Little Sister

Coming Home

Colleen (Addison Timlin) used to be splatter-goth; now she cleans up in modern ash cardigan accented by a silver crucifix. She's come to Asheville to visit her brother (Keith Poulson) who has also arrived home, living in an apartment detached from the main property. The entirety of his head has become disfigured by burns suffered during a tour of duty in the Iraq War and its associated conflicts. Now he's a recluse with a drum-kit and a pretty girlfriend who has stuck by his side through thick-and-thin.

"You smell weird," says Colleen's dad (who comes off like a stepdad). Scentless now in all likelihood, given that Colleen is residing in a nunnery, though has yet to take her vows. Little Sister [2016] suggests the rationale for Colleen's 180 life-change, but offers no definite conclusion as to so radical a turn. Perhaps high school misfit'ism, or the passive-aggressive resentment of her mother (Ally Sheedy) toward her daughter, which as things do in movies rise to a boil (especially in tiny, tidy narratives). A reconciliation, an awakening, a marriage ceremony.

In the course of Little Sister Obama/Biden campaign placards have sprung forth. This next time around it won't be Rumsfeld, but following O/B's disastrous terms, could be Egseth, a Fox News propagandist, guiding the playbook of champions. This time the target, one of which, and others by proxy, could well figure as Iran. No matter for heroes, when the decision to join the service provides a route out of the lower-middle-class to elevated income and stable living, with the only obstacle coming between a soldier and his pension is getting his face blown off. •

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Other writing on the films of Zach Clark on Cinemasparagus:

Little Sister [2016]

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Tuscarora

Untouchable

Tuscarora, Nevada, zero-mile marker, end of the road. Seems like the end of the world based on its isolation alone.Vast horizon murals of lowering clouds; sometimes something near a cyan. At ground level piles of collapsed structure lie strewn like toppled lecture hall skeletons.
 

Schickele's documentary subject, Dennis Parks, was a middle-aged teacher, in fact, a sculptor and master pottery maker. His students live and work off the studio acreage, which not only includes a kiln, but ample studio space accessible to the clay that Parks uses on his artwork — the practice akin, one might say, on a much more modest scale, to the earth upended in industrial mining and fracking. It's the Tuscarorans versus the microgold barons.

Tuscarora [1992] was shot on an — inherently — ugly format, Hi8 video. At the time a signifier of "the real." This, however lets loose a slew of aesthetic questions too numerous for this post  As Dennis pronounces: "I am interested in permanence."

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Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of David Schickele:

Give Me a Riddle [1966]

Bushman [1971]

Tuscarora [1992]

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Bushman

Revolutions Can't Be Televised

Bushman picks up where David Schickele's Give Me a Riddle left off a few years earlier; it's 1971 now. The self-proclaimed Nigerian "bushman," Paul, has made his way to the States, San Jose environs to be exact. The direct cinema method of Give Me a Riddle has been jettisoned in place of a mixture between the documentary style and a raw narrative (sometimes handheld, other times locked) — like a Mekas brother film the results dutifully expand the world beyond the shot and diegetic audio.

Paul learns quickly and harshly that the US isn't what the PanAm travel brochures depict or portray. The bartender Paul takes up with is a piece of liberated gyrating pain-in-the-ass, for one; additionally every surface is paved over with concrete. Work isn't easy to come by. Student riots sweep Paul up in their rush, and the cops cuff him to a basement urinal and ask whether a (planted) makeshift bomb belongs to him, and interrogate him on his political anarchist, goals. No cameras (handheld or bodycam) only sound over an extended still shot of two urinals side by side. Caught in the nightmare system, Paul is sentenced to five years in prison before being released and deported back to Nigeria. Anything resembling happiness will play out in life in the home country. •

Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of David Schickele:

Give Me a Riddle [1966]

Bushman [1971]

Tuscarora [1992]

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Give Me a Riddle

Sort of a Magic Lantern 

On the eve of the 1967 Nigerian Civil War, filmmaker David Schickele arrived in a remote village for a multi-year stint courtesy of the Peace Corps's diplomatic relations and cultural exchange program. Give Me a Riddle [1966] employs a direct cinema method that focuses on Schickele's friend Roger Landrum, who is teaching (and frequently meeting with) the work of Chinua Achebe, author of the 1958 novel Things Fall Apart. Remarks one of the villagers near the end of the film: "Things are really falling apart now." Something's astir in the air...

Another friend of Roger's is one Paul Okpokam, to whom the former suggests an extended stay in the United States — the places he might go, taking up employment in the modern capitalist society... (Though comradely, Roger still exhibits an ironic difference with his friend.) Landrum asks Achebe, "Where do you see Nigeria 100 years from now?" to which the Nigerian immediately responds, "It will be an industrial society." And if tradition holds decades on, Nigeria will continue its rich tradition of storytelling, taking up place in the mind, in darkness, a small lantern barely burning brightly.

Give Me a Riddle continues its narrative and the adventures of Paul Okpokam in the Bay Area of the United States inn the film Bushman. As excellent as that movie is, Give Me a Riddle strikes me as the superior work, Schickele's masterpiece. •

Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of David Schickele:

Give Me a Riddle [1966]

Bushman [1971]

Tuscarora [1992]

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Palookaville

Show Reel

Less regularly than in Queen of Lapa, Collatos and Monnerat's 2022 15-minute Palookaville throws an off-kilter quality inside of its frames, angles that perhaps might better lie (mapped?) elsewhere, damage-signs of Rio. Sounding something like a game level,  Palookaville has its charms — sidewalk, Arbor Day offerings, all the things that freedom grants. But a cigarette wedged behind designer eyewear breaks a baby-daddy's stride when he's toting formula exuding the scent of hot shit. Striding between the ropes  does not a Joe Louis make. Knocks you right on your merchandise •

Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Theodore Collatos and Carolina Monnerat:

Dipso [2014]

Queen of Lapa [2019]

Palookaville [2022]

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Queen of Lapa

Shadow Royalty

Luana Muniz was the queen of the brothels in the Lapa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Note the past-tense: a final title card informs the viewer of her passing in 2017. Further research reveals she died from pneumonia, which places her death during or directly after the shooting and editing of Theodore Collatos and Carolina Monnerat's 2019 film. The pair had been given full access to the Muniz brothel, and the intimacy on display at once fascinates and repulses. The overprimping trans tenants recount harrowing street assaults; they wear happy faces, their goals largely hanging upon the aspiration toward American celebrity, and saving up enough cash (if it's not robbed first) to modify their bodies irreversibly.

Luana's hopes and dreams? Obscure at best. She had taken up the street life at age eleven. •

Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Theodore Collatos and Carolina Monnerat:

Dipso [2014]

Queen of Lapa [2019]

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The All Golden: The Polyamorous Soap Opera

A Dream Soap

Filmmaker Nathaniel Wilson wrote a press blurb for his 2024 film The All Golden: The Polyamorous Soap Operat, which reads:

"Our feature film The All Golden is having an exciting, totally independent distribution, only through the enthusiasm of curious programmers, and the unique spaces and institutions where films are discovered (virtual spaces into real ones). Our current run presents each night as a different new way to experience the movie - w/ Special Guest Moderators, Interactive Gallery Components, and pairings with other exciting new work."

Does this sound at all interesting? I'm allergic to a share of art-happening stuff (Mike Bilandic chronicles the current scene better than anyone out there now), but The All Golden I can dig, what with its prompt to force a construction of narrative in my own brain, or not. (See the onscreen title a little less than half-an-hour in, which announces "Part Two [?], Ein Traumspiel," or "A Dream Play," the German title for Strindberg's play — Kubrick adapted Schnitzler's Traumnovelle or "Dream Story" into Eyes Wide Shut.) The All Golden exists lost in the fragmentation and aggressive capabilities of modern editing. A script readthrough mentions the discovery of lost Nazi gold (a thread buried within Godard's Film Socialisme).

A viewing of Wilson's film has much to do with a zone-out via the supplement of one's choice. Somewhere in the back of the mind, or during REM sleep, different connections draw themselves. After a good night's sleep one will come back to The All Golden, film literally re-playing or not. •

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