For Eureka, Lisandro Alonso returns to the face of Misael Saavedra and those who look like him in order to map the colonial wound over continental spaces. The Western that opens this triptych is a rather satisfiying closing chapter on the poorly aging Jauja. This part gains strength if it is understood as a renunciation of its two famous faces as well as its setting. In truth, Viggo Mortensen and Catherine Deneuve's daughter were just vessels to get Eureka financed.…
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LBJ 1968
Nervous montage at a corrosive apex. The lyrics of Pablo Milanes' song are so crucial to the outro and overall affect of LBJ... so much so that I'm offended by the awful English translation still going around screenings and other formats to this day. Fortunately, I'm here to fix that:
Watch it here: youtu.be/izzrYLjWjZk
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Godard in America 1970
"In the heat of the post-war period in France, a "new-wave" of young directors appeared who threw themselves impetuously into revolutionizing filmmaking without going beyond the limits of the petty bourgeois world. Among them, Godard stands out as the great destroyer of bourgeois cinema. Taking Brecht as his point of departure—and the New Left as his point of arrival—he tried to make revolution on the screen. His genius, inventiveness, imagination, and clumsy aggressiveness gave him a privileged place among the…
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Origins of the 21st Century 2000
This still burns but purely as a montage. It would have been a better film history if there had been more people who picked up a camera because of Santiago Alvarez than because of Godard. And all evidence points to the latter agreeing with that sentiment.
The 20th century is dying, and the new century struggles to be born. Now is the time of [...].
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The French Revolution 1989
Produced to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution but its sympathies blatantly lie with the monarchy. Within its regressive logic, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen it paraphrases at its conclusion is but a wistful compromise set off by the errors of a king who was a poor administrator. Its purported neutrality praised by critics: nothing but liberal finger waving at the political power of crowds and mobilizations in history. Truly the blandest of TV films but impossible to look away from as a capsule of French conservatism.
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Liberté 2019
Prior to this film, the one chief sensation that I have always drawn from Serra’s filmography is that Albert Serra is a want-to-be aristocrat. I mean this in the Mallarmian sense of the artist raging against the vulgar masses and art for everybody. But with the addition of Liberte, which marks a trilogy of films depicting the end of an era before the French Revolution, a perverse sense of mourning for the progress of class history that is not without…
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In the Year of the Pig 1969
Similar to a Santiago Alvarez or Grupo de La Base reel in its formalistic sincerity when portraying and inhabiting what was then counter-information brought to the public. Among many impressions, one of the most striking is how much of a psychopath Curtis LeMay was. A demon among little hitlers who liked to keep their gloves on.
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Prey 2022
The only proper way to watch this is in the Comanche dubbed version. That immersion provided, then there is something to be said of the sympathetic genealogical experience of seeing the colonial wound reversed whenever the Predator strikes the colonial French. Within this reversed scope, even the banality of the prey overcoming the predator has a certain revelatory sting because the prey is twice the prey and the Predator is both conqueror vanquished and usurper deposed. An entertaining action film not far from the classic one and quite honestly the first good installment in a battered film franchise.
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Her Socialist Smile 2020
Instead of hiding behind a hagiographical documentary on Helen Keller, John Gianvito ought to have been honest with us and his auteurism, that is to say the trajectory of his filmography, and revealed that he is to the right of Keller. The addendum of Chomsky is just the latest instance of a recurring anti-communism.
"For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly…
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Dear Comrades! 2020
One full star for leaving me the option to imagine that Syomina remains a committed Stalinist.