Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.
Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond) It is hard to think of a recent horror film––or a film of any genre, really––in which the main character is tasked with a job as original and ingenious as Enid Baines, the protagonist of Prano Bailey-Bond’s riveting Censor. She is, yes, the titular censor. It is 1980s England, the time of “video nasties” that drew parental consternation and tabloid outrage. These were the low-budget, ultra-violent VHS cassettes that earned their own category in the collective consciousness. Not all were UK productions––I Spit On Your Grave and Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer made the list. In Censor, however, the nasties are homegrown, in more ways than one. Chris S. (full review) Where to Stream: Hulu
Copshop (Joe Carnahan) It’d be hard to argue Joe Carnahan isn’t permanently stuck in 1997. Operating well past the point where dozens upon dozens of Tarantino knockoffs were inescapable on video store shelves and in shoebox auditoriums across America, he seems, if anything, intent on morphing the ’90s aesthetic into a new form of classicism for the 21st century. As the kind of guy who still finds slow-motion gunfights cool a full three decades after Hollywood caught wind of Hard Boiled, it’s nice he at least believes in a tangible, quasi-human cinema. – Ethan V. (full review) Where to Stream: VOD
Film About a Father Who and More Films by Lynne Sachs Along with her new documentary Film About a Father Who, The Criterion Channel is featuring seven shorts from director Lynne Sachs, including Which Way Is East (1994), The Last Happy Day (2009), Wind in Our Hair (2010), The Washing Society (2018), Girl Is Presence (2020), E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021), and Maya at 24 (2021). Jared Mobarak said in his review of her latest feature, “While director Lynne Sachs admits her latest documentary Film About a Father Who could be superficially construed as a portrait (the title alludes to and the content revolves around her father Ira), she labels it a reckoning instead. With thirty-five years of footage shot across varied formats and devices to cull through and piece together, the result becomes less about providing a clear picture of who this man is and more about understanding the cost of his actions. Whether it began that way or not, however, it surely didn’t take long to realize how deep a drop the rabbit hole of his life would prove. Sachs jumped in to discover truths surrounding her childhood only to fall through numerous false bottoms that revealed truths she couldn’t even imagine.” Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Gunda (Victor Kossakovsky) In 2018, Victor Kossakovsky set out to shoot Aquarela, a survey-symphony that took the Russian documentarian around the world to capture glaciers, waterfalls, frozen lakes, oceans, and storms. Water, art-speak waffle as it may sound, served as Aquarela’s only protagonist: in that hyper-high-definition blue canvas, human faces seldom popped up, and voices were seldom heard, as Kossakovsky’s focus centered squarely on his liquid star alone. A mystifying follow-up working again to question and depart from an anthropocentric perspective, here comes Gunda, a black-and-white, dialogue-free documentary chronicling a few months in the lives of the animals stranded in a Norwegian farm. – Leonardo G. (full review)Where to Stream: Hulu
I’m Your Man (Maria Schrader) Falling in love with a robot isn’t good news, as Her and Blade Runner (both 2019 and 2049) tell us. In I’m Your Man, unspooling in competition at Berlin, a forty-something museum director (Maren Eggert) is justifiably nervous—she’s in a film named after a Leonard Cohen track, which is only asking for trouble—when asked to try out a new romantic partner. That’s because this is a “humanoid robot,” Tom, algorithmically aligned to her romantic preferences and played by dashing English actor Dan Stevens in a performance in which he impressively speaks fluent German. – Ed F. (full review) Where to Stream: VOD
Needle in a Timestack (John Ridley) For a movie about a fated love (Leslie Odom Jr.’s Nick and Cynthia Erivo’s Janine) being undermined by a jealous ex (Orlando Bloom’s Tommy), I didn’t expect to witness a scene towards the start where the latter philosophically (and selfishly) attempts to legitimize his sabotage by explaining how every love is, by definition, another’s missed opportunity. He points out a random woman in the bar and tells Nick that whomever she falls for will be the lucky one of millions, setting off a chain reaction that diverts all the other men and women destined to have crossed her path as suitable partners somewhere else instead. The sentiment is intriguing and full of possibilities well outside the scope of what appeared to be a run-of-the-mill, time travel romance. – Jared M. (full review) Where to Stream: VOD
Rat Film (Theo Anthony) It’s not often that a documentary with such a clear focus surprises and unnerves you. Rat Film, directed by Theo Anthony, finds its narrative in the parallel between rat-control efforts in Baltimore and the redlining that has kept certain neighborhoods in the city locked in poverty and crime. With a passionate attention to historical detail and nuance that is belied by the robotic narration of Maureen Jones, the film seduces the audience into following its train of thought through moments and ideas both grotesque and harrowing. Some of the tangents and paths of thought that Rat Film travels are surreal to the point of abstraction, but at the end of it all your view of urban development and its impact on human lives will have been fundamentally altered for the better. – Brian R. Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes) If you told people in 1967 that Andy Warhol’s house band just released one of the most revered rock albums of all-time, they would ask what they’re called, and when you told them they would laugh. As far as the public was concerned, there were a hundred acts capable of that historical success in the ‘60s, and none were called the Velvet Underground (or Nico). To a certain extent they would be right. It would be another decade before the banana-adorned The Velvet Underground & Nico would have its pop cultural comeuppance and over half a century before the glam avant-garde group would receive definitive documentary treatment by one of the best living filmmakers. But as history and said doc have proven, we would have the last laugh in that exchange. – Luke H. (full review) Where to Stream: Apple TV+
If you’re braving indoor screenings and other head- and heart-enriching activities, and you happen to find yourself in Europe at some point over the next few months, we’ve got a couple of tips. The second of three exhibitions devoted to the work of Agnès Varda opens tomorrow at the Palais idéal du facteur Cheval in Hauterives, France. On view through April 3, a series of installations will explore the artist and filmmaker’s engagement with architecture. Varda first visited the Palais in the 1950s and returned to it throughout her life. Five hundred miles north, in Bonn, the Bundeskunsthalle is presenting the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Method, an exhibition of more than 850 items, including screenplays, letters, photos, sketches, and costumes, through March 6.Here are just five items that caught our eye this week:
In The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1973), we see Luchino Visconti “at his most operatic, confessionally queer, and questioning of the present through meticulous reconstructions of the past,” writes Joshua Barone in the New York Times. The German trilogy is “a series of films that quietly wrestled with his own conflicted feelings about sexuality and class, and at the same time illustrated the twilight of the monarchy, of the aristocracy and, eventually, of Germany itself.”
The Damned is one of the films Bernardo Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro watched together while preparing to shoot The Conformist (1970). American Cinematographer has republished a 2001 interview with Storaro in which he talks about creating a “visual cage” around Marcello Clerici, the ’30s-era Italian fascist played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. That cage is “almost monochromatic” until Clerici leaves Rome, when it opens up to an orange afternoon before sinking into a blue evening in Paris. Storaro created an astonishing palette, often with limited resources, but he humbly emphasizes that all credit for the compositions and camera movements goes to Bertolucci. “From the first time I met Bernardo in the early 1960s,” says Storaro, “he made it clear that the positioning and movement of the camera was part of his directorial grammar.”
The twentieth Courtisane Festival, opening in Ghent on Wednesday, will screen Sumiko Haneda’s The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (1977) on Friday. Haneda first encountered what is believed to be the oldest tree in Japan—planted by Emperor Keitai in the early sixth century—in 1969. She says she intended to make “a short, musical kind of work” incorporating poems by her younger sister—who died one year later. Haneda returned to the project in 1972 when, as Erika Balsom writes for the New Left Review, the tree “had become ‘something ominous’ to her. She shot intermittently over two-and-a-half years to capture its changing state across four seasons—in close-up and at a distance, in glorious bloom and dusted with snow—and then worked for a further eighteen months to complete the film. The result is a poetic reckoning with mortality and memory at the crossroads of the human and nonhuman, anchored by a female voiceover, haunting appearances of an adolescent girl, and, of course, myriad images of the titular entity. It is a portrait of a village and its inhabitants; a cultural history of a celebrated tree; a film like no other.”
On the Criterion Channel, we’re presenting seven short films by Lynne Sachs as well as her new introduction to her latest feature documentary, Film About a Father Who. Ira Sachs, Sr., a developer in Park City, Utah, fathered not only Lynne and her brother and fellow filmmaker, Ira Sachs, Jr. (Keep the Lights On,Frankie), but also nine other children that Lynne counts as half-siblings. Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harrison Blackman suggests that Film About a Father Who “tests the limits of audience empathy as it explores an obscure figure whose behavior is gradually revealed to be abhorrent. Though Sachs doesn’t pull any punches, her film takes pains to convey her love for her father despite the revelations she has discovered . . . Though it’s become a staple of the memoir genre in film and nonfiction to air familial dirty laundry, Sachs proceeds with her investigation in a conscientiously humanistic way.” John Bleasdale, in the meantime, talks with Lynne Sachs on his latest podcast.
Movie poster aficionados will be familiar with the Polish School, and while “luminaries such as Jan Lenica, Waldemar Świerzy, or Roman Cieślewicz are well-known in design circles,” writes Zosia Swidlicka in the Calvert Journal, “their female counterparts remain consistently overlooked.” Swidlicka tells the story of Barbara Baranowska, whose “impressive body of work encapsulates twentieth-century visual culture at its peak.” Baranowska designed a series of book covers for her first husband, author Adolf Rudnicki, as well as the poster for Possession (1981), directed by her second husband, Andrzej Żuławski—who introduced her to her third husband, film producer Christian Ferry. In Paris, she created innovative posters for the French releases of films by Miloš Forman, Steven Spielberg, and Alan J. Pakula. And “she still goes to the cinema every day, devours books, and is just as perceptive today as she was forty years ago.”
The first minute of Lynne Sachs’ new documentary, Film About a Father Who (2021), embraces an unsettling image. The camera trains closely on the dense mane of hair belonging to the filmmaker’s father, Ira Sachs Sr., who winces while Lynne brushes and detangles his hair.
This overture serves as a potent visual metaphor for the film, as Lynne Sachs examines the dark legacy of her father, an eccentric playboy developer of Park City, Utah, whose freewheeling sexual appetite has wreaked collateral damage upon their complicated, ever-expanding family. In that opening scene, as the filmmaker continues to brush her father’s hair, the shot widens to reveal her reluctant but natural proximity to her father, despite all the knots about to be painfully loosened.
The documentary, streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of a collection sampling the celebrated filmmaker’s body of work, tests the limits of audience empathy as it explores an obscure figure whose behavior is gradually revealed to be abhorrent. Though Sachs doesn’t pull any punches, her film takes pains to convey her love for her father despite the revelations she has discovered. In the process, Sachs has crafted a damning portrait of a loved one. Though it’s become a staple of the memoir genre in film and nonfiction to air familial dirty laundry, Sachs proceeds with her investigation in a conscientiously humanistic way.
While a few of Sachs’ other films in the upcoming Criterion Channel anthology are short films (including her recent “Epistolary: A Letter to Jean Vigo,” which juxtaposes scenes from the 1963 adaptation of Lord of the Flies with footage from the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol), Film About a Father Who stands as an entry firmly straddling the line between memoir and biography. It’s a work that could be screened side by side Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012), a film that also sought to understand the unusual circumstances of a filmmaker’s parentage.
Film about a Father Who eases us into the mystery of Lynne’s father, a research question that the filmmaker has tackled since she started collecting material for the project in 1984. When we are introduced to Ira Sachs Sr., the film includes an old cable news interview that showcases Sachs Sr.’s Holiday Inn developments in Utah and his hobby of gaming pay real money or skiing while talking on an enormous early model cellular phone.
Behind that goofy exterior, however, exists a troubling side marked by secrecy and curious dissembling. According to Lynne Sachs’ narration, this was a man who owned two identical red convertibles so that his mother wouldn’t chastise him for being a spendthrift — because the two vehicles, when shrewdly used, could deceive Sachs Sr.’s mother into thinking he possessed only one car.
“The first time I saw both cars parked together, I was shocked that he had two,” Lynne Sachs states. “It was his secret, but now I was also keeping it.”
As the film continues, the revelations grow more disquieting, as Sachs and her (immediate) siblings, including fellow filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr., struggle to remember all the women who passed through their father’s life. Six of these women had children with Sachs Sr. — culminating in nine children with whom Lynne Sachs counts as half-siblings.
The interviews with Sachs Sr.’s former romantic partners and their children are often raw. These include the experience of a woman named Diana, who ruefully describes her seduction by Sachs Sr., and Mallory Chaffin, who tragically recounts her unrequited love for the same man.
Lynne’s interviews of known relations eventually leads to her discovery of several half-siblings she never knew she had, including a pair that Sachs Sr. willfully obscured from his original nuclear family — only outed after Lynne discovered he had blatantly cut out their names printed on a shared health plan card. Shockingly, this was to prevent his mother from learning about the two children, since she had forbidden the fathering of any additional extramarital children lest she cut him out of the will.
“Can I make myself forget for the first 20 years of my sister’s life, I didn’t know she existed?” Lynne Sachs asks.
Take the experience of Beth Evans, one of Sachs Sr.’s estranged daughters who grew up poor and unknown to the rest of the family. “I grew up in a really hard life, like we didn’t have food,” Beth explains. “We had to worry about electricity. When I’m around you guys, it kind of angers me, because you don’t know real problems.”
As in other documentaries that apply a literary dimension to biography, Lynne Sachs tries to identify and psychoanalyze moments from Sachs Sr.’s life as defining traumas that shaped his character and worldview. For Ira, his “ghost” involved being abducted by his biological father as a child, and being rescued by his mother, who subsequently devoted her life to caring for him as a single mother. As Lynne’s grandmother tells this story in the presence of her son, who shakes his head uncomfortably, she scolds: “You mean you can’t go back and say I had a horrible childhood and that’s why I do all of this?”
As this summation indicates, this origin story doesn’t solve the cipher of Lynne’s father, who is shown repeatedly deflecting his daughter’s questions over four decades of interviews. Sachs tactfully includes moments that reveal her father’s consistent cooperation with the project and his seeming obliviousness that the end product will portray him in a negative light. It’s his love for his daughter, or his abject social cluelessness, that allows the project to proceed. The filmmaker clearly possesses courage in telling this story to a wide audience, and the consent of her family and rather large informal extended family is striking in their public testimony about their peculiar situation.
Just as Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle series of memoirs raised eyebrows for how willing the author was to depict the private lives of his relatives, Film About a Father Who might provoke similar qualms. Will Ira’s former romantic partners and children suffer harm from this documentary telling their story so openly?
In a similar vein, the film also reminds us of the problematic ethics of biographical narrative when the subject is too close to the storyteller. However, while such works by definition cannot be objective, these stories have the potential of channeling stronger emotional valences that generate empathy for the family’s curious predicament, despite Ira Sachs Sr.’s clearly callous attitude to his various dependents.
At the conclusion of the film, though the audience can’t sympathize with Ira Sachs Sr., we are convinced that the filmmaker does — or wants to. That desire to understand insulates the project from what, in less steady hands, might have receded into a purely sensationalist narrative.
“This is not a self-portrait,” Sachs concludes. “This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry. A story I share with my sisters and brothers, all nine of us. My father’s story, or at least part of it.”
With its haunting, fractal approach to biographical filmmaking, Film About a Father Who supports the Tolstoian adage that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Such a project would not be feasible without the boldness and honesty of the filmmaker and her subjects, with the exception of the enigmatic patriarch.
Life World is an ephemeral cannery-adjacent event space for performance, cinema, and more. We are located in Brooklyn, NY. The address will be revealed upon RSVP :)
Filmmaker, poet, and educator Lynne Sachs talks to host Elizabeth Howard about her work, particularly her Film About a Father Who. The documentary probes a fragmented family, both bound and roiled by a secretive father’s serial love affairs and marriages, and his children’s struggle to make sense of their lives, as well as their relationships with one another. Sachs’s films blend many forms — essay, collage, performance, and documentary. Film About a Father Who is streaming as part of the Directed by Lynne Sachs series on the Criterion Channel.
Episode Notes
Lynne Sachsis a Memphis born, Brooklyn based filmmaker. Since the 1980s, Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, she investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NYFA, and Jerome Foundation. Sachs has made 40 films (including Tip of My Tongue, Your Day is My Night, Investigation of a Flame, and Which Way is East). Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center, the Walker, the Getty, New York Film Festival, and Sundance. In 2021, Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at Maysles Documentary Center awarded Sachs for her body of work.
Sachs is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. In 2020 and 2021, she taught film and poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque, Flowchart Foundation, San Francisco Public Library, and Hunter.
STEPHEN VITIELLO (MUSIC): Electronic musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. He has composed music for independent films, experimental video projects and art installations, collaborating with such artists as Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler and Dara Birnbaum. Solo and group exhibitions include MASS MoCA, The High Line, NYC, and Museum of Modern Art.
Elizabeth Howardhas never had boundaries between her life, work, art, and writing. Experience, sense of place, and exploration define the choices she makes, seeking collaboration, flexibility, and spontaneity. She is an author, journalist, and creative director. Elizabeth has organized programming around the arts and social issues for organizations in the United States and internationally.
Alex Waters is a media producer and editor for the Short Fuse Podcast, a music producer, and a Berklee College of Music student. He has written and produced music for podcasts such as The Faith and Chai Podcast and Con Confianza. He produces his own music, as well as writing and recording for independent artists such as The Living. Alex lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two cats and enjoys creating and writing music. You can reach him with inquiries by emailing alexwatersmusic12@gmail.com.
The Short Fuse Podcast is produced by the Arts Fuse.
Directors Sarah Kunstler and Emily Kunstler’s new documentary “Who We Are: A Chronicle Of Racism In America” shows why the GOP should be stopped from promoting educational cover-ups of America’s shameful racist history. ACLU attorney Jeffery Robinson’s titular Juneteenth 2018 talk exposes the unfortunately deep roots racism has in American society…and the obligations people of conscience have to help this nation leave its racist legacy behind. Particularly disturbing will be the hidden racist history of some iconic American places.
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Experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ newest short “Maya at 24” can be called simultaneously intimate and enigmatic. Certainly, the film evokes feelings similar to watching Michael Apted’s beloved “Up” series. Yet Sachs’ short film maintains some emotional remove from its central subject.
The titular Maya happens to be Sachs’ daughter Maya Street-Sachs. The film captures its subject at three distinct ages: 6, 16, and 24. In this dialogue-free film, the girl’s/young woman’s three ages get linked via 16mm film footage capturing Maya’s running around her mother clockwise.
Yet “Maya At 24” offers more than an obvious visual metaphor of time passing for her film subject. A silhouette of an older Maya filled out by footage of a running Maya at 6 provides a nice metaphor for the spiritual continuity between child and older person.
Without the medium of words, the viewer must rely on the facial expressions Maya displays at each age to have emotional glimpses of the person depicted. Yet it could be reasonably argued that the visual results prove too enigmatic to create a realistic emotional picture of its subject. The single-mindedness on the face of age 6 Maya treats the apparent frivolity of running in a circle as something still worth giving her all for. The face of age 16 Maya uses her younger self’s single-mindedness as a mask for safely regarding the world. There’s her awareness of being the object of unseen viewers’ gazes, but that awareness of gaze and viewers’ judgment is protected by her visible expressionlessness.
By age 24, Maya’s face displays an amused lack of self-consciousness regarding the camera’s gaze. Rather than being intimidated by the unblinking eye of the camera lens (and by implication her mother, although that might be projection), the filmmaker’s daughter shows in her face a combination of relaxation and an awareness of her ability to control how much she will reveal of herself before the camera.
The drawn animated microscopic images allude to the fact that the age 24 footage was shot in the midst of coronavirus lockdown. Yet Maya’s face displays neither fear of COVID-19 nor grief at seeing friends or loved ones succumb to the disease. The run that Maya does at this age would, in this context, be a metaphorical act of defiance at both fear of contracting the disease or even the idea that COVID-19 requires life to completely come to a halt.
“Maya At 24” can ultimately be called a celebration of life…but without the sticky sentiment usually associated with that well-worn phrase.
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LIfe in a drug cartel-dominated area has provided grist for plenty of films and television series. But Teodora Ana Mihai’s drama “La Civil” delivers something different. It doesn’t go for glorifying either action-movie vengeance or the power of the drug cartels. Instead, it slowly sucks the viewer into a moral quandry whose resolution feels as preordained as the bleakest Greek tragedy.
In an unnamed town in Northern Mexico, Cielo (Arcelia Ramirez) lives a passable existence with her teenage daughter Laura. The mother’s life gets thrown into disarray when the smug teenage thug El Puma informs her that Laura’s being held for ransom. Despite Cielo enlisting the grudging help of her estranged husband Gustavo, Laura is not returned. When the usual government outlets prove unable to help the determined mother, she starts conducting her own search for her missing daughter. But what happens to Cielo when she begins accepting more morally dubious tactics to obtain her answers?
In a nice bit of irony, Cielo (Spanish for “sky”) lives an incredibly constricted life at the film’s start. Her estranged bullying husband Gustavo has her so browbeaten that she just goes along with whatever he says. She even declines to get the financial support she deserves from Gustavo despite his leaving her and Laura for the younger and hotter Rosy. The intimidating power of the local drug cartels also limits Cielo’s actions. But until Laura’s disappearance, the mother is unaware of the shape of that social constriction on her and other civilians in the town.
One of the great ironies teased out by Habacuc Antonio de Rosario’s script is seeing how Cielo’s growing awareness of the grip of the local drug cartels liberates her from passivity to more actively participating in her life. She even goes from fearing Gustavo to finding him a loudmouthed afterthought. However, her increased self-confidence doesn’t translate to adopting Gustavo’s role of humiliating those weaker than himself.
Two critical moments provide key changes to the dynamic between Cielo and Gustavo. One is the second ransom sequence. Cielo wants proof of life from El Puma before handing over a peso; Gustavo doesn’t pause for a second to give up the money. The other is the differing attitudes of Laura’s parents as the days pass. Gustavo is probably right that Laura is dead at this point. But that suspicion becomes an excuse for him to emotionally sweep things under the rug. Cielo by contrast is driven to get as definitive an answer as she can regarding Laura’s fate.
That drive is not aided by a society that seems incapable of dealing with the local narco scourge. The cops seem to engage in triage on what narco-related crimes they will investigate. The civilian status quo involves either giving the narcos what they want or otherwise staying off their radar. The military patrols resemble security theater exercises rather than an actual deterrent presence.
Mihai’s film embraces the ambivalence of Cielo’s accepting Lieutenant Lamarque’s extra-judicial methods of combating the narcos. Her gathering intelligence on Commandante Inez’ gang may have been intended to spur official action. But it’s not clear the cops would have been willing to act off the data Cielo gathered. Certainly Cielo’s neighbors are notably absent when some narcos pay her a violent evening visit. At least Lieutenant Lamarque proves willing to act on the desperate mother’s accumulated information.
Yet being a witness to beatings and shootouts that Lieutenant Lamarque and his troops engage in raises questions about Cielo’s moral complicity for the soldiers’ actions. On one hand, the current status quo of basically unchecked criminality is definitely undesirable. On the other hand, having the likes of Lieutenant Lamarque exercise unchecked power against the cartels can’t be called an ultimately necessary societal good.
“La Civil”’s satisfying refusal to offer neat solutions or resolutions will of course spark viewer debate. That approach may explain why the film garnered a Courage Prize at the recent Cannes Film Festival. Yet one could also wish for a more riveting treatment than what is presented here.
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Why has it taken over 55 years to finally get a documentary feature film on The Velvet Underground? Even though the legendary avant-garde rock band existed for five years and left a small handful of recordings, they would influence such legends as David Bowie and Jonathan Richman. Yet taking the bog standard documentary filmmaking approach of talking heads, archival clips, and period media presented straight would be a disservice to the band’s very unconventional legacy.
On the other hand, it could also be argued that making a film about the Velvet Underground would have been commercial suicide. The band’s musical output never became gold or even multi-platinum sellers. Their music celebrated drug culture in a way that would have ensured whoever broadcast any such film could count on lots of hairy eyeballs from sponsors of various stripes. Props should be offered to David Blackman of Universal Music Group for starting the rolling of this cinematic ball.
Congratulations are thus in order for filmmaker Todd Haynes for taking the plunge and making the first ever documentary about Andy Warhol’s Factory house band “The Velvet Underground.” Haynes’ well-made feature documentary debut strikes the right balance between sharing the basic facts about the band’s history and telling their story in a visually inventive manner. Then again, this is the director who used Barbie dolls in a Karen Carpenter biography (“Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story”) and did a picture about Bob Dylan which had Cate Blanchett as one version of the famed singer/songwriter (“I’m Not There”).
Viewers who have never heard of The Velvet Underground will be introduced to the band’s significant moments ranging from Lou Reed and John Cale discovering a mutual love of rock music and sonic experimentation to the band’s unceremonious break-up at Max’s Kansas City. Yes, later band addition Doug Yule gets some short shrift in Haynes’ film. But it can be argued that Yule’s later attempts to revive the band couldn’t even lick the soles of “Venus In Furs”’ boots.
Haynes’ film stands out because he doesn’t treat his subject as things to be scrutinized in isolation under a microscope. Instead, he creates a fascinating cinematic terrarium which shows the band’s significance by depicting both the cultural milieus it reacted against and the avant garde world it epitomized. Footage of Levittown and other icons of late 1950s-early 1960s consumerist safety and conformity deliver a good sense of the mind-numbing banality of that era’s mainstream culture. A moment where the screen is split into a dozen tiny images captures a sense of the creative ferment that the Velvet Underground became a part of.
“The Velvet Underground” constantly surprises with its visual storytelling. Warhol’s cinematic studies of the band’s members get juxtaposed with interviews filling in intriguing personal details such as Reed’s sister commenting on her brother’s mental health. Samples of an Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event suggest how ahead of its time Warhol’s show turned out to be. Valerie Solanas’ attempted murder of Warhol is presented in a way that conveys what happened without sliding into melodrama.
And of course the Velvet Underground songs heard on the soundtrack demonstrate their durability with both their lyrics and the sounds used to bring them to life. “Heroin” and “Waiting For The Man” suggest what might have happened if Jean Genet had turned to rock music rather than the stage. The Mamas and the Papas’ “Monday Monday” may have been a bigger popular hit than anything Lou Reed and crew put out. But it’s Reed et al.’s more experimental songs that still retain the energy of Now.
Haynes shows how the strengths of the band also contained the seeds of its eventual destruction. Reed may have shared Cale’s interest in sonic experimentation, but he ultimately wanted to be a successful rock star. Nico brought iconic beauty and singing talent to the band, but she had little interest in making her work with the group a long term gig. Warhol did a great job guiding The Velvet Underground into the rock world, but his presence overshadowed popular attention that might have gone to Reed.
Of the main members of the Velvet Underground seen on screen. Yule comes off the most colorless thanks to a hunger for rock stardom not matched by commensurate talent. Cale’s able to look back on his period with the band without rancor, even given the shameful way he was booted from the group. Drummer Moe Tucker obviously brought a quietly grounded presence to the Velvet Underground.
It is, of course, Reed who displays the most emotionally complex personality. He turned his encounters with the seamier side of life aka the wild side into the stuff of unforgettable poetry. His determination to be the Hubert Selby/William Burroughs of the rock world is definitely admirable. However, Haynes makes clear that Reed’s ambition would ultimately undermine the Velvet Underground’s long term existence. “The Velvet Underground” doesn’t quite show that Reed would never achieve his dream of rock superstardom.
Reed’s failure, though, might be attributed to the shortcomings of the period’s audiences. Then as now, rock superstardom and reverence for distinct individual artistic rock voices frequently don’t intersect. Tours by the Velvet Underground outside New York led to a standing joke among the band members that a good touring show was one where only half the audience walked out.
Rock celebrity appearances in Haynes’ film are a mixed bag. Jonathan Richman justifiably treats the Velvet Underground’s Sterling Morrison as a mentor, but his admiration ultimately comes off a little too fanboyish. Rock tastemaker Danny Fields brings a nice balance of admiration and innocence. But late Bay Area music impresario Bill Graham has the best moment with his pre-show encouragement to the Velvet Underground of “I hope you guys f**king bomb.”
Haynes has performed a valuable cultural public service by making “The Velvet Underground.” Not only has he introduced their music to new audiences, but he shows to older audiences that the brevity of the band’s existence is outweighed by the fact that they were even able to come together at all. If the viewer watching Haynes’ documentary streaming on Apple TV Plus doesn’t skip over the end credits, they will be treated to a performance of a classic Velvet Underground song that’s only hinted at earlier in the film.
(“Maya at 24” screens as part of the “There She Goes Again” shorts block. Both that shorts block and “La Civil” are available for online streaming at mvff.com until October 17, 2021.
“Who We Are: A Chronicle Of Racism In America” screens in-theater at 12:00 PM on October 16, 2021 at the Smith Rafael Film Theater (1118 4th Street, San Rafael, CA).
“The Velvet Underground” debuts on Apple TV Plus on October 15, 2021. It also screens in-theater at 12:00 PM on October 17, 2021 at the Smith Rafael Film Theater (1118 4th Street, San Rafael, CA).
Tickets for all the films reviewed are available at mvff.com.)
On November 9, 10 and 11, 2021, the Art House Zinema in BilbaoArte will host ARCHIVOS VIVOS, a conference on contemporary documentary film based on domestic archives. The purpose is to outline what kind of autobiographical gaze emerges within a digital culture where personal memories acquire a multi-format kaleidoscopic materiality. The authors gathered here subvert the domestic archive with the intention of repairing the family history, building a space of autonomy for women, reflecting on the ephemeral nature of our digital identities or speculating on other possible futures.
Tuesday, November 9, 2021. 6:00 p.m.
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO Lynne Sachs, United States, 2020, 74 ‘, VOSE Premiere in Spain.
Virtual Discussion with the Director
Over a period of 35 years, director Lynne Sachs recorded tapes and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr, a ‘bon vivant’ and pioneering entrepreneur from Park City, Utah. This documentary is her attempt to understand the network that connects a girl with her father and a sister with her peers.
SHORTS PROGRAM. Wednesday 10 November 2021. 6:00 p.m.
A COMUÑÓN DA MIÑA PRIMA ANDREA Brandán Cerviño, Spain, 2021, 13 ‘. Andrea has made her first communion. However, the ceremony lacks glamor. For Andrea, things without glitter are not things. The only problem is: Does this God exist?
9.32 Ignacio Losada, Argentina, 2019, 13 ‘. The cell phone is an extension of our life experience. The images that appear on our screens represent the future of our existence. Algorithms shelter us in a sea of images and news that construct us as subjects. Reflection in the face of what is presented to us is a political decision. What we see and how we build our own identity.
LA VEDA Paco Chavinet, Spain, 2018, 30 min. Halfway between the film essay and the video-souvenir, this story about family ties is framed. Using the images recorded on a cruise ship made by his parents, the author invokes a dystopian society where the problems of collective coexistence are solved by an algorithm and in which the prohibition of abortion is compensated by a law that allows parents to prosecute their children if at the age of 30 they have not met the expectations placed on them.
Thursday 11 November 2021.18: 00 hs
VIDEO BLUES Emma Tusell, Spain, 2019, 74 min.
+ In-person discussion with the director
Suggestive and mysterious images recorded with a domestic camera at the end of the 80s. Two voices, one female and the other male, discuss their meaning and do not seem to agree. Emma reviews her family history to try to piece together lives that are still a mystery to her. In this review you will face the ghosts of your past and make the viewer a voyeur accomplice of your privacy. But … who is that voice that confronts you and why will it end up being so important in this story?
Distributor Neon has announced its release plans for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria: Playing only in theaters, Memoria will be “moving from city to city, theater to theater, week by week, playing in front of only one solitary audience at any given time.”
Tilda Swinton and George Mackay will be starring in the next film by Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence). Titled The End, the film has been described as a “a Golden Age musical about the last human family.”
Co-programmed by James Hansen & Eric Souther, Light Matter Festival is a new “moving-image art festival dedicated to experimental film and media arts.” Taking place in Alfred, New York, the festival will be screening films by Simon Liu, Mary Helena Clark, Lynne Sachs, and more.
Sylvester Stallone’s director’s cut of Rocky IV (1985) will be playing in theaters in the United States for one night only on November 11. The new cut includes 40 minutes of never-before-seen footage, and will be available on demand the following day, on the 12th.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
A24’s official trailer for Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, which arrives in theaters this December. Simon Rex stars as a washed up former porn star who returns to his Texas hometown. Its delicious poster was illustrated by Steven Chorney and designed by GrandSon. Read Leonardo Goi’s review of the film here
The official trailer for Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale. Read our review of the film by Ela Bittencourt here.
Zia Anger has directed a new music video for Mitski’s latest single, “Working for the Knife.” With cinematography by Ashley Conner, the video follows Mitski as she performs inside The Egg at the Empire State Plaza in Albany.
Ahead of the release of Shin Ultraman, a teaser has been released for Hideaki Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider. The film is a reboot of the 1971 Kamen Rider series, which tells the story of a young motorcyclist who is transformed into a cyborg by a terrorist organization.
RECOMMENDED READING
“Miami Vice seems to do everything wrong by genre standards, and yet manages to captivate us in a way that few others can.” Bilge Ebiri reappraises Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (which turns 15 this year), from its tender intimacy to its digital video cinematography.
For Reverse Shot, critic Michael Koresky investigates Gaspar Noé’s Vortex, and whether cinema is an apt enough art form for representing the effects of dementia.
In a conversation with Nick Newman for the Film Stage, Kiyoshi Kurosawa discussesWife of a Spy, being a fan of Clint Eastwood as an actor, and the Japanese studio system. Another excellent interview can be found at Asian Movie Pulse, where Kurosawa considers the divide between film and reality, piracy, and the new generation of Japanese filmmakers.
Carol Kane discusses the rerelease of Joan Micklin Silver’s feature debut Hester Street (1975), which starred Kane at the age of 23, and pushing away fame at a young age.
“The emphasis is on diversity and pluralism, not past and present sins. Call it a museum of good intentions.” Manohla Dargis of the New York Timesreflects on the opening of the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
“Pino rides through these tunnels on his motorcycle as he’s leaving this plane of reality and entering forever into the history of art…” Walter Fasano introduces his film Pino, which is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries.
In a foreword to Yevgenia Belorusets’s new book, Modern Animal, the British director Peter Greenaway offers 19 stories about animals big and small.
From NYFF, correspondent Peter Kim George reports on two new films: Joel Coen’s solo directed, dread-filled adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Gaspar Noé’s split-screened Vortex.
Lillian Crawford reflects on two documentaries, a new one by Charlotte Gainsbourg and a 1988 one by Agnès Varda, which explore the subject of the singer and actress Jane Birkin.
In his review of Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winning Titane, Anthony Hawley considers the ways in which the film challenges the viewer to consider the path ahead, about “the future of our species.”
In an interview with Kelley Dong, Payal Kapadia discusses the making of her debut feature A Night of Knowing Nothing and the relationship between politics, love, and cinema.
Kelley Dong reports back from Toronto, which presented a weak, pared down pandemic-era edition that nevertheless had some highlights, including the latest by Terence Davies and Masaaki Yuasa.
Rachel Michelle Fernandes locates One Shot that encapsulates Claire Denis in her film U.S. Go Home.
To mark the arrival of Iván Zulueta’s Arrebato in America 4o years after its release, Elizabeth Horkley examines and uncovers the dark and banal truths at the heart of the film.
And THE HOUR OF LATERAL THINKING ON CANDY| October 10/11, midnight-1 am
CAT RADIO CAFÉ: FILMMAKERS LYNNE SACHS AND LIZZIE OLESKER ON THE WASHING \SOCIETY
On tonight’s show, we’ll be joined by filmmaker Lynne Sachs and theater and performance maker and labor organizer Lizzie Olesker to discuss their 2018 film, The Washing Society, and to celebrate the debut of eight of Lynne Sachs’s films on the prestigious list of Criterion Classics. The Criterion series relates to feminism, complicated parent-child relationships, female adolescence, Vietnam, the Holocaust and historic labor movements. Both The Washing Society and last year’s remarkable Film About a Father Who are among them.
Lynne Sachs’s cinematic works defy genre through the use of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate connection between personal observations and broader historical experiences. She has made 40 films which have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center, the Walker, the Getty, New York Film Festival and Sundance. In 2021, Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at Maysles Documentary Center awarded Sachs for her body of work. Her first book of poetry, “Year by Year Poems, was published by Tender Buttons Press in 2019. In 2020 and 2021, she taught film and poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque, Flowchart Foundation and Hunter.
Lizzie Olesker has been making theater and performances in New York City for several decades, reflecting on the politics and poetry of everyday experience. She’s created a series of solo pieces and plays around different aspects of domestic work, recently Infinite Miniatures (a solo piece with objects at a kitchen table) and Five Stages of Grief (a play starring a home care attendant and a ghost). Olesker’s first film, The Washing Society, which she co-directed with Lynne Sachs, grew out of their site-specific performance piece in New York City laundromats, Every Fold Matters. She teaches documentary theater at the New School and playwriting at NYU. She is also an organizer and adjunct representative with UAW Local 7902, and part of its movement to organize higher education and other professional workers.
