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Category Archives: On Film

May 9, 2017
On Film

Master of Light

By Noah Gallagher Shannon

Cinematographer Roger Deakins uses his blog to pull back the curtain on the lighting tricks that have made him famous.

Roger Deakins, 2004, via Buena Vista.

Sometime in the late nineties, the cinematographer Roger Deakins took a kind of pilgrimage to visit his friend and mentor Conrad “Connie” Hall, who was living in semiretirement on a tiny island off Tahiti. The timing found Deakins visiting the older Hall—a three-time Academy Award winner and sort of tribal elder to directors of photography—as the industry-wide shift toward digital cameras was being met by a renewed nostalgia for film, and Deakins was excited to share how he’d recently remodeled his LA home to include a darkroom. “My expectations were shattered,” Deakins later wrote, “when Conrad pronounced the photochemical process ‘antiquated.’ ” Hall praised the possibilities of digital, telling Deakins he was happy to indulge any “technique that might have helped him develop as a visual storyteller.” That was Hall’s guiding mantra, and one the younger artist soon took up: “Story! Story! Story!” Read More
April 10, 2017
On Film

Worst-Case Scenario

By Tom Overton

The vision of nuclear holocaust in Threads (1984) remains visceral and urgent.

Still from Threads.

The audience at the 1984 press screening of Barry Hines and Mick Jackson’s BBC TV film Threads apparently walked out in numbed silence. One of them, the novelist Russell Hoban, concluded in The Listener,

This is not a film to be reviewed as a film; its art is that it cancels all aesthetic distance between our unthinking and the unthinkable: here is the death of our life and the birth of a new life for our children, a life … of slow death by radiation sickness and plagues and starvation and quick death by violence.

Threads is a virtually faultless film, but as Hoban suggests, its unrelenting bleakness makes it all but impossible to recommend to someone one likes. That said, it has recently won a “Ten Films That Shook Our World” poll, and tonight, April 10, it’s showing at the Barbican Centre, in London. Spoiler alerts are irrelevant; the movie will spoil your day however you see it. In its harrowing vision of Britain after a nuclear war, pretty much everyone dies eventually, while rats, maggots, and the class system endure. As vividly as it defines the experience of living through the Cold War, we no longer have the luxury of viewing it as a historical document: in January 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists declared us closer to doomsday than we’ve been since the early eighties. Read More
April 3, 2017
On Film

Search for the New Land

By Adam Shatz

Kasper Collin’s new documentary celebrates the vibrant, turbulent life of the jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan.

Photo: Kasper Collin Produktion AB. Courtesy of the Afro-American Newspaper Archives and Research Center.

“Every listener to jazz has had a few experiences so startling that they are literally unforgettable,” Nat Hentoff wrote in 1960:

One of mine took place during an engagement the Dizzy Gillespie big band had at Birdland in 1957. My back was to the bandstand as the band started playing “Night in Tunisia.” Suddenly, a trumpet soared out of the band into a break that was so vividly brilliant and electrifying that all conversation in the room stopped and those of us who were gesturing were frozen with hands outstretched. After the first thunderclap impact, I turned and saw that the trumpeter was the very young sideman from Philadelphia, Lee Morgan.

Lee Morgan, who was nineteen when Hentoff heard him, had this effect on many people. His sound was bright, brash, and sassy: like James Brown’s early work, it had the seductively strutting arrogance of youth. Morgan was a funky, down-home player, with a penchant for “smeared,” dirty notes, but he was also a subtle and calculating musical thinker who constructed his solos as if they were stories. That synergy of soulfulness and hipster cool defined the so-called Blue Note sound in the fifties and sixties, and Morgan was one of the label’s most celebrated artists. As David H. Rosenthal wrote in his classic study Hard Bop, he was the “quintessential hard-bopper.” Read More
February 23, 2017
On Film

Herr Fassbinder’s Trip to Heaven

By Charlie Fox

The prolific, careening career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

FAUST: Joy is not the issue,  I give myself to frenzy, to pleasure that hurts most. —Goethe

Death stands there with its thing sticking out. —Frederick Seidel

“Ah,” said the policeman studying the corpse on that summer morning in 1982, “even Fassbinder is mortal.” The German filmmaker lay on his bed in a swank benefactor’s penthouse, flesh cold, blood snaking from one nostril and the script for a new project—a spaced-out biopic of the communist heroine Rosa Luxemburg—lying next to his body. The postmortem would later reveal that Rainer Werner Fassbinder, aged thirty-seven, had died around four A.M. on June 10, his heart stopped by the fatal interaction between a mixture of cocaine and sleeping pills. Even if this scene related in Robert Katz’s scurrilous biography Love Is Colder Than Death (1987) is cultish apocrypha, there is something in its freeze-framed combination of unbelievable fact, mythic allure and disclosure of a desolate fall that serves to encapsulate Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s life. Dionysiac excess was the norm: he drank all day, snorted snowdrifts of coke like a vacuum and gorged on barbiturates by the bagful but work was all that mattered. He spent the next day behind the camera shooting his new project, editing its predecessor at night, and writing whatever was next until dawn. “I really have a drive that’s hard to explain,” he said, “I’m actually only happy when I’m doing things and that’s my drug, if you will.”

Adopt his thinking and the merits of coupling sleeping pills with cocaine are obvious: achieve white-hot exhilaration with coke but smooth that comedown into a sweet dream with a rainbow combination of knockout tranquilizers. If that wasn’t a fast enough route to oblivion, he wasn’t scared to darken the mixture with a little heroin and promptly vanish down a black hole for the next few hours. The drugs would be syncopated with whiskey sloshed into a pint glass to keep his thinking limber and remove any residual jitters from the cocaine. For any observer, the whole desperate party must have looked like a suicide accomplished in slow motion. Fassbinder had kept up this rhythm for years; his films, too, were about fatal interactions, encounters between the kind-hearted and wicked that frequently end with the innocent’s demise. The policeman was right: he didn’t seem to have the same needs or limits as other men—he was, to quote the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s fond description of his friend, “an unruly beast.” Read More
February 22, 2017
On Film

The Right to Speak

By Sarah Cowan

“Africa was colonized, and so is its cinema,” Sidney Sokhona wrote. His films aimed to change that.

Still from Safrana.

The first time we see Sidney Sokhona, the director and star of Nationalité: Immigré, he is on his knees. Two French bureaucrats sit behind a desk, not bothering to look at him as they conduct their interrogation, mechanically writing down his details and finally handing him a piece of paper, which he takes in his mouth before crawling away on all fours. The paper bears the name of his public-housing assignment. His submission symbolizes the inhumane treatment he’ll face in his new home, and the politeness with which he will be expected to endure it.

Hybridizing documentary and fiction, Nationalité: Immigré reaches occasionally into the surreal, as in this first scene. The film was shot between 1972 and 1975. With no money to pay another actor, Sokhona, a Mauritanian immigrant in his early twenties, was forced to play the lead role himself. As the story begins, Sokhona arrives in Paris, having traveled in the trunk of a car. His fantasy of city life, as thin as it is—“Finally, I will see with my own eyes the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, which I have seen so many times at free movie screenings organized by the French embassies in Dakar and Nouakchott”—never materializes, and neither do job opportunities, despite the prayers and lotto tickets to which he pins hope. Sokhona centers the film on the real-life rent strike undertaken by the rue Riquet shelter tenants in those years, in opposition to abusive and dangerous housing conditions. Voice-over explains: “Immigrant workers were already living and working in the most inhumane conditions. But then five people died in Aubervilliers, victims of the owners of this slum. One week after this atrocity, two black Africans were pulled from the Ourcq Canal with fractured skulls.” Over an image of two bodies under a sheet, the voice insists, “So for us immigrants, the situation presented itself like this: we had to organize ourselves to struggle or we would all perish.” Read More
February 7, 2017
On Film

The Alley Cats of Istanbul

By Darrell Hartman

Still from Kedi.

If you love something, you let it go. Cat people understand this intuitively. You never quite possess a cat, and the sooner you acknowledge that, the better. Cats will chase the tinfoil ball, if they are in the mood, but they will almost certainly not bring it back. We forgive them for this because there is no other option.

I have no trouble linking cats to the divine. Chris Marker’s transcendent short film of a sleeping cat is nothing if not an image of Nirvana, pure being, whatever you want to call it. The look in a cat’s eye guides us toward an idea of freedom, as Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested. Having spent a lifetime studying the structures of ancient societies, the French anthropologist understood well the prison cell into which technological man had locked himself. Only at rare moments, Lévi-Strauss posits near the end of Tristes Tropiques, do we see beyond this cell. One of those is “in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.” Read More