myDylarama

Nomadland take 2: A reconfiguration of a terribly dysfunctional society.

George Crosthwait — 2021-04-03T16:43:43Z

In 2011 the USG mine in Empire Nevada closed, effectively creating a ghost town. Caught in the wake of this collapse, Fern (Frances McDormand) has lost her job, her home and is reeling from her husband's recent passing. Fern becomes part of the disparate and transient “nomad” community. The nomads are usually older, often solitary, Americans living on the road in cars, vans, and mobile homes, following seasonal work and forming short term convoys.

“What the nomads are doing is not that different from what the pioneers did. I think Fern's part of an American tradition.” So says Fern's sister, defending her at a bad-tempered cook out. But what sounds like a justification and possibly an ethos for the film, lands ambivalently. The nomads seek to exist on the periphery rather than strike out to tame and settle the expansive wilds of the new world. Again and again, Nomadland reinforces the precarity of a mode of living that can be shattered by a flat tyre, an unwanted visitor, the law, sickness, or the weather. What the pioneers did was to exact mass genocide on indigenous peoples in order to make claims on the land. Something not lost to a director whose previous two features, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), are both set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. And whilst the nomad existence evokes a kind of libertarian fantasy, Fern's situation is generated and perpetuated by the destabilising employment practices of companies such as USG and Amazon.

Nomad living is an insular inversion of the pioneer spirit and a rejection of the modern American dream, an attempt at a transparent existence with minimal impact upon the landscape. It may, however, be appropriate to think of Zhao herself as taking part in, or even establishing new pathways within an American cinematic tradition. Whilst Zhao evokes Terrence Malick with stunning, crepuscular photography of (appropriately) Badlands National Park, her focus on marginalised American lives places her more comfortably alongside contemporary filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, Sean Baker, and Debra Granik. Whilst you can see the same interests in unorthodox modes of living/habitation as Granik's Leave no Trace (2018) and (often temporary) female labour as Reichardt's Certain Women (2016), Zhao's films have less of the textured, tactile, immersive cinematography of her peers. Rather, films like The Rider and Nomadland have a more objective, observational tone. Her Malickean citations hold nature as something phenomenal to behold, rather than to fully sense. Her approach to her subjects is ethnographic, and much attention is paid to verbal testimony. The most initially striking aspect of Zhao's style is her docufiction approach. Beyond recognisable stars (McDormand, David Strathairn) actors in Nomadland play versions of themselves and tell their own stories and histories of life on the road. Although Fern has a loose narrative arc of processing her personal traumas, at times she acts as a wandering witness, or conduit to these very real testimonies. This approach to filmmaking is distilled even further in The Rider, which incorporates an entire cast of non-actors performing both themselves and their community.

It's a device that aligns Zhao with Todd Haynes, who briefly brings in actual victims of DuPont's water poisoning in Dark Waters (2019), and the Ross Brothers, who tear down the boundaries between fiction and documentary in the magnificent Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020). But with her unprecedented awards season success, no current filmmaker is exploring the pervasive sense of loss coursing through vast parts of the USA with such mainstream appeal. Nomadland pulls off the trick of romanticising without sugar coating that the best American art achieves. It is both a eulogy, a coping mechanism, and a reconfiguration of a terribly dysfunctional society.

Mank: David Fincher's Xanadu

George Crosthwait — 2020-12-17T10:27:05Z

Something is troubling David Fincher. Despite his multiple Oscar nominations, the consistent box office returns that keep the studios purring, and the cult fandom generated by his dark and twisty thrillers, something is gnawing at him. He hasn't done his “Hollywood” picture. And really, how do you expect to be taken seriously as a white male American auteur without a handsome and lightly satirical peek behind the soundstage. Look around you. Scorsese has made Aviator, Tarantino has Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the Coen brothers have Barton Fink AND Hail, Caesar!, (that's not to mention films by Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, Woody Allen, Richard Linklater, Barry Sonnenfeld, Frank Oz, Damien Chazelle, Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, Jay Roach, Martin McDonagh, Richard Kelly, James Franco, Michel Hazanavicius, Curtis Hanson, Spike Jonze, Tim Burton, Mike Figgis, Bernard Rose, Robert Altman, Robert Aldrich, John McTiernan, Wes Craven, Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader, Richard Attenborough, Terrence Malick, Peter Bogdanovich, John Schlesinger, Vincente Minelli, Warren Beatty, Sidney Pollack, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Billy Wilder, George Cukor, William Wyler, William Wellman, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Preston Sturges, and Buster Keaton).

Now the World has Mank. Fincher's tribute to a golden age of the Mankiewicz bros., Orson Welles, the creative process, the studio system, executive control, and alcoholism. A handsomely mounted (Netflix) production with a personal genesis, Mank has thrilled the critics and taken its place in the pantheon of cinema's most self-indulgent sub-genre. What is there to make of Hollywood's addiction to self-representation? Certainly, there's a degree of brand management occurring here; a constant need to justify that the act of making movies is so important/fascinating that there needs to be more movies about it! And, of course, the cultural legacies of such films are guaranteed by the unceasing cascade of award nominations—Fincher is, at the time of writing, every bookies' favourite for the Best Director Oscar.

Onscreen representations of Hollywood tend to fit into two categories: celebrations of movie magic (The Artist), and industry satires (The Player). These categories overlap somewhat, so you might reasonably expect at least a few swipes at unscrupulous producers in the former, and some eventual vindication of cinema in the latter. In reality, one should always regard Hollywood self-satire with suspicion. It is hardly revelatory to paint studio execs as exploitative, or to suggest that the industry as a whole values profit over artistic vision. The exposures of #MeToo and Time's Up were painfully shocking, but if we're being honest, not all that surprising. Whenever Hollywood indulges in self-critique, the actual effect is to remind the public (and the industry drones) that producers are odiously powerful. If you mess with them, you do so at the risk of your career. This can also act as a mea culpa: “We know Hollywood is messed up, but at least we can criticise ourselves”. When an industry is constantly poised in a Teflon coated stance of self-satire, sincere accusations from outside parties tend to slide straight off. “Tell the story you know”, declares John Houseman in Mank. Maybe it's all just Hollywood water cooler chat.
How effective can a Hollywood takedown of an institution, or public figure, be? Citizen Kane may have pissed off William Randolph Hearst, but did it hamper newspaper sales? Rupert Murdoch might not like Succession (if he watches it), but is presumably happy with the health of his evil empire. Hearst actually appears as a major supporting character in Mank, alongside a rogues' gallery that includes Louis B. Mayer, Ben Hecht and David O. Selznick. As cartoonishly reprehensible as these caricatures are, forget about making links to media moguls or studio heads of the present (a couple of wafts at Goebbels and fake news aside). Like other golden age hagiographies such as Trumbo and The Aviator, Mank's “Hollywoodland” is presented as a temporally isolated space where art triumphs and everyone cheerfully trades witty barbs like Dorothy Parker after a large scotch. Whilst this mythical past is haunted by ghouls like Hearst, Mayer, and Joe McCarthy, their presence is countered by guardians of the craft. Our saviours in Mank include the visionary prophet Orson Welles, the doomed but noble Irving Thalberg, and the uncompromising court jester Herman Mankiewicz, flirting with career suicide but protecting his creative honour.

Mankiewicz is an interesting vessel through which to tell this story. Whilst Fincher may be righting a misconception that Citizen Kane was a co-authored script, Welles remains the unchallenged genius. Fincher adores him. We rarely see his face, and Tom Burke's booming impression dominates, even when heard through the phone. He is frequently framed from below, towering over everyone, or from behind, in darkened silhouette. One analysis of Mank and similar films is to draw a connection between creator and subject. Take for example the perfectionist Martin Scorsese the rehabilitating an OCD suffering Howard Hughes as a tragic romantic in The Aviator, or the exploitation upcycler Quentin Tarantino's aging tough guys saving the world from hippies in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Here, Fincher isn't hubristic enough to compare himself directly to Welles, but possibly sees himself in Mankiewicz: the highly successful, uniquely talented and principled, yet flawed and underrated studio veteran.

Mank's opening credits plunge the viewer into immediate pastiche territory. A golden-era-esque title card fades into digitally simulated black-and-white celluloid stock. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score accurately captures the atmosphere of an (anachronistic) 50s noir—nostalgia often miss-remembers what 1940s Hollywood sounded like. As the first artificial reel-change “cigarette-burn” (surely Fincher's career “rosebud”) marker appears, you might find yourself experiencing a kind of inauthentic authenticity. A sense that everything looks like it should and is thus uncannily unreal. Whilst there are some zingy exchanges—Mankiewicz and Marion Davies' moonlit stroll through Hearst's menagerie is a clear standout—much of the dialogue occupies the awkward space between the didactic “I'm [insert Hollywood player] and I work at [insert studio] and I made [insert well known film]” and the niche “I hear you won an arm wrestle [sic] against Wallace Beery”). Mank doesn't even operate as the “creative block” tale it establishes in the first act. The moment Mankiewicz's deadline looms, he simply completes his script with relative ease. What remains then is an occasionally witty, handsomely mounted, mildly informative, narratively turgid, hollow shell. It is telling that some of the truly interesting backstage-movies come courtesy of non-male, or non-white directors. See Kitty Green's The Assistant if it's a real industry critique you're after, or Spike Lee's assault on Hollywood narrative history in BlacKkKlansman, or even delight in Sofia Coppola turning Tinseltown tedium into its own aesthetic in Somewhere. Compared to these, Fincher comes across as pretty frothy.

And after all that having been said, it is interesting to note that Mank itself is based on a script penned by Fincher's late father, Jack (also responsible for an early The Aviator draft). Maybe then, this is all a tribute to the unrecognised talents of a loved one, and for all those un-optioned scripts, and movies that might have been, now lost to the void. A disposable film to scold Hollywood's creative entropy.

Our Picks + Black Is King (Special Guest)

Abla Kandalaft, Coco Green, George Crosthwait — 2020-08-19T16:41:18Z

For this episode of Mydylarama's Top Picks podcast, we're joined by our guest, academic, film programmer and Japanese Avant-Garde and Experimental Film Festival producer George Crosthwait. George Crosthwait.

George's pick of the week, and also his first trip back to the cinema since February, is Shannon Murphy's debut film 'Babyteeth'. An Australian coming-of-age drama that both impressed and confused him due to it's tonal eccentricities.

Abla's picks of the week include Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic (2013), now available on Sky, a pretty engaging and informative documentary about the comedian's life, and a couple of festivals to look out for: the Cologne International Film Festival, whose first - and entertainingly eclectic - edition will run on 11-12 September 2020 across various venues in the city, and the London Kurdish Film Festival (15-24 August), offering a collection of 50 screenings carefully curated into various themes, all available ONLINE and for FREE!

George's choice for this episode take the podcast deep into the beehive for Beyoncé's ambitious new visual album 'Black is King'. A kaleidoscopic collage of symbolism, music and visual splendour, involving an impressive rollcall of African diasporic performers and artists, 'Black is King' is the first in a reported three picture deal between Beyoncé and Disney.

We discuss the film's aesthetic qualities and cultural merit, as well as its more problematic dimensions, its simplistic, potentially fetishistic depiction of a vague and all-encompassing "African" culture, its celebration of opulence and capitalist ambitions as a lever of Black empowerment, and the way it highlights a melancholic search for identity, roots and heritage among many African Americans. We mention a number of other films, namely The Burial Of Kojo, that you can watch on Netflix, the excellent Black Girl by Ousmane Sembene, freely available on YouTube!

As an aside, here is an article Abla mentions about Disney's dodgy credentials when it comes to matters of race and ethnicity - not to mention its history of plagiarism, sexism and dubious business practices.

This week's picks - Striking Colour Schemes

George Crosthwait — 2020-05-04T13:01:25Z

Japanese Avant-garde and Experimental Film Festival [JAEFF] producer George Crosthwait picks his three favourite films currently available on streaming platforms in the UK. This time tailored to suit precise days. It's May and the world is looking lush and vibrant (and empty). So this time I'm recommending three films with particularly striking colour schemes.

Viva - BFI Player

Watch on: Wednesday (because like a bored 70s housewife, you'll only get through the rest of the week with cocktails and pastel colours).

Wandering through the twisting labyrinths of Netflix and Amazon Prime is maddening even when only occasionally required. With home entertainment the only entertainment, maybe you're becoming more acquainted with streaming libraries than you ever dreamed possible. Now those endless “failure-to-choose-your-adventure” searches transcend frustration and erode your love of movies itself (dear Netflix algorithm, stop trying to make me watch Extraction). Praise be then for BFI Player's “Collections” category for providing some thematic coherence to salve the choice-bloat of the larger VOD platforms.

The BFI Flare LGBTIQ+ collection is a fabulous starting point, full of queer jewels and softens the loss of the festival's physical presence earlier this year. There's a ton of great stuff here but my personal pick is the uniquely talented Anna Biller's (The Love Witch) Viva. Ostensibly a pastiche of Russ Meyer-type 70s sexploitation, Viva (Biller herself) is your typical bored suburban housewife looking for sex, cocktails and liberation. Unlike films such as Black Dynamite, the recreation of genre aesthetics in Viva is both amazingly exact and surprisingly unreflexive. Biller herself frequently rebuffs terms like “homage” and “pastiche”, challenging her audience to view her films on their own terms. Indeed, her deliberate colour palette is like nothing else in contemporary cinema, something that we might only appreciate once we deactivate our desire to make comparisons to older films (a critical habit that's hard to break). Viva is a work of high camp that nonetheless demands sincerity and rejects irony. A most ludicrous and enjoyable film that is somehow shockingly serious.

Revenge - Shudder

Watch on: Friday (because it's the end of the working/furloughed week and you either need to blow off some steam or generate some energy for the weekend).

On the face of it, Revenge is another entry into the grottiest of cinema sub-genres: rape-revenge. Neither leaning on the male-avenger trope of Straw Dogs or The Virgin Spring/Last House on the Left, nor the cheap titillation of I Spit on Your Grave, Revenge aims to flip the stereotypes and gender roles around. The rape is deeply uncomfortable and un-sensationalised; the revenge is just really, really painful. Taking place in an unspecified and empty desert space, Revenge becomes a sandpit for eye-bleeding evisceration shot in extreme colour saturation. (male) Nude bodies glisten (with blood) under a burning sky as Jen (Mathilde Lutz) slays her way out of her nightmare vacation.

The recent successes of The Hunt and Bacurau suggest we're currently all down for a bit of human hunting in our life. Revenge will scratch that itch whilst staring down genre misogyny and providing some wince-inducing catharsis.

Ran – Mubi

Watch on: Sunday (because its an immensely long feudal war epic).

Amongst the many cinematic casualties of COVID-19, and particularly hard for me to take, is the postponement of the BFI's massive Japan season, which had been due to start this month. A planned restoration of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai has also been shelved, but we can take some comfort by settling in with his (arguably—depends how you feel about Richard Gere) final masterpiece: the magnificent King Lear adaptation Ran. Kurosawa revised Shakespearean tragedies several times throughout his career. The Bad Sleep Well loosely used the structure of Hamlet, the wonderful and ghostly Throne of Blood (coming soon to BFI Player) took on Macbeth and Ran sets Lear in Feudal Japan.

Having already secured a place amongst the greats with his films made during the golden age of Japanese cinema, Kurosawa proved himself to be a master of colour with late period work such as Kagemusha, Dersu Uzala and Dreams. “The Emperor” was exacting and exacerbating in his methods. Chris Marker's quasi-making-of-Ran, A.K. (also showing on Mubi this month) shows Kurosawa demanding that his production team paint an entire field of reeds gold in order to achieve the desired aesthetic quality. The scene was later cut from the final version of the film. Ran features a signature role for Tatsuya Nakadai (as the Lear surrogate), one of the greatest actors in cinema history. Also present is queer icon Pītā (Funeral Parade of Roses) as the Fool.

Ran is filmmaking on a scale to rival anything that Kurosawa, or anyone else, had attempted to date. It is one of the great historical epics and arguably the greatest imagining of Shakespeare ever set to celluloid.

VOD Picks Of The Week - Japanese triple bill

George Crosthwait — 2020-04-20T20:05:56Z

Japanese Avant-garde and Experimental Film Festival [JAEFF] producer George Crosthwait picks his three favourite Japanese films currently available on streaming platforms in the UK.

Visitor Q – Mubi

First up is something thoroughly deranged. Takashi Miike's no-budget tale of incest, domestic violence and lactation, shot on unappealing digital video. It's a comedy.

This won't come as a surprise to followers of Miike's career. A famously hard working filmmaker (over 100 films in less than 30 years) whose genre hopping tales of excess made him a poster director for Tartan's “Asia Extreme” DVD imprint in the late 90s/early 00s. Whilst Miike delivered a string of jidaigeki action epics in the 2010s (Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, Thirteen Assassins, Blade of the Immortal), and the recent gangster/boxing film First Love (released in UK cinemas in January), it was through his earlier hyperviolent and surreal films such as Audition, Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris and Gozu that he made his name.

Visitor Q oozes out of this period, and perhaps tops the lot in terms of risqué content. Ostensibly a riff on Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 satire of the bourgeois family, Teorema, Visitor Q likewise annihilates its middle-class milieu. In Pasolini's film, the family are seduced and liberated by a mysterious stranger. In Miike's updating, the family are abused and traumatised by both the titular visitor and each other. Their liberation, if we can call it that, comes from the evaporation of taboos and pleasure of transgression. If you can access the wavelength of this hysterical satire then you too may be released from the restrictions of your social coding (if not from your lockdown).

The Night is Short, Walk On Girl – Netflix

If, like me, in times of strife you seek solace in the loving embrace in anime, then you're probably spending a fair amount of lockdown life working through Netflix's auspiciously timed deployment of Studio Ghibli's entire catalogue. But Ghibli is not the last word for Anime, and Netflix offers a (patchy) selection of delights beyond the gateway drugs of Totoro and Ponyo. On furlough with endless hours stretching out ahead? No better time than to dive into Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion (a kind of anime Twin Peaks). Other choice cuts include pre-Your Name work from Makoto Shinkai (Garden of Words), a rare example of anime directed by a woman (A Silent Voice), and the inventive Hiroshima-set WW2 drama In This Corner of the World.

My pick for this week, however, is Masaaki Yuasa's The Night is Short, Walk On Girl. A Lewis Carroll inspired, offbeat odyssey encompassing an epic pub crawl, an improvised musical play within a film, a viral epidemic (how topical), a mysterious after dark second-hand book fair, unrequited romance and clandestine shunga traders, all in the course of one long (short) night!

Often citing René Laloux's 1973 classic symbolist sci-fi animation The Fantastic Planet as his key inspiration, Yuasa's wildly imaginative brand of surrealism has garnered him a dedicated following. Films like Mind Game, Lu Over the Wall, and adaptations of novelist Tomohiko Morimi (The Night is Short, Walk On Girl; The Tatami Galaxy) demonstrate the possibilities afforded to an animator with only a passing relationship to logic. Given that civilisation no longer makes any sense, why not dive into an animated world where nonsense rules supreme.

Still Walking – Curzon Home Cinema / BFI Player (rental)

My final pick goes to Hirokazu Kore-eda; a household name following the Palme d'Or winning Shoplifters, and fresh off his first film made in Europe: The Truth. As seen in the latter, return to the childhood home and intergenerational relationships are two Kore-eda staples. These themes never crystallised as perfectly as in my personal favourite Kore-eda film, 2008's Still Walking.

Still Walking plays as a kind of reversal of Tokyo Story (don't say this to Kore-eda, he loathes the constant comparisons to Ozu) where the grown-up children visit their elderly parents. To me, Still Walking is a fulcrum around which the rest of Kore-eda's filmography turns. The aforementioned themes aside, the cast includes some of his favourite actors: the great, and sadly late, Kirin Kiki, Hiroshi Abe (I Wish, After the Storm) and You (best known now for Terrace House!); there is a strong focus on food preparation and eating; and a final Kore-eda trope, the train. Without giving too much away, there is one long take at the end of the film which captures a train sliding across the screen. It's very simple, although the timing is very precise. It's one of my favourite moments in cinema.

Not much happens in Still Walking. The family argues and reminisces. Food is eaten. Walks are taken. This is a film of quiet moments and contemplation. Its a film that requires you to sync with its rhythm. If you do, you should achieve a sense of beautiful calm. A welcome meditation during these testing times.