THUNDER ROAD screens this Sunday, September 23 at AFS Cinema. Purchase tickets.
In celebration of Art House Theater Day on September 23, we’re pleased to screen a film that truly embodies the spirit of independent filmmaking and was shot right here in Austin, including portions at our very own Austin Studios. THUNDER ROAD is the tragicomic debut from writer/director/star Jim Cummings, who Variety calls “a born filmmaker who plants seedlings of raw drama that sprout in unexpected and moving ways.” Cummings is no stranger to the independent film scene, having created a slew of shorts that were festival favorites. With THUNDER ROAD, Cummings has adapted his Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning 2016 short into a full-length, SXSW Grand Jury Award-winning feature about a police officer whose life unravels after his mother’s passing.
Alicia Malone of FilmStruck sat down last month with Jim Cummings to take a deep dive into his numerous short films (now available on FilmStruck and Vimeo) in anticipation of THUNDER ROAD’s release. Watch their interview and get to know one of today’s most exciting emerging talents. Then join us for an advance screening of THUNDER ROAD with cast and crew in attendance this Sunday, Sept. 23 at 4:30 PM.
From an outsider’s view, the Toronto International Film Festival may appear to be a glamorous, high-profile festival with back-to-back red carpet premieres of this year’s crop of Oscar contenders. For AFS Lead Film Programmer Lars Nilsen, the festival is a great opportunity to explore the pool of films that will someday make their way to the AFS Cinema. Fresh off his return from watching a personal record breaking 37(!) films, we spoke with Lars about his favorites from the festival. Be on the lookout for many of these film to make their way onto the AFS calendar in the coming months.
“This is a film co-directed by Ciro Guerra, whose films EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT and THE WIND JOURNEYS we’ve played at our cinema. BIRDS OF PASSAGE is almost like a Godfather film in its scope. It’s a film about a crime organization formed among indigenous Columbian people who have an encounter with some Peace Corps volunteers who really want to buy some weed. So they go from being these people who live in a barter economy to becoming business tycoons in a way, over a 15-year period. It’s a wide, sweeping film about the ways of the first world coming to these people. It is an exciting, action-packed, incredibly violent, emotionally resonant film; but it’s also a sort of political tract about Capitalism. And I always think it’s really interesting when there’s that kind of a subtext to a film.”
“Radu Jude (whose films AFERIM! and SCARRED HEARTS we’ve shown) has a new, fascinating film which takes place in his native Romania. It’s about people putting on a historical pageant about World War II, and what happened during World War II in Romania, which was a very complicated time period. The film is about three hours long, and it’s mostly just people having conversations and quoting from books. It’s Godard-ian in the sense that it’s a film that’s made out of material that is non-traditional film material. It’s really good, and a really important film for our time. I was watching it with a friend and we walked out of it like ‘wow, is America the most illiterate country in the world?’ because these Romanians are talking about everything from like political theory to Laurel and Hardy in their conversations, and the breadth and scope of their discourse is so wide. It’s a really special film, I liked it a lot.”
“Carlos Reygadas, who made POST TENEBRAS LUX has a new film that’s amazing in scope. Three-hour long movies is one of the themes this year at TIFF I have to say. OUR TIME is a three-hour long movie about a married couple who are intellectuals. He is a poet, they’re ranchers on a huge spread outside of Mexico City and their sex life is very eventful, which sort of sows the seeds of their destruction, or at least the destruction of certain concepts that they hold dear. It’s a really interesting film and I can’t say much about it without spoiling it. But for me, it was one of the most emotionally wrenching movies I saw at the festival. I think it’s kind of a masterpiece, actually.”
“There’s a very good new movie by Mia Hansen-Love, who has guest programmed for us before. It’s about a French journalist who was held hostage by terrorists and is trying to re-acclimate. He goes on a trip to India–which is the country where he grew up–and we see him trying to sort of rebuild his soul. It’s a sort of small film full of small observations and it’s just very good film with a lot of heart.”
“The new Claire Denis film HIGH LIFE takes place in a space station/penal colony where prisoners are being dispatched to the outer reaches of the universe to see what happens when they go into a black hole. It stars Robert Pattinson and its an odd sort of prison movie (in space), and of course, it’s directed by Claire Denis so it’s weird and unusual and I liked it.”
“Another filmmaker we love, South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo. We’ve shown several of his films. His new one, HOTEL BY THE RIVER, is part of his cycle of black and white chamber films with a small cast. It’s about a poet staying in a hotel, and his sons come to join him, and a couple of women recognize him as the poet he is, and there’s a lot of back and forth kind of like a drawing-room farce. I read a review immediately afterward saying that this was a “sad” new movie from Hong Sang-soo and it made me realize that everyone experiences movies so differently. I was laughing all the way through this film, and I didn’t think it was sad, I thought it was very drily funny, like so much of Hong’s work”
“There’s a good, talky (not in a bad way) new Olivier Assayas movie called NON-FICTION, it’s about a bunch of Parisian intellectuals who are authors and book publishers and people adjacent to the literary industry sort of dealing with the technological change and sort of what it means in terms of a shift in the French world of letters, if you will. It’s sort of a salon film. We experience the pleasure of good conversation with interesting people. There are some arch laughs, and a lot of very on-point cultural observations.”
“Chang-dong Lee’s new film BURNING (which is going to be playing at Fantastic Fest) is a pretty riveting film based on a Murakami short story called “Barn Burning”. I don’t want to spoil what the movie’s about, but it’s a really interesting story about a guy who falls in love with a woman, a romantic triangle with an older rich guy develops, and then the rivalry between the two men reaches extreme proportions.”
“The new film from Koreeda, whose film THE THIRD MURDER we just played, is called SHOPLIFTERS. This was the Palme D’Or winner at Cannes this year. It’s a pretty amazing neo-neo-realist film about a family of very poor people in a city in Japan who make a living hand-to-mouth: stealing, hustling, begging, living however they can. Things happen over the course of the family’s life of course, which I won’t spoil here. A really nice, really wonderful, well acted film.
“AMERICAN DHARMA is a full-length interview with the fascist, Steve Bannon. And a lot of people I talked to had real mixed feelings about this because they felt like, ‘why give the microphone and camera to this fascist to tell his fascist, racist stories?’ But (as always for me with Errol Morris films) I think it’s fascinating to hear from Steve Bannon. Because Bannon trips over himself, he trips over his logical fallacies at every turn, and it becomes more of a pathological document about what creates a Steve Bannon, which I think is valuable. And it’s creepy to spend time with Steve Bannon, there’s no doubt about that–but I also feel like I have insight into the sort of mental processes that create a Steve Bannon and I think it’s valuable for that reason alone.”
“I saw a movie called THE WILD PEAR TREE which is by the director of WINTER SLEEP, which won the Palme D’Or a few years ago (and which just played at the AFS Cinema) . This new film takes place partly in the Anatolian region of Turkey, partly in the cities, but it’s about a young man whose father is a poet. Over the course of his life his father has become a school teacher and a gambling addict and is generally kind of a fuck-up, and we see him through the son’s eyes. The son–so full of promise and ideals–judges the father. Over the course of the three-hour long film we see as he begins to forgive his father and draws insight over his own life from looking at his father’s ruined, wasted life: which may or may not have been so ruined and wasted, as it turns out. It’s like a big discursive novel that bulges out in some places and is understated in others, but is so full of detail that it gives you a vivid sense of time and place.”
“Frederick Wiseman is a filmmaker who we’ve played every film that he’s come out with since the AFS Cinema has been open, and I can’t imagine us not playing a new Frederick Wiseman film (or an older film as it’s restored). I think Wiseman is really in the top tier of our greatest living filmmakers. He has a new film called MONROVIA, INDIANA, and it’s in the manner of some of his recent films like IN JACKSON HEIGHTS where he goes and explores a neighborhood and sees how the neighborhood works. Here he goes to a small town in Indiana and he examines the process by which the town runs, by which the culture happens in the town, and how the school system works, and all of that. We see the mechanisms of small-town America circa 2018, or 2016, or whenever the film was made. And it has a whole new gloss now that Trump has been elected based on voters from towns like Monrovia, Indiana. I’m not sure the political tone was intended at the time the cameras were rolling, but it’s fascinating to watch people in church, to watch people having a wedding, to watch a Masonic ceremony, to watch a town council meeting, and to just see the way that small towns work. It’s not ‘urbane-New-York-guy-is-looking-at-small-town-Americans-and-judging-them’ I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not a film where we’re laughing at people. There are some times where we’re laughing with them, but it’s a film that really makes us think about what it’s like to be, for instance, a guy who runs a gun shop in Monrovia, Indiana.”
As many comedians will attest, nobody captured the hearts of the 70’s and 80’s (as well as the cultural zeitgeist) quite like Gilda Radner. She ascended through the boys club of The National Lampoon straight into stardom as the first performer ever cast for Saturday Night Live. Lisa Dapolito’s new documentary mines through years and years of never-before-seen photos, audio recordings, and archival footage to tell the story of Gilda Radner, from her days at SNL to her all-too-soon passing of ovarian cancer in 1991. Countless comedians followed in the footsteps of Radner and many make appearances here in the documentary, including Melissa McCarthy, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, and Steve Martin.
“Understandably weighted toward her years on Saturday Night Live, the polished debut offers a chance to both reconnect with her most famous recurring characters there and to marvel at the amount of fun she clearly had in Studio 8H.” –John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
“…even with Radner gone for nearly three decades, she and her mile-wide smile rule every moment and image.” –Kate Erbland, IndieWire
“…the gone-too-soon SNL star and comedic genius of the 1970s and ’80s is still making us laugh all these years later.” –Brandon Katz, New York Observer
Contributed by Stacy Brick, guest programmer of our family-friendly SUNDAY SCHOOL series.
In an interview about the “unrestoration” of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, director Christopher Nolan talked about seeing the film for the first time at age 7. “I had the extraordinary experience of being transported in a way that I hadn’t realized was possible. The screen just opened up and I went on this incredible journey,” he said. Movies have changed quite a bit since 1977 (when Nolan saw the film), but 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is still a rarity. I was planning to take my 10-year-old son to see the film, but after reading this I figured I would take my 7-year-old daughter along as well.
I’m the programmer for the AFS Sunday School series, so my kids have seen a wide range of films. I would like to think that the foundation prepared them for this moviegoing experience. They’ve seen films like THE RED TURTLE—with no dialogue, and THE YELLOW SUBMARINE—with trippy visuals and groovy music. When I told them we were going to see a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie my son reminded me that AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR was just as long and they made it through that with no problem.
Don’t get me wrong, there was still plenty of “I can’t sit for 2 more hours,” and “We need to go home,” but all in all they did pretty well. Watching a movie like this with children can often bring you out of the experience, but there were a few moments during the film that were enhanced by their commentary. My son caught a movie reference that would have slipped right by me. When the camera was panning over the Discovery One he said, “It’s just like in SPACEBALLS!” (That one was not a Sunday School selection.) During the psychedelic sequence in the “Beyond”, my daughter kept saying, “Whoa!” in my ear each time the film cut to a new scene. It was pretty great if you ask me.
They have not, however, seen a movie as ambiguous and open-ended as 2001 so the final scenes were the focus of our discussion after the film. Both kids wanted to know how it ended. My son asked, “What was baby Jesus doing there at the end?” They talked it out for a while and we came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a correct answer. They seemed OK with that, along with the possibilities it opened up.
The first time I saw 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was on VHS at a slumber party—I was 8. What I mainly remember from the experience is laughing at the “Dawn of Man” portion at the beginning. We all thought the apes were silly and found the part when the bone is thrown in the air and you’re suddenly transported into space particularly amusing. I don’t think we stuck around for the whole movie—more than likely we switched to something else.
Upon entering the theater this weekend I struggled to remember if I had ever seen the film in its entirety—and I still can’t determine that for sure—but something strange happened during the film for me. When the rapid strings and chorus of voices filled the theater during the encounter with the monolith on the moon I immediately recognized the sounds from my childhood nightmares. Quite literally: when I was 8, I had an episode of night terrors featuring hallucinated audio. Turns out it was straight from this film; it was hiding somewhere in my brain and was unearthed while I sat in the theater.
Neither of my kids had a transformative experience like Nolan’s—at least not one they can put their finger on now. Perhaps it needs to percolate in their subconscious for a few decades.
Contributed by Stacy Brick, guest programmer of our family-friendly SUNDAY SCHOOL series.
Check out the new 4K “Unrestoration” of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY for yourself, screening at the AFS Cinema through September 7th.
Reality in Long Shots: A Hou Hsiao-Hsien Retrospective begins Saturday, September 8, at AFS Cinema. Buy your tickets today. Presented in partnership with Austin Asian American Film Festival.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien grew up in the wake of WWII and Japanese occupation of Taiwan, witnessing a generation with bleak outlooks leading bleak lives. Reflecting on his early years of learning to deal with this overarching sense of despair, Hou says he would dive into literature and absorb as much film as he could by sneaking into movie theaters at a young age. These experiences directly informed many of his films and formed the basis of his filmmaking style.
John Berra of BFI outlines the effect of this type of viewing in his profile of the director, “Multiple viewings are often required to settle into Hou’s measured rhythm, but once the necessary internal adjustment has been made, patience gives rise to a rare form of sensory pleasure.” Our retrospective series gives us the ability to observe the development of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s style as he reveals a new understanding of our relationship with our place in time.
THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI, Hou’s fourth feature, witnesses the coming of age of Ah-Ching and his debaucherous friends as they move from their hometown of Fengkeui to find work in the city of Kaohsiung. The boys discover unique new difficulties in life in the city and find themselves torn physically and emotionally between their past and present.
Hou reflects on the work in an interview with Criterion, “this film really broke the conventional ways of doing things and taught me that you have freedom to do whatever you desire, which allowed me to transcend all those dogmatic ways of making films that I was taught in film school.”
Winner of the International Critics’ Prize Award at Berlin Film Festival, this autobiographical work follows a young boy named Ah-Ha and his family as they leave China and move to Taiwan. Ah-Ha acclimates quickly to this change by joining a local gang, but his family grows strained in their longing for the mainland. Hou observes a gradual, deep divide between the boy and his family as they drift apart in this monumental coming-of-age drama.
In his reflection on the work of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Philip Lopate of the New York Times calls this film the directors’ first genuine masterpiece.
Gao is a bottom-tier thug in contemporary Taiwan who coordinates shoddy money-making schemes with his rag tag group of friends. In this slow-burn reconception of the gangster genre, Hou frequently finds his subjects as they lazily navigate in-between moments of their petty crime lifestyle in the sensuous streets of Taiwan. Gao’s absurd dreams of striking it rich are mirrored by a fantastic soundtrack coordinated by musician and co-star, Lim Giong.
Vicky (Shu Qi, THE ASSASSIN) finds relief in the bright lights and designer drugs of the Taipei club scene, then returns to the cluttered apartment she shares with her abusive, good-for-nothing boyfriend Hao-hao (Tuan Chun-hao). A hard-edged but sensitive gangster (Jack Kao) holds out the possibility of a more lasting escape, but Vicky must first break free of the inertia confining her. With MILLENNIUM MAMBO, Hou Hsiao-hsien kicks off the 21st century as only he can, delivering a reflective, neon-drenched mood piece that captures the excitement and ennui of contemporary urban life.
Consisting of only 37 total long shots, FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI is a story told within the candlelit rooms of a 19th century high-end brothel. Hou travels between three of these flower houses, weaving together concurrent experiences of love, ultimately creating what is considered one of the most beautiful films ever made.
In his most overtly political film, Hou chronicles the story of four brothers during a time when thousands of Taiwanese settlers were being murdered or imprisoned by a tyrannical Kuomintang government. Blending the elements of social, familial and personal turmoil that color Hou’s earlier works, A CITY OF SADNESS represents the ability of the director to portray how society affects minute details in the life of the individual. This film was the first Taiwanese film to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and established Hou Hsiao-Hsien as an indelible voice in world cinema.
In an interview about the film, Hou gave a rare insight into his directing process, “The character of Tony Leung’s elder brother in A CITY OF SADNESS is a very dramatic actor so when we were filming, he tended to be overly dramatic for what the scene required. The way to combat this was to pretend to him that we were just doing a test and it wasn’t real, and whenever he felt he was doing a test he would tone it down, for whatever reason, but it was actually a real shot, he just didn’t know it and then the minute I said ‘ok this is a real take’ he would revert back to his very dramatic style. That was the only way to get him to give the more realistic kind of performance that I’m looking for.”
Written by Associate Professor Karen Grumberg, of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at UT.
The three Israeli Palestinian women in Maysaloun Hamoud’s debut film, IN BETWEEN, are, first and foremost, women. The fact that Hamoud is Israeli Palestinian herself may lead viewers to expect her film to focus on the political dimension of their existence; while the political is never far from the everyday lives of Israeli Palestinians, though, it recedes to the background in IN BETWEEN, allowing for the women’s stories to emerge in all their intimacy and universality.
Laila (Mouna Hawa), who hails from Haifa, is a beautiful, unconventional, chain-smoking lawyer; she shares an apartment with Salma (Sana Jammelieh), a DJ who disdains her Christian parents’ constant attempts to marry her off. Their life of non-stop nightclubs and casual drug use is suddenly disrupted by the arrival of a third flatmate, Nur (Shaden Kanboura), an observant Muslim from Umm al-Fahm. Though Nur is initially put off by her new roommates’ unapologetically secular lifestyle – and they by her conservatism – all three gradually realize that their similarities are greater than their differences. The film highlights concrete signifiers of the women’s differences: it lingers on Laila’s crisp white button-down shirts as she dresses for work, on Selma’s defiantly shapeless dress as she prepares for yet another meeting with a potential suitor, on Nur’s careful wrapping of her headscarf. As soon as it acknowledges these differences, though, it works to expose them as superficial.
What binds them together is how they experience relationships as women who don’t fit into the roles that their families, societies, or partners wish them to occupy. The experience of feminist autonomy granted by life in a hedonistic Tel Aviv clashes with the discrimination these women experience as Palestinians; though not dominant in the film, it hovers always just beneath the surface. Meanwhile, the expectations of a patriarchal society constrict these characters and force them to make difficult and painful choices. And they make them, courageously.
Since its 2016 premiere, the film has received numerous accolades, in Israel and abroad, most notably in the form of the Cannes Women in Motion Young Talents Award. Hamoud has also, perhaps inevitably, been criticized for accepting Israeli funding for the film, a choice she has eloquently defended. The most ironic reaction of all was expressed by the municipality of the conservative Umm Al-Fahm, which called for a boycott of the film for its irreverence and requested that the Ministry of Culture ban its screening. This outrage, and the death threats Hamoud has received since, are perhaps the greatest confirmation of the urgency and relevance of IN BETWEEN.
For the 12th year running the Austin Film Society, the UT Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Initiative for Communication on Media and the Middle East (ICOMME) present Children of Abraham/Ibrahim, a selection of recent films that shine a light on the diverse people and perspectives of the Middle East. The series kicks off with IN BETWEEN, which plays at AFS Cinema on September 5th. Get tickets here.
JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION opens Friday, September 7th at AFS Cinema.Tickets are on sale now.
In the 1980’s, the Technical Director of the French Tennis Federation wanted to make instructional films of tennis players in action. His experiments ended with 16mm footage of superstar bad boy John McEnroe at Roland Garros (colloquially called the ‘French Open’). This 16mm footage was later unearthed and became the basis of Julien Faraut’s new documentary, JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION, which uses its source material as a jumping off point into the maddening mind of its subject. Through this perspective, Faraut begins to realize that every expression, every outburst from the famously temperamental player is part of a carefully calculated performance, with the actor’s role being the embodiment of victory itself.
Here’s what critics are saying:
“Julien Faraut’s John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection is the best tennis film ever made.” –Corey Seymour, Vogue Online
“A sports documentary unlike any other, a beguiling and delightful piece of visionary non-fiction.” –David Elrich, IndieWire
“Rising gently from Faraut’s film is the belief that a professional tennis match is more like a movie than it is like anything else.” –Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“A lovely meditation on time and movement, dedication and obsession, image and perception.” –Jessica Kiang, Variety
“Mr. Faraut’s impressionistic conflation of humor, wonder, horror and sympathy whisks this movie to the deluxe suite of the pleasure palace.” –Wesley Morris, New York Times
JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION opens Friday, September 7th at AFS Cinema.Tickets are on sale now.
WANDA screens at AFS Cinema this weekend, September 1-3. Get tickets today.
Barbara Loden wrote, directed, and starred in WANDA with a crew of four people. They filmed in a Pennsylvania coal town on a $100K budget gifted by Harry Schuster. Without studio pressure, Loden could make the film that she wanted to. “There is a miracle in WANDA,” as Marguerite Duras puts it in her conversation with Elia Kazan, “Usually there is a distance between the visual representation and the text, as well as the subject and the action. Here this distance is completely nullified; there is an instant and permanent continuity between Barbara Loden and Wanda.”
In a great interview after the film’s premiere in 1971, Loden describes her flight from an “emotionally impoverished” home life to an equally alienating experience dancing at the Copacabana in New York City, the two ways of living that inform her film WANDA.
Here is that unearthed New York Times interview:
Barbara Loden in WANDA
Barbara Loden Speaks Of the World of ‘Wanda’
by Mccandlish Phillips
The film “Wanda” opened recently at the Cinema II under banners of international critical praise. It bears the signature of Barbara Loden —she wrote it, directed it and played its central role—in other than obvious ‘ways.
More than merely a film she has made, Wanda is the woman Miss Loden might have become, before she discovered who she was.
The film was made in express rejection of Hollywood techniques. It was also made in express rejection of national values as Miss Loden sees them.
In its blighted atmosphere, WANDA discloses the poverty and ignorance of Appalachia. It tells of a passive, slatternly young woman who abandons her family and drifts, like a piece of wood caught on a slow tide, through dreary events in motels and bars.
“She’s trapped and she will never, ever get out of it and there are millions like her,” Miss Loden said.
At first, her declaration that the film is in some respects autobiographical seems unlikely, but the improbability dissolves as she talks. Much of her mature life has been, perhaps only half‐consciously, a flight from categorization.
“I really hate slick pictures,” she said, coiled in a green chair in the sitting room in which she presides. as Mrs. Elia Kazan, wife of the stage and film director. The film was edited in a back room of their spacious townhouse near Central Park West.
“They’re too perfect to be believable. I don’t mean just in the look. I mean in the rhythm, in the cutting, the music — everything. The slicker the technique is, the slicker the content becomes, until everything turns into Formica, including the people.”
Miss Loden is made up of no parts Formica. Her countenance glows softly without a trace of cosmetics. She has wide, innocent eyes, strong cheekbones, and a turned‐up nose. She wore brown corduroy slacks.
“I tried not to explain things too much in the film, not to be too explicit, not to be too verbal,” she said. “My subject matter is of people who are not too verbal and not aware of their condition.
“I’ve been like that myself. I came from a rural region, where people have a hard time. They don’t have time for wittily observing the things around them. They’re not concerned about anything more than existing from day to day.
“They’re not stupid. They’re ignorant. Everything is ugly around them — the architecture, the town, the clothing they wear. Everything they see is ugly.
“It’s not a matter of money,” Miss Loden said, describing the produce‐and-consume‐and‐produce treadmill.
“It’s the same in Detroit,” she went on. “They work in the factories to make all those ugly cars that don’t last so they can get paid to buy a few of those ugly cars and to buy the things that others are making in other factories—own a color television. It’s a whole aspect of America.”
“Do you have any answer?”
“No, Miss Loden said quietly. “Just to change the whole society.”
The revolutionary currents that are running are evidence of a terminal distaste for the entire setup, she believes.
“People are always saying, ‘Why don’t they work within the system?’ They don’t because the system doesn’t work, you see,” Miss Loden remarked.
“I sort of made my way up, but I know if I had stayed where I came from, I would just be a wasted person.”
By leaving her rural setting near Asheville, N. C., and coming to New York, Miss Loden escaped a life of ignorance and routine drudgery, But she was immediately caught up in another banal categorization.
Since she had “a figure approaching perfection,” as one reviewer put it, and a face that undeniably suggested both the beauty of Bergman and the sensuous glamour, of Monroe (whose image she reflected in “After the Fall”), Miss Loden was credited with exterior assets only.
She danced at the Copacabana. Ernie Kovacs, who knew, a good thing when he saw one, dressed her in very abbreviated tights and had her romp through television slapstick parts. For several years she did little, else.
She sees both of these circumstances — the drab and hollow life at home, and the glittering and hollow life here—as having a single root in a misorganized society.
“I got into the whole thing of being a dumb blonde—sort of an object, as they say. I didn’t think anything of myself, so I succumbed to the whole role. I never knew who I was, or what I was supposed to do.”
Barbara Loden and Elia Kazan
“Do you know now?” “Yes.”
Had Mr. Kazan helped? “He helps me every way he can,” she said. “It’s good to have an expert around. What he tried to do was get me to do what I wanted to do, and that’s not the way he would have done it.”
WANDA was shot in 16mm and printed in 35mm. Miss Loden wrote the screenplay nine years ago. Her awareness of the far simpler techniques of the underground movement encouraged her to attempt it herself.
“It’s not a new wave,” she said. “It’s the old wave. That’s what they used to do. They took a camera and they went out and shot. Around that act this whole fantastic apparatus grew up — the Hollywood albatross. They made a ship out of lead. It won’t float any more.”
WANDA plays at the AFS Cinema on September 1st through 3rd.
Josephine Decker (BUTTER ON THE LATCH, THOU WAST MILD AND LOVELY) is back with her newest feature, a favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Madeline (newcomer Helena Howard) has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop’s ambitious director (Molly Parker) pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother (Miranda July) into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women’s lives. Hailed as “one of the boldest and most invigorating American films of the 21st century,” this inventive film is one you won’t want to miss.
Here’s what the critics are saying:
“In the role of Madeline, Howard delivers a performance that is one of the most distinctive, most varied, and most extreme in its expressive array and technical power, of any teen performer in the history of cinema.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Helena Howard makes a heart-stopping professional debut as Madeline caught between Molly Parker’s manipulative acting teacher and Miranda July’s differently manipulative mom.” Bob Mondello, NPR
“Writer-director Josephine Decker more than earns the label “auteur,” and all the connotations that come with it.” Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
Check out the trailer for Madeline’s Madeline below:
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’s new 4K unrestoration opens at AFS Cinema on Friday, August 31. Get tickets.
Few movies can top both the lists ofbest movies made of all time andmost boring movies of all time. A work of art must have greatness in it – a la “Moby Dick” – to produce such a polarity of opinion. It’s likely that many of those heretical people who find 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY boring have never seen it properly projected on the big screen and Christopher Nolan is trying to change that.
Christopher Nolan—an avid fan of 2001 ever since his father took him to see it at the age of seven—has been working alongside Warner Brothers to “un-restore” one of the most divisive films ever made.
What is an “un-restoration” exactly? Unlike many modern restorations which tinker or even correct past “mistakes,” Nolan wanted the exact opposite of a restoration, to return the film to the way it was projected back in 1968, the way he remembered it as a child.
Warner Brothers had begun the process of restoring the film in 1999, making interpositives (film stock that is essential in going from an original camera negative to a final print) from the original camera negative. Soon after seeing the major costs to restore a project like this, they put it on hold, leaving the reels in a Burbank storage facility where they’d wait until Nolan picked up the project.
Under the supervision of Nolan, the film lab began work on a deep clean of the film, spending six months polishing the fifty year old negative and fixing any past mistakes on the reel. Then using Kubrick’s original notes, Nolan’s DUNKIRK cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, and a complex method of color correction to revamp the faded negative, the so-called “un-restoration” began.
“None of what we did was interpretive,” Nolan claimed toThe LA Times, further solidifying his idea that the best way to see a massive movie such as 2001, is exactly the way it was seen fifty years ago now, projected onto the big screen.
Nolan is not against the benefits of digital technology in restorations, but he still has a fondness for thepower of projection, emphasizing the power of understanding that “the same shadows the filmmaker saw are the ones you watch” in the theater.
And while 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was a childhood favorite for him, he urges audiences that it’s not about nostalgia, instead it’s the value of understanding a totally different way of watching a movie, one that is in danger of being lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1JIkK7-fUI
The 4k presentation of Christopher Nolan’s “unrestoration” of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY comes to the AFS Cinema this September. You can find showtimes and ticketshere.
AFS Doc Days guest programmer Todd Savage talked to MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS director Jake Meginsky in anticipation of the film’s opening this weekend at AFS Cinema.
15 years ago, drummer Jake Meginsky showed up at the front door of the renowned free-jazz percussionist Milford Graves’ home and asked to be taken on as a student. Graves invited him in to play, and thus began an ongoing mentorship that forms the foundation of Meginsky’s intimate and immersive portrait, MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS.
The documentary is an extended meditation on Graves and his music though a series of lessons on sound and vibration, healing, creative expression, and the artistic life. Director Jake Meginsky talks about what drew him to the Professor and his approach to capturing and sharing the energy of Graves through cinema.
How did the film develop?
The film kind of chose me. The earliest scenes I recorded that made it into the film were in the first six months of meeting the Professor. I could sense immediately that I was around someone who had a really dynamic and complex way of thinking about the world. All the stories and lessons in the film are ones that I received pretty early, but also heard in different ways over the years.
He showed me an archival reel of him performing for the school for children with autism. This film was about 16 minutes total, and we watched that in his basement on a super hot day. The experience of cinema in that—the colors, the way he demonstrated so clearly his particular vision of music as a healing force in the universe, through his interaction with the children—was so powerful visually and sonically and at that point I was kind of like, “Whoa!”
There’s something about the way that footage so clearly captures the transmission of energy, which I think cinema does so well. In that sense, it‘s activating so many senses at once, and it has the chance to transmit energy, not unlike what a musical performance can do.
The rest of the archival footage in the film came from him giving me other pieces, so nothing in the film is done in a traditional way. Everything in the film—the footage of the Professor in the bamboo garden in Japan, the footage where everyone is drinking sake at the farm, the footage from the dojo, the black and white photography—those are all things he’d kind of ask me to come to the basement and see. It was an organic process and it definitely was something that emerged out of a labor of love.
Would you ever put the camera down near him? Or was he too likely to say or do something interesting?
Yes, he’s super dynamic, so it would be that situation where you would put the camera down and he would drop some sort of amazing knowledge. There are hundreds of hours of footage. Learning what this film wanted to be was an emerging process; it wasn’t something that was necessarily devised from a composition, but came through more improvising and learning how the film wanted to structure itself.
The opening shots sets up the documentary’s visual approach. How did you find a style that connected to Milford’s music and work as an artist?
It was all a process of discovery, but the filmmakers I really love that deal with music and sensation, people like Les Blank, kind of learn to dance with the subject.
The language of the film had to be in tune with the Professor’s vibe. At the time of that initial shot, which the cinematographer took, we were staying up all night and shooting with the idea of thoughtfully shooting all of the iconography in his backyard dojo: masks from all over the world, medical models, books and mirrors, and other kinds of equipment. All of a sudden you could see that that shot had the whole film in it. It had the sense of slowly dropping into a really intimate space.
He let us into a space that many artists aren’t comfortable sharing. The dynamic mystery of the creative process is really what he let me into and let the film into. Milford has a really unique quality: He’s compelled to share the secrets of how he makes sense of making art. Ultimately that does become the content of the film. It’s really a film about creativity and creative process.
He seems like a very generous person in the way he shares his vision of the world.
I would go so far as to say he’s the most generous person I’ve ever met in my life. It extends far past his sharing of the creative process. As a teacher, his first instincts are to uplift everyone around him. He shares everything he has when you come to his house. You’re going to end up with a tasting menu from his garden, on top of a four-hour lesson, on top of him showing you the inner workings of a new invention. He’s extremely generous as a person, and I think anyone who has spent time with him would agree.
Did you have any first impression of him or his music that stayed with you and made its way into the film?
I was a huge fan of avant-garde music and free jazz when I went to study with him. My impression of seeing him perform with the kind of vitality and the amount of energy that he was putting out was intimidating. There are narratives about that music that have to do with aggression and yet qualities that I didn’t find at all once I met the Professor. I showed up at his door extremely nervous, feeling like I had to present myself in a confident way, and it was just shattered. The moment he opened the door, he basically was so curious and interested about who I was and how—how he would put it, “how I was vibrating.” Then we played music together in my first meeting, which was so far beyond my wildest expectations. It wasn’t even anything I would have fathomed.
I was already pretty impressed by the music I had heard because it felt so expansive. That’s something that has stayed with me, and I definitely wanted the film to capture an expansive way of looking at an artist, something that didn’t close itself off or present a linear structure. I wanted the film to do what the music does, which is make the world seem more mysterious and strange and beautiful and complex—rather than present an encyclopedic entry on someone’s career.
When I saw him play live – before I met him personally – when the lights came on, the thing that struck me most was everyone around me was talking about feeling their heartbeat change. Some people’s faces were more flush, and people were crying—there was this huge energy shift in the room. I’ve seen it now dozens and dozens of times, but there’s something about his music and his performance which is so focused on the transmission of energy. In the film I wanted to make sure that every decision tried to preserve that potential for energy transfer. How can you take 90 minutes and have all the decisions be pointed toward this end of transmitting the most human energy through cinema? Milford’s focus on transmitting raw energy has led him down a different path than many other musicians. I wanted the film to show that—the potential of sound to change the world and to change someone’s mind and body.
Who did you make the film for?
My first instinct when I had a sensible-sized cut was to bring it down to Milford and his wife and show it to them. I’ve learned so much from him, and you don’t always get a chance to tell your teacher how much you care about them and show them what you’ve been listening to. I’m not trying to say that all portrait documentaries need to be this way, but I always kept close to my heart that I wanted him to know that I was listening and the things he’s been saying to me weren’t falling on deaf ears.
It was also important that whatever cinematic version that manifested in the 90 minutes was one that he recognized as himself. I don’t think every film has to be that way, but it was important that this one was. I think about other people who have meant a lot to me, other heroes like John Coltrane, for example—I would love to be able to sit with him and understand the things that he cared about and feel some of the human energy that comes through. Going further into history, what kind of film would you want if people were making films about Leonardo da Vinci? Would you want a documentary about Leonardo da Vinci while he was alive that chronicled his career and listed all the different innovations in a linear way—or would you want to sit inside his studio and look at his notebooks and hear him talk about the relationships between the different things he’s interested in?
For the audience, I wanted to make the kind of film that, if you didn’t know about Milford, you would compelled to learn a little bit more. I didn’t want the film to be the end all and be all. There are a thousands films you could make about Milford Graves. He’s a super dynamic individual with a career that goes back to when he was 19 years old, and there are a thousand stories. There are a thousand films you could make. When it’s not easy to tell a simple story about a career, it becomes no story. Someone could come to this film as a gardener and find a way in, and come out having learned more about Milford’s work with the heartbeat. Or a drummer who was fascinated by Milford’s speed and dexterity could come out learning about the relationships of heartbeats and drum pattern.
I wanted this film to be one where you keep going deeper and deeper into his world. The film is definitely consciously constructed that way. The way the lessons are arranged are set up so you have time to reflect and have aesthetic experiences with music. Each lesson gets more and more intense until toward the end where there are things about major and minor scales and relationships with your tear ducts. You’re ready for that at that time because you’ve also not been taken away from learning the way Milford talks. It’s all built to provide that full access to the teaching.
Anything else you want people to know before they see the film?
Throw away the metronome and listen to your heart.
This month’s ongoing Essential Cinema series, Pre-Code Treasures, looks back at the unique period of time (roughly 1929-34) before the implementation of the Hays Code. Each week, we’re joined by film scholars to talk about the era and the film selection for the week.
On August 9, scholar, professor, and film archivist Dr. Caroline Frick joined us to discuss “a funky artifact of its time,” the Marx Brothers’ THE COCOANUTS (1929), one of the early talkies that explored the transition of Broadway and Vaudeville productions to film. Lead programmer Lars Nilsen and Dr. Frick (a self-proclaimed Marx Brothers enthusiast) discussed many aspects of the movie including the Marx Brothers deal with Paramount, how cinematography had to change to adjust for sound, and a possible Austin connection between the famed Marx Brothers.
You can listen to the full conversation here, iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher.
Our Pre-Code Treasures film series continues through September 2nd (buy tickets here). Dr. Caroline Frick returns back to co-host this Thursday’s screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s THE SMILING LIEUTENANT in 35mm.
