msicism

Murmur (Heather Young, 2019)

Debut films are often tricky melanges of shopworn cliches and the unique ideas that made the artist want to make the movie in the first place. It's almost as though, in trying to figure out how to give shape to those inchoate sounds and images rattling around in their heads, novice filmmakers instincti...

Ghost Strata (Ben Rivers, 2019)

Although Rivers is getting most of his festival exposure this year with Krabi, 2562, the feature he co-directed with Thai helmer Anocha Suwichakornpong, he also made a medium-length solo work that, while perhaps more of a piece with his previous work than Krabi, nevertheless represent...

Letter to the Editor (Alan Berliner, 2019)

In his characteristic essay-film way, Berliner uses a framing device -- his personal relationship to the New York Times -- to consider a range of broader issues. But much of the film really is about the problem of print journalism's twilight years, its replacement by the big scary Internet, and Trump's...

Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger (Alanis Obomsawin, 2019)

For all my dedication to Canadian cinema, this is the first time I have watched a documentary by Obomsawin, the revered filmmaker who is at this point the world's leading chronicler of the experience of First Peoples. (I'll admit that the fact that this was a short one encouraged me to knuckle down and...

We Still Have to Close Our Eyes (John Torres, 2019)

Among the various directors of the Filipino New Wave, John Torres (Todo todo teros, Lukas the Strange) has always been one of the strangest and most original. This newest work is long on concept but comes up short on delivery, feeling like a sketch for something that Torres might choo...

Remembrance: A Portrait Study (Edward Owens, 1967)

The films of 60s experimentalist Edward Owens, which were rediscovered and restored not too long ago, provide a voice that had been missing from American avant-garde history for far too long. An African-American filmmaker who studied with Gregory J. Markopoulos, Owens provides a partial correction to t...

Book of Hours (Annie McDonell, 2019)

A brief film composed of gentle, quotidian gestures, Book of Hours is elegant in its subtlety. In the film, McDonell focuses on the domestic sphere, one of a number of possible "spaces" of activity that could have served as her primary stage. (Early in the film, we hear a voice reciting a lita...

Who's Afraid of Ideology? (Marwa Arsanios, 2019)

Beginning with a woman thumbing through a notebook of pressed plants, detailing the ailments that can be cured with each one, Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2 soon becomes wider in scope, exploring the broader connections between people and the land. In this case, Arsanios is offering the vi...

Hrvoji, Look at You From the Tower (Ryan Ferko, 2019)

Ryan Ferko has presented a number of films in festivals past, although those previous entries have been co-directed by Faraz and Parastoo Anoushahpour. They are both listed in the credits of Hrvoji as collaborators, but Ferko is credited as the sole filmmaker, and this in itself is intriguing....

Second Generation (Miryam Charles, 2019)

A film that hints at a narrative but is presented as an assemblage of fragments, Second Generation suggests a love affair, a pending marriage, a history of migration and resettlement, and a sense that the shifting and unmooring of cultural identities may be playing a role in creating strife be...

Transcript (Erica Sheu, 2019)

I had the good fortune to first come across Erica Sheu's Transcript back in March when I was previewing films for the SF Crossroads Festival, where it stood out from the pack quite powerfully. But it's a quiet power, to be sure. There may not be a more delicate, unassuming film in the Waveleng...

The Bite (Pedro Neves Marques, 2019)

Another form of tropical malady has taken hold in Sao Paolo, and it's up to a group of renegade entomologist-epidemiologists to stop the plague, not by finding a cure to the disease itself, but by releasing a genetically-modified mosquito that will disrupt the transmission of the virus by making its ca...

SaF05 (Charlotte Prodger, 2019)

SaF05, the latest video work by Turner Prize winner Charlotte Prodger, could perhaps be considered a video essay, although to call it that would imply a level of directness and clarity SaF05 doesn't have. The work is much more like a constellation of tangentially related concepts, a s...

Sun Rave (Roy Samaha, 2019)

Roy Samaha's Sun Rave is a complex, knotty little film that, like the espionage agents described in it, does not give up its secrets easily. By bringing a number of unlikely ideas into orbit around each other, the film leads the viewer not to conclusions but to hints and suspicions, to concept...

Slow Volumes (Mike Gibisser, 2019)

A bit of domestic abstraction, Slow Volumes employs a 35mm camera at the center axis of both a living room and a particular point in a field outdoors, and spins out a highly relatable horizontal blur regarding those things closest to its maker. Granted, we cannot be certain that the people and...

Black Sun (Maureen Fazendiero, 2019)

Taking as its ostensible topic the recent partial solar eclipse, Fazendiero’s film is a meditation on the role that light plays in shaping reality and our consciousness of it. To this end, we hear a recording of Delphine Seyrig on the soundtrack, reading a poem by Henri Michaux about a land where sun...

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2019)

For the Viennale catalog, I wrote the following:

Not all reproductions are mechanical, even in our age of digital imagery, 3D printing, and instantaneous communication. It is still necessary to create physical facsimiles of various artifacts of material culture, such as fossils, ancient pottery a...

San Vittore (Yuri Ancarani, 2019)

It is easy (if nonetheless necessary) to criticize power in its most heinous manifestations. If we consider, for example, the Trump administration's disgusting anti-immigration policies and weaponization of ICE, with random raids on law-abiding families and peaceful communities, caged children denied m...

This Action Lies (James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2018)

Commissioned last year by a Swiss gallery but world premiering only now, Kienitz Wilkins' latest featurette nevertheless arrives piping hot. In fact, it should probably come with a warning. In a field that generally prizes image composition above all else, with sound design coming in a distant second, ...

Circumplector (Gastón Solnicki, 2019)

In Latin, circumplector means that which is all-encompassing. True to form, Argentinian experimentalist Solnicki (Kékszakállú) enfolds nearly everything in less than three minutes: sculpture, architecture, devotional music, a painterly still life, a bit of portraiture, and the inkl...

Cézanne (Luke Fowler, 2019)

Live from Aix-en-Provence comes an unusual new film from Luke Fowler. Although his work tends to be discursive in its exploration of cultural history, here he lets the images do the talking, using his camera like a paintbrush to explore a complex dichotomy. The abundant flora, the quality of light, and...

Billy (Zachary Epcar, 2019)

Billy is a talkie.

Epcar is one of the most interesting among the current crop of younger filmmakers, in part because his stock in trade seems to be a collection of ineffable moods. He's a bit like Laida Lertxundi and Jennifer Reeder in this respect, although thus far, Epcar is a bit har...

Heavy Metal Detox (Josef Dabernig, 2019)

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the intersection of experimental cinema and horror. A lot of this was occasioned by work coming out of Austria, birthplace of Freud and the uncanny, and perhaps not coincidentally the locus of some pretty bracing stuff in the avant-garde art worl...

E-Ticket (Simon Liu, 2019)

Simon Liu, who grew up between Hong Kong and the U.K. and is now based in New York City, has a distinctly urban sensibility in his films, even when the spaces he's depicting are not cities per se. They often are, but his films also include rural areas, far flung global locales, and a lot of interstitia...

Amusement Ride (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2019)

Q: What's a 'structural film'?

A: That's easy! Everybody knows what a structural film is! It's when engineers design an airplane or a bridge, and they build a model to find out if it will fall apart too soon. The film shows where all the stresses are!

(Owen Land, On th...