strikes up a friendship with Wright and isn’t bothered by her deafness, which she tells him has cost her relationships in the past. It’s a nice little thriller that is worth tracking down. There is a sequence of Peter Lorre laughing hysterically at one point that is worth the price of admission by itself.

After more than a decade of television work, Lupino returned to feature filmmaking with The Trouble with Angels (1966), a zany family comedy about two pranksters in a catholic boarding school. It is a huge departure from her previous film work: it’s in color, so her play with high contrast lighting isn’t really a factor and the dark mood of her early 50s work is completely absent. Yet I still find it absolutely delightful: Rosalind Russell is wonderful as the Mother Superior and the two young leads (Hayley Mills and June Harding) are hilarious. The film uses an episodic structure with the lead’s various pranks motoring the narrative. There are some tinges of the cinema’s great boarding school rebellion films like Maidens in Uniform and Zero for Conduct, although less is at stake. The film is largely about the caring relationship developed between the two leads, which develops into some rather poignant moments towards the film’s conclusion. Not a bad way to finish off a Lupino binge.

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knives
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Re: Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

#150 Post by knives » Thu May 17, 2018 12:17 pm

I was hoping to see all of her films before posting about the great Kasi Lemmons, but it looks like I won't be able to get to Black Nativity before this list is over so I'm posting about her now so that people will have time to get to her films. Lemmons is probably best known as the best friend in Silence of the Lambs, but she's a pretty accomplished and interesting director in her own right. All of her films including her short Dr. Hugo are available on DVD in good enough presentations and she's only made five films all of a reasonable length. Her films have a theatrical flair to them, but towards the melodramatic realism of a van Pebbles rather than the aesthetic playfulness of Spike Lee (I'm a bit reluctant to mention him, but his theatricality is a god counterpoint to Lemmons). They all feel like they could be adapted to the stage though also feeling fully cinematic. I guess William Wyler might be the best comparison point. There's also a thematic similarity all of her films have which weigh sort of like a Boudu Saved from Drowning. Even in Dr. Hugo the story tells of an integrated member of society, someone living past their ethnicity, who finds somebody outside of society and tries to reform them. Typically that doesn't work and instead they integrate the outsider as part of themselves.

Eve's Bayou, her first and best feature, has shades of this theme. It comes out most explicitly in amazing retelling of events we have just seen, but is far too expansive to be limited to the role of African Americans play in society. There's quite a bit of familiarity her as it is a story of an adult world told through the eyes of a child plastered in the old southern gothic storytelling mold, there's even a subplot that would be taken much more literally in Bill Bob Thorton's The Gift. It eventually, and to my mind in a better way than Daughters of the Dust builds a question of how to balance a sort of traditionally African (and in this case French as well) identity in an American world. Sam Jackson as the patriarch gives one of his best performances exuding the appeal of the American personality while also highlighting its difficulties. As usual he's asked to walk with a confident swagger and coolness, but it's done in a way that suggests all of this is a mask from the idol worshiping eyes of a daughter to her father. He's an attractive and intelligent man, but also one who is sensitive and weak. Jackson is asked to be very reflective in his swagger with regret appearing every now and then which is something he hasn't too often been asked to do. His moments of weakness where his flaws are laid bare are conveyed with such quiet maturity that it really makes me angry that he's been looked into playing Jules Winfield for the past thirty years. I desperately would love to see this Sam Jackson again. The counter to that is surprisingly not the family's matriarch, but Jackson's sister played intensely by Debbi Morgan. This emblem of the old way of slavery and before is ridiculed as crazy and weird, but has a power over the family that feels like a fairy tale. She and the plots that come out of her are the moments that feel most like a children's film though Lemmons gives it an ugly feel that is never cloying and suffers a certain maturity.

Her next film, Caveman's Valentine, also plays with genre. This time moving in on the conspiratorial '90s thrillers. Lemmons has a lot of fun with that aspect making things completely nuts and untethered. Her main interest though is in the human relationship between Sam Jackson's schizophrenic homeless man and his police officer daughter Aunjanue Ellis which again gets at the fragility that these archetypes can possess. I can understand if for some the genre elements over ride the rest of the film and weaken it for them, but the quality of the performances and central relationship is quality enough for me to love.

Much easier to recommend is Talk to Me, Lemmons imagined biopic of DC radio personality Petey Greene as played with aplomb by Don Cheedle, which takes the comedic sensibility of its lead to reorganize the biopic into satire. This easily could have been another pofaced film considering the political nature of Greene. Fortunately Lemmons decides not to give us a new Lenny, but instead creates a tone as irreverent as one of Greene's bit (the most famous of which is in this link). The sane counter to Cheedle's Greene is, in an early performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a radio producer who is trying to be white in order to succeed until it no longer becomes profitable. What's very interesting about that is how the film tries to argue authenticity to that whiteness with his worship of Johnny Carson. Counter to Eve's Bayou that mask of perspective shows that a person can be authentic. Where the similarity lies to the point it can probably be considered a second major theme of Lemmons' career is that you can be true to yourself without being culturally black in all the expected ways. It's a sensitive subject that the film meets with humour as well.

I'm not sure how much time everyone has, but I hope that room can be made for at least some of these films.

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