Tag: film festivals

August 24, 2021

The following is a press release from Film at Lincoln Center:

Film at Lincoln Center announces Currents for the 59th New York Film Festival (September 24 – October 10, 2021). 

“Currents is the section of the festival that attests to cinema’s continued capacity for reinvention,” said Dennis Lim, NYFF Director of Programming. “The features and shorts in this year’s program take many forms—everything from reimagined fables to archival experiments—and you’ll find some of the most personal films in the festival here, as well as some of the most political. We hope that audiences will share the sense of surprise and discovery that we experienced in putting together this lineup.” 

The Currents section includes 15 features and 36 short films, representing 27 countries, and complements the Main Slate, tracing a more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices. The section presents a diverse offering of short and feature-length productions by filmmakers and artists working at the vanguard of the medium. The Opening Night selection is Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’s (Arabian Nights, NYFF53) The Tsugua Diaries, a beguiling pandemic-era tale about three housemates in lockdown—one of several films in the section responding to the current health crisis through varying lenses; others include Shengze Zhu’s A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces, a meditation on urban spaces before and after the COVID outbreak, and Denis Côté’s Social Hygiene, an absurdist comedy in which characters exchange barbs from a humorous distance. 

A pair of features make their world festival premieres: Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam’s Prism, which explores how racism remains entrenched in film culture via the biases of movie camera lighting; and pioneering film essayist Artavazd Peleshian’s Nature, an uncanny montage of humanity’s harmony and conflict with the natural world. Other nonfiction highlights include Wang Qiong’s reflection on her fractured family and China’s one-child policy in All About My Sisters; Vincent Meessen’s Just a Movement, a portrait of artist, Marxist, and anti-colonialist organizer Omar Blondin Diop; Jean-Gabriel Périot’s chronicle of the French working class over the past 70 years, Returning to Reims; Rhayne Vermette’s evocative film illustrating her native Manitoba and the Métis community, Ste. Anne; and Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing, which won the Cannes Golden Eye award for best documentary. Also screening are Kyoshi Sugita’s impressionistic poetry adaptation, Haruhara-san’s Recorder; Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s folkloric fiction feature debut, The Tale of King Crab; NYFF56 Projections alum Ted Fendt’s 16mm-shot Outside Noise; Kiro Russo’s South American cityscape, El Gran Movimiento; and Claire Simon’s hybrid film, I Want to Talk About Duras, a portrait of experimental filmmaker Marguerite Duras as recalled by her partner. Simon, Meessen, Périot, Zhu, and Rigo de Righi & Zoppis have previously shown work in the annual FLC festival Art of the Real. 

Currents also showcases eight shorts programs, with work from notable new talents including two new films by British artist and filmmaker Morgan Quaintance; the latest work in a trilogy of experimental narrative shorts by Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand; a mesmerizing in-camera collage by the Mexican Indigenous filmmaking collective Los Ingrávidos; a ruminative essay on colonial traces in archival photographs from Philippine filmmaker Shireen Seno; Virgil Vernier with his thought provoking examination of the 2005 riots in Parisian suburbs; as well as artist Tiffany Sia’s incisive video essay on the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

Artists returning to NYFF this year include Kevin Jerome Everson, whose May June July documents the summer of 2020; Matías Piñeiro, collaborating with Galician co-director Lois Patiño for their beguiling film Sycrorax; Ericka Beckman, whose work was featured in a retrospective program in NYFF56; Tomonari Nishikawa with a new live projection performance for 16mm; and NYFF59 Main Slate filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Additional returning filmmakers include Allison Chhorn, Zachary Epcar, Eliane Esther Bots, Luise Donschen, Shun Ikezoe, Richard Tuohy, Vika Kirchenbauer, Ross Meckfessel, Guillermo Moncayo, and Aykan Safoğlu.

The Currents selection committee, chaired by Dennis Lim, includes Florence Almozini, Aily Nash, and Tyler Wilson. Nash and Wilson are the head shorts programmers for NYFF. Shelby Shaw and Madeline Whittle are programming assistants for short films, and Almudena Escobar López, Manny Lage-Valera, Marius Hrdy, Vikram Murthi, Maxwell Paparella, and Mariana Sánchez Bueno are submissions screeners. Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, Leo Goldsmith, Rachael Rakes, and Gina Telaroli serve as NYFF program advisors.

NYFF59 will feature in-person screenings, as well as select outdoor and virtual events. In response to distributor and filmmaker partners and in light of festivals returning and theaters reopening across the country, NYFF will not offer virtual screenings for this year’s edition. 

Proof of vaccination will be required for all staff, audiences, and filmmakers at NYFF59 venues. Additionally, NYFF59 will adhere to a comprehensive series of health and safety policies in coordination with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and state and city medical experts, while adapting as necessary to the current health crisis. Visit filmlinc.org/safety for more information. 

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema and takes place September 24 – October 10, 2021. An annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture since 1963, the festival continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. 

NYFF59 tickets will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 7 at noon ET, with early-access opportunities for FLC members and pass holders prior to this date. Experience all of Currents with an All-Access Pass, available for $140. Learn more here. Support of the New York Film Festival benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to promote the art and craft of cinema.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Currents Features

Opening Night
The Tsugua Diaries
Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, 2021, Portugal, 102m
Portuguese and Romanian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The rigorous process of moviemaking meets the torpor of pandemic life in this beguiling new film co-directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes (Arabian Nights, NYFF53). A daily journal that unfolds in revelatory reverse order, this playful rug-puller begins by surveying the mundane routines of three housemates (Carloto Cotta, Crista Alfaiate, and João Nunes Monteiro) living in rural peace during the COVID lockdown: impromptu dance parties, cleaning, building a backyard butterfly house. Soon, we discover that there’s more going on beyond the limits of the camera frame. Cockeyed, funny, and slyly meta-cinematic, The Tsugua Diaries, lovingly shot on 16mm, demonstrates the possibility of artistic creation out of sheer will.

All About My Sisters
Wang Qiong, 2021, USA, 175m
Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In her astonishing feature debut, Wang Qiong documents with unflinching and harrowing honesty her own fractured family, gradually revealing the personal and psychological effects of China’s one-child policy on the individual, the family unit, and women in society at large. At the center of the film is her sister, Jin, who remains profoundly affected by her biological parents’ abandonment of her as a baby after attempting to abort her. Adopted by her aunt and uncle, Jin resumed living with her birth parents as a teenager, yet the family remains embroiled in a legacy of trauma. Filming over the course of seven years, Wang moves far beyond the diaristic, capturing moments of vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry; in excavating her own difficult history, she establishes herself as a major new voice in nonfiction cinema. An Icarus Films release.

El Gran Movimiento / The Great Movement
Kiro Russo, 2021, Bolivia/France/Qatar/Switzerland, 85m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Expanding on the hybrid narrative of his remarkable 2016 film Dark Skull, Kiro Russo has mounted a monumental, gently mystical portrait of the contemporary central South American cityscape and those who work within its bowels and environs. Set in the alternately harsh and beautiful terrain of La Paz, Bolivia and its surrounding rural areas, El Gran Movimiento follows a young miner as he looks for work alongside his friends, even as he begins to descend into a mysterious sickness. With its marvelous long-lens zoom work and increasingly dynamic, rhythmic editing, Russo’s film is a hypnotic journey into a psychological space that touches upon the supernatural.

Haruhara-san’s Recorder
Kyoshi Sugita, 2021, Japan, 120m
Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Kyoshi Sugita creates an evocative portrait of a young woman’s interior world through impressionistic action rather than psychology. Though we learn little about her, the central character, played by Chika Araki, is marvelously present: she rents an apartment on her own, gets a job in a café, and begins to find peace after a recent tragic event. Fixing his patient camera on meetings with friends, family, and strangers, lunches and teatime, and occurrences both mundane and mystical, Sugita alights upon surprising, inexplicable, and frequently moving moments that hint at the spiritual in everyday life. Adapted from a tanka (a short poem) by Naoko Higashi, Sugita’s film, which won the Grand Prize at FIDMarseille, employs the cinematic form to express the otherwise inexpressible.

I Want to Talk About Duras
Claire Simon, 2021, France, 95m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

French director Claire Simon, a prolific maker of fiction and documentary films, unites the two forms in her surprising latest, a precise, enveloping portrait of the complex romantic relationship between epochal experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and her much younger, homosexual partner, Yann Andréa. Dramatized as a pair of dialogues based entirely on transcripts from a 1982 interview between Andréa (played on screen by Swann Arlaud) and journalist Michèle Manceaux (Emmanuelle Devos, an expert interrogator and a mesmerizing listener), Simon’s film underlines the sexual imbalances and power plays that defined their fraught love life while maintaining the mysteries and ambiguities that marked Duras’s singular artistic corpus. 

Just a Movement
Vincent Meessen, 2021, Belgium/France, 110m
Mandarin, French, and Wolof with English subtitles

In the late ’60s, Niger-born Marxist intellectual Omar Blondin Diop became a central organizer and communicator of anti-colonialist political theory as a student in France and as a researcher in Senegal. Diop died at the age of 26 in prison after being arrested by the Senegalese government, his suspicious death considered by many to be a likely assassination. He’s left an impression on generations of audiences with his appearance as a Maoist revolutionary in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise, and it is this film that serves as the backbone text, providing aesthetic and thematic inspiration for Vincent Meessen’s freewheeling yet highly disciplined documentary—a film about its own making as much as it is a visual evocation and recapitulation of Diop’s political philosophies.

Nature
Artavazd Peleshian, 2020, France/Germany/Armenia, 63m
World Festival Premiere

Legendary Armenian visual essayist Artavazd Peleshian’s first feature film in nearly 30 years is an epic return to his major theme: humanity in harmony and conflict with the natural world. Sublime and terrifying, the forces of Nature are captured in a relentless montage of found disaster videos—of capsizing icebergs, inky black dust clouds, ferocious winds, pitiless floodwaters. Rendered in stark black and white and subject to the distinctive mode of montage that Peleshian has developed over six decades, these images take on an uncanny mix of timelessness and immediacy, imparting an overwhelming experience of nature’s vast, destructive processes of regeneration, and of humanity’s precarious existence amid constantly unfolding catastrophe.

Screening with:

2 Pasolini
Andrei Ujică, 2021, France, 10m
Italian with English subtitles
World Premiere
Andrei Ujică’s 2 Pasolini follows the Italian auteur and his theological advisor, Don Andrea Carraro, on a trip through 1960s Palestine to scout locations for his 1964 biblical masterpiece The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Through candid archival footage and surprising juxtapositions, the film tracks both Pasolini’s journey and Christ’s—across the desert, to the shores of a raging sea, and beyond.

A Night of Knowing Nothing
Payal Kapadia, 2021, France/India, 96m
Bengali and Hindi with English subtitles

Through a series of letters read aloud to an absent lover, we learn about the fears, desires, and philosophical identity of a young woman named L, a student at the Film and Television Institute of India. Through these words, and via the documentary images collected by her and her peers of contemporary Indian youths engaged in university life, writer-director Payal Kapadia has constructed a brilliantly fragmentary work of witnessing. A Night of Knowing Nothing—winner of the Golden Eye award for best documentary at this year’s Cannes Film Festival—is a testament to the inseparability of life, film, politics, and dreams, while functioning as an essential portrait of the ongoing struggle for resistance from discrimination. 

Outside Noise
Ted Fendt, 2021, Germany/South Korea/Austria, 61m
German and English with English subtitles
North American Premiere

The latest feature from Philadelphian micro-independent treasure Ted Fendt (Classical Period, NYFF56) finds the filmmaker, writer, projectionist, and translator in a contemplative mode, shooting for the first time abroad. With his customary mix of narrative restraint and intellectual curiosity, Fendt follows a small group of young women through Berlin and Vienna over the course of several months, particularly Daniela, who has just returned from traveling in New York and is dealing with a bout of insomnia. Shot on 16mm and glowing with natural light, Outside Noise—co-written by Fendt and his two lead actors, Daniela Zahlner and Mia Sellmann—is an authentic depiction of the tremors and pleasures of the in-between years of our early thirties.

Prism
Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam, 2021, Belgium, 78m
French and English with English subtitles
World Premiere

Among the many ways that racism is deeply entrenched in our film culture is a technical one: the lighting for movie cameras has always been calibrated for white skin, with other production tools reflecting the same bias throughout cinema history. Three filmmakers collectively explore the literal, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of that reality in this discursive, playful, and profound work of nonfiction. In a series of thematically linked, provocative discussions and interrogations, Eléonore Yameogo from Burkina Faso, Belgian An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam from Cameroon chart the making of their own film, while exploring the cinematic construction of whiteness and how this relates to power, privilege, and the myth of objectivity. An Icarus Films release.

Returning to Reims
Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2021, France, 83m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In just over 80 minutes, filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot provides a fleet, thorough, and incisive sociological examination of the French working class over the past 70 years. Loosely adapting Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, in which the author’s journey back to his hometown in northern France became a reckoning with his family’s history and politics, Périot weaves his own nonfiction tapestry, using decades’ worth of artfully deployed archival footage, film clips, and TV news reports to illustrate the rise, fall, and hopeful rebirth of the country’s proletariat, as well as how social identity is gradually constructed. Narrated by Adèle Haenel and structured in two distinct halves—the personal and the political—Periot’s sensationally edited film is an urgent reminder that the moral health of a nation is dependent on how it treats its citizens.

A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
Shengze Zhu, 2021, USA, 87m
Without dialogue, featuring Chinese and English text
U.S. Premiere

Documentarian Shengze Zhu, who was born and raised in China and studied filmmaking in the United States, contrasts mid-pandemic surveillance video of Wuhan’s empty streets with footage she’d captured before the COVID outbreak in this becalmed, wordless meditation on the vulnerability and resilience of urban spaces. Interspersed with her exquisitely composed images of life and hope along the Yangtze River are pieces of on-screen text translating the poignant, sometimes wrenching letters written to loved ones affected by illness and death. A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces is a work of dissolution and regeneration, architecture and landscape, a portrait of a city and a world in transition.

Social Hygiene
Denis Côté, 2021, Canada, 76m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The versatile and mischievous Quebecois filmmaker Denis Côté (A Skin So Soft, NYFF55) has made an absurdist comedy that’s incidentally perfect for the pandemic era. Constructed as a series of frank and often hilarious repartees between an insolent petty thief named Antonin and a succession of largely fed-up women—who range from sister to wife to lover to tax collector—Côté’s film situates its characters in elegant outdoor tableaux in the Quebec countryside, keeping a safe, proper, and humorous distance from one another as they verbally parry and thrust in static long takes. Unexpectedly traversing time, with characters appearing in either period or contemporary dress depending on the context of their conversation, Social Hygiene is a sly reminder that our present-day culture of moral confrontation was ever thus.

Ste. Anne
Rhayne Vermette, 2021, Canada, 80m
English and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

In her evocative, collage-like 16mm film, Rhayne Vermette immerses the viewer in the sounds, textures, and atmosphere of her native Manitoba to limn the outer edges of a twilight-toned narrative centering on a long-missing young woman’s unexpected return to her indigenous Métis community. Unbeholden to temporal or structural boundaries, Vermette uses Renée’s reappearance as the anchor point for a work of dreams and memory. Shot over the course of 14 months, incorporating scripted and improvised elements, Ste. Anne is as much a fragmentary portrait of the seasons as it is about the people whose lives are dictated in part by nature’s flow.

The Tale of King Crab
Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, 2021, Italy/Argentina/France, 99m
Italian and Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere

This rich, engrossing fiction feature debut from documentary filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis takes storytelling itself as its subject. Based on a legendary figure about whom the filmmakers first heard while making their previous collaboration, 2015’s Il Solengo, this rousing, bifurcated tale follows the improbable adventures of Luciano (a bewitching Gabriele Silli), a village outcast in late-19th-century rural Italy. In the film’s first half, set in the countryside near Rome, his life is undone by alcohol, forbidden love, and an escalating quarrel with a local aristocrat; in the second, Luciano is in the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, hunting for a mythic treasure with the help of a compass-like crab. Rigo de Righi and Zoppis have created a highly unconventional narrative of redemption, alternating images of grandeur and folkloric idiosyncrasy. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Currents Shorts

Program 1: Acts of Seeing 

Day Is Done
Zhang Dalei, 2021, China, 24m
Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere

A miniature portrait of a family’s multiple generations, Day Is Done follows a young film student—on the eve of his departure to study in Russia—as he accompanies his parents on a rare visit to his grandfather in Inner Mongolia. Delicately observed and minutely detailed, Zhang’s film captures the subtle harmonies and discordances of the different generations occupying, for a brief time, the same space and the same moment of calm.

38
Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand, 2021, USA, 23m
World Premiere

Vivid interruptions of sound and images fragment the psychic landscape of a 38-year-old woman who becomes obsessed with the social media presence of the young woman who broke up her relationship. The latest entry in Chew and Durand’s ongoing examination of the embodied experience of our hybrid online-IRL existence, 38 mines contemporary life’s nuanced exchanges between longing and looking, voyeurism and the desire to be seen.

ELLE
Luise Donschen, 2021, Germany, 14m
English and Japanese with English subtitles
World Premiere

Hovering between the commonplace and the mysterious, ELLE follows a father and daughter on an early spring visit to the Kyoto Botanical Gardens. At once highly formal and thrumming with life, the liminal space of the Garden becomes the stage for a series of fleeting encounters, which director Luise Donschen explores with a precise sensitivity to the seen and the unseen.

Sycorax
Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro, 2021, Spain/Portugal, 21m
Portuguese and Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Mother of Caliban and imprisoner of Ariel, Sycorax remains offstage for the duration of The Tempest, dismissed by Prospero as an evil sorceress. In this collaboration between Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro, she becomes the central subject, as a director (played by Piñeiro regular Agustina Muñoz), with the help of local women from a village in the Azores, attempts to give a face and voice to this silenced character. 

Program 2: Critical Mass

Do Not Circulate
Tiffany Sia, 2021, Hong Kong, 17m
World Premiere

The timeline and vertical aspect ratio of social media set the formal parameters for Tiffany Sia’s essay film, which follows the image trail of a single event in Hong Kong from the 2019 protests. Reckoning with this event, a relentless voiceover reframes archival media salvaged in the midst of disappearance and erasure, drawing upon a traumatic media memory, summoning ghosts and occult forces alongside disinformation and rumor.

Dreams Under Confinement
Christopher Harris, 2020 USA, 3m

Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, the prison and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape.

In Flow of Words
Eliane Esther Bots, 2021, Netherlands, 22m
Bosnian, Croatian, English, and Serbian with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In Eliane Esther Bots’s film, three interpreters for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia share their experiences with translating the testimony of witnesses and victims of genocide. But how can an interpreter—who is so physically and vocally central to the tribunal’s proceedings—remain an objective medium for testimony? How can they provide a simple conduit for meaning, stripped of the original voice’s incommunicable sounds of grief, sympathy, and anger?

All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes
Haig Aivazian, 2021, Lebanon, 18m
English, Arabic, and French with English subtitles
Provocatively scrambling geography and chronology, Haig Aivazian’s densely associative montage writes a history of illumination as it intersects with the technological evolution of state and police control. From New York to Paris to Beirut, from the origins of whale oil lanterns to the era of predictive policing, this video assemblage accounts for the use of light and visibility in the service of social management, and creates space for a counter-optics of opacity and resistance.

Kindertotenlieder
Virgil Vernier, 2021, France, 27m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Through television news bulletins, Kindertotenlieder revisits the 2005 riots in France, sparked by the deaths of two teenagers from the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sur-Bois, who were killed during a police chase. Here, the static formal conventions of TV news—vox pop interviews, B-roll of burning cars, outraged neighbors—slowly reveal a subtler narrative beneath the surface: one of neglect, oppression, and ethnic and class divisions.

Program 3: Free Form

Personality Test
Justin Jinsoo Kim, 2021, South Korea/USA, 8m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A walk in the woods, an encounter with an animal, a body of water. On the soundtrack, a woman’s voice responds to an internet personality quiz, while grainy, inkjet printouts—animated and collaged by the filmmaker—approximate the imagined scenes. Distortions in the reproduction of word and picture accompany the blur of memory and fantasy, past experience and desire.

Dog Star Descending
Aykan Safoğlu, 2020, Germany/Turkey, 12m
German with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Images and objects warp under the scrolling gaze of a scanner bed. Photographs, shredded and reassembled, spark reminiscences in the artist’s voiceover, which relates the intertwined stories of a family trip to the island of Imbros and of his education at a bilingual German-Turkish public school. The coiling timeline of present experience overlaps with other stories detailing the complex intersection of these two cultures, and of personal and intergenerational memories.

Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse
Pablo Martín Weber, 2020, Argentina, 22m
Spanish with English subtitles

Pablo Martín Weber’s video essay forges a link between the creative abundance of computer imaging and artificial intelligence and the speculative cosmologies of Philip Henry Gosse, a 19th-century naturalist and advocate for science. Just as Gosse became obsessed with reconciling the geological record with the Biblical account of the Earth’s creation, Weber attempts to understand the digital image’s new world of infinitely malleable data.

(No Subject)
Guillermo Moncayo, 2021, France/Colombia, 29m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A film about a zookeeper and his renewed relationship with his estranged daughter is fragmented and interrupted by the filmmaker’s own voice, reading an email to his sister about the roots of this story in their own shared history with an absent father. Through memory, dreams, and fiction, (No Subject) probes the various ways of representing the past in order to process and break free of it.

Program 4: Still Life

THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER
Vika Kirchenbauer, 2021, Germany, 15m
U.S. Premiere

THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER. Courtesy of Vika Kirchenbauer.

A collage of ephemera both personal and public, The Capacity for Adequate Anger traverses the distance between present and past in an examination of the artist’s relationship to class identity. Through voiceover and flashes of imagery—family photographs; the ’90s media representation of AIDS; Marie Antoinette; a gender-ambiguous anime character—Kirchenbauer’s autobiographical video contemplates the sociological dimensions of emotions from shame to envy to rage, and what forms of political agency they make possible or impede.

A Human Certainty
Morgan Quaintance, 2021, UK, 21m
U.S. Premiere
Voices from the past haunt A Human Certainty, whose entangled threads link its multifarious narratives of suffering: a recent break-up; the romantic sweep of mid-century pop music; Weegee’s crime-scene photography; and images taken by the artist’s grandmother, a spirit medium, on her travels in Asia and Africa. Here, Quaintance’s montage becomes a codec for assembling these disparate threads, and for making sense of mortality and loss in all its forms.

Home When You Return
Carl Elsaesser, 2021, USA, 30m
World Premiere
Superimposing the stories of two women—the filmmaker’s late grandmother and the amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin—Home When You Return explores the psychogeographies of mourning through a variety of modes, from documentary to melodrama. Emptied and put up for sale following its matriarch’s passing, the family home becomes the site of a winding tour through polymorphic representations of the past in media and memory.

Program 5: Pattern Language

Cutting the Mushroom
Mike Crane, 2021 USA, 22m
World Premiere
An email correspondence between the filmmaker and a mysterious online art dealer in the Baltic develops into a strangely intimate exchange about art and authenticity, media of questionable provenance, digressive Wikipedia research, and—to borrow the title of Hans Richter’s 1947 film—dreams that money can buy. 

Estuary
Ross Meckfessel, 2021, USA, 12m
World Premiere

Inescapable forces intersect in Ross Meckfessel’s Estuary when the increasingly unreal landscape of everyday life is invaded by the hyperreality of computer graphics and AI social-media influencers. The analog and the digital vie and blend with each other as Nature, dissected and repackaged, reemerges in pixel form.

The Canyon
Zachary Epcar, 2021, USA, 15m
The boxy architecture and cordoned greenery of luxury housing developments populate a series of uniform urban spaces, which Zachary Epcar depicts as a sequence of precise frames, stock gestures, and preprogrammed phrases, drifting into entropy. What wayward flows, what eruptions of energy, can be found beneath the flat surfaces and grid-like structures of The Canyon?

Reach Capacity
Ericka Beckman, 2020, USA, 15m
U.S. Premiere
In Reach Capacity, the rapacious world of the urban real-estate market takes on the form of a playfully obsessive, yet violently deterministic system. Combining mechanical musical numbers, digital objects, and board-game parameters, Ericka Beckman converts lower Manhattan into a giant Monopoly board upon which real-estate speculators and contracted labor compete for dominance in a programmatic dance. To see the future, follow the money.

Program 6: Camera Lucida

Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical
Rhea Storr, 2020, UK, 10m
World Premiere

Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical. Courtesy of Rhea Storr.

The music, movements, and oral histories of Junkanoo—a distinctive Bahamian cultural medium in the form of a street carnival—set the rhythm of Rhea Storr’s video. Located in this vernacular tradition is an emergent Black radical imagination, one that envisions an Afrofuturism of the present, which the film reworks and remixes.

Strange Object
Miranda Pennell, 2020, UK, 15m
U.S. Premiere
Aerial photographs from 1920 of a colonized territory in the Horn of Africa provide the material for Miranda Pennell’s essay film, a meditation on image-making, erasure, and the writing of history. The abstract patterns, blurry forms, and disorienting scales of these photographs and their warped transposition into descriptive text testify to an expansive project of imperial capture, a doubling of the world in imagery and language.

To Pick a Flower
Shireen Seno, 2021, Philippines, 17m
North American Premiere
Shireen Seno’s video essay explores the transformation and commodification of nature through archival photographs from the American colonial occupation of the Philippines in the first half of the 20th century. These images testify to what the voiceover calls “the sticky relationship between humans and nature and their entanglements with empire”—an ambivalent dependence on natural resources that drives the colonial project and implicates photography, with its concurrent processes of preservation, transmutation, and destruction.

South
Morgan Quaintance, 2020, UK, 28m
Superimposing the working-class movements of Chicago’s South Side in the 1960s and South London in the 1980s, South draws upon alternative media archives and cultural ephemera to form a creative diasporic geography of anti-racism and liberation—one that poses the question of how to forge relations and solidarity across time, cultural divisions, and intra-class antagonisms.

Program 7: New Sensations

May June July
Kevin Jerome Everson, 2021, USA, 8m
North American Premiere
Kinetic and fragmentary, May June July is a document of the summer of 2020, distilled through Kevin Jerome Everson’s distinctively contrapuntal audiovisual assemblage. It is also a dance film: the camera enacts balletic encounters, first with a roller-skater in the street against a sonic background of protest chants and drumming, then among flowers and fireflies against the inky black of night.

Grandma’s Scissors
Erica Sheu, 2021, Taiwan/USA, 6m
U.S. Premiere
Guided by the words of her grandmother, the filmmaker explores the synesthetic properties of memory. Images give way to haptic experience via a range of textures—of sea, celluloid, paper, and pencil traces, of raindrops drifting in and out of focus—linking the arts of textiles and montage into a shared artisanal tradition.

Blind Body
Allison Chhorn, 2021, Australia, 15m
Khmer with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
As abstract shapes come into focus, dim memories surface. With Blind Body, Allison Chhorn offers an impressionistic portrait of her grandmother Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Partially blind, Kim spends her days in a mostly sonic and textural world, in which the sound of rain, the voices of Khmer radio, and distant birdsong summon the sensations of a lost homeland.

If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever)
Hope Strickland, 2021, UK, 8m
North American Premiere
Wake and soil, skin and voice: Hope Strickland’s film locates a legacy of slavery and colonial exploitation beneath the archive’s official chronicle, in the deep historical memory of the body. If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever) sings an alternate history of resistance—familial, elemental, and sensuous.

What is it that you said?
Shun Ikezoe, 2021, Japan, 20m
Japanese with English subtitles
World Premiere
The sun’s path outside the window. The slow cycle of the seasons. A dead cat found behind a curtain. A neighbor yelling while dreaming. Images, sounds, spoken and written text try to correspond, gently interrupting each other. Shun Ikezoe’s What is it that you said? tracks the quiet movement of light and time, marking the progress of a year of small movements and intimate, imperfect exchanges.

In and Out a Window
Richard Tuohy, 2021, Australia, 16mm, 13m
U.S. Premiere
The literal frame of a window overlooking a small garden becomes the scene through which Richard Tuohy’s film exploits the myriad plastic potentialities of the cinematic frame. Immersive and stroboscopic, In and Out a Window offers its own variations on cinema’s mechanical segmentations of space and time, opening up a portal to undiscovered dimensions and new phenomenologies.

Night Colonies
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021, Thailand, 14m
Thai with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Night Colonies is a microscopic rumination on the unobserved passage of time. Humming fluorescent lights illuminate a bedroom at night, drawing Chiang Mai’s subtropical nightlife into a tiny, intimate, and temporary cohabitation—a buzzing and bustling ecosystem of insects and lizards, nested within the human domestic space.

Program 8: Vibrant Matter

earthearthearth
Daïchi Saïto, 2021, Canada, 35mm, 30m
U.S. Premiere
The hand-processed celluloid of earthearthearth explodes with oranges, purples, and aquamarines, transforming the sweeping desert mountain ranges of the Andes into a world of green-gold dawns, vermilion sands, and dense, granular atmospheres. Accompanied by an undulating improvised soundtrack by Jason Sharp, Saïto’s film depicts an alien, irradiated world that is at once interior, cosmic, and fiercely material.

Tonalli
Los Ingrávidos, 2021, Mexico, 16m
U.S. Premiere
Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.

Fictions
Manuela de Laborde, 2021, Mexico/Germany, 16mm, 22m
North American Premiere
Fictions conjures representations as if imagined from the perspective of the plant world. ‘Lithic’ lifeforms made out of ceramic and organic matter were filmed in motion by a mobile of film cameras. Layered in Laborde’s superimpositions, these objects become performers alongside other images—sunlight through jungle flora, scintillating film grain—interacting in their own fictive world of pulsating matter.

Six Seventy-Two Variations, Variation 1
Tomonari Nishikawa, 2021, USA, 16mm, 25m
World Premiere
In this live projection performance for 16mm film, Tomonari Nishikawa explores the material specificity of the cinematic apparatus through a real-time manipulation of its physical elements. Scratching directly onto the emulsion of a looping filmstrip in the midst of projection, Nishikawa creates animated abstractions in a pattern of horizontal lines, and also generates the film’s score, a percussive throbbing of noise.

August 19, 2021

The following is a press release from Film at Lincoln Center:

Film at Lincoln Center announces Spotlight for the 59th New York Film Festival (September 24 – October 10, 2021). The Spotlight section is NYFF’s showcase of the season’s most anticipated and significant films. Early ticket access to Spotlight selections and more are available with a NYFF59 Festival Pass, available through this Sunday, August 22 only.

“Our Spotlight section is a new part of our reshaped New York Film Festival, a place that this year encompasses a range of cinema, new and old,” said Eugene Hernandez, Director of the New York Film Festival. “Of the new work, we’re showcasing a selection of anticipated films (and talent) from recent festivals (Wes & company! Olivia! Timmy! Jane & Charlotte! Joaquin! and more), while also looking back at our roots, celebrating the history of NYFF and New York City’s film culture by shining a special light on Amos Vogel. We hope that our Spotlight section, in year two, will again engage, enlighten, and entertain!”

Among the highlights are Denis Villeneuve’s highly anticipated adaptation of Dune; Academy Award–nominated director Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle, a visually extraordinary tale about a shy teenager who becomes an online sensation as a pop star; Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a warmhearted radio journalist; Wes Anderson’s latest, The French Dispatch, showcasing his unmistakable cinematic style with a cast of familiar collaborators; directorial debuts from Charlotte Gainsbourg, profiling her legendary mother Jane Birkin in Jane By Charlotte, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, adapting Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, with a brilliant performance by Oscar-winner Olivia Colman; veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio’s Marx Can Wait, a heart-wrenching examination of the legacy of his twin brother’s suicide, on the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza; and Red Rocket, Sean Baker’s newest depiction of contemporary America as a playground for hustlers and con men, set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election. 

NYFF59 also pays tribute to the centenary of late film programmer and festival co-founder Amos Vogel—who offered the city “films you cannot see elsewhere,” and whose uncompromising dedication to the medium’s radical possibilities inspired NYC film culture as it exists today—with a special Spotlight sidebar. Vogel’s wide-ranging curatorial career spanned his many years running Cinema 16, America’s most influential film society; his foundational work at Lincoln Center; his time at Grove Press; and his classic study Film as a Subversive Art, which will soon be reissued by The Film Desk. FLC’s tribute focuses on the NYFF period, bookended by screenings devoted to his work before and after his involvement with the festival, including films from Glauber Rocha, John Huston, and trailblazers of the Czech New Wave; a program from NYFF5 sidebar The Social Cinema in America, featuring Lebert Bethune’s Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom, Santiago Álvarez’s dispatch from postrevolutionary Cuba, Now, and David Neuman and Ed Pincus’s snapshot of Civil Rights-era Mississippi, Black Natchez; and works from the era’s burgeoning avant-garde scene, such as Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and a world premiere restoration of Robert Frerck’s Nebula II. 

The NYFF59 Spotlight retrospective will be followed by tributes at repertory cinemas across New York City—Anthology Film Archives, Film Forum, Light Industry, Metrograph, MoMA, and the Museum of the Moving Image—in an unprecedented collaboration. 

The Spotlight section is programmed by Eugene Hernandez and Dennis Lim. NYFF’s Amos Vogel centenary celebration is organized by Thomas Beard, Dennis Lim, and Tyler Wilson.

NYFF59 will feature in-person screenings, as well as select outdoor and virtual events. In response to distributor and filmmaker partners and in light of festivals returning and theaters reopening across the country, NYFF will not offer virtual screenings for this year’s edition. 

Proof of vaccination will be required for all staff, audiences, and filmmakers at NYFF59 venues. Additionally, NYFF59 will adhere to a comprehensive series of health and safety policies in coordination with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and state and city medical experts, while adapting as necessary to the current health crisis. Visit filmlinc.org for more information. 

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema and takes place September 24 – October 10, 2021. An annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture since 1963, the festival continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. 

Festival Passes are now on sale through this Sunday, August 22 only. NYFF59 tickets will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 7 at noon ET, with early-access opportunities for FLC members and pass holders prior to this date. Learn more here. Support of the New York Film Festival benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to promote the art and craft of cinema.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Belle
Mamoru Hosoda, 2021, Japan, 121m
Japanese with English subtitles

In his densely beautiful, eye-popping animated spectacle, Academy Award–nominated director Mamoru Hosoda (Mirai) tells the exhilarating story of a shy teenager who becomes an online sensation as a princess of pop. Still grieving over a childhood tragedy, Suzu has a difficult time singing in public or talking to her crush at school, yet when she takes on the persona of her glittering, pink-haired avatar, Belle, in the parallel virtual universe known as the “U,” her insecurities magically disappear. As her star begins to rise, Belle/Suzu finds herself drawn to another “U” fan favorite—a scary but soulful monster whose “real” identity, like Belle’s, becomes a source of fascination for legions. Both a knowing riff on the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale and a moving commentary on the duality of contemporary living, Belle is a thrilling journey into the matrix and a deeply human coming-of-age story, packed with unforgettable images and dazzlingly styled characters. A GKIDS release.

C’mon C’mon
Mike Mills, 2021, USA, 108m

After gracing audiences with Beginners and 20th Century Women (NYFF54), writer-director Mike Mills returns with another warm, insightful, and gratifyingly askew portrait of American family life. A soulful Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a kindhearted radio journalist deep into a project in which he interviews children across the U.S. about our world’s uncertain future. His sister, Viv (a marvelously intuitive Gaby Hoffmann), asks him to watch her 9-year-old son, Jesse (Woody Norman, in one of the most affecting breakout child performances in years), while she tends to the child’s father, who’s suffering from mental health issues. After agreeing, Johnny finds himself connecting with his nephew in ways he hadn’t expected, ultimately taking Jesse with him on a journey from Los Angeles to New York to New Orleans. Anchored by three remarkable actors, C’mon C’mon is a gentle yet impeccably crafted drama about coming to terms with personal trauma and historical legacies. An A24 release.

Dune
Denis Villeneuve, 2021, USA, 155m

A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, who must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet’s exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence—a commodity capable of unlocking humanity’s greatest potential—only those who can conquer their fear will survive. Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, Chang Chen, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem lead the all-star ensemble in visionary filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel. A Warner Bros. Pictures release.

​​The French Dispatch
Wes Anderson, 2021, USA, 107m
English and French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Wes Anderson’s unmistakable cinematic style proves delightfully suited to periodical format in this missive from the eponymous expatriate journal, published on behalf of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun from the picturesque French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Brought to press by a corps of idiosyncratic correspondents, the issue includes reports on a criminal artist and his prison guard muse, student revolutionaries, and a memorable dinner with a police commissioner and his personal chef. As brimming with finely tuned texture as a juicy issue of a certain New York–based magazine to which the film pays homage, The French Dispatch features precision work from a full masthead of collaborators (including Bill Murray, Timothée Chalamet, Tilda Swinton, Benicio del Toro, Frances McDormand, and Jeffrey Wright), each propagating inventive dedication to detail. Anderson’s deadpan whimsy is complemented by the film’s palpable sense of nostalgia. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Jane by Charlotte
Charlotte Gainsbourg, 2021, France, 86m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In creating a documentary portrait of a parent, as actor Charlotte Gainsbourg does in her directorial debut, one could overly flatter the subject or iron out the tough creases. Gainsbourg avoids these traps in her wise and wondrous film about her legendary mother, the singer and actress Jane Birkin. Consisting of several intimate conversations between parent and child, as well as footage of Birkin performing onstage, the result is a spare, loving window into the emotional lives of two women as they talk about subject matter that ranges from the delightful to the difficult: aging, dying, insomnia, celebrity, and their differing memories of their shared past, which includes Charlotte’s father and Jane’s husband, Serge Gainsbourg. Jane by Charlotte is an unexpected, imaginatively visualized work that affords intimate access to someone whom many of us only think we know.

The Lost Daughter
Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021, USA/Greece, 121m

In her striking feature directorial debut, Maggie Gyllenhaal adapts the 2006 novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante, a potent work of psychological interiority that follows Leda, a divorced professor on a solitary summer vacation who becomes intrigued and then oddly involved in the lives of another family she meets there. Oscar-winner Olivia Colman brilliantly embodies this quietly tempestuous character, finely shading in the enigmatic relationships she creates with strangers. A moving, sometimes unsettling inquiry into motherhood and personal freedom, Gyllenhaal’s adaptation maintains Ferrante’s signature ambiguity and matter-of-fact style, and features an outstanding supporting cast, including Jessie Buckley, Ed Harris, Dakota Johnson, Paul Mescal, Alba Rohrwacher, and Peter Sarsgaard. A Netflix release.

Marx Can Wait
Marco Bellocchio, 2021, Italy, 95m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In his most achingly personal film to date, legendary Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio—an NYFF mainstay from the very beginning, from Fists in the Pocket (NYFF3) to The Traitor (NYFF57)—uses the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza to excavate and discuss a traumatic event: the death his twin brother Camillo, who committed suicide in the late ’60s at age 29. Through detailed conversations with his siblings, archival footage providing context about 20th-century Italian leftist politics, and occasional clips from his films, many of which were in some way imbued with this defining family tragedy, Bellocchio conducts a personal and historical exorcism. Reckoning with the push-pull the director has long felt between the twin poles of family and politics, Marx Can Wait is an attempt at reconciliation and understanding from a filmmaker in his eighties whose work has never shied away from the challenging or the provocative.

Red Rocket
Sean Baker, 2021, USA, 128m

Adding to his gallery of jet-fueled portraits of economic hardship within marginalized pockets of the U.S., director Sean Baker (The Florida Project, NYFF55) trains his restless camera on an unforgettable protagonist. Mikey, a wildly narcissistic former porn star fallen on hard times, has returned from L.A. to his depressed, postindustrial hometown of Texas City, reconnecting with his skeptical, drug-dependent estranged wife and mother-in-law, and using his wily charms to ingratiate himself into a community of people he couldn’t care less about. As played by a brilliantly cast Simon Rex (a star MTV VJ in the ’90s), Mikey is a charismatic force of nature—and destruction—who exploits the innocence and goodwill of everyone around him. Pointedly set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election, Red Rocket is an aptly steamed-up depiction of contemporary America as a playground for hustlers and con men. An A24 release.

The Souvenir
Joanna Hogg, 2019, UK/USA, 119m

The follow-up to her 2013 feature Exhibition finds Joanna Hogg mining her own autobiography to craft a portrait of the artist as a young woman in early 1980s London. Caught between her dreams of becoming a filmmaker and her commitment to a toxic romance, 24-year-old Julie (an excellent Honor Swinton Byrne) comes home each night from film school to the Knightsbridge apartment owned by her mother (Tilda Swinton) only to discover some new, unpleasant surprise proffered by her boyfriend, Anthony (Tom Burke), a dandyish junkie whose sophisticated aura masks an abyss of selfishness and desperation. An eminently refined and moving bildungsroman about the ties that inexplicably bind, The Souvenir—as its title suggests—is also an absorbing evocation of a time, place, and national mood. An A24 release. 

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II is a Main Slate selection.

AMOS VOGEL CENTENARY RETROSPECTIVE

Program 1, 113m
Cinema 16
At a time when moviegoing in New York was dominated by Hollywood offerings, Amos Vogel, a young Austrian émigré, and his wife Marcia saw the need for a new kind of venue. In the fall of 1947, they founded Cinema 16, inspired by European film societies as well as the daily screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, the shows Maya Deren organized of her own work at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, and Frank Stauffacher’s Art in Cinema series in San Francisco. The organization, named after the gauge of the independent filmmaker, would become the most important film society of its era. Unlike a typical movie theater, Cinema 16 was based on a subscription model, with members paying a fee for a season of programs—an approach that allowed for financial stability, and a means by which to thwart the local censorship board. By the 1950s, 7,000 adventurous cinephiles had joined.

It was through Vogel that many of the period’s most vital auteurs were introduced to New York audiences. As historian Scott MacDonald has noted, Cinema 16 “was one of the first, if not the first, American exhibitor to present the work of Robert Breer, John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Brian DePalma, Georges Franju, Robert Gardner, John Hubley, Alexander Kluge, Jan Lenica, Richard Lester, Norman McLaren, Jonas Mekas, Nagisa Oshima, Yasujiro Ozu, Sidney Peterson, Roman Polanski, Alain Resnais, Tony Richardson, Jacques Rivette, Lionel Rogosin, Carlos Saura, Arne Sucksdorff, François Truffaut, Stan Vanderbeek, Melvin Van Peebles, Agnes Varda, and Peter Weiss.”

The significance of Cinema 16, however, lies not simply in what was shown, but how. Vogel would routinely bring together strikingly different works—pairing, for instance, an abstract animation with a science film, allowing both to be understood, contrapuntally, in a new light. For this screening, we’ve recreated the May 1950 program, with Vogel’s original notes.

The Lead Shoes
Sidney Peterson, 1949, USA, 16mm, 18m

A surrealist exploration of two ballads, “Edward” and “The Three Ravens,” scrambled in jam session style and interwoven with a boogie-woogie score. Produced by Workshop 20 at California Institute of Fine Arts.

Unconscious Motivation
Lester F. Beck, USA, 1949, 16mm, 40m

Produced by Dr. Lester F. Beck of the University of Oregon, this astonishing 40-minute motion picture is an unrehearsed, authentic clinical record, showing the inducement of an artificial neurosis by hypnotic suggestion in a young man and a young woman. Upon reawakening, the subjects, by means of dream analysis, ink blot and word association tests, gradually realize first the existence of a traumatic experience and then its content by slowly reconstructing the bogus events which caused it. Their reactions, discussion and self-analysis were spontaneous, unrehearsed and unpredictable: the result is a most unusual motion picture. Print courtesy of Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive.

The Battle of San Pietro
John Huston, USA, 1945, 35mm, 38m

A master of the cinema, John Huston (Treasure of the Sierra Madre) portrays the horror of battle and the cruelty of its aftermath in unforgettable images that make this one of the great anti-war films of all time. Print preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

The Work of Oskar Fischinger
Study No. 11, Germany, 1932, 16mm, 4m
Allegretto, USA, 1936-43, 35mm, 2.5m
Motion Painting No. 1, USA, 1947, 35mm, 11m

The father of the “absolute film” and internationally famous film experimentalist is here represented by three films: Absolute Film Study No. 11 is an abstraction set to Mozart’s “Divertissement;” Allegretto, a non-objective color film accompanied by jazz; Motion Painting No. 1—hand-painted in oil on glass—won the Grand Prix 1949 at the International Experimental Film Festival in Belgium. [NB: “Absolute Film” was not part of Fischinger’s title for this film, and its accompaniment is Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” not “Divertissement.”] All Fischinger prints courtesy of Center for Visual Music, Allegretto preserved by CVM.

The New York Film Festival, 1963-1968
Cinema 16 came to a close in 1963. That same year Vogel co-founded the New York Film Festival with Richard Roud, and, as the head of Lincoln Center’s film department, laid the groundwork for the FLC of today. For our tribute, we’ll be highlighting a number of works that were presented during Vogel’s tenure at the festival, each of which reflects, in different ways, his long-standing preoccupations as a programmer.

Program 2
Barravento
Glauber Rocha, 1962, Brazil, 16mm, 78m
Portuguese with English subtitles

The first edition of NYFF included in its main slate Barravento, a seminal work of Cinema Novo and the debut feature of Glauber Rocha, whose work Vogel would champion for decades thereafter. The film—shot on location in sensuous black and white, and deeply attuned to the rhythms of collective labor and religious ritual—centers upon a Bahian fishing village. The community finds itself caught in the net of capitalist exploitation and likewise bound by mystical belief, a situation that one man, returning to his hometown after years spent in the city, seeks to change. Though Rocha’s visual style would continue evolving with later works like Antonio das Mortes, his insurrectionary imperatives, aesthetic as well as political, were already evident in Barravento. “The Tricontinental cinema,” he would famously declare, “must infiltrate the conventional cinema and blow it up.” Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Program 3
Pearls of the Deep / Perličky na dně
Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, Věra Chytilová, and Jaromil Jireš, Czechoslovakia, 1965, 107m
Czech with English subtitles

Among Vogel’s many contributions to film culture in America, especially notable is the platform he gave to work coming out of Eastern Europe during the 1960s and ’70s, a particularly rich moment for filmmaking in the region. Emblematic of this era is the omnibus Pearls of the Deep, which played at the New York Film Festival in 1966. Each of its five sections, from the wonderfully morbid opening chapter, set against the backdrop of a motorcycle race, to its closer, a tender study of young love, is directed by a different filmmaker and based on a short story by Bohumil Hrabal; the work as a whole, with its forays into the absurd, is now regarded as a kind of manifesto for the Czech New Wave. “This astonishing, tightly knit group of young filmmakers represented the values of the first post-Stalinist generation,” Vogel would go on to remark. “It was striking to note how similar their views were to those of the West’s rebellious youth, which, from a different starting point, had also become engaged in a search, without illusions, for possible ideals and provisional truths. It seemed that the world was perversely backing into an enforced brotherhood, which would universalize such problems as individual freedom in a bureaucratic society, estrangement between generations, the failure of dogmatic ideologies, and eternal confrontations of imperfect innocence as against the corruption of so-called maturity.”

Program 4, 105m
The New American Cinema, 1966
The Fourth New York Film Festival featured a sampling of the New American Cinema, bringing the underground uptown. Two of the works screened that year, Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence, reflect the range of avant-garde activity flourishing at the time: the former, a landmark of structural filmmaking, reduces the cinema to its most fundamental elements, while the latter suggested alternative paths for the narrative feature. 

The Flicker
Tony Conrad, 1966, USA, 16mm, 30m

“This film contains no images at all,” wrote Vogel of The Flicker. “Its subject is light and its absence. It consists of combinations of alternating white and black frames, flashing by in constantly changing patterns and causing a continuous stroboscopic flicker effect of great complexity. Whether its frequency is momentarily static or changeable (it ranges from 24 flashes down to 4 flashes per second throughout its 30 minute duration), the effect is literally hypnotic. This concerted ‘overload’ of the retina and nervous system provokes an endless variety of changing shapes, patterns and, most surprisingly, colors, whose nature differs with each viewer (even varying from performance to performance). The electronic soundtrack was generated by relays and components carrying different types of information; the various frequencies are orchestrated by the director. This ‘pure’ film deals with perception itself; its hallucinatory effect—despite absence of image, content, or meaning—reveals an unsuspected congruity with deep emotional needs.” Please note: This film may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy and other photosensitivities.

Echoes of Silence
Peter Emmanuel Goldman, 1965, USA, 16mm, 75m

Echoes of Silence, by contrast, chronicles the lives of twentysomethings adrift in New York City, locating tremendous feeling in the smallest moments: a furtive glance across a museum gallery, women putting on makeup, a stroll beneath the gleaming lights of Times Square marquees. Unencumbered by diegetic sound, its shadowy images of youthful flaneurs are paired with evocatively hand-painted title cards and a dynamic soundtrack drawn from the artist’s LPs that, when combined, produce an unforgettable ballad of sexual dependency. Though little remembered today, Goldman was hailed by Vogel (along with Godard, Mekas, and Sontag) as a major new talent.

Program 5, 92m
The Social Cinema in America, 1967
The Fifth New York Film Festival featured a sidebar on “The Social Cinema in America,” which surveyed the new directions of documentary filmmaking, with an emphasis on cinema verité and the possibilities opened up by more portable recording equipment (the program introduced New York audiences to now-classic works like Peter Adair’s Holy Ghost People, Allan King’s Warrendale, and Frederick Wiseman’s Titticut Follies). One screening, reprised here, brought together Lebert Bethune’s Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom, Santiago Álvarez’s Now, and David Neuman and Ed Pincus’s Black Natchez. 

Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom
Lebert Bethune, 1964, France, 22m

Bethune, a Jamaican filmmaker who had become a notable figure within Paris’s Black expatriate milieu, created a remarkable portrait of a political icon, and his film features some of the very last interviews with Malcolm X, recorded during his travels in Europe and Africa mere months prior to his assassination. 

Now
Santiago Álvarez, 1965, Cuba, 35mm, 6m
A brief but incendiary dispatch from postrevolutionary Cuba, Now blasts forth as a machine-gun montage of violent imagery from the American civil rights era while Lena Horne provides a soaring soundtrack with her titular protest anthem, sung to the tune of “Hava Nagila.”

Black Natchez
David Neuman and Ed Pincus, 1967, USA, 64m
In Black Natchez, we encounter the struggle for freedom again, though articulated in a different form. “The advent of portable sync-sound equipment in the early ’60s meant, for the first time in the sound era, that filmmakers could go to the subject as opposed to bringing the subject to the camera,” Pincus would later explain. “The ability to take a camera out into the world created the desire to ‘get it right,’ to film the world independent of the act of filmmaking. In the U.S., all sorts of rules were being created in documentary film—no script, no narration, no interviews, no lighting, no mic boom, no collusion between subject and filmmaker.

In 1965, the second year of intense voter registration drives in Mississippi, we decided to make a film in the southwest corner of the state. Little civil rights work had been done there because of the danger in the region. Our approach was to seek out several story lines and then continue with the most interesting. A car bombing of a civil rights leader while we were there changed everything. The event emphasized the rifts in the Black community around the demands for equality. Rifts between teenagers and women on one hand and the Black business community on the other. Rifts between Black males forming armed protection groups and the call for nonviolence by the major civil rights groups. And rifts between grassroots organizations and more traditional leadership organizations such as the FDP (Freedom Democratic Party) and the NAACP.” New digitization courtesy of Ed Pincus Film Collection, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digitization was supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Program 6, 69m
Personal Cinema, 1968
1968 marked Vogel’s final year of overseeing the NYFF, and, as with the festival’s previous iterations, many remarkable (and even today underappreciated) works were selected. One program in particular from that edition stands out. Dubbed “Personal Cinema,” it included several key examples of how the medium was being democratized, with the camera made accessible to those who had previously enjoyed limited or no access to the tools of production. In The Jungle, members of North Philadelphia’s 12th & Oxford Street gang dramatize the internal workings of their group, and, in so doing, put forward a vivid, unvarnished image of urban life in America, while Jaime Barrios’s Film Club showcases the activities of a storefront workshop that allowed Puerto Rican teenagers living on the Lower East Side to make their own movies. In The Spirit of the Navajo, Mary J. and Maxine Tsosie likewise drew from their own community, here focusing on their grandfather, a well-known medicine man, as a way to document the traditions of their tribe in their own style, on their own terms.

The Jungle
12th and Oxford Street Film Makers, 1967, USA, 35mm, 22m
35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Film Club
Jaime Barrios, 1968, USA, 16mm, 26m

The Spirit of the Navajo
Maxine Tsosie and Mary J. Tsosie, 1966, USA, 16mm, 21m
Print courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art. 

Program 7, 90m
Film as a Subversive Art
Long a source of inspiration for film programmers, Film as a Subversive Art is a guidebook to cinema’s outer limits, replete with tantalizing descriptions of some of the most radical movies ever made. First published in 1974, this lavishly illustrated volume can be seen as a culmination of Vogel’s work over the previous decades, chronicling as it does the taboo-busting potential of cinema, at the level of form as well as content. For this program, we foreground one of the book’s most iconic titles, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (a still featuring its star, Milena Dravić, with clenched fist raised, graces Vogel’s cover), alongside an altogether different piece: Nebula II, one of its most obscure entries. The precise abstraction of the latter stands in contradistinction to the messy fantasies, sexual and political, of the former, yet they emerge from a similar moment—and, in true Vogelian style, complement one another, suggesting unexpected affinities. His notes on the films are below.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism
Dušan Makavejev, 1971, Yugoslavia/West Germany, 35mm, 85m
English, German, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles
Banned in Yugoslavia, hailed at international film festivals, this is unquestionably one of the most important subversive masterpieces of the 1970s: a hilarious, highly erotic political comedy which quite seriously proposes sex as the ideological imperative for revolution and advances a plea for Erotic Socialism. Only the revolutionary Cubist Makavejev—clearly one of the most significant new directors now working in world cinema—could have pulled together this hallucinatory melange of Wilhelm Reich; excerpts from a monstrous Soviet film, The Vow (1946), starring Stalin; a transvestite of the Warhol factory; A.S. Neill of Summerhill; several beautiful young Yugoslavs fucking merrily throughout; the editor of America’s sex magazine Screw having his most important private part lovingly plaster-cast in erection; not to speak of a Soviet figure-skating champion, Honored Artist of the People (named Vladimir Ilyich!), who cuts off his girlfriend’s head with one of his skates after a particularly bountiful ejaculation, to save his Communist virginity from Revisionist Yugoslav Contamination. It is an outrageous, exuberant, marvelous work of a new breed of international revolutionary, strangely spawned by cross-fertilization between the original radical ideologies of the East, Consciousness III in America, and the sexual-politics radicalism of the early Wilhelm Reich, who equated sexual with political liberation and denied the possibility of one without the other…

Preceded by: 

Nebula II
Robert Frerck, 1971, USA, 16mm, 5m
World premiere of restoration
After Jordan Belson, one might have thought no further mandala films could be fruitfully made; Nebula II quickly dispels this notion. As the ever-changing circular patterns become more complex and change in increasingly rapid fashion, the incessant bombardment of our senses with flicker effects, visual transmogrifications, pulsating color, and enforced forward movement via zoom, finally set up a sensory overload both hypnotic and overpowering in its beauty and mystical revelation. Print restored by Anthology Film Archives with support from Cinema Conservancy.

Acknowledgments
Loring Vogel and Steven Vogel; Academy Film Archive; Anthology Film Archives; Amistad Research Center, Tulane University; Center for Visual Music; Elizabeth Peterson;  Lebert Bethune; The Museum of Modern Art; Rachael Stoeltje, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive; Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; UCLA Film & Television Archive