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is published by Fandor is the on-demand film source for people who love movies, offering a broad and carefully curated library of independent and international films. www.fandor.com

What’s Inside Welcome to Keyframe

What We Lost, Regained, Discovered

Brando’s Ghost

It’s Complicated: An Oversimplification of Her Beauty

Documentary Unbound: Leviathan

Bava’s Bombshells

More than a Movie: The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Still Looking for One’s Self: First Cousin Once Removed

Porterfield’s Panoramic View: Putty Hill

Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’: Night Across the Street

By Susie Gerhard

By David Hudson

By Adrian Martin

By Lauren Treihaft

By Max Goldberg

By Dennis Harvey

By Michael Guillén

By Aaron Cutler

By Calum Marsh

By Adrian Martin

What’s Inside (continued) Bujalski Now: Computer Chess

On Being Alex Karpovsky

The Duplass Brothers’ Family Business

Todd Solondz on the Here and Now of Dark Horse

‘I Am Original, You Are Mundane’: Niko von Glasow

Caroline Martel: Wavemakers and Operators

Su Friedrich: ‘Gut’ Check

Amy Seimetz and the ‘Complicated’ Female

Between the Lines in The Day He Arrives

Film List: New York Neorealism

By Jonathan Marlow

By Jackson Scarlett

By Sara Maria Vizcarrondo

By Anna Tatarska

By Błazej Hrapkowicz

By Jonathan Marlow

By Beatrice Behn

By Tina Hassannia

By Kevin B. Lee

By Mark Asch

FROM EDITOR IN CHIEF SUSAN GERHARD

Norma Desmond claimed it was the pictures that got small. No argument there: Some of those pictures can, today, fit into your pocket. Yet the image looms larger, I’d argue, than it ever has. Was there ever a time when people did more “watching” than they do today? The ephemeral images we’re immersed in are most certainly worth discussing. Inside this collection of articles from Keyframe, the digital film magazine of the streaming film-subscription service Fandor, the picture expands to the size of our globe as writers from Reykjavík to Rio, Warsaw to San Francisco, Houston to Berlin to Boston to Melbourne venture through an ever-enlarging landscape of cinema. We hope you enjoy the ride.

What We Lost, Regained, Discovered An overview of the events and ideas that shaped the year in cinema.

BY DAVID HUDSON

The death of Roger Ebert in April shocked us all, despite our knowing that it’d been imminent for years. Just two days before, he’d announced a “Leave of Presence,” telling us that, yes, he’d be slowing down, but also reassuring us that he was still, as always, good to go. Two years before, in his memoir, Life Itself, Ebert peered into the face of death and proclaimed: “I do not fear it.” When, suddenly, he was gone, the outburst of tributes and remembrances, the mourning, but also the celebration of his life and the writing he left us rolled on for weeks and months while a zillion other news cycles rolled right on by. Ebert’s rich legacy lives on not just in his volumes of reviews but also in the community he built around him, those who followed his rapid-fire tweets, chatted with him and each other via comments on his blog entries, attended his festival, and of course, those who wrote and are writing now at RogerEbert.com.

Read the full article on Keyframe Based in Berlin, David Hudson’s translated screenplays and contributed to a wide variety of American and German publications. Since May 2003, the Daily, in its various incarnations at GreenCine, IFC, MUBI, and now, Keyframe, obsessively tracks goings on in the world of cinema.

As our CEO, Dan Aronson, noted that day, we here at Fandor felt we’d lost a friend. And so did countless others who took to social media to share favorite quips and quotes from Ebert’s work. My own favorite passage has been cited over and again by many, but I never tire of reading it again. From a 1997 piece on Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960): Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw La Dolce Vita in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom “the sweet life” represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello’s world; Chicago’s North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello’s age. When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years 5

Following page: Roger Ebert as a young film critic. Photo by Art Shay

older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal. Savor the beauty of such an essential observation delivered in the clear and confident prose of a plain-spoken Chicagoan. Then note that the last screening he mentions was almost certainly one of his “Cinema Interruptus” events in which Ebert and an audience would spend an entire day watching a film, stopping it at any moment anyone called out for a discussion of a particular camera angle, cut, composition, what have you. The movie-watching experience at its most communal, in other words. The Dolce Vita passage touches on several themes that seem to have echoed throughout 2013, this melding of an individual reception of a film and the sharing of that experience with others being one of them. Flying back home to Vancouver from Toronto, Adam Cook wrote an open letter to his fellow Notebook contributors about the ways that festivals intensify both the private and communal aspects of watching films. At the Dissolve—itself a pretty big story of 2013, having been launched in the summer by Pitchfork and a team of writers, most of them veterans of the AV Club—Matt Singer positively reveled in the Rashomon effect of movie-

La Dolce Vita

viewing: “A film plays before us with all the same shots and cuts. But what happens from there is entirely up to us, and if you ask 100 people to describe what they saw you’ll get 100 different responses.” As it happens, his piece eventually turns to a Siskel & Ebert review of Congo (1995): “Siskel found the film disappointingly cheesy; Ebert felt the film was entertainingly cheesy. He offered up a perfect summation of this phenomenon. ‘I agree with what you observe,’ he said. ‘I disagree with your interpretation.’” I’ve always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists. —Richard Linklater And as Ebert’s so eloquently noted, we can even disagree with our own interpretations at various stages in our lives. This theme of returning to films, now more possible than ever on a communal level, a sort of reunion of a film’s characters, its makers, and its viewers, the sense of reuniting with a family one has chosen, has been practically embodied all year long in the person of Richard Linklater. The year began with the Sundance premiere of Before Midnight— at long last, we’d discover what Jesse and Celine had been up to ever since he missed that plane. Of course, some family reunions are pretty rough going. As James MacDowell writes at Alternate Takes, the three Before films, certainly a contender for the greatest trilogy ever made, have “done something generically unprecedented: they have transformed what might have been a standalone (unconventional and realist, but still passingly familiar) romantic comedy into merely the first act in what has become an ongoing romantic melodrama—culminating (for now) in the pain and bitterness we find in Midnight.” In 2013, Criterion re-released Slacker (1991) on Blu-ray; the New York Film Festival hosted a twentieth anniversary “special Reunion screening” of Dazed and Confused, a group portrait that was already a sort of hazily mirrored time machine in 1993; the Austin Film Society hosted

Before Midnight

a ten-year School of Rock reunion (my parents were among the 1000+ people who showed up and had a blast—everyone noted that the kids in the band are all grown up now); and Gabe Klinger reunited Linklater with an old friend, James Benning, turning their conversation into Double Play and scoring a Lion in Venice for Best Documentary on Cinema. Speaking of Venice, the festival celebrated an anniversary of its own, its seventieth, and invited seventy outstanding filmmakers to create shorts addressing the future of cinema. The festival eventually, and quite generously, posted the films online. Locarno, by all accounts presenting one of its finest editions yet, felt as if it were overlapping not with Venice but with Toronto by way of Cinema Scope editor Mark Peranson, who helped program the former and brought La última película, the film he co-directed with Raya Martin, to the latter, where it was one of either two or three (reports vary) out of 366 films to be projected as a film, i.e., not digitally. We’ve known for some time that, on the business end at least, the Great Digital Changeover, as David Bordwell calls it, is now complete; aesthetically, though, Peter Labuza and Carson Lund, in their recent Cinephiliacs discussion of films at this year’s NYFF, come this close to deciding that the switchover has not been the disaster many were predicting. Berlin opened with The Grandmaster, and the arrival of the film in the States was reason enough for several cities to stage Wong Kar-wai retrospectives. Another filmmaker celebrated all summer long was Werner Herzog, whose oeuvre was revived in London, Locarno, and New York before he saw the Werner Herzog Theater open in Telluride, where Eric Ames and Jonathan Marlow interviewed him for Keyframe. Other filmmakers spotlighted in 2013: Orson Welles, whose Too Much Johnson (1938) was rediscovered and restored and whose conversations found their way into two new books; William Friedkin, who released a memoir and received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Venice; Satyajit Ray, celebrated with a major season in London and a pair of Criterion releases; Pier Paolo Pasolini, the subject of a traveling retrospective following the UK revival of Theorem (1968); John Cassavetes, remem-

Blue is the Warmest Color

bered with a retrospective in New York; and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose hard-to-see early work—well, some of it—is now available in a Criterion box set. But the granddaddy of retrospectives in 2013 has to be Jean-Luc Godard—The Spirit of the Forms. Over three weeks in October, New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center screened just about everything by cinema’s most profoundly influential director that resourceful curators Kent Jones and Jacob Perlin could get their hands on. If there was one big story to come out of Cannes, it doesn’t seem to have been about any particular film rocking anyone’s world. The consensus, far as I could tell, is that the 66th was a solid edition with a lot of good films and maybe even a few great ones, but none that had attendees rethinking what cinema might be or become. In lieu of a such a breakthrough, critics seemed to settle for the sign-of-the-times angle, that is, that two of the major awardwinners, Abdellatif Kechiche’s love story Blue Is the Warmest Color (Palme d’Or) and Alain Guiraudie’s Hitchcockian thriller Stranger by the Lake (Un Certain Regard Directing Prize) happened to feature gay protagonists—and this in a year that’s seen such leaps and bounds toward marriage equality. A greater spark between cinema and world affairs flared when Laura Poitras’s work on the third film in her trilogy on post-9/11 America attracted the attention of one Edward Snowden. His string of revelations regarding the reach of the NSA began with a video interview in which he introduced himself to the world, and as I wrote in June, “what makes the twelve-minutes and thirty-five seconds such endlessly fascinating viewing, apart from the eerily quiet views of Hong Kong’s harbor that bookend it, is the calm and clarity with which Snowden discusses his potential ability to tap into President Obama’s email, the prospect of shutting down the entire global intelligence community in an afternoon, or even his own demise should the CIA decide to task the local triads with taking him out.” As of this writing, Poitras is editing her feature in Berlin. The Grandmaster

Cinephiles signed quite a few petitions this year, one demanding the release of Canadian filmmaker John Greyson and physician Tarek Loubani, arrested and imprisoned in Egypt as they were traveling to Gaza—they’d eventually be released after fifty days in captivity—and another demanding that Boston University professor Ray Carney release essential materials he’s still holding that actually belong to Mark Rappaport. Carney hasn’t budged, but at the very least, we can hope that the controversy has raised awareness of a remarkable filmmaker. In August, cinephiles rallied again on behalf of the Cinemateca Portuguesa, whose threatened closure has been delayed but whose survival over the long term is still not guaranteed. Within the happy realm of cinephilia, we avoided an outright brawl anywhere near as uproarious as those of previous years over “cultural vegetables,” say, or the supposed end of film culture, but we did have a lively chat about Vulgar Auteurism. That chat never blew up in part because its advocates insist that its championing of formerly maligned filmmakers such as Paul W.S. Anderson, John Hyams, Nimrod Antal, John McTiernan, and yes, Tony Scott, to name but a few, is not intended as a counter-canon. And in part because the name seems to wink at you from the outset, like other self-aware mini-movements—Neo-Neo Realism, anyone? In 2013, we lost not only Roger Ebert but also filmmakers Nagisa Oshima, Aleksei German, Les Blank, Jess Franco, and Alexey Balabanov; special effects and stop motion animation innovator Ray Harryhausen; scholar Donald Richie; and actors James Gandolfini, Karen Black, Bernadette Lafont, and Jonathan Winters. But we also made new discoveries. Appearing in Berlin seemingly out of nowhere was Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat, which, over the course of the festival, became the must-see, and little wonder. As Mike D’Angelo of this “purely beguiling movie” in the Dissolve, it’s that “rare film that offers a new way of looking at the everyday world.” And then New York Times critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott did something wonderful with the paper’s fall preview this year. Instead of rounding up the usual profiles of directors and stars of features we’ll be hearing more than enough about anyway as we begin the long trudge through awards season, they poured their energy into a multimedia special called “20 Directors to Watch.” And they introduced their collection of interviews with young men and women from around the world currently making some of the most exciting films to struggle for distribution in the coming years with a declaration that strikes the ideal note on which to ring in the new year:

“We are living in a time of cinematic bounty. In multiplexes and beyond, movie lovers have a greater, more dizzying variety of choices—and of screens, large and small—than at any time in history.” 10

Brando’s Ghost Marlon Brando was, in his lone anguish and frenzy, the first Raging Bull of American cinema. BY ADRIAN MARTIN

In Elia Kazan’s screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois gets to call Marlon Brando some good names: “common,” “primitive,” “animal,” “subhuman” and possessed of a “brutal desire.” Underneath the alibi of the film’s realism—which looks extremely artificial today, like all bygone realisms—an extremely potent sexual fantasy takes charge: Brando as Kowalski, the glorious working class beast of a man, a libidinal feast for the eyes of female viewers and, just as explicitly, a fount of narcissistic delight for male viewers (gay or straight.) Indeed, while the various women in the movie generally stay clothed, Brando spends virtually his entire screen time bare-chested or sporting a suitably proletarian-looking singlet that is either at the point of falling off, or drenched in sweat. Twenty-two years later, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), the tables have completely turned. Carrying on the predictably misogynist style of the so-called liberated 1960s counterculture, it is now Brando who stays clothed—even during sex—while the young woman, Maria Schneider, prances naked before the camera in scene after scene. Bertolucci did, in fact, film Brando’s naked genitals, but chose to cut this apparition from the finished film, candidly admitting: “I had so identified myself with Brando that I cut it out of shame for myself. To show him naked would have been like showing myself naked.” Why is it that Brando’s body, once upon a time such a proud object of display, ends up so cloaked and occulted, so painfully fragile under our gaze? There’s more to it than Brando’s 11

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Meet Marlon Brando Adrian Martin teaches film studies at Goethe University (Frankfurt), is the co-editor of LOLA (www.lolajournal.com), and writes for many magazines and websites. Forthcoming are books on film style and theory, and his archivewebsite covering over thirty years of writing.

personal insecurities—already well-developed by the early seventies—about growing old and losing his good looks. The deeper reasons are cultural, concerning the ever-shifting politics of gender. Between the brief flowering of masculine beefcake in the fifties and the lasting shame of the seventies and eighties, there lies an entire tale of the twilight of a certain kind of masculinity, at least in our Western world. Brando, who had been a glorious monument of this masculinity, became its ghost. In the despairing cinema of the 1970s—the cinema of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Brian De Palma and Al Pacino, James Toback and Harvey Keitel—Brando was several times asked to play his own phantom, a withered and inglorious simulacrum of his former youthful triumphs: thus Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Paul in Last Tango (whose fictional biography resembles a composite of Brando’s past roles on and off screen) and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979). What had happened to all the icons of masculinity in the meantime of the sixties? A few rose— Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)—but many more fell, and fell hard. Looking back from the fated meeting of Brando and Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, one can see the poetic affinity between their respective careers. Hopper—who likewise emerged alongside James Dean in the blazing era of rock’n’roll’s youth culture—lived out all the available excesses of sixties liberation, and paid the price of fifteen years of exile in filmdom’s hinterlands, before making his mid eighties comeback with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). Brando, the original Wild One, blew out in a somewhat different way during the sixties—he learned how to be lazy, and coasted through a sometimes intriguing, sometimes forgettable string of films: The Appaloosa (Sidney J. Furie, 1966), Mutiny on the Bounty (Lewis Milestone, 1962), The Night of the Following Day (Hubert Cornfield, 1968), The Countess From Hong Kong (Charles Chaplin, 1967), The Saboteur (Bernhard Wicki, 1967), Bedtime Story (Ralph Levy, 1964) and Candy (Christian Marquand, 1968). His striking roles in this period—The Nightcomers (Michael Winner, 1971), a variation on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw), The Chase (Arthur Penn, 1967), and Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967)—were Gothic premonitions of the ghostly, emptied-out Brando to come.

It’s Complicated: An Oversimplification of Her Beauty ‘New Face in Independent Film’ Terence Nance explores illusory love. BY LAUREN TREIHAFT

Near the close of An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, director and lead actor, Terence Nance expresses his consternation with the standard love salutation, ‘Love,” a formality used at the end of a love letter. Instead, Nance proposes to replace the sterile utterance with his own “well-thought-out definition of love.” Nance’s pledge to replace the customary gesture offers a window into his innovative film as he does indeed introduce the audience to a new kind of love, a love for raw, unadulterated romance.

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: An Oversimplification of Her Beauty Lauren Treihaft is finishing her master’s thesis at The New School (New York) on Tarkovsky, slow cinema and the long take. Her work has appeared in Keyframe, Indiewire and Exclaim! Magazine.

Terrence Nanceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty

Documentary Unbound Leviathan breaks the mold. BY MAX GOLDBERG

When asked about their decision to film much of Leviathan using SLRs and GoPros, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel explained that they lost many of their larger cameras to the sea. One doesn’t doubt it after seeing the film, but this account elides their broader rejection of the traditional tools of the trade: not only tripods, but narration, exposition, the entire edifice of perspective. Embodiment is a first principle for much of the work produced out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (Castaing-Taylor is the SEL’s Director), but Leviathan goes considerably further in treating experience as a kind of reckoning. The film moves with the force of a great storm. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel collected material off the coast of New Bedford, “the very waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick.” It doesn’t seem just to say that Leviathan documents industrial fishing when the subject is so manifestly overpowering. Perhaps better to say it derives from industrial fishing—or that it places itself in industrial fishing’s devouring path. We watch the men onboard doing repetitive labor; fish in their death throes; and the ship itself as an organism, ingesting fantastic loads of sea-life and depositing the bloody remainder back to the sea (we swim along thanks to those GoPros). While lacking interviews or voiceover, the danger of the environment—to body and soul—is utterly palpable.

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Leviathan Max Goldberg lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and recently completed a project processing the films and personal papers of Warren Sonbert at the Harvard Film Archive.

Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath

Bava’s Bombshells Mario Bava’s exercises in the genre recall the initiating moment for “Eurobabe” scream queens. BY DENNIS HARVEY

Brigitte Bardot never made a horror film, but in a roundabout way she had considerable impact on the genre. Before she caused an international sensation in 1950’s And God Created Woman, exportable European movie goddesses had mostly been of the remote, mysterious, “exotic” type—Garbo and Dietrich rather than the corn-fed, busting-out-all-over likes of Betty Grable or Jane Russell. But Bardot’s sexuality was so blatant it trumped even contemporary Marilyn Monroe to a degree: If MM most often played the giddy ninny oblivious to her own seductive power, BB never left such self-knowledge in doubt. The enormity of “Bebe’s” popularity naturally triggered a frantic search for other bombshells, from Sweden (Anita Ekberg) to England (Diana Dors) to Austria (Senta Berger)—anywhere between the Atlantic shores and the Soviet bloc. Meanwhile, the surprise success of Britain’s Hammer horrors (notably the Dracula/Frankenstein films with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing) from 1957 onward, as well as a gradual loosening in censorship toward sexual and violent content, resulted in a new, and newly lurid, generation of scary movies from Europe. While beautiful dames menaced by maniacs and monsters had always been a movie staple, earlier horror had doled out deaths more or less equally to male and female characters. That began to change, however, amidst the more overtly sexed-up screen environment of the 17

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: films by Mario Bava Dennis Harvey has been a film/theater critic and film festival correspondent for the trade publication Variety since 1990. He also writes for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and has contributed to such publications as Film Comment, the L.A. Times, the S.F. Chronicle, Sidewalk, San Francisco Focus and Digital City.

1960s. With men the primary target audience, it made perfect sense that such grisly thrillers should be populated with gorgeous, scantily clad (or, as time marched on, naked) women. Sometimes they were cast as murderesses, witches and vampires—but most often as scream-queen victims. Where the screen Eurobabe had once risked little danger beyond the racy misunderstandings of sex farces, now she was subjected to endless mortal peril from which her odds of survival were slim. Late Italian horror maestro Mario Bava, while hardly the most lascivious director toiling in sixties’ and seventies’ Eurosploitation, certainly knew the box-office value of a pretty face and figure—or at least his producers and financiers did. Beyond being among the best, most influential horror films of their era, Bava’s exercises in that genre provide a representative parade of Continental beauties running, screaming and expiring their way to screen terror immortality.

More than a Movie Pasolini opus The Gospel According to St. Matthew, lovingly revisited. BY MICHAEL GUILLÉN

Now and again I watch a movie that doesn’t allow itself to be “just” a movie. And maybe it’s a film that’s nearly fifty years old, alluringly freed from market pressures, but still so incredibly current and relevant that it won’t let go, demanding articulation and praise, insisting on being understood through language, and thereby undeniably elevating itself into the so-called seventh art by the sheer force of creative, competent will. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo, 1964) is one such film. I sometimes wonder if I am ever going to stop writing about this movie? Though, truthfully, I am delighted I even want to. During these last few weeks I have been asking myself just why Pasolini’s Matthew has taken such a hold on me? The painterly quality of the film does seem to hold me in contemplative orbit even as its narrative urgency speaks to the gravitational pull of political necessity. It abounds with conflicting energies: acknowledged as possibly the best film about the life of Christ, made by an affirmed Marxist atheist homosexual. Peter Bradshaw’s description for The Guardian that Matthew “looks as if it has been hacked from some stark rockface” comports with Bosley Crowther’s earlier comment in his New York Times review that the film’s language is “flinty,” suggesting Matthew’s essential beauty is lapidary. There’s a sculpted quality to Matthew, perhaps more rough-hewn than burnished, constructed as an homage to neorealism yet contaminated by stylized, purposeful anachronisms. Like the best pieces of Christian art, Matthew speaks to the history of Christian art, and situates itself along a vast continuum. In this historical layering it resembles something sedimentary.

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: The Gospel According to Saint Matthew Michael Guillén is a film critic and enthusiast whose work can be found in a variety of publications, including his own, theeveningclass. blogspot.com/ and who travels between Idaho, California and many other locations.

Pier Paolo Pasolini shooting on location for The Gospel According to Saint Matthew

Still Looking for One’s Self On the unanswered, unresolved and universal questions of fate and family in Alan Berliner’s First Cousin Once Removed. BY AARON CUTLER

A small moment in Alan Berliner’s new film First Cousin Once Removed shows an adult man visiting his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. The last time the two saw each other in good health was a painful parting several years prior, but the son now smiles gently and says, “It’s been some time.” The moment resonates with context. We have previously been told that Jeremy, the son, was never good enough for his father, Edwin Honig, a great poet and university professor and an extremely demanding—even cruel—parent. But time can heal such wounds. Jeremy only plays a small role in First Cousin. The film’s primary focus is Edwin, who is related to Berliner as per the film’s title in addition to being the much younger filmmaker’s lifelong friend. The film operates as a documentary portrait in which present-day exchanges between an offscreen Berliner and an in-and-out-of-his-wits Edwin lead the younger man deep into investigating his elder’s past. Edwin’s history is related to the viewer through archive film images and photographs and testimony from loved ones, all assembled puzzle-piece style to form a chronological sequence, as though we are bearing witness to the ongoing creation of a life’s story. Like Berliner’s previous films, First Cousin is a work of great compassion for people, which entails striving to understand their flaws and weaknesses as well as their strengths. The films collectively suggest that the best way to understand someone is to gather a picture of his or her entire life, and then find your own within it. 21

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: films by Alan Berliner Aaron Cutler works as a programming aide for the São Paulo International Film Festival and keeps a film criticism website, The Moviegoer.

Porterfield’s Panoramic View Notes on space in Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill as the director’s new I Used to Be Darker hits the big screen. BY CALUM MARSH

“Putty Hill is a movie about people living in a place,” writes The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, and there is perhaps no more succinct or perceptive description of the film than this. Its threadbare narrative revolves around the recent death and imminent funeral of an overdosed heroin addict named Cory—a tragic, spectral figure who functions as a kind of Laura Palmerlike structuring absence—but the real focus here is the modest working class community in Baltimore within which Cory had spent his too-short life ensconced, and what emerges through the film is not so much a portrait of one young man as an illustrated panorama of the place he called home. Putty Hill is an expression of pronounced locality: in its regional intimacy and lucid delineation of both public and private space, it proves itself authentically grounded in something real, not only firmly situated in a neighborhood but, more significantly, committed to conveying the lived experience of those who live there. 22

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Putty Hill Calum Marsh is an essayist and critic born in Great Britain and based in Toronto. His writings have appeared in such periodicals as The Atlantic, Esquire, the Village Voice, and Sight & Sound magazine.

Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’: Night Across the Street On exits, entries and eccentricities in Raúl Ruiz’s ‘La noche de enfrente.’ BY ADRIAN MARTIN

Some things never seem to start in the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, and some things never seem to end. His films take place in the fuzzy, indeterminate zone between finding a beginning and reaching a conclusion to the central action. That is, if you can figure what the central action is meant to be. In La noche de enfrente/Night Across the Street (2012), Ruiz’s last completed work, the central action appears, for much of the film, to center on an old man, Celso Barra (Sergio Hernández), who is anticipating—as he has long anticipated—the moment of his own death. He believes that a hired killer is coming for him, and he patiently awaits this assassin each night, in the parlor of the boarding house where he dwells. Several different prime candidates appear, in the course of the events, who might be about to carry out this preordained act. Eventually, it is Celso himself, as a neat, well-dressed schoolboy (Santiago Figueroa), who shows up with the gun. But a final twist on this plot—just one image—suggests another scenario altogether. But there is something else, as well: a crime, a mass murder in fact, also in the parlor of the boarding house—a line of corpses that is revealed to us in one of those off-hand visual postscripts to a scene, when the camera moves, that Ruiz loved to append wherever and whenever 24

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Night Across the Street Adrian Martin teaches film studies at Goethe University (Frankfurt), is the co-editor of LOLA (www.lolajournal. com), and writes for many magazines and websites. Forthcoming are books on film style and theory, and his archive-website covering over thirty years of writing.

possible. Is this the real center of the movie, the crime to which everything else provides a scattered, obscured genealogy? Ruiz, especially in the last fifteen years or so of his career, married the generic structure of the murder-mystery (the more old-fashioned, the better) to the often grisly faits divers that filled his experience, and especially his long memory, of his homeland, Chile. Crimes, secrets, murders, bodies in pieces everywhere; so pervasive, in fact, such a mundane occurrence, that they become banal, just part of the texture of a strange, everyday life. In a Ruiz film, whichever guiding plot you ultimately choose from the available menu of options only ends up being a cover for another logic behind the scenes—an “occult order,” he often called it, but even this was just another fictional ploy (however resonant with the myriad conspiracies of real-world events and institutions). The final, bottom level of mystery in his work—often deliberately impossible to crack—is how any one film has be engenerated: from which pool of elements, according to which permutational or transformative procedures? Because it is the proliferation of this game-logic—eating up everything it touches upon—that constitutes the main event, the central action, certainly in La noche de enfrente.

Raúl Ruiz died in Paris on August 19th, 2011, after directing 113 films.

Bujalski Now: Computer Chess ‘The radically different thing I would like to do next would be earning a living.’ I N T E R V I E W BY J O N AT H A N M A R LO W

In the fallow period of independent filmmaking at the beginning of the present century, Bostonborn Andrew Bujalski completed his first feature, Funny Ha Ha. It was immediately recognized as something unique and worthwhile by the handful of folks who notice such things. A year later, he completed Mutual Appreciation and it was abundantly clear that the greatness of his debut was no fluke. Bujalski was (and is) a distinctly talented screenwriter and director (and, on occasion, a gifted actor as well). The filmmaker relocated to Austin, Texas, to make his third feature, Beeswax, and he has remained in the “city of the violet crown” ever since. Bujalski’s latest, Computer Chess, fastidiously recreates early-1980s programming culture, imagining the efforts of a motley assortment of teams pitting their chess programs against others at a competitive weekend tournament. Among its many charms, Computer Chess cleverly captures the limited capabilities of video equipment of the era.The unstable tube-camera imagery adds a particular verisimilitude to an already aesthetically authentic production. The following conversation between Andrew Bujalski and Fandor co-founder Jonathan Marlow occurred in the moments prior to the filmmaker’s introduction to the theatrical premiere of Computer Chess at Film Forum in New York. Keyframe Was it always a point for you that you were going to shoot Computer Chess in Austin? Bujalski I think so. This was such a crazy stunt to do. We made the movie as cheaply as we

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Computer Chess Fandor co-founder and Chief Content Officer Jonathan Marlow has been affiliated with numerous film exhibition institutions, film festivals and technology-centric film distribution companies (such as Amazon, VUDU and others). He is also known to host occasional screenings throughout the world showcasing remarkable films that are generally unavailable elsewhere.

could make it (which still ended up being a good deal more expensive than I’d initially hoped or planned). I want to phrase this right because I was certainly dead serious about it and obviously worked as hard and as enthusiastically on this as I ever have on anything. But still, by the nature of it, it had to be something of a lark, if that makes sense. It takes place in nowhere so we could shoot it anywhere. I guess, being the father of a small child, I might as well shoot it where I can see my kid every night. Keyframe That seems very sensible. You also had access to…. Bujalski That’s the other thing, too. Austin is by far the most supportive filmmaking community I’ve ever encountered.Of course, I was very happy to draw on all the resources of that town. Keyframe Right. You premiered the film at Sundance. I finally had an opportunity to see it at SXSW, even though I was at Sundance and I didn’t see anything at all (which is an all‑too‑familiar experience for me these days). Even at SXSW, I was only able to see a handful of things, one of which was Joe Swanberg‘s new film, which some folks claim to be his most accessible. I take that to mean that it has a higher proportion of recognizable actors. Coincidentally enough, Drinking Buddies is also opening theatrically right about now. Computer Chess, however, could be perceived by some audiences as divisive. Bujalski I thought it would be a lot more divisive than it was. I mean, I’ve actually been stunned so far by how warm most of the responses have been. Before we premiered at Sundance, I did not know if I was going to have to spend the next two or three years apologizing for this movie and I was quite surprised to find that there was an audience for it. Obviously, it’s not for everyone but the people who dig it don’t have too hard a time finding their way to it. Keyframe I suppose Austin was going to be a receptive and supportive audience on a certain level, regardless, but it was encouraging seeing the SXSW premiere audience and their enthusiasm for the film. Bujalski Right now, everything feels great. It feels like the stars are aligning well for us. I make no predictions about whether or not anybody’s going to be there tomorrow. We’ll see. Keyframe It’s rewarding to see an overwhelming positive reaction. People are embracing the film and embracing the weirdness of it. 27

Bujalski My fear has instantly flipped over from being afraid that I have to apologize to, instead, being afraid that somebody was going to say, ‘Okay, do that again!’ Because I would have no idea how to do that. Keyframe Right, right. Now when we look across these films, there is a desire from the earliest stages to try and pigeonhole the work. To try to characterize it as something that doesn’t seem accurate. I’m not going to invoke the inappropriate naming convention…. Bujalski I know where you’re going. Keyframe [Laughs.] Because I was mentioning Drinking Buddies in the context of Computer Chess to suggest that, even now, there is a desire for certain folks to try to draw some kind of parallels when those kinds of parallels are just absurd. They might say, ‘Oh, look. Joe Swanberg is going off in this direction and Andrew Bujalski is going off in another direction,’ as if this is some larger preconceived idea or strategy. Bujalski I’m mostly at peace with the nature of journalism. You’ve got to get the story out the door fast and you’ve got to try to make sense of something and, obviously, there’s value to it. It’s like any kind of system. As human beings, we want to find patterns in things so we look for them and we sometimes invent them and it’s useful. It just frustrates me, of course, when that feels like the beginning of the end of it. When everybody wants to dig at that same idea. There’s nowhere deeper to go. Keyframe That’s a real problem. Though you’re still in the thick of the Computer Chess theatrical release, is there something radically different that you would like to do next? There was some time between Beeswax and this film; obviously, becoming a parent plays a part in that. Bujalski The radically different thing I would like to do next would be earning a living. Keyframe That would be nice. That doesn’t seem unreasonable at all. Bujalski That would be nice. Trying to figure out how do that has never been something that’s intuitive to me so I really don’t know. Certainly, I’ve been putting more and more energy into trying to figure out something—anything—that might earn me a living. Inevitably, it seems to be my kind of career pattern that I have my head against the wall, trying to figure that stuff out and eventually you get frustrated enough with it (or an opportunity presents itself) where I run off and do something commercially disastrous again. Which is kind of, for better or worse, usually where my heart is. I don’t know. I certainly have those things that I’m working on one way or another, that range from trying to do things very much within the commercial system to stuff that is a little more independent. But something like this I was absolutely taking on with the plan of it not making money. Again, it’s kind of an irony that this may well be my highest grossing movie.

Alex Karpovsky’s The Hole Story

On Being Alex Karpovsky ‘I’ve found there’s only a handful of ways you can even portray a straight man or a nice guy, but there are an infinite number of ways to play a jerk.’ BY JACKSON SCARLETT

There’s a certain kind of independent film director who is destined, or cursed, to be venerated maybe five, or fifteen years down the line by diligent curators who’ve enjoy his modest, casually insightful works. Usually it takes at least a few retrospectives to make his (or her) name, then he might go on making similarly solid films, for a similarly stalwart audience, until he no longer deigns to do so. Simultaneously more easily misunderstood than similarly hardworking contemporaries like Joe Swanberg and less flashy than more ‘intellectual’ perfectionists like Shane Carruth, Alex Karpovsky could be this kind of director. Unlike Swanberg, whose Olivia Wilde-starring Drinking Buddies will come out this fall in wide release, Karpovsky’s four narratives (and one documentary) would never make sense in a multiplex—unpacking the hopes and fears of a character audiences might not always like isn’t an affair to be conducted in a large auditorium. Their common fascination with jerks, failed relationships and his own ‘death anxiety’ seems uniquely tailored to a more intimate stage. It seems to makes sense that he’s found the greatest acclaim on the small screen, as a particularly unflattering version of himself, the all-too-relatable misfit Ray on HBO’s Girls.

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Beeswax Jackson Scarlett came of age in movie theaters across the Northeast and attended New York University. Now based in San Francisco, he writes film criticism, interviews, and commentary for 7x7, BULLETT and others.

So relatable, apparently, that publications far and wide are writing editorials on how cute his hair is or what a big crush they have on him—hyperbole Karpovsky himself would probably agree wouldn’t be conferred on another, similarly genetically blessed man. The Woody Allen comparisons haven’t hurt either. His stock in New York is high enough that his new films Red Flag and Rubberneck, which he made back-to-back for an absurdly low amount of money, received prestigious Lincoln Center screening simultaneous with their VOD release. Keyframe Do you like being typecast as a jerk? Karpovsky I never said I was typecast, but I am cast repeatedly as a jerk. I wouldn’t say typecast because I think people have different ideas about being typecast—some people think it’s based on a recurring pattern and others think it’s based on who you really are. But anyways, I enjoy playing the jerk—I do. It’s fun for me to do because I’ve found there’s only a handful of ways you can even portray a straight man or a nice guy, but there are an infinite number of ways to play a jerk and that versatility, that spectrum, is something that I’m interested in. Keyframe Let’s talk about Rubberneck and Red Flag then, because you’re playing a jerk in both of them in different ways. I understand you shot them simultaneously. Why motivated you to work that way? Karpovsky They were my fourth and fifth movies and one thing that I’ve noticed from working on earlier movies and and acting as well is that you can lose perspective very easily and you can lose enthusiasm very quickly, especially if you’re working on lower budget movies where you’re carrying alot of the weight and there’s not really a delineation of responsibility and you’ve got a pretty big load. It can make you tired. It can make you disengage emotionally and creatively from the endeavor. Hoping to sidestep that trap, I basically tried to do two movies more or less at the same time that were very different tonally. Even if it took twice as long for them to individually come out, that was OK. I just wanted to make sure I had a real ‘escape’ when I moved from one movie to the other, temporarily. So, we shot Rubberneck first but before I was able to roll my sleeves up and get into the edit, we started Red Flag, and before I was able to get into the edit of Rubberneck, I had to edit Red Flag, and that allowed me to come back to one project pretty refreshed and enthused, and very eager to explore this new place. Keyframe That could be the reason they have parallel structures, in some ways. Karpovsky That could be a reason they have parallel structures; another reason is because I only know how to tell stories with one structure, I think time will tell. [laughs]

The Duplass Brothers’ Family Business Psychic jungle gyms and sibling rivalries in the work of Jay and Mark Duplass. BY SARA MARIA VIZCARRONDO

Filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass first hit the national radar with their Sundance hit The Puffy Chair in 2005. The story was small in scope and scale, boasting a handful of cast members, half of them Duplasses. Mark Duplass wrote and starred and Jay Duplass directed—the climax of the film (about a son bringing his dad a recliner like the one they had growing up) features both Mom and Pop Duplass doling out gentle wisdom. True to the family spirit, The Puffy Chair is a comedy of minor frustrations and gentle oppression, about educated twentysomethings who still don’t qualify as “grown ups.” The film shared a sentiment with other Sundance and SXSW alumni Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation) and Joe Swanberg (LOL, Kissing on the Mouth), so were lumped together, later to be dubbed “mumblecore” as a comment on their characters’ difficulties with initiative. Though the term was coined by a soundman, it refers to the sort of slouching, navel gazing “seekers” who don’t declare their intentions so much as shuffle around them. The sound of their shuffling is consistently clean. The unofficial movement of non-joiners would, ironically, grow in membership, and its intimate, prevalent ethos was critically heralded as the voice of a generation, the expression of an American condition. 32

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: films by the Duplass brothers Sara Maria Vizcarrondo is a freelance writer in San Francisco. She edits Rottentomatoes’ Opening Movies page, teaches media studies at De Anza College and is working on two books.

Todd Solondz on the Here and Now of Dark Horse The singular indie voice explains he’s a creator, not a destroyer. I N T E R V I E W BY A N N A TATA R S K A

Family trauma, toxic relationships, social dependencies, and morality’s gray fringes: Welcome to the world of Todd Solondz. Critic Andrew Sarris once posited that the hands of Todd Solondz must be bloodied from the numerous stabs he’s taken at the so-called American Dream. Dark Horse, at first glance, fits right into the oeuvre as another story of growing up painfully, with a poisoned parent pool and love found in the wrong places. But there’s nothing to fear as leading man Jordan Gelber spices up thirty-nothing Abe Wertheimer’s stillborn life. Keyframe I always felt there was a television connection in your films: episodic construction, open endings, spatial design, even casting. Dark Horse, for example, quite openly alludes to sitcom. Todd Solondz: Because, in a way, it is a tragic version of Seinfeld‘s George Costanza story. We couldn’t afford to license Seinfeld; what we did instead was I got each of the actors that are playing George and his parents: Jason Alexander, Jerry Stiller, Estelle Harris. They recorded lines that I wrote and then we put it together with laugh track. Any American, even Seinfeld aficionados, would think the TV program they are watching is Seinfeld, while it’s [actually] a pure fabrication. I wanted it as a counterpoint to my tragic version of George’s story. I’ve never written a sitcom but certainly watched millions growing up and I’m sure I’m informed by that experience in ways I may not be fully conscious of. To address things that sitcoms do not address, to examine things from another angle is very compelling for me. 33

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Dark Horse Anna Tatarska is a Polish film journalist based in Warsaw, who works as a freelancer for many outlets, including Keyframe, Slant, Movie Mezzanine, Zwierciadło, KINO, Aktivist, and ELLE.

Todd Solondzâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dark Horse

Niko von Glasow’s My Way to Olympia

‘I Am Original, You Are Mundane’ My Way to Olympia and Nobody’s Perfect director Niko von Glasow on ‘disability,’ art and his colorful film career: ‘Humor is the only weapon we have.’ BY BŁAZEJ HRAPKOWICZ

If you wanted to look for an example of channeling misfortune into creative work, German director Niko von Glasow would serve that purpose perfectly. Born in 1960, von Glasow was one of the victims of thalidomide, an anti-nausea and sedative drug that was prescribed to help pregnant women with morning sickness. Unfortunately, it also caused number of birth defects—in case of von Glasow, very short arms. Now a filmmaker, von Glasow’s work focuses on disability, its public perception and psychological repercussions. During our wide-ranging conversation at Berlinale 2013, he talked about therapeutic value of his documentaries. Keyframe Your first experience on a film set was with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Is there anything particular that you learned from him? How did this collaboration influence you as a filmmaker? Niko von Glasow I was twenty years old and very innocent. I didn’t know who this guy was. I was trying to get a job in a film industry and there he was in the long corridor of the studio. When he saw me, he shouted: ‘This guy is in charge of beer boxes!’ And if I didn’t carry the beer boxes for a week, I would be fired. 35

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: films by Niko von Glasow Błazej Hrapkowicz is a Polish film journalist who’s been interviewing a variety of filmmakers on the festival circuit this year.

Keyframe You also attended Polish Film School in Lodz. Artistic education can be a very controversial subject—some people even say it destroys young talents by forcing a strict set of rules upon them. Would you agree? Von Glasow I have a very clear opinion about that. When I made my first film in Lodz—Wedding Guests—I ran around the set and kept shouting: ‘Don’t try to make art!’ And I still believe you shouldn’t try to make art. Because art is a gift from God, it just happens. If you strive to make art, you’ll end up being pretentious. I have a film school of my own, I teach a lot and I use many young, talented people in my crews. But I’m appalled by film schools. They let students do what they want, and after a couple of years they say: ‘Oh, go out there, do something, try yourself out.’ What a load of crap! When you graduate, you need to earn money and you need to survive people like me, because I will fire those idiots. If you’re not capable of doing your job, you will be sacked. This is not a rosy world of day-dreaming fuckin’ artists, this is film business. It’s a profession. If you want to become a carpenter, you should learn how to deal with wood. If you want to become a filmmaker, learn how to write scripts, how to handle a camera, how to be on time, how to make money. If you’re an artist—good for you, if you’re not—even better. Keyframe Let’s talk about your films. What I found interesting about Nobody’s Perfect—probably your most famous film to date—is the idea of photos depicting disabled people. Disability makes you a victim of discrimination, but also a victim of gaze—people either stare at you or cannot bear to look. I think what you tried to do is change that very gaze. Von Glasow Yes, I tried to change the way people look at me, but also the way I look at myself. Because if I see myself as a disabled loser, you will also see a disabled loser. But if I see myself as a wonderful person who was given short arms by God to feel special—that’s completely different. It’s so boring to be you. You’re so fuckin’ normal! I am original—you are mundane. That’s the change I was looking for. I wanted to become proud of who I am. 36

Caroline Martel: Wavemakers and Operators ‘I want to let time and chance encounters do part of the work,’ says Martel, dialing into the sublime beauty of the arcane and ‘obsolete.’ BY J O N AT H A N M A R LO W

Following the international premiere of Wavemakers (aka Le chant des ondes) at the International Film Festival Rotterdam back in January, Fandor co-founder Jonathan Marlow spoke with filmmaker Caroline Martel about this illuminating documentary (regarding the little-known yet hauntingly beautiful Ondes Martenot) along with her earlier film, The Phantom of the Operator. Keyframe In general, most documentary filmmakers have a tendency to address a point in a relatively casual way and then move on. They use archival footage as footnotes that support a series of talking heads. In Phantom of the Operator and Wavemakers, these materials support the narrative. They’re not extraneous. Everything is related. Martel Or integrated—constitutive in the actual story of the film.

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: films by Caroline Martel

Keyframe It is an exceptional amount of work. Martel My work is research-based and process-based. I never really developed much thinking about the idea that it would be ethnographic, but I care about getting to know the culture or the subculture that I make a film about—or that in fact I make a film with. Not just to represent it ‘well,’ but to transpose and reveal it in a way that will be faithful to the subject(s). I don’t feel bound to please the people that I ‘document’, but to be true to their spirit, yes. And it takes time to discover the spirit of a (sub)culture, it happens by a process of sedimentation. Keyframe Is that part of the attraction to things that might otherwise be considered obsolete (even if that is a misnomer). Martel I would never call those technologies obsolete—it’s just the practices, the uses that change over time… Keyframe Our understanding for the sake of this discussion is that these things are not obsolete. But society, in general, has disregarded them. There’s a contemporary view of telephone operations that takes for granted the fact that it used to require a person to make the connection. That whole existence was documented, usually second-hand. In feature films, you see a reference to phones from the 1930s in particular. And then, of course, the industrial films, several of which you put that film. Not to disparage the younger generation but, in general, they don’t seem to be aware of the existence of this. With Wavemakers, for instance, even people who are interested in non-traditional instruments or electronic instruments were not particularly aware of the Ondes Martenot. Martel This intervention is really part of the making of the film. Keyframe You don’t want to fetishize the object, though; you want to show respect for it. We talked after your screening about the documentary on the origins of the theremin and another about the Mellotron. The filmmakers treat the instruments in a way that I suppose is appropriate for the respective instruments. Your film is more delicate because you’re dealing with something that is more delicate. Martel In fact, this is what Jonny Greenwood said about the film—‘as beautiful and tender as the instrument itself.’ Wavemakers, in the process and in the result, is meant to reflect its very ‘subject.’ This is also why I took all this time to make it (some five years and a half), to let the subject organically shape the film. I don’t want to control everything. This might explain why I’m drawn to documentary actually. I want to let time and chance encounters do part of the work.

Su Friedrich: ‘Gut’ Check Experimenter and personal filmmaker Su Friedrich stirs the pot with her latest, the gentrification documentary Gut Renovation. BY B E AT R I C E B E H N

Su Friedrich has no interest in polished images and perfectly crafted stories. She films whatever stirs her passion. And she films it in which ever way she sees fit, freely combining experimental film with traditional narratives and documentary styles. Her works are very personal and deal with minorities and their history/histories. However small and intimate the stories, they transcend the personal and comment on the bigger picture of contemporary American politics—sometimes in a subtle, other times in a loud and bold voice: In The Ties that Bind, Friedrich and her mother, a woman of German descent who grew up in the Third Reich, explore their common history together. Hide and Seek tells the stories of lesbian women and their childhoods. In From the Ground Up, a cup of coffee stirred Friedrich’s interest, so she tracked down its roots all the way to Guatemala, exposing the gruesome complexity of today’s industries. With her newest installment, Gut Renovation, which recently screened at the Berlin Interna39

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Gut Renovation Beatrice Behn is a film scholar, critic and frequent film festival correspondent. She resides in Berlin.

tional Film Festival, it is her anger about the gentrification and the abolishment of the artist residencies in her Brooklyn neighborhood, Williamsburg, that caused her to pick up her camera again and document the vast and aggressive change of her environment. Keyframe There is an interesting thing you do in Gut Renovation, where you have commentary, your own voiceover of what you’re saying in the second that you’re just holding the camera and pointing it at the things that are happening. There’s another layer of written commentary that you superimpose on your pictures, which is really funny and even contradicts yourself. Why did you do that? Friedrich I just liked it, because in a way it gives you this sense of two separate timeframes: my emotions in that very moment and then later on a reflection, because we do sometimes regret or think again about what we’ve done or said and so I think it’s funny to really make that absolutely present in a film. You know, I have thought a lot about what it means to present language in a film, aside from a narrative dialogue language or a documentary narration of that conventional kind. So this is this other kind of language. I feel like in this film I finally had the chance to play with these different voices. You know, a sort of interior voice, the public, exterior voice, the sort of dry commentary, the funny thought. Keyframe In terms of film theory you’re actually breaking a rule here. You are exposing yourself as an ‘unreliable narrator’… Friedrich Because I am! They took away my home and changed my neighborhood, I was furious. Filmmakers are just human, we are just individuals. I am making some very big statements about what these developers think they’re doing, what the city thinks it’s doing, what the people moving into—and it’s a little bit dangerous to make sweeping statements about the whole economic movement or social situations. And so I felt I had to be a little bit humble. I don’t know everything. But I appreciate it that you noticed it, because to me that is important as it transports both stories: the one of what happened to Williamsburg and then my personal story.

Amy Seimetz and the ‘Complicated’ Female Fatal attractions, a feminine revolution and filming at high noon: Sun Don’t Shine director Amy Seimetz talks process. BY TINA HASSANNIA

Describing hot weather, Jane Austen once wrote, “It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.” Amy Seimetz’s directorial feature debut film Sun Don’t Shine is a moody loverson-the-run tale that taps into that state: characters smeared with grease and mud, dripping sweat, a pink sheen on their desperate faces, all presented with such raw viscerality on 16mm stock that one cannot help but feel the claustrophobic Floridian heat on their own flesh. Shooting in her home state of Florida was an important decision for Seimetz; as she describes in the interview, the state’s summer heat informs the way people dress, think and move. In 41

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Sun Don’t Shine Tina Hassannia is a freelance film critic and writer residing in Toronto, Canada.

Sun Don’t Shine, the emotionally needy Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and her comparatively coolheaded boyfriend Leo (Kentucker Audley) drive across state in a sedan with a bad secret in the trunk Inelegance is [spoiler alert] the least of Crystal’s problems—the couple are trying to cover up the murder of Crystal’s husband, whom she killed in a fit of rage—and while their plan seems straightforward, Crystal’s childlike regressive tendencies, accompanied by emotional outbreaks and an inability to think coherently, make their trip nigh impossible. The film is less interesting in regard to the closure of its narrative than the emotional resonance that surfaces between these two characters, which show the psychological and cognitive breakdown of two people under that much pressure. Keyframe You’ve been making movies since you were eighteen, and you’ve been part of the filmmaking process in that period of time in different roles, as a director, producer, actor or something else. For your first feature, what were the most salient things that you learned in these various experiences that you were able to bring to Sun Don’t Shine? Or was it a case of starting up from the ground up? Amy Seimetz It was kind of both. With each film that you make, you have to approach it as its own beast, because every film needs ‘tender loving care’ in its own special way. If you’re going to make the film on a DIY or independent level you have to know the inner workings of production, the writing, the actors, the set design, where it’s going to take place, so that all the logistics seamlessly come together. With Sun Don’t Shine I wrote it in pieces over a series of months. I would go to locations [in Florida] and take pictures and video and attach the actors and D.P. and the producer to every single email. I wrote the script over a series of months through these emails, in prose. As I was writing it I was having a conversation with all the departments on how to make it seamless. By the time I had a finished script—I only really put it in a finished script format for production purpose—it was already built and we had worked out all the logistics, so when we were shooting, everyone knew what we were shooting and had the overall scope of everything. Keyframe The way you establish Florida in the film is an accomplishment, particularly for setting the tone of the film. When I watched it, I was sitting in an air-conditioned room and I felt like I was drenched in sweat like the characters. It had such an impact on me physically. Can you talk about your decision to shoot in Florida, and how high noon and 16mm aided that decision? Seimetz It’s funny, my sister who watched the film for the first time and who also grew up in Florida, she said, ‘I was so happy when [Crystal] got in the swimming pool at the end!’ It’s brutal in the summer. When you get down there it’s so hot and sticky that you just kind of give

up in the summer months what you look like because once you step outside it’s like stepping into a sauna. I think it informs how people dress and move in Florida. Unless you’re sitting on a beach enjoying the beach, it’s just brutal to get through your day outside. It affects your thinking because you’re not comfortable and your body’s saying, ‘can I just get to a place where I can function correctly?’ So your brain is not working. That was the interesting pressure element I wanted in the story. The humidity affecting their decision-making, as well as the crime that they had committed, and the pressure of everything affecting their logic and their decisions. When you read about Florida crime stories sometimes, you know there are websites that comment on how crazy people are down there. But just try going there in the middle of summer and try to think straight! The heat makes people crazy. Keyframe Oh yes. The link between violence and intense heat has been proven scientifically. Seimetz It makes you feel stuck. I wanted the viewer to feel it with high noon. But everyone tries to avoid filmmaking in high noon.

Between the Lines in The Day He Arrives Unassuming surfaces mask cinematic audacity. A video essay reveals a Korean master Hong Sang-soo’s artistry. BY KEVIN B. LEE

“Random things happen for no reason in our lives. We choose a few and form a line of thought… Made by all these dots, which we call reason.”

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: The Day He Arrives Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, critic and programmer with a growing collection of critical work on Vimeo (vimeo. com/user459576).

The film is called The Day He Arrives. “He” refers to Yoo Seongjun, a film director making a brief visit to the city of Seoul.

The film’s English title refers to just one day, but the film covers a period of five days. Or does it?

If the story happens over five consecutive days, then why does each character wear the same clothes every day?

Why is the winter snowfall that blankets one scene nowhere to be found in the very next?

Why doesn’t this woman remember passionately making out with Seongjun the previous evening?

Why do they keep going to the same bar, but Seongjun’s voiceover makes it sound like each visit is his first? The bar itself is called Novel, cueing us that this is all a fiction.

If what we’re watching is only a movie, as the saying goes, then maybe it’s best to approach it as such.

FILM LIST

New York Neorealism New York City plays itself in a few generations of filmmaking. BY MARK ASCH

New York’s Photo League had its roots in Depression-era leftist populism, and counted among its members many of the era’s most influential art photographers. In 1948, the Photo League’s Helen Levitt, noted for her street photography, made In the Street, a slice-of-life short that she filmed in Spanish Harlem with Janice Loeb and the critic James Agee. Shot with hidden cameras, In the Street is initially a plangent, well-composed social-realist portrait—kids playing in an open fire hydrant, neighbors chatting, dogs sniffing—but it changes strikingly in the final minutes, when a group of children discover the cameras and begin pulling faces and posing. The film remains emblematic for its combination of vérité texture—in the service of both reportorial conscience and historical curiosity— black-and-white photo chops, and reflexivity. The opening title of In the Street reads: “The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theater and a battleground. There, unaware and unnoticed, every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer; and in his innocent artistry he projects, against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence. The attempt in this short film is to capture this image.” Its “poetry of the masses” tone aside, this accurately conveys both the eye-level truthfulness, and self-conscious performance, that would prove to be constants for subsequent generations of films using New York City—its characters and locations—as their raw materials. The films discussed below, all fiction features with a close relationship to sociological observation and evolving styles of documentary photography, treat New York City as their proscenium, making them perfect time capsules for a city always consigning parts of itself to a nostalgically recalled past. Mark Asch, for several years the film editor of The L Magazine in Brooklyn, is currently a Master’s student in Reykjavík.

Little Fugitive

Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, 1953

The first film by Engel and his wife and fellow Photo League member Orkin is an obvious influence on The 400 Blows for its plein air staging of searching delinquency. It’s primarily shot on location at America’s Playground, Coney Island, with the press of the flesh of thousands of bodies used for set decoration. Young Joey (Richie Andrusco) and his twelve-year-old brother Lennie are latchkey kids at play in Brooklyn’s vacant lots and side streets. (The filmmakers climb onto fire escapes to shoot their stickball games.) Tricked by the older boys he tags along with into believing that he has “moidered” his “brudda,” Joey flees on the elevated out to Coney Island and is overwhelmed by pleasures—wooden Skeeball lanes, bumper boats, sodapop from Nathan’s, the Wonder Wheel lighting up at night— distracting him from his guilt (mostly). The observational montages suggest a link between photographed impressions and unreliable memory from deep childhood; they also echo the “city symphony” documentaries of an earlier era, particularly Joris Ivens’s Rain during rainstorm that sends the beachgoers running for cover. (For a more wry, color view, see the famous crime photographer Weegee’s Coney Island film from the following year.) The youth of the protagonist gives an unpredictable texture to scenes, with stumbles in Andrusco’s walk and stammers in his line readings going against the grain of the minimal but symmetrical plot. Even so, compositions, like the lines of light and shadow alternating under the boardwalk, anticipate the immaculate serendipity of Robert Frank’s The Americans five years later. Genre is also a key element: the film opens on a sidewalk chalk drawing of a horse, Joey is drawn repeatedly to the carousel and then the pony ride attraction, and “Home on the Range” plays on the soundtrack—Western fantasies, as refracted through comic books and cowboy shows, are integrated into the fabric of verisimilitude.

Watch Little Fugitive on Fandor

David Holzman’s Diary Jim McBride, 1967

David Holzman’s Diary begins with a young man holding his camera and trying to figure out how to begin. The protagonist (played by actor-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson), just reclassified as 1A, attempts with his film diary to make sense of his life, but in ten or so days of to-camera confessionals, he’s at least as likely to riff about masturbation as to articulate his intentions with any clarity. (“I thought this would be a film… I thought this would be a film about things… the mystery of things,” he finally confesses.) He quotes Godard and Truffaut, and can’t figure out why his own personal passion project isn’t as revelatory. The camera is frequently pointed into a mirror. But McBride understands cinematic truth better than his protagonist: it has to do with letting time perform its alchemy on the photographed image. The film takes place over a week and a half in July of 1967, during which David does sometimes get out of his apartment and take “my friend, my camera,” out for a stroll: filming the Upper West Side from a moving car—tilting up to take in the Dakota and Ansonia—or sizing up the old ladies on in their fur hats and pearls on pocket-park benches near Lincoln Center. With the ambient hum of news broadcasts reporting on the Newark riots, it’s almost a newsreel. David is, he freely admits, a “voyeur.” He stages an artful following shot of an attractive woman disembarking from the subway (aboveground, she first speeds up her walk, then turns to the camera and exclaims “Beat it!”); films the girl across the street through her open window; and is dumped by his girlfriend Penny after he films her sleeping in the nude. “I don’t quite get her sense of privacy,” he says in voiceover. There’s a line from Masculin Féminin that David doesn’t quote, but could: “It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make… and secretly wanted to live.” This gets at the notion of a film as a kind of idealized, elevated presentation of the truth of life, and also gets at the effect such a notion can have on a person. The only thing is, Masculin Féminin isn’t a comedy.

Streaming now on Fandor: David Holzman’s Diary

Blank Generation Ulli Lommel, 1980

The second of two films to take its title from Richard Hell’s song, following Amos Poe’s 1976 home-movie and performance film—a suggestive contrast to the polished color cinematography here, which beautifully captures New York City winter daylight, on the Bowery and through barroom windows. Like Wild Style, Blank Generation features NYC underground icons playing themselves in the lightly fictionalized story of a subculture about to break. Richard Hell plays “Billy,” a punk bandleader in talks with a major label. His self-doubt manifests in his walking off the stage mid-song at CBGB’s (perhaps a quarter of the movie, which features several of his songs on the soundtrack, is shot in and around the venue). The other narrative thread, concerning Billy’s tumultuous relationship with the significantly monikered Nada (Carole Bouquet), a filmmaker from French TV, is also self-conscious: Billy and Nada communicate with each other through videotapes, and turn the camera on one another as a turn-on. Where David Holzman’s Diary is preoccupied with the artifice of the medium, Blank Generation is preoccupied with the artifice of the self. Andy Warhol shows up for a heavily built-up TV interview late in the film, a godhead in a fur coat, and delivers an exquisitely mundane reflection on a Godard quote. He’s the perfect presiding spirit, given the film’s existentialist posing and preoccupation with fame. Punk and No Wave culture’s fascination with celebrity led to much ironic (and not quite ironic) playing at iconography (see Blank City, Celine Danhier’s doc on the era, for many emblematic clips). One way Blank Generation is typical of its era is in the way the narrative accumulates weirdoes as it goes, from the avantgarde violinist who crashes a TV set, to the bearded sage who informs Nada that “film steals images from living beings.”

Streaming now on Fandor: Blank Generation

What About Me Rachel Amodeo, 1993

Richard Hell appears again (you can also see him in Susan Seidelman’s debut, Smithereens), in this little-seen debut feature from East Village resident Amodeo, a drummer in local cult bands throughout the eighties. Other notable musicians involved include an emaciated Johnny Thunders—the soundtrack also features several of his compositions, including “So Alone” and “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory”—and Jerry Nolan, in a cameo as a murder victim. Both died before the film was completed. Shot between 1988 and 1992, mostly in winter, against the backdrop of the Tompkins Square Park riots and homeless-encampment clearances, the death-haunted What About Me refers back to a romanticized, culturally productive period of urban decay (the “blank city” of the seventies and eighties) and shows its attrition through middle age, crack and booze, and poverty. It’s still personality-driven cinema, but the memorable New York characters, played by real-life memorable New York characters, are more likely to be street people: witness the exquisite digressive drunken etiquette of Dee Dee Ramone, in his scene as a ’Nam vet. Amodeo herself stars as Lisa, a lost little girl on the way down into cart-pushing, coatclutching, doorway-sleeping homelessness. The film is in part a ballad of sexual dependency: Lisa is shacked up primarily with bum raconteur Richard Edson, with his slurred, nasally, overelaborated speech patterns; as well as with Hell’s hopeless romantic and downtown filmmaker Nick Zedd. The amateurish acting styles convey the rambling, distracted, addled vibe of Alphabet City’s bad old days, as surely as do the storefront glimpses of palm-reader parlors and the Pyramid Club.

Streaming now on Fandor: What About Me

Yeast

Mary Bronstein, 2008

Another multihyphenate female auteur, Bronstein stars here as Rachel, in a standard-setting performance of unlikeability. Rachel is transparent in her need to control situations, mostly through status-establishing insults and emotional scab-picking. Her aggressiveness brings out the almost equally unflattering passivity of her friends, pothead Gen (Greta Gerwig), who hides behind dopey airquote humor, and sloppy-sullen roommate Alice (Amy Judd). The mode of performance in Yeast is palpably actorly, with scene partners each pursuing masked but evident objectives; though scenes are raw and seemingly only semi-scripted, the characterizations seem stylized. This is perhaps the Cassavetes influence on the group of films called, for lack of a better term, ‘mumblecore,’ a trend that’s less specifically localized than previous generations of filmmaking movements. Still, the tension is fueled by the too-close-for-comfort dimensions of an NYC apartment, and keyed to episodes of roommate drama. There’s almost a college dorm vibe to Rachel and Alice’s apartment, with Polaroids and posters on the walls, suggestive of a long-standing friendship. (It makes it almost sad, then, to see how little they like each other; and it explains why it really would be worse for them to admit that they hate each other.) The digital videography, by Sean Price Williams, is present-tense shaky, and intrusive, picking up the summer shine on the actresses’ faces. It’s emblematic of an epoch in which the boundaries of privacy violated by David Holzman, and flaunted by Billy and Nada, seem to have evaporated completely. The story, too, is especially of its time, a very twentysomething account of shedding the skin of old friendships and identities. The venues are apartments more than streets, and the truths feel more private than public. The new realism, in NYC and elsewhere, continues its spiritual alignment with the contemporaneous mode of photography—which is, of course, self-portraiture.

Streaming now on Fandor: Yeast