It’s the extreme close-up approach — a less experimentally extreme version of Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab’s similar aesthetic approach in Leviathan (2012) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022) — that Hints most consistently applies to genuinely moving effect. For one, the closeness, naturally, puts us right in the mi(d)st of things: we feel we’re there with these women, listening to them, laughing and crying with them. But their vulnerabilities, physical and emotional, never feel exposed, as Hints also uses the camera’s extreme proximity — focusing on hands, feet, and legs more so than faces — to protect these women’s identities.
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Four Daughters 2023
Can the blatant artificiality of cinema fill the gaping void of reality? Acclaimed Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s resilient but consistently hurting Four Daughters asks this not exactly original, but ever compelling, question throughout. The answer — never clear — always poses a similarly unresolvable question. Then another. And another. For Four Daughters, unlike, say, the Iranian docufiction cinema of Jafar Panahi doesn’t reveal the truth by blurring reality and fiction. Instead, Ben Hania’s film, with its noticeable tension between the…
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The Walk 2023
The film’s necessitated sameness of life experiences, despite its feeble attempts at personalization, undermines the wide-ranging spectrum of experienced life. Amal becomes Asil. Aphorisms like “home is defined by the people around me” replace actualities. Interesting lives without the dull bits, that is, manufactured, “important” drama, take over life itself — crucially defined by those very dull bits.
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A Still Small Voice 2023
The overwrought, overexplained, overedited maximalism of modern-day blockbuster cinema is a somewhat dumbed-down version of what film theorist Tom Gunning championed early, non-narrative silent cinema as: a thrilling, moving, purely sensorial “cinema of attractions.” Sure, it provides great entertainment (mainly as opposed to today’s Marvel-ism). But it also does much of this at the cost of making the audience lazy watchers and listeners. Anything informationally dense is consistently explained; “downtime” — usually still and small — is either truncated or entirely eliminated.
Luke Lorentzen’s A Still Small Voice makes clear in its title which end of the maximalist-minimalist spectrum it occupies.
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Thappad 2020
The rise in production and consumption of "social-message movies" in Bollywood of late has given birth to some actors' careers (Ayushmann Khurrana), and somewhat resurrected flailing ones (Akshay Kumar). But, if there is one person, this movement has entirely changed (arguably liberated), it is director Anubhav Sushila Sinha. Take his output before the still hauntingly effective Mulk (2018) and tell me that you saw a filmmaker who wanted to use the medium of cinema to make a change or challenge…
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Sardar Udham 2021
Interrogations into history - both personal and socio-political - are always subjective, colored by the very form in which people express them. One can choose to look at revolutions and tragedies forensically, excavating personal facts about someone's past from documents like passports, employment certificates, and other paperwork. This form of investigation is a detached one, governed most strongly by the desire to attain some form of tangible, understandable truth. The more personal methodology is that of interviews. Here too, though,…
