Friday, November 01, 2024
Tuscarora
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
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. •
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Give Me a Riddle
Sunday, October 27, 2024
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 •
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Queen of Lapa
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. •
Friday, October 25, 2024
The All Golden: The Polyamorous Soap Opera
"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).