ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13: High Tension on a Low Budget in John Carpenter’s Urban Western

Thursday, February 23rd, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 were written by Lance St. Laurent, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A new 4K DCP restoration of Assault from the American Genre Film Archice will screen on Saturday, February 23 at 7 p.m. The screening takes place at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free!

By Lance St. Laurent

With apologies to his debut film Dark Star (1974), it’s really John Carpenter’s follow-up (on which he served as director, writer, editor and composer), the ruthlessly entertaining Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), that we really begin to see Carpenter’s bona fides as a genre auteur and a classical stylist take shape. If you want to get extremely specific, one might go as far as to say you can pinpoint the exact moment, roughly thirty minutes into Assault, when John Carpenter starts etching his name into genre history. It’s a moment so dramatic and so self-assured in its wanton cruelty that the entire movie changes instantly around it. I’ll spare the details for those unfamiliar, but keep an eye out for an adorable little girl and an ice cream truck, and leave your good taste at the door.

Inspired by western classic Rio Bravo—Carpenter’s editorial pseudonym, John T. Chance, is even named after John Wayne’s character from that film—and the low-budget achievements of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Assault on Precinct 13 is a classic siege scenario in the key of 1970s gang warfare, made on a budget of only $100,000. After a cold open depicting a street gang being ambushed and gunned down by a squad of heavily-armed LAPD officers, the living leaders of the gang swear a blood oath for revenge. Unbeknownst to either the gang or the poor souls trapped inside, however, is the fact that the gang’s attack takes place on the last night of duty for the decommissioned Precinct 13, leaving only a skeleton crew of officers, secretaries, and one in-transit prisoner to defend against the invading force.

Much like Romero’s Living Dead, the leader of this ragtag group of defenders is a black man, Lt. Ethan Bishop, played with uncommon gravitas in one of the only leading roles from character actor Austin Stoker. Despite this being uncommon casting for the period, Bishop’s race—like Duane Jones’ protagonist in Romero’s film—is largely unremarked upon and incidental to the story, instead enriching the subtextual character dynamics undergirding the film. His counterpoint is the exquisitely (and mysteriously) named Napoleon Wilson, played with a laconic, devil-may-care attitude by Darwin Joston. A prisoner on his way to death row who proves to be a cool head under pressure, Wilson is a source of some of the film’s best one-liners (“In my situation, days are like women - each one's so damn precious, but they all end up leaving you”).

Assault is a narratively stripped back sort of affair, limited locations and only a few major characters, but the dynamic between Bishop and Joston grounds the film’s drama and makes for a compelling pairing built on burgeoning respect instead of the macho posturing that defined so many later action films. This interracial dynamic is mirrored by the invading gang, a curiously diverse horde of black, white, and latino criminals brought together by a shared lust for violence and revenge. In the world of Assault on Precinct 13, violence may beget more violence, but it also serves as a unifying catalyst for breaking down existing social barriers, albeit in the names of vengeance and survival.

As with any John Carpenter film, though, the real star is the director himself. Assault is only Carpenter’s second feature film, and his first shot in CinemaScope, the aspect ratio (2.35.1) he would make his trademark. Working with cinematographer Douglas Knapp (who also shot Dark Star), Carpenter’s wide compositions and roving camera render the enclosed space of the besieged precinct as a place where death from outside can strike at any moment and tensions inside are slowly building to a boil. All of the skills Carpenter would bring to films like Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982) are in their earliest bloom here, and the results, such as in the film’s sound design, are thrilling. The gang uses silenced rifles fired from a great distance to dispatch their prey, and the resulting attack first resembles less an explosive siege than the silent hand of death itself, reaching out to snatch life away from those unlucky enough to poke out their heads.

Throughout his career, John Carpenter has repeatedly shown himself to be a genre auteur whose technical craft is only matched by his keen sense of history. With Assault on Precinct 13, he placed himself in a long lineage of filmmakers who have reworked familiar genres over and over armed with little more than a barebones budget and a boundless sense of ingenuity. Filmmakers like Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and Don Siegel—whose Riot in Cell Block 11 gets a tip of the cap from Carpenter’s own pulpy title—set the template, but it was filmmakers of the 1970s and 80s like Walter Hill, Tobe Hooper, and Brian De Palma who carried on this tradition of genre craftsmanship on the cheap. Among his peers, John Carpenter is among the most illustrious and the most multifaceted, far more varied than his “Master of Horror” moniker might suggest. His stylistic elegance and elemental storytelling prowess were almost unmatched in his prime, and he has become a titanic influence for generations of genre filmmakers since, even as he himself has receded into a comfortable retirement. For fans of Carpenter, Assault on Precinct 13 should be an essential text: a training ground for a master in the making and a captivating exercise in squeezing out the most bang for the fewest bucks.

SAINT OMER: A Stylish Narrative Debut

Monday, February 13th, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

This review of Alice Diop's Saint Omer was written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. Saint Omer will screen on Thursday, February 16, at 7 p.m., in our regular Cinematheque venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free!

By David Vanden Bossche

Alice Diop came to prominence as a filmmaker award-winning crafting documentaries like Nous and La Mort de Danton in which African identity and the African diaspora were central themes. That approach certainly hasn’t changed for her new feature Saint Omer but this is the first time Diop is working with a more structured narrative that undergirds her thematic ponderings. The resulting film won a slew of awards, among them the prize for Best Screenplay at the Chicago International Film Festival and the award for Best Film at the Ghent Film Festival last October.

As if to illustrate that there is not a clear line that divides documentary work and fiction, Saint Omer opens, after a short ten second prologue, with a university lecture about the way in which art sublimates reality, a scene that uses Hiroshima, Mon Amour to make its point. The story Diop subsequently uses to sublimate reality is a fascinating tale that mirrors two African-European women: on one side is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a writer working on a new version of Euripides’ Medea. Seeking inspiration, the project leads her to attend a trial in the town of Saint Omer. On trial is the second female protagonist of this drama: Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) who is being charged with the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, a case that has obvious parallels with Rama’s Greek tragedy of choice.

It takes a while before the movie reveals its full storyline to the viewer and even when it has done so, Diop opts for a pace that allows us to slowly take in all the complex elements of the unfolding trial. Using predominantly long takes, the camera explores the emotions on the characters’ faces but also lets the judicial details slowly unfurl themselves through testimonies. Out of these lengthy observations – a scarcely moving camera often keeps the image locked on a single face while we hear other voices contributing from offscreen – a richly textured account of complex and often perplexing events slowly develops. Diop opts for letting testimonies and interrogations play out mostly in real time, which means that the viewer is asked to adjust judgements and views along with the crowd in the courtroom.

Most striking as this trial unfolds is the way in which the directorial choices open up a second layer of meaning that finds its way to the surface through the reflective and contemplative style. Underneath what seems to be a simple formalist exercise in a time-tested format lies a much more poignant reflection on the warping of African traditions. In his book Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft, Professor Koen Stroeken addresses the way in which traditional African witchcraft has morphed into a violent hybrid with westernized conceptions of guilt and punishment. Without ever explicitly talking about Stroeken’s subject, Saint Omer still manages to make these changing traditions palpable to the viewer by subtly suggesting the shadow they cast over the trial proceedings.

The fact that the film succeeds in weaving these layers into the narrative is in no small way indebted to the superbly crafted screenplay that often smuggles small subtleties and telling details into lines of dialogue or seemingly redundant situations. In that way, scenes such as the one in which Laurence’s mother lectures Rama on what to eat and not to eat at lunch become much more important than they might initially seem and neatly tie into the undergirding themes.

The quality of the writing should not blind us though, to the splendidness equally displayed in the visual style of Saint Omer. Although never really vying for the viewer’s attention, the images shot by Diop and director of cinematography Claire Mathon are quietly powerful and overwhelming. Mathon has worked on films as different as Stranger by the Lake, Spencer, and two acclaimed collaborations with director Céline Sciamma: Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Maman. Once again, the cinematographer finds the perfect pictorial style – albeit a very different one than in previous work – to best suit the narrative needs of the film. Alice Diop, for her part, has already revealed herself as a remarkably mature filmmaker, even at the relatively young age of 43. This first foray into fictional work – although her films have always eluded such easy categorizations – certainly bodes well for future endeavors.

NO BEARS: A Reflective Tale About Images and Truth

Tuesday, February 7th, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

This review of Jafar Panahi's No Bears was written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. No Bears will have its Madison theatrical premiere on Thursday, February 9, at 7 p.m., in our regular Cinematheque venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free!

By David Vanden Bossche

After a 'New Wave' of Iranian Cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jafar Panahi was part of the second ‘New Wave’ that gained prominence in the 1990s after the international success of films by the late Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up, A Taste of Cherry). After winning several prizes in the film festival circuit for films like The White Balloon and The Mirror, Panahi’s career took a much darker turn in 2010 when the Iranian authorities convicted him of national security violations stemming from a documentary he was making chronicling the protests that followed the disputed reelection of Iran's then-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Even after being placed under house arrest, the director managed to keep working, sometimes smuggling his films out of the country to ensure overseas screenings at several renowned festivals. Since Panahi has not been allowed to leave Iran for more than a decade, No Bears was also filmed under circumstances that restricted the director’s freedom, but this time these restrictions became an integral part of the film’s concept. (Just prior to the No Bears premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it won a special jury prize, Panahi was arrested in July 2022 in Tehran and ordered to serve a six-year prison sentence for "propaganda against the system" that had been suspended after he served two months in 2010. Two days after beginning a hunger strike last week, Panahi was released from prison.)

As in the movies directed by his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, the director himself often plays an important role and this alter ego often functions as a conscious presence within the fabric and stories of Panahi’s films. In No Bears, a conversation is created between the director’s own story and the narrative we watch unfolding onscreen. Panahi plays a thinly veiled version of himself: a director who oversees the shoot of a film from his laptop while he is spending time at a remote village near the Iranian-Turkish border. Panahi is shown wrestling with uncooperative technology and inquisitive villagers, while trying to work through the footage his assistant is sending him from Tehran. The film-within-the-film revolves around a couple trying to leave Iran with false documents, while the actors playing the couple are themselves wrapped up in a similar situation. Panahi's own situation of not being able to leave the country becomes another element in the tapestry of threads being woven together, as does a clandestine romance in the village that may or may not have been accidentally captured by Panahi’s camera. Bringing all of these premises together, the film creates an intricate network of meanings and metaphors that becomes more complex and interesting as the narrative unfolds.

In visualizing these ideas, Panahi, like Kiarostami, rarely changes camera positions. Panahi also provides a clear nod to the scene in Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us when the protagonist is searching for the highest point in the village to try and get some reception on his cell-phone, but Panahi’s most daring interaction with the oeuvre of his mentor is the way in which – echoing Kiarostami’s Close-Up – the film constantly questions the relation between film and reality. The viewer witnesses the manipulation necessary to create images and meaning, and because we side with the protagonist/director, we also become accomplices in providing meaning to these images. The building blocks of cinema– color, movement, editing, sound – are foregrounded here in a reflective tale about images and truth. At the end of the film, it becomes clear that the references to The Wind Will Carry Us are not just playful or coincidental. Kiarostami's central theme, to paraphrase Professor Tom Paulus of Antwerp University, is that the lie of cinema uncovers the truth, and Panahi reworks that theme for a new, digital age. For Kiarostami, the poetic beauty and power of the ‘cinematic lie’ (the ‘illusion of art’ if you like) was necessary to uncover fundamental truths about life. For Panahi, then, this lie can no longer just lead to the utopian (platonic?) idea of truth and life that his predecessor believed in, there’s now a rude awakening and a call for the caution and responsibility that need to be the filmmaker’s – or rather ‘image maker’s’ – part when creating images and releasing them into the world.

It is this fascinating dialogue with the cinematic traditions that shaped him and guided him throughout his career, that make Jafar Panahi’s No Bears his most accomplished and richest film since his breakthrough over a quarter of a century ago with The White Balloon.

BIG BROWN EYES: Grant & Bennett On the Road to Stardom

Thursday, February 2nd, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on Raoul Walsh's Big Brown Eyes (1936) were written by Samantha Janes, PhD student in film in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. Big Brown Eyes will screen as part of an early Cary Grant double feature on Saturday, February 4 at 6 p.m., followed by Hot Saturday (1932) at 7:30 p.m. The double feature screens at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is Free!

By Samantha Janes

Who wants to get their nails done and solve some crimes? If you say yes, then you’ll join nearly the entire cast of Raoul Walsh’s 1936 crime comedy film Big Brown Eyes. While the salon that doubles for a makeshift police bullpen is full of criminals and beauticians, the plot lies in the hands of the young Cary Grant, who emerges as the charming detective on the hunt for killer jewel thieves, and Joan Bennett, his manicurist girlfriend who polishes up her investigation skills to become a reporter. Though Cary Grant’s charming personality shines through this film and offers a glimpse of his future stardom in Hollywood, Grant was not the one the studios wanted in the lead role. Walsh noted in an interview that Grant was “in the doghouse” and that Joan Bennett, along with the studio wanted someone like Fred MacMurray to play Danny. After a string of praised performances in unsuccessful films, Grant was in a slump. Bennett, on the other hand, was gaining ground after beginning in silent movies. 1936 was one of her years as a blonde before a drastic change to brunette altered her career’s trajectory with roles in films such as The House Across the Bay (1940) and The Woman in the Window (1944). Though Big Brown Eyes ultimately did little to further Grant and Bennett's careers, it did provide space for both to demonstrate their fast-talking comedy skills while also indicating their ability to adapt to more serious thematic elements.

This snappy seventy-six-minute film from Paramount came during the middle of Walsh’s illustrious career that spanned from 1913 to 1964. Walsh was not only an actor in films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Sadie Thompson (1928), but directed large scale projects such as The Big Trail (1930), Klondike Annie (1936), The Roaring Twenties (1939), and High Sierra (1941). Even after losing an eye while working on In Old Arizona (1928), Walsh had a knack for spotting and nurturing new on-screen talent. While the films he directed ranged drastically in genre and settings, when asked in an interview with Patrick McGilligan what makes a film a “Walsh film,” the director answered, “the tempo, breaking it up, and hustling it along.”

Balancing the tempo, breaking the story up, and hustling it along is exactly what allows the plot of Big Brown Eyes to successfully capture and keep the audience’s attention. The beginning of the film presents Grant’s character, Danny Barr, as an up-and-coming police detective who is investigating a string of jewelry thefts that involve wealthy older women. The most recent victim, Mrs. Cole, involves not only the police but also Richard Morey, a deceitful private insurance investigator. This introduction of Morey, played by Walter Pidgeon, begins the arrival of numerous other ne’er-do-wells played by character actors Lloyd Nolan, Alan Baxter, and Douglas Fowley.

While Danny is on the case of the jewelry thieves, Bennett’s character Eve Fallon become Danny’s eyes and ears within the confines of her work place, the salon. The purposeful editing throughout the salon scenes showcases the space where the community gathers to exchange gossip. Though the film does not have an intricate plot or intense cinematography, there are plenty of subtle key elements that liven up the film and force the audience to focus on the information being exchanged.

Although the film is a comedy, the stakes of the crimes increase when an unexpected murder occurs and the investigation is thrown into disarray. As Danny’s job now becomes a ticking clock to catch the murderers, Eve’s career takes a turn from manicurist to reporter when her talents become recognized by a local lead journalist. With both main character’s involvement in the hunt for the criminals, an audience might expect some suspense in finding the identity of the killers, but this film quickly reveals the one responsible for the murder and explores the injustice of the legal system when the killers go free. When Danny and Eve are foiled during their investigation, they both go through personal and relationship struggles as a result of their newfound cynicism. Eventually the pair manage to uncover the truth and bring about a happier ending to the story, but the unexpected darkness to the plot lingers even after the pair share their final kiss. 

Altogether, the tone of the film teeters between the couple’s comedy and their brewing disillusionment with the law, and often leans more into the gloomier mystery elements. Like many films of the 1930s based on pre-existing material, Big Brown Eyes is adapted from two of James Edward Grant’s short stories, “Hahsit, Babe?” and “Big Brown Eyes,” both published in Liberty Magazine in 1934 and 1935, respectively. Both of these stories feature reporter Eve Whitney and Sgt. Daniel Howard, the original source versions of Grant and Bennett’s characters, who clash heads while they are investigating the same murders. Both stories exhibit that hard-boiled tone that the film draws from during the latter half. Though the adaptation allows for a fleshed-out version of Eve and Danny, the film keeps the joke that appears in “Big Brown Eyes” that alludes to Eve being an even better investigator than Danny (she can convince anyone to do anything with her big brown eyes). While this detective-comedy film is not one of the most well-known in film history, ultimately, it provides a wonderful glance into the budding stardom of its cast.

AFTERSUN: A Remarkable Debut Memory Film

Thursday, February 2nd, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

The following notes on Charlotte Wells's Aftersun were written by Nick Sansone, PhD student in film in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. The Cinematheque will present Aftersun in our Premieres series on Thursday, February 2 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Free admission!

By Nick Sansone

When looking back at the movie year 2022, one of the most significant trends was the increase of auteur-driven “memory films,” original writer-director projects deeply rooted in a filmmaker’s own memory of either their own childhood or the various goings-on around their growing-up. While filmmakers like Alfonso Cuarón and Kenneth Branagh had engaged in these types of work with Roma and Belfast in previous years, 2022 brought such films as Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, James Gray’s Armageddon Time, and Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, all of which served as cinematic reflections of a particular time during the filmmakers’ coming-of-age and were largely based in their own memories of the period. However, a very different sort of memory film opened in limited release alongside these other works last fall and quickly garnered a higher level of universal critical acclaim than the other aforementioned 2022 memory films.

But rather than the long-awaited memory film of a legendary Hollywood filmmaker, Aftersun is the debut feature of a largely-unknown Scottish filmmaker named Charlotte Wells. Having initially garnered attention with a trilogy of short films she directed as an MFA student at New York University, Wells collaborated on this first feature with Moonlight creators Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski, and the latter film’s artistic rendering of memory and youth coming-of-age amidst a broken family dynamic is very much reflected in how Wells approaches this story, albeit with a heightened sense of ambiguity and mystery that more than helps it stand on its own.

Aftersun’s unique approach is established almost immediately, as the film is framed as a flashback to the childhood of protagonist Sophie (played by Frankie Corio as a child and Celia Rowlson-Hall as an adult), and specifically a vacation she took as an eleven-year-old with her father Calum (Paul Mescal) to a Turkish resort in the mid-to-late-1990s. While on this vacation, she becomes forced to grapple with her father’s humanity, and the fact that he has pain and trauma and regret and all the things that every human faces in an amplified manner. And in the present-day, the adult Sophie watches a series of miniDV tapes of the aforementioned vacation in an attempt to understand the person that her father was when raising her.

Within its framework as a memory film, Aftersun seeks to capture the feeling of grappling with the humanity of a parent much later in life, when it is far too late to actually have a real conversation with them. Like many acclaimed art filmmakers (she specifically cites Chantal Akerman as a key influence), Wells constructs this film as a cryptic puzzle, slowly revealing information throughout while still keeping it vague enough that different viewers can come up with differing interpretations as to the nature of this specific father-daughter relationship and what exactly the adult Sophie is trying to understand about her father.

But despite the mysterious and cryptic nature of the film, there are strong undercurrents of clinical depression and repressed sexuality that run throughout its entirety. Specifically, the film’s portrayal of the former is communicated in the most subtle of ways, as Wells allows the viewer to pick up on various things such as books on a hotel room shelf, seemingly-throwaway lines of dialogue and understated gestures in order to construct the picture for themselves. And helping to serve as a guide throughout this is Paul Mescal, whose performance as Calum does much to allow his character to become three-dimensional outside of his daughter’s memories.

In addition, Wells makes careful use of certain pop music to evoke the film’s primary time period (i.e., 1996-97), re-contextualizing such songs as Los del Río’s “Macarena” and R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” in order to both evoke nostalgia and establish a sense of distance that comes with reflecting from a new perspective. But it is in the third act of the film where Wells applies this re-contextualization to the song “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie in such a way that all but transforms it. This artistic choice then culminates in a final shot that furthers the abstract and ethereal nature of the entire enterprise, while keeping Sophie’s conflicting emotions front-and-center and never letting the form overwhelm those emotions.

As Hollywood is currently in the midst of an Oscar season that is largely dominated by such films as Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, and Tár (among others), it is very easy for smaller arthouse-oriented films like Aftersun to get lost in the shuffle, especially when they don’t carry big-name actors, directors, or awards-campaigning budgets, or when they require a particular patience and distraction-free environment in order to appreciate their many gifts. But the Cinematheque screening of Aftersun gives us the chance to allow this film to stand on its own theatrically in Madison and be seen communally on the big screen as a bold artistic statement from a first-time feature filmmaker with a promising career ahead of her.

THE GOOD BOSS: An Elegant Tragicomedy

Monday, January 23rd, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

This review of Fernando León de Aranoa's El Buen Patrón/ The Good Boss was written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. The Good Boss will have its Madison theatrical premiere on Friday, January 27, the first screening in our annual series supported by UW-Madison's Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies (LACIS). The screening begins at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By David Vanden Bossche

Fernando León de Aranoa already had a flourishing career working for Spanish television before he decided to helm his first feature film as a bona fide director. His directorial efforts – among them Amador, A Perfect Day and Loving Pablo - went largely unnoticed, until in 2022, his El Buen Patrón/ The Good Boss, suddenly received award upon award at several film festivals around the world. Rightfully so, one might add, because this intriguing film that starts deceivingly lighthearted and playful, gradually transforms into an elegant mature tragicomedy that benevolently chuckles at the mostly self-inflicted tragedies of modern life this flawed but bizarre species called ‘humans’ faces on a daily basis.

The Good Boss is buttressed by a remarkably inspired performance by De Aranoa’s compatriot Javier Bardem (Skyfall, No Country for Old Men among countless others) who clearly is having a blast portraying Blanco, owner and CEO of a small local Spanish factory. Blanco – we never learn his first name – is the type of man who seemingly has full control over his life: he took over his father’s small business – producing scales of various kinds – and turned it into a true success story. And while we hear Blanco in the opening scene mundanely delivering a speech for the occasion of his business being up for a prestigious price, we do feel he has a heart for his employees when we see him altruistically making a call to his high-paid lawyer when one of his workers’ sons has gotten himself into some trouble with the law. Even Blanco’s marriage is still functional, a bit lacking in passionate affection maybe, but – fitting for someone in the business of selling scales – utterly balanced, and most certainly free of any financial woes.

Appearances quickly turn out to be deceptive, however, as we slowly realize that things are not entirely as they seem. However perfect business life may be, it sometimes requires little annoyances like firing people. And isn’t it annoyingly inconvenient that just when an inspection is to be held at the plant, a former disgruntled employee decides to stage a protest in front of the company’s main gate? Equally annoying is the fact that your childhood friend and company right-hand man Miralles seems to have lost his touch when it comes to taking care of daily management. And not so much annoying but rather a bit awkward is that charming new young female intern flashing her smile at you just a tiny bit too much for comfort. Obviously, these pesky details should be of no concern to a man used to always making the right decisions at the right time, no? Not so much, as we will quickly learn.

The Good Boss looks at how we create our own personal narratives and personae, and become incredibly well-versed in convincing ourselves that every step we take and every decision we make is justified within our own personal framework. Weaving comedy around that idea could easily have ventured into the domain of predictable and questionable humor, but the jokes are peppered liberally, never oppressively throughout the film, and everything is elevated by the director’s unmistakable sense of visual flair. Instead of aiming for rather obvious humorous situations and quick laughs, De Aranoa chooses to let things play out slowly, while the camera unobtrusively observes and allows the viewer to be detached and distant, wryly smiling at so much ‘condition humaine’. The distance between viewer and action is often palpable in a literal sense, with repeated use of ‘long shots’ that let us witness a situation, without necessarily allowing us to hear what characters are saying. This approach requires the spectator to pay attention to salient little details – both visual and narratively – and the film contains a considerable amount of neatly orchestrated little surprises that are undergirded by the well-crafted visual language.

The blending of drama and sometimes stingy, but always heartfelt comedy, manages to unmask several painful universal truths, without having to resort to moralizing or the kind of emphatic rhetorical formulas that lesser films tend to apply. Many contemporary problems and discussion points are touched upon in The Good Boss, but the film leaves it to the viewer to discern them and never insults the audience’s intelligence by spelling out what we are supposed to take away from a given situation.

Comedies that are both well-scripted and visually interesting are – alas – a progressively rare breed in today’s cinema (American or elsewhere). The Good Boss isn’t the kind of film you are likely to find on any critic’s ‘best-of-the-year’ list. Its low profile and genre keep it from being perceived as ‘high brow award fare’. However, in the way the film manages to combine keen visual craftmanship with social critique, while still functioning as an engaging comedy, it is a perfect alternative for both the run-of-the-mill comedic blockbuster and the more sophisticated comedies we tend to associate with arthouse fare.

Favorites of 2022: John Bennett

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023
Posted by Jim Healy

John Bennett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison, the Cinematheque's Project Assistant, and a Programmer for the Cinematheque and Wisconsin Film Festival.

  1. TÁR (Todd Field, 2022)
  2. ARMAGEDDON TIME (James Gray, 2022)
  3. BENEDICTION (Terence Davies, 2021)
  4. APOLLO 10 1/2: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD (Richard Linklater, 2022)
  5. PETROV'S FLU (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2021)
  6. COW (Andrea Arnold, 2021)
  7. THE FABELMANS (Steven Spielberg, 2022)
  8. ONE FINE MORNING (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022)
  9. IL BUCO (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2021)
  10. TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund, 2022)
  11. INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE (Quentin Dupieux, 2022)
  12. LINGUI (Mahamat Saleh-Haroun, 2021)
  13. BABYLON (Damien Chazelle, 2022)
  14. KIMI (Steven Soderbergh, 2022) 
  15. BONES AND ALL (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)

Favorites of 2022: Ben Reiser

Saturday, December 31st, 2022
Posted by Jim Healy

Ben Reiser is Director of Operations for the Wisconsin Film Festival and a Programmer for the Cinematheque.

Ben Reiser’s Fourteen Favorite Movies Seen in Movie Theaters in 2022

In alphabetical order

AFTERSUN (2022, Charlotte Wells) – A sense memory piece that miraculously balances precise details with a fathomless sense of the unknown. Somehow both achingly sad and filled with dread yet beautiful and strangely comforting.

AMSTERDAM (2022, David O Russell) – I’ve rarely connected with a movie so quickly and so completely. I was sold within the first thirty seconds, and after two viewings, I’m ready for a third. Featuring terrific, effervescent turns not only from Christian Bale, Margot Robie and John David Washington, but also by actors I don’t normally enjoy, including Rami Malek and Mike Meyers.

ARMAGEDDON TIME (2022, James Gray) – Like an atom bomb dropped directly on my adolescence, James Gray’s fearlessly honest and clear-eyed account of a Jewish family living in 1980s Queens features another late-career highlight from Anthony Hopkins that left me in tears.

BABYLON (2022, Damien Chazelle) – A swing for the fences that ultimately gets caught at the warning track, but man is it ever fun to watch it’s long slow descent down to earth.

BARBARIAN (2022, Zach Cregger) I had a lot of luck this year with films I’d heard negative things about in advance, but this one lived up to all the positive hype and then some. Barbarian weaponizes our knowledge of horror movie tropes against us in all the best ways.

BONES AND ALL (2022, Luca Guadagnino) – Guadagnino, like James Gray, is a director whose work I’ve admired more than loved, but I was completely hypnotized by this YA tale that somehow taps into the emotionally devastating vibe of George A. Romero’s Martin and milks it for all its worth.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022, David Cronenberg) – I love David Cronenberg and this is my favorite film of his since Existenz.

THE FABELMANS (2022, Steven Spielberg) – How amazing that we got both Armageddon Time and this in the same year? My favorite Spielberg since A.I..

FUNNY PAGES (2022 Owen Kline) – I haven’t laughed this long and hard since our Cinematheque screening of What’s Up Doc?, and that is rarified air.

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2022, Daniel Goldhaber) An urgent political tract dressed up as a big, dumb, ridiculously entertaining action movie. Oceans 11 written by Abbie Hoffman.

LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG (2022, Antonio Lukich) – This Ukranian comedy about two brothers – one a cop, the other, a ne’er-do-well - is consistently funny and surprising, and ultimately, quite moving.

PETER VON KANT (2022, François Ozon) – Is it heresy to admit I prefer this funny, lighthearted remake to Fassbender’s original, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant? Well, I’m on record.

RIMINI (2022, Ulrich Seidl) – Ulrich Seidl’s latest is a typically disturbing, funny, sad, brilliantly observed character piece. It’s almost a remake of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, but better.

A WOUNDED FAWN (2022, Travis Stevens) – This giallo meets The Evil Dead mashup has a first half that might be even more terrifying than the first act of Barbarian. And then it gets freaky.

Movies I wish I’d seen in a theater, but enjoyed quite a bit at home:

GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO (2022, Guillermo Del Toro, Mark Gustafson)

RRR (2022, S.S Rajamouli)

SPEAK NO EVIL (2022, Christian Tafdrup)

Favorites of 2022: Jim Healy

Friday, December 30th, 2022
Posted by Jim Healy

Jim Healy is Director of Programming for the UW Cinematheque and a Programmer for the Wisconsin Film Festival.

In 2022, I saw 443 feature films from throughout cinema history that were all new to me. These 10, presented in alphabetical order, were my top favorites:

ARMAGEDDON TIME (2022, James Gray)

BARBARIAN (2022, Zach Cregger)

DRIVE MY CAR (2021, Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

THE FABELMANS (2022, Steven Spielberg)

FUNNY PAGES (2022, Owen Kline)

HELLO, SISTER! (WALKING DOWN BROADWAY, 1933, Erich von Stroheim, Edwin Burke, Alfred Werker)

RRR (2022, S.S Rajamouli)

SCHLUSSAKKORD (1936, Detlef Sierck/Douglas Sirk)

SYMPHONIE POUR UN MASSACRE (1963, Jacques Deray)

VENGEANCE IS MINE (1984, Michael Roemer)

 

...and here are 21 more titles of films that I thought were outstanding:

BABYLON (2022, Damien Chazelle)

BROTHER’S KEEPER/OKUL TIRASI (2021, Ferit Karahan)

UN CONDE/THE COP (1970, Yves Boisset)

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022, David Cronenberg)

DOUBLE DOOR (1933, Charles Vidor)

EMILY THE CRIMINAL (2022, John Patton Ford)

FALCON LAKE (2022, Charlotte Le Bon)

GOLDEN EIGHTIES (1986, Chantal Akerman)

GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO (2022, Guillermo Del Toro, Mark Gustafson)

THE HAPPIEST MAN IN THE WORLD (2022, Teona Strugar Mitevska)

J’ACCUSE (2019, Roman Polanski)

MARY STEVENS, M.D. (1933, Lloyd Bacon)

THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH/LA NUIT DU 12 (2022, Dominik Moll)

NOPE (2022, Jordan Peele)

MOONAGE DAYDREAM (2022, Brett Morgen)

PARALLEL MOTHERS/MADRES PARALELAS (2021, Pedro Almodóvar)

PUSS IN BOOTS THE LAST WISH (2022, Joel Crawford)

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING (2022, George Miller)

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (2022, Ruben Ostlund)

SAINT OMER (2022, Alice Diop)

TAKE OUT (2004, Sean Baker, Shih Ching-Tsou)

VORTEX (2021, Gaspar Noe)

TONI: Jean Renoir's Painterly Masterwork

Wednesday, December 7th, 2022
Posted by Jim Healy

These notes on Jean Renoir's Toni (1935) were written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A 4K restoration of Toni will screen in our series of recent French film restorations on Friday, December 9 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular screening venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By David Vanden Bossche

Which ‘Renoir’ is the most influential: father Pierre-Auguste Renoir, impressionist painter known for masterpieces such as Dance at Bougival and The Umbrellas, or son Jean Renoir whose films Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu, 1939) and La Grande Illusion (1937) regularly feature on lists naming the greatest films of all time? It’s a question that remains up for debate, preferably over a good glass of French wine or absinthe.

Whatever the case, there’s no denying Jean Renoir’s standing as one of the most important French filmmakers of the twentieth century, his towering achievements as a director far outnumbering the limited amount of titles that found their way into the public cultural memory. Few directors can boast ever having made a film like La Bête Humaine (1938) let alone line that one up with the aforementioned classics and films like The River (1951), The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), The Golden Coach (1952) or arguably his most famous film among casual movie viewers: A Day in the Country (Une Partie de Campagne, 1946).

Missing from that list – among many others – is Toni from 1935, another one of Jean Renoir’s master classes in filmmaking.

In his book Film History, Peter von Bagh labeled this rural drama as a direct predecessor to the Italian neo-realism that would revolutionize film art about a decade later. To a certain degree that is true – Renoir admitted that he wanted to convey a high degree of naturalism in Toni – but if we look at Italian neo-realism along the lines of Gilles Deleuze’s ideas of this being the moment when cinema drastically re-conceptualized the notion of ‘time’, then Toni is a different beast altogether. ‘Time’ and ‘Temps Mort/ Dead Time’ became the main element around which films like Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952) were centered – a notion recently powerfully reiterated in Jordan Schonig’s book The Shape of Motion – and this element is decidedly absent from Toni’s dramatic arc, which is much more akin’ to classic storytelling than anything that came out of Italian neo-realism. Much more than a predecessor to the Italian movement, Toni, with its penchant for heightened lyrical realism, is part of the ‘French Poetic Realism’ that would go on to dominate the next decade with such famous titles as Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows (Quai des Brumes, 1938) and Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945).

Toni’s plot is based on the writings of Jacques Levert (who plays a minor uncredited part), a retired French police commissioner from the Martigues region near Marseille – the same region where the film was shot – and tells the story of a tragedy that unfolds among the migrant populace in the south of France. This is primarily a love story, but the grim social reality and hostile environment in which the drama takes place is an integral part of the cinematic universe Renoir creates here. Anchored in a bleak view of humanity, Toni surely is one of Renoir’s most pessimistic films, offering little redemption for the characters, or the viewer for that matter. Focusing on the love story between an Italian migrant worker (Charles Blavette) and a local young girl (Celia Montalván), the film brings questions to the fore about race, class and economical hardship that certainly struck a chord with contemporaneous French audiences but also proved to have a universal appeal for 1930s audiences worldwide. In a 1956 issue of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Renoir addressed this success by stating that ‘I would be happy if you could fathom just a little bit of my love for this Mediterranean community’. It seems he did more than that, as viewers anywhere were more than willing to sympathize with the tragic protagonist.

The black and white cinematography in Toni is by Claude Renoir, the director’s nephew who would subsequently work with him on a few more projects and become a prolific director of photography signing off on high-profile titles like The French Connection II (1975) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). The most remarkable name attached to this project, however, is Luchino Visconti’s , the future director of bona fide classics such as Rocco and his Brothers (1960), The Leopard (1963) and Death in Venice (1971), to name but a few. Visconti served as an uncredited assistant director on Toni and later never ceased to mention how much he had learned about cinema and directing from the great Jean Renoir.

Toni may not contain the ‘bravura’ shots that people have come to associate with Renoir based on La Grande Illusion or La Règle du Jeu, but the more timid register in which the director works here is just as interesting and visually overwhelming, drawing from more painterly influences that would remain a mainstay in Renoir’s oeuvre, through his ‘Hollywood’ period (1941's Swamp Water being a prime example) and later on in movies like The River, or his homage to his father’s work in 1959’s Picnic in the Grass (Déjeuner sur L’Herbe, 1959).

The film was splendidly restored in 4K at the‘L’Immagine Ritrovato laboratory in Bologna and premiered at the 2019 edition of the annual Il Cinema Ritrovato festival.

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