Favorites of 2021: Pauline Lampert

Monday, January 10th, 2022
Posted by Jim Healy

Pauline Lampert is a Phd candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. She is also Project Assistant and Programmer for the Cinematheque and the Wisconsin Film Festival.

Best of 2021

1. Power of the Dog (Campion)

2. West Side Story (Spielberg)

3. A Hero (Farhadi)

4. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (Greenbaum)

5. The French Dispatch (Anderson)

6. Pretend It’s a City (Scorsese)

7. The Velvet Underground (Haynes)

8. The Lost Daughter (Gyllenhaal)

9. Flee (Poher Rasmussen)

10. Petite Maman (Sciamma)

2021 Honorable Mentions

The Worst Person in the World (Trier)

Parallel Mothers (Almodóvar)

Try Harder! (Lum)

Best first views of 2021 in alphabetical order:

1. Bell, Book and Candle (Quine, 1958)

2. Blue Hawaii (Taurog, 1961)

3. Chan is Missing (Wang, 1982)

4. Chess of the Wind (Reza Aslani, 1975)

5. Crossing Delancey (Micklin Silver,1988)

6. The End of the Track (Mou Tun-fei, 1970)

7. Ghost ( Zucker, 1990)

8. He Ran All the Way (Berry, 1951)

9. Hester Street (Micklin Silver, 1975)

10. Klute (Pakula, 1971)

11. The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (Mambéty, 1999)

12. Miss Juneteenth (Godfrey Peoples, 2020)

13. She-Devil (Seidelman, 1989)

14. The Story of Temple Drake (Roberts, 1933)

15. West Indies (Hondo, 1979)

Favorites of 2021: Jim Healy

Wednesday, January 5th, 2022
Posted by Jim Healy

Jim Healy is the UW Cinematheque's Director of Programming and a contributing programmer for the Wisconsin Film Festival.

There are no "new" movies or "old" movies. Only movies I have seen and movies I haven't seen. I saw 577 feature-length films in 2021 that were all new to me. My three top favorites are:

GET BACK (2021, Peter Jackson)

LICORICE PIZZA (2021, Paul Thomas Anderson)

ONE SECOND (2020, Zhang Yimou)

And, in alphabetical order, here are 55 more movies that are all exceptionally good.

A CHIARA (2021, Jonas Carpignano)

ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (2019, Roy Andersson)

AN ACT OF MURDER (1948, Michael Gordon)

ANNETTE (2021, Leos Carax)

BACK STREET (1961, David Miller)

LA BELLE DE NUIT (1934, Louis Valray)

THE BLUE KNIGHT (1973, Robert Butler)

BUSTER AND BILLIE (1974, Daniel Petrie)

COMMANDOS STRIKE AT DAWN (1943, John Farrow)

THE DISCIPLE (2020, Chaitanya Tamhane)

ENCANTO (2021, Jared Bush, Byron Howard)

ESCALE (1935, Louis Valray)

FLEE (2021, Jonas Poher Rasmussen)

GAMAK GHAR/THE VILLAGE HOUSE (2019, Achal Mishra)

A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX (2021, Rodney Ascher)

GOLDEN VOICES (2020, Evgeny Ruman)

HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS (1976, James Szalapski)

I WOULDN'T BE IN YOUR SHOES (1948, William Nigh)

IN JACKSON HEIGHTS (2015, Frederick Wiseman)

ISLANDS (2021, Martin Edralin)

KING RICHARD (2021, Reinaldo Marcus Green)

LARCENY (1947, George Sherman)

LET HIM GO (2020, Thomas Bezucha)

THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD (1971, Kevin Billington)

LOVERS AND LOLLIPOPS (1956, Ruth Orkin, Morris Engel)

LUCA (2021, Enrico Casarosa)

MAD GOD (2021, Phil Tippett)

MINARI (2020, Lee-Isaac Chung)

NIGHTMARE IN BADHAM COUNTY (1976, John Llewelyn Moxley)

NOBODY (2021, Ilya Naishuller)

PARTY GIRL (1995, Daisy von Scherler Mayer)

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS (1934, Alexander Hall)

A QUIET PLACE PART II (2020, John Krasinski)

REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM (1938, Allan Dwan)

RED ROCKET (2021, Sean Baker)

THE RESCUE (2021, Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi)

THE ROAD TO SALINA (1970, Georges Lautner)

SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS (2021, Dustin Daniel Cretton)

LES SEINS DE GLACE/ICY BREASTS/SOMEONE IS BLEEDING (1974, Georges Lautner)

THE SHIP THAT DIED OF SHAME/PT RAIDERS (1955, Basil Dearden)

SPIDER MAN NO WAY HOME (2021, Jon Watts)

STILLWATER (2021, Tom McCarthy)

SUN CHILDREN (2020, Majid Majidi)

SUNDOWN (2021, Michel Franco)

SHE WANTED A MILLIONAIRE (1932, John Blystone)

THEY WON’T BELIEVE ME (1947, Irving Pichel)

THREE MINUTES A LENGTHENING (2021, Bianca Stigter)

TRUE MOTHERS (2020, Naomi Kawase)

LA VÉRITÉ (1960, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

THE VICTORS (1963, Carl Foreman)

THE WEB (1947, Michael Gordon)

WEST SIDE STORY (2021, Steven Spielberg)

WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY (2021, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)

WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? (1977, Michael Fengler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

THE YELLOW HANDKERCHIEF (1977, Yoji Yamada)

The Lovely, Lonely World of THE APARTMENT

Thursday, December 16th, 2021
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on Billy Wilder’s The Apartment were written by John Bennett, PhD candidate in UW Madison's Department of Communication Arts. A 4K DCP of The Apartment will be the Cinematheque's final feature film presentation of 2021 on Friday, December 17, 7 p.m., in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is Free!

By John Bennett

As of 2021, the Academy Award for Best Picture has been bestowed on over ninety films. Usually, these films deal with momentous topics, whether that entails historical heroism (as in Patton (1970), Gandhi (1982), Schindler’s List (1993)) or the condemnation of social ills (How Green Was My Valley (1941), Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), 12 Years a Slave (2013)). They include visually dazzling epics (Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Titanic (1997)) and examinations of the entertainment industry itself (All About Eve (1950), The Artist (2011)). The Apartment, one of legendary writer/director Billy Wilder’s best films, and the winner of the 1960 Oscar for Best Picture, is notable for its depiction of normal people experiencing normal, human emotions. Of all the Best Picture Oscar winners, The Apartment may have the best understanding of ordinary people (surpassing even, yes, Ordinary People, which won the same award twenty years after The Apartment).

The film tells the story of C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), a cog in the vast machinery of Consolidated Life, an insurance behemoth in Manhattan. Baxter is a popular employee with some of the Consolidated Life brass, not because of his innate abilities as an insurance clerk, but rather because he allows them to use his Central-Park-adjacent apartment as a pied-à-terre for their extramarital affairs. In exchange for these accommodations, Baxter’s superiors are happy to recommend him for promotions. Though this arrangement exhausts Baxter and disturbs his kindly neighbors (who are under the humorous impression that Baxter is indulging in a parade of noisy evening jaunts), he nevertheless enjoys the professional leg-up it brings him, which puts enough wind in the timid clerk’s sails for him to pursue his longtime office crush, elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacClaine). Fran initially seems charmed by Baxter, but before long it is revealed that she, too, is swept up in corporate infidelities. In fact, she is in love with Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), the powerful executive who is now Baxter’s direct supervisor. It is this affair that weighs down and nearly destroys both Baxter and Fran with crushing loneliness amid the sprawl of lively Manhattan. With this love triangle in place, Wilder unspools The Apartment’s lovely, lonely story.

Throughout Wilder’s oeuvre, one can discern two tonal tendencies that are striking in their sheer contrapuntal difference. On one hand, Wilder’s films can be mischievously acerbic, as in A Foreign Affair (1948), Ace in the Hole (1951), or Kiss Me Stupid (1964). In this mode, Wilder’s stories cuttingly explore sex and deception through the schemes and shenanigans of morally compromised characters. In these films, the men are cads and the women forgo virtue both casually and opportunistically. On the other hand, Wilder’s work can exhibit an earnest, almost plaintive romanticism, as in Sabrina (1954), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), or Avanti! (1972). In this mode, Wilder’s characters are more likely to reveal their deep-seated vulnerabilities, expressing regret and/or loneliness among the turmoil of an indifferent world. All of Wilder’s films mix these two sensibilities in some fashion, but none blends them more expertly than The Apartment.

But what sets The Apartment out in Wilder’s body of work is its deployment of the romantic tone to actively comment upon, and even condemn, the cynicism that the writer/director was so skilled at conjuring. The Apartment generates sympathy for Baxter and Fran in depicting them as sincere, well-intentioned individuals cast in a pit of lecherous and egotistical vipers. Whereas Dean Martin’s excessive prurience is played for laughs in Kiss Me Stupid, the sexual impropriety of Consolidated Life’s executives is revolting to the audience because we can see how it twists more sincere characters like Baxter and Fran into miserable knots. No character represents this sliminess more than Sheldrake, who, through his syrupy vows of love to Fran and subsequent off-hand dismissal of Fran to Baxter, betrays a total disregard for basic human consideration. The ardent executives have as their counterpoint Dr. and Mrs. Dreyfuss, Baxter’s friendly neighbors who, despite the disturbances that emanate from Baxter’s apartment, treat him with parental fondness. The film’s moral core seems to be summed up at one point during the film’s climactic crisis, during which Dr. Dreyfuss, misunderstanding a near-tragic situation, admonishes Baxter to “be a mensch.” As Ed Sikov notes in his excellent biography of Wilder, “...[he] puts the world’s baseness to the service of a higher good in this film, his most genuinely sweet-tempered and generous work to date.”

Billy Wilder is perhaps remembered more for the wit of his stories and dialogue than for the formal properties of his images. Nevertheless, The Apartment boasts many beautifully composed visuals that also reinforce the film’s story and themes. The visual flair of the film is obvious from the very first shot of Baxter’s vast workplace. In this shot, Wilder positions the camera’s height and angle such that much of the ceiling and floor are visible; the office’s ceiling lights and the rows of the clerks’ desks create a grid of lines that run cleanly to a seemingly eternally distant vanishing point. The cavernous office (along with Baxter’s introductory voice over reducing large sums of people to mere statistics) establishes the idea of the anonymity that the film’s characters can use as cover for their various indiscretions. The richness of the impossibly large open plan office is explored again in the final shot of the holiday party scene after Baxter has learned of Fran’s affair with Sheldrake. The shot, which lasts nearly forty seconds, opens with the image of a company telephone operator (Joan Shawlee, who played bandleader Sweet Sue in Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959)) dancing suggestively on a table as a large crowd of employees cheer her on. As Baxter dejectedly scoots by the revelers, the camera tilts down and tracks left. Kirkeby, one of his bosses, catches up to him as the camera comes to a halt. The two are now isolated in an eerily empty shot that had teemed seconds ago with carousing coworkers. Kirkeby further wounds Baxter’s pride by imploring once more for the use of his apartment. After Baxter quietly assents, the camera pans left as he recedes alone to the deceptively endless depths of the office. These three compositions, all nestled within one shot, help drive home the film’s preoccupation with lechery and loneliness. Excellent, too, are many of the compositions depicting the apartment itself. With Baxter’s bedroom and kitchen existing as offshoots of the central den, Wilder can carve out pockets of space that allow characters to secretly observe the actions of others in the foreground. Similarly strong are the visuals that transform a recurring Chinese restaurant into a dense urban jungle that affords, nominally, a degree of anonymity for unfaithful men and kept women.

It would take a monograph to adequately draw attention to all of The Apartment’s rich cinematic details. The film is full of recurring jokes, the reappearance of each taking on new emotional significance in light of new narrative information. Detail-filled, too, are the film’s many long takes, which allow the tiniest gestures to convey secrecy, solitude, desire, and power. (Note, for example, the quiet, tender care with which Baxter removes blades from a razor in the film’s second half). A book length study might also be necessary to sufficiently praise the contributions of Wilder’s collaborators, including writer I.A.L. Diamond (with whom Wilder wrote all of his subsequent films), cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, set designer Alex Trauner, and composer Adolph Deutsch–to say nothing of the three excellent lead performances by Lemmon, MacClaine, and MacMurray. Wilder masterfully marshals all of these details, all of these artistic contributions of other skilled craftspeople, into a story that understands so perceptively what it means to be lonely in the midst of so much callousness and the reserves of strength that are necessary to take a stab at overcoming these forces to find some trace of happiness.

Please Give to UW Cinematheque

Tuesday, November 30th, 2021
Posted by Jim Healy

As we near the end of 2021, we are taking a moment to reflect on what the Cinematheque has been able to provide for our audiences during this unique year.

The year began much as 2020 had ended, with our home venue of 4070 Vilas Hall shuttered due to Covid 19 health and safety concerns. Cinematheque continued our Cinematheque at Home series of films available to view online, as well as regular installments of our Cinematalk podcast. Highlights included the latest works from Rodney Ascher (A Glitch in the Matrix), Nicolas Pareda (Fauna) along with podcast interviews with the directors; an in-depth discussion with interdisciplinary artist-in-residence, Litza Bixler and at home screenings of The World’s End featuring her choreography, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a profound influence on Bixler’s work. We also presented free online screenings of a generous slate of bold new films including Shiva Baby, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, and There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse. In April we took deep dives into the films of independent Midwestern filmmakers Frank V. Ross and Emir Cakaroz with multiple film screenings and companion podcasts.

Cinematheque made a much-anticipated return to 4070 Vilas Hall at the end of June with six weeks of free screenings. Starting with Leo McCarey’s classic tearjerker Make Way for Tomorrow and ending with James Cameron’s summer blockbuster spectacular, Aliens, we presented an exciting, typically eclectic slate of films, everything from Where’s Poppa? to Pepe Le Moko; and from Ruggles of Red Gap to The Lunchbox. We also celebrated the Charles Bronson centennial with a handful of his best films, ending with the singular From Noon Till Three and a podcast discussion with writer/director Dan Gilroy, whose father, Frank Gilroy, wrote and directed From Noon.

Fall kicked off with Roy Andersson’s About Endlessness and a 35mm screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and proceeded with well-attended screenings of Rashomon, New Order, and a sneak preview of Dear Evan Hansen. October brought a tribute to the trailblazing career of Joan Micklin Silver, the return of in-person guests to the Cinematheque in the form of Brandon Colvin, presenting his latest, A Dim Valley, and archivist & UW alum, Olivia Babler, presenting the recently discovered, long lost silent feature, The First Degree, featuring live piano by David Drazin. In November, we hosted acclaimed writer/director Ken Kwapis, here to present special 35mm screenings of his modern- day classic, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and a personal favorite, American Graffiti.

Our programming goes on hiatus mid-December as we prepare for an exciting 2022 Cinematheque season that will begin in late January. Our free film programming would not be possible without the generous support of individuals like you. In the spirit of this season of giving, please donate here to the UW Cinematheque. Our organization continues to take the lead in keeping cinema culture and cinema talk alive and well in Madison during this uncertain time for movie-going.

Sincerely,

Jim Healy, Director of Programming

Friendship and Blue Jeans: THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS

Wednesday, November 10th, 2021
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on Ken Kwapis’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants were written by Ashton Leach, graduate student in UW Madison's Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Sisterhood will be screening on Thursday, November 11, at the Marquee Theater at Union South. After the screening, director Ken Kwapis will join us in person to answer audience questions. This screening is a collaboration between the UW Cinematheque and WUD Film.

By Ashton Leach

Tears, laughter, love. These are the key components of Ken Kwapis' The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Based on the 2001 Ann Brashares book by the same name, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants revels in the complexities of teenage girlhood, intertwining comedy and drama seamlessly as the narrative follows four girls during their first summer apart as they spread out across the world. The sixteen-year-olds that comprise the Sisterhood of the title question the importance of love, especially as they approach it in a way they have never done before. Carmen (America Ferrera) seeks affection from her father as cultural differences leave her feeling othered in his new WASP family in South Carolina. Lena (Alexis Bledel) finds a boyfriend who is seen as a family enemy by the relatives she's visiting in Greece. After the death of her mother, Bridget (Blake Lively) confronts her feelings of depression, loss, and shame while at soccer camp in Mexico. Tibby (Amber Tamblyn) makes new friends with a younger girl while working through the summer in Maryland.

Director Ken Kwapis is best known for his contributions to sitcoms, including Freaks and Geeks, Malcolm in the Middle, and most notably, The Office. Kwapis' film offers a look at the connection friendship creates beyond the differences of size, class, and distance and the director excels at crafting spaces that leave the four protagonists vulnerable while also showing their fortitude. Sisterhood remains a cornerstone of late-night sleepovers, and as America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Amber Tamblyn, and Alexis Bledel continue to dominate both small and large screens, Sisterhood stays in conversation as an important achievement in their early careers.

The way Kwapis represents the intensity of change on the screen leaves the viewer reflecting on the changes that cause the character shifts in the four protagonists. From Greece to South Carolina, from Mexico to Maryland, the girls send the pants to each other seemingly when they need them most. The pants come to represent the confidence that is gained through companionship, giving each of the girls the encouragement to take the risks in new places where their friends aren't. The pants, in actuality, get little screen time, and aren't a particularly memorable aspect of the movie. This just goes to show that the pants, which also represent the affection between the four friends, were never really important, and the cost of shipping the jeans all over the world is well worth the price for friendship.

Four girls, four vastly different backgrounds, one hip-hugging pair of denim jeans that represent much more than a fashion trend of 2005. Sisterhood digs into the difficulty of change: each girl realizes that what they wanted is much more complicated than they ever expected and the characters offer so much more beyond the usual trite depiction of bland and vapid teenagers. Kwapis' film instead focuses on the struggles that many girls will have to face during this sensitive time of immense metamorphosis. The dramatic actions taken by each of the girls might seem cliched on the surface, but the film sensitively reveals the emotional turmoil that lead them to their actions, giving weight to their experiences and pain. That is why Sisterhood remains a staple in the library of teenage girlhood cinema.

Sisterhood provides an honest portrayal of finding oneself with a little help from your friends, even when they are not physically there. The familiarity of Sisterhood is moving, painfully relatable, and guaranteed to elicit a plethora of emotions. Though the girls are not stereotypes, the performances and writing make it possible for anyone watching the film to sympathize with the girls. Sisterhood leaves the audience reflecting upon the pressures of teenagerhood and acts as a reminder that chosen family is just as valuable as any blood relation. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants will undoubtedly live on in the pantheon of teenage girlhood films, but it leaves all its viewers, regardless of age, knowing that perhaps “being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things, like wearing these pants.”

Cinematalk Podcast: J.J. Murphy on THE FLORIDA PROJECT

Wednesday, November 10th, 2021
Posted by Jim Healy

On Saturday, November 13th, the Cinematheque will present a 35mm print of Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. Our free screening coincides with the publication of J.J. Murphy’s revelatory new monograph on the film’s production from University of Texas press.

On this new episode of our Cinematalk podcast, our special guest is  J.J. Murphy, author, filmmaker and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught film production and studies courses for many years. His films include the avant-garde classics Print Generation and Sky Blue Water Light Sign, which have been restored by the Academy Film Archive. His two most recently published books are Rewriting Indie Cinema: Improvisation, Psychodrama and the Screenplay, and The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol.

Listen to Cinematalk below or subscribe through Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Nasty Business of POSSESSION

Thursday, November 4th, 2021
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, were written by Tim Brayton, PhD candidate in UW Madison's Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Possession will screen on Friday, November 5, at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is Free.

By Tim Brayton

The fourth film directed Andrzej Żuławski, 1981’s Possession, has had a difficult history in the English-speaking world. The film (itself shot in English, the director’s only film in that language) was heavily cut down for its 1983 United States release: fully one-third of the film was carved away to bring it down to an incoherent 81 minutes, received with hostility by critics and ignored by audiences. On the other side of the Atlantic, it was initially released uncut in the United Kingdom, but then fell under a bizarre form of notoriety, when it was targeted as one of the 72 “Video Nasties,” the 1983 list of films that the Director Public Prosecutions sought to ban on obscenity grounds.

The Video Nasties list came about due to concerns, in the wake of the first wave of slasher films reaching the new medium of VHS tapes, that young people were being exposed to too much violence and other depraved content. In this context, the presence of Possession is especially bizarre, given that it is, uniquely among those 72 titles, a politically-laden art film, not any kind of exploitation film, and certainly not one that impressionable children would likely have encountered in the first place. Nor, if they had, would they be likely to have understood some of the most challenging and unsettling material in the film. Since its initial European release, critics have struggled to describe Possession: is it horror? Is it a character drama, the symbolic expression of Żuławski’s misery at his acrimonious 1976 divorce from Małgorzata Braunek? Is it a metaphor for Cold War Europe trying desperately to maintain a sense of cohesion even as it is split between two irreconcilable political blocs?

The simple answer is that it’s horror because it’s the other things. Look to Possession in the hope of finding a collection of gory jump scares, and you will look in vain (there is a monster, though: a tremendously convincing and uncomfortably organic-looking one co-created by the great make-up and effects designer Carlo Rambaldi, who went directly from this to the title character of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial). But its portrayal of psychological despair is its own kind of bone-deep horror. Viewed as a study of life in West Berlin, right in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, it achieves a surreal, alien quality: Żuławski wanted to suggest the fundamentally anti-human character of the space around the wall, using a Steadicam, then still a fairly novel cinematography tool, to create a weightless, frictionless feeling. It’s part of the film’s overall visual strategy of creating an eerily clean, lifeless vision of Berlin, one that feels like the ghost of a city rather than a place that people go about their days (another part of the filmmakers’ strategy was to use the “wrong” color lights for their film stock, deliberately creating a sickly blue sheen over the whole film).

More still than that, the film’s horror resides in its utter despair with which it presents the collapse of an unhealthy marriage. Żuławski reveals perhaps more than he intended, and perhaps more than we should be comfortable with, of his anger at women in this film’s reality-bending depiction of sexual desire gone wrong. Surely, it’s the film’s visceral portrayal of bodies, human and otherwise, that earned it a spot among the Video Nasties; those were the elements foregrounded in the butchery that transformed the American cut into a bit of gross-out exploitation. Like David Cronenberg’s The Brood, two years earlier, another work of body horror in which an unhappily divorced man worked out his feelings towards his ex-wife and his own failures as a man, Possession finds something fundamentally terrifying in the female sex drive and incomprehensible in female psychology. But here, the restored material filling in the marriage between Mark and Anna moves past body horror into the realm of psychological thriller. The real focus of the film is not on the cephalopod-like thing that Anna is apparently having an affair with, but the sense of comprehensible reality fracturing for Mark and Anna alike as their inner lives shatter.

This focus on the psychological disintegration of two people, fueled by their incompatibility as marriage partners, and Mark’s desperate failed attempts to understand anything about Anna’s mind, is the real source of Possession’s deepest horrors. Isabelle Adjani (who won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her work in this film and Quartet) and Sam Neill, playing the central couple, have both reported in later interviews that the experience of filming the movie nearly broke them psychologically. The extremes they are pushed to, physically and expressively, are raw and shocking – especially for Adjani, whose work verges into genuine incoherence as she pushes herself all the way into a portrait of unpredictable frenzy. We are watching actors trying to drive themselves to insanity right in front of our eyes, and the results are as gripping as they are disturbing and disorienting.

Possession isn’t an easy film to sit through, in other words. Both in its portrait of the world at large and in its attitude towards the two broken figures who make up its central marriage. It is nihilistic, angry, and unstinting in its attempt to match their mental collapse in the aggressive visual style and frequently unclear narrative. The film’s cult status is well-earned: it holds nothing back emotionally or physically, resulting in a depiction of mental uncertainty and instability that’s like very little else that has ever been made. It’s not an experience for every viewer, but for anyone looking to take a disquieting, disturbing trip through some dark corners of the human mind, Possession lives up to every bit of its nasty reputation.

Life Could Be a Dream: MULHOLLAND DR.

Thursday, November 4th, 2021
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., were written by Joseph Shin, graduate student in UW Madison's Department of Communication ArtsA 35mm print of Mulholland Dr. will screen on Saturday, November 6 in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free!

By Joseph Shin

There is a certain stratum of film that occupies such rarefied space and achieves such transcendent qualities that when asked to proffer the reasons for its perceived greatness, one can find oneself at a loss for words. Some films’ raison d’etre are far easier to pinpoint: impeccable performances, a perfect script, an infallible audiovisual aesthetic. Mulholland Dr. contains all of these elements and more, but to explain its personal significance seems almost futile. And in this way, the film becomes analogous to a dream one has woken up from and cannot quite place, an abundantly appropriate metaphor for those who have seen the film or are familiar with David Lynch’s work. 

Mulholland Dr. began its journey as the pilot for a television series, continuing the complex negotiation Lynch’s career has had between the dual worlds of film and television. His first dalliance with television, of course, began in the ‘90s with what became perhaps his most widely beloved work, Twin Peaks, a show that Lynch relaunched on Showtime in 2017 to great acclaim. Indeed, the genesis of Mulholland Dr. was as a spin-off of Twin Peaks, centering on Audrey Horne as she moves from the Pacific Northwest to sunny Los Angeles in an attempt to become a star on the silver screen. 

The spinoff idea morphed into an original property, though still one imbued through and through with Lynch’s artistic DNA. Mulholland Dr. retained this basic core of “Hollywood as Dream Factory" and the film ostensibly follows Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress seeking to make it big in Tinseltown, and her entanglement with Rita (Laura Harring) who at film’s beginning suffers a car crash on the titular Mulholland Drive that spurs a case of amnesia. The mystery of who “Rita” is becomes the narrative drive of the bulk of the film, but it is not the story proper that accounts for Mulholland Dr.’s significance. Rather, it is Lynch’s treatment of such tried-and-true material that makes up its singularity. 

Mulholland Dr. forms an interesting case within Lynch’s greater oeuvre. At once, it marks many continuities. From its very title, we can surmise its fascination with one of Lynch’s favorite motifs, that of the road. In Blue Velvet, we can think of the car rides with Frank Booth that transport us from idyllic suburbia to the seedy underbelly it conceals. Wild at Heart was a surreal road movie that made phantasmagoria out of Americana. Lost Highway, probably the closest aesthetic and thematic precursor to Mulholland Dr. in Lynch’s filmography, used the road as a psychoanalytic bridge between characters’ constantly shifting identity. Two years before the release of Mulholland Drive, Lynch would rework the road film in his most obviously humanist work, The Straight Story.   

In Mulholland Dr., the titular road provides a sense of locality. Lynch marks the territory of Los Angeles as his area of play. In an early scene, we are afforded not only a glimpse of the Mulholland Drive street sign, but that of another famous Hollywood signifier, that of Sunset Boulevard. Here begins the highly cinematically reflexive and self-referential quality of the film that extends to the naming of characters (Rita takes on her name after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda), the narrative focus on filmmaking as focalized through Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), the deliberate nods to classical Hollywood noir (there is a particular debt to Otto Preminger’s Laura), and perhaps best represented through one of the most astounding scenes in Lynch’s entire filmography, the Club Silencio sequence. 

The Club Silencio sequence marks an inflection point in the film where Betty and Rita find their greatest spiritual bond, one that is analytically broken down by each successive scene. They stumble upon a curious sort of performance where an emcee explains its inherent artificiality. Its closest analogue in art is the infamous René Magritte work The Treachery of Images. The famous phrase “ceci n’est pas une pipe” or in English “this is not a pipe” is echoed by Mulholland Dr.’s “no hay banda” or, in English, “there is no band.” The scene climaxes with a lip-sync performance of a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s song “Crying” (a callback to the use of Orbison’s “In Dreams” in a pivotal scene of Blue Velvet) that despite the constant intimations of its artifice and construction, become desperately moving to both the diegetic audience and the film viewer, as well, forming a potent metaphor for the art of filmmaking in the process. 

Nostalgia forms a crucial component to Mulholland Dr., Lynch’s own nostalgic remembrances of signifiers of his cultural past (the opening dance party sequence, kitschy pop tunes like “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star”) become mediated through the imagined remembrances of who becomes revealed as the film’s “true” protagonist, Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts). In her dream-construction, Hollywood is a place where ingenues can become starlets. A place where through luck, grit, and determination, one can find themselves magically in the pictures. In this universe, one need not sacrifice love for career or vice versa. Rather, both can be consummated in one fell swoop. The revelation in the final sections of the film of Betty and Rita as dream-screens and how disparate the lives of these dream-surrogates and their “real-life” referents transform the film from a celebration of Tinseltown to a damning critique of Hollywood toxicity. As critic David Thomson puts it, Mulholland Dr. is not only “about itself and the dual process of dreaming and driving – it’s also one of the greatest films ever made about the cultural devastation caused by Hollywood.” Silencio. 

Cinematalk Presents 70 Movies We Sawn in the 70s: THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE

Wednesday, October 27th, 2021
Posted by Jim Healy

In conjunction with the Cinematheque's presentation of Tobe Hooper'sThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre on October 30, we have repackaged an episode of 70 Movies We Saw in the '70s podcast on our own Cinematalk podcast.

On this episode, the Cinematheque's Ben Reiser talks with his regular co-host Scott Lucas about the movie's production history, its influences on other horror movies, and their own personal histories with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Listen below or subscribe to Cinematalk here.

The Artistry and Humanity of Djibril Diop Mambéty

Wednesday, October 27th, 2021
Posted by Jim Healy

This essay on Djibril Diop Mambéty's Le franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun was written by John Bennett, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. Le franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun will be screened in a program on Friday, October 29 at 7 p.m., at our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is Free!

By John Bennett

In the history of Senegalese cinema, two filmmakers stand out as the nation’s most prominent. The first, Ousmane Sembene, is known for his inventive yet direct moral parables (in films such as Mandabi, Xala, or Faat Kiné) that detail quandaries experienced by individuals in postcolonial Senegal. The second, Djibril Diop Mambéty, may be harder to neatly label. Unlike Sembene, Mambéty avoids overt didacticism (even if individual moments in his films do indeed appear to comment on the postcolonial moment during which he worked). And while Sembene’s films relay narratives with clear characterizations and causal narration, Mambéty’s films experiment extensively with both cinematic storytelling and style. Such experimentation is most boldly showcased in his 1973 masterpiece, Touki Bouki. But even if Mambéty toned down some of his more extreme experimental tendencies by the late 1990s, his virtues as a filmmaker are nevertheless on full display in his final two films: Le franc (1994) and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999).

Le franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun are part of a planned trilogy titled “histoires de petites gens” or “stories of little people”--a trilogy that Mambéty did not manage to complete before his untimely death in 1998. In both films, Mambéty presents slice-of-life narratives of ordinary Senegalese individuals navigating life in Dakar and its environs. In Le franc, a poor musician named Marigo discovers he has won the national lottery and treks across Dakar to claim his winnings. In The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, a young disabled girl named Sili becomes determined to sell copies of the newspaper called The Sun in Dakar to support both herself and her blind grandmother. But in both films, the stories are less straightforward than simple summaries might suggest. Of the two works, Le franc experiments the most with narrative design. After Marigo embarks on his quest to cash in his lottery ticket, the film largely abandons dialogue as a means of advancing the story. Instead, Marigo is presented in a series of locations whose spatial relationships to each other remain unclear. The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun may be Mambéty’s most classically constructed film; Sili has a goal to sell newspapers and encounters obstacles in the achievement of that goal. But narrative experimentation is nevertheless present in this work as well: Sili announces her goal to her unseen grandmother in voice-over as the image track shows a close up Sili’s stoic face (her lips unmoving despite her voice’s presence on the soundtrack) superimposed over a rapidly-moving printing press. Both films conclude ambiguously: Le franc ends with Marigo’s wild laughter at having recovered the ticket that he briefly thought lost. The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun concludes with Sili being carried into the distance by an older student without having recovered her crutch stolen by a gang of rival newspaper vendors. Though both films depict intelligible stories about believable characters, Mambety’s light narrative experimentation infuses both works with a dreamy atmosphere

Aiding in the creation of this atmosphere are other stylistic devices with which Mambéty experiments. In both shorts, like Touki Bouki before them, Mambéty saturates his Dakar cityscapes with deep, warm colors. Marigo traverses Dakar in a deep red/orange garment that complements the rich yellows and blues painted on the side of the bus that serves as his transportation. After she has made a considerable sum on the sale of her newspapers, Sili dances down a street in a deep yellow dress. Subtler still are the rich soundscaes that abound in both works. Though dialogue disappears for much of the middle of Le franc, it is replaced on the soundtrack by dense waves of sounds that include calls to prayer; saxophone, guitar, and percussion solos; and the general hum and whir of the city. Sonorous, too, is the booming voice of Aminata Fall, the actress who plays Marigo’s landlady (Fall was also featured prominently in Touki Bouki). One of the more memorable elements of The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun is Sili’s calm, repeated mantra-like intonation of “Le soleil!” as she promotes her wares. (For more on sound in Mambéty’s films, see UW professor Vlad Dima’s book, Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Films). The confluence of narrative experimentation, saturated palettes, and dense and varied soundscapes make Le franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun pleasantly hypnotic and sensorial cinematic experiences.

Ambiguity is Mambéty’s modus operandi, but that doesn’t prevent his films from delivering moments of pointed political critique. As Yasmina Price points out in her recent essay on the restorations for New York’s Metrograph theater, Mambéty was strongly critical of the global economic forces that he felt worked against such “petites gens” as Marigo and Sili (such a criticism is particularly evident in his 1992 feature, Hyenas). In a Kafkaesque moment from Le franc that recalls several scenes from Sembene’s Mandabi, Marigo encounters difficulty in claiming his winnings when speaking to a government functionary. Le franc, like Mandabi before it, criticizes the inaccessibility of governmental institutions for those who are poor and uneducated. While speaking with the functionary, Marigo briefly recounts the story of Yaadikoone Ndiaye, a poster of whom adorns the door he has lugged from his small apartment across town. Ndiaye, explains Marigo, is the Senegalese Robin Hood--a man who protected the young and the weak. The same poster can be seen briefly on a wall in the police station to which Sili is taken on the suspicion of theft in The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun. Despite Maméty’s disorienting stylistic concoctions, his criticism of Senegal’s place within a neocolonial global economy can nevertheless be clearly discerned.

Beyond the unique political commentary of Le franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, the films are also notable social documents for their portrayal of disability. In both works, the audience witnesses disabled characters navigate crowded and occasionally inhospitable spaces. But in neither work is the representation of disability exploited for easy pathos. Yes, we are invited to sympathize with Sili when we see her harassment at the hands of the gang of rival newspaper peddlers. But more often, we are simply invited to witness the placid calm with which she interfaces with her quotidian world. As a viewer with a physical disability, I personally have found Sili’s ordinary management of her life (and Mambéty’s unfussy depiction thereof) to be one of world cinema’s finest depictions of what it means and what it is like to be disabled. This, along with his creative political rhetoric and novel exploitation of cinematic conventions, are sufficient grounds to rank Mambéty as a first-rate humanist and artist.

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