VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS For the sake of the song The title of Araby (Arábia) – an enigmatic choice for a film set in Minas Gerais, Brazil – appears twice during its 96 minutes. The first time is as a conventional title card, except that it is introduced over 20 minutes into the film, separated from […]
Archives for January 2018
News from Home
. The winners of the 8th Cinema Tropical awards will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image this coming weekend, February 2-4. I was part of the fiction film jury last year and, if the criteria haven’t changed, the awards are for Latin American films with a festival premiere between May 2016 and April […]
Jealousy (La Jalousie, 2013), Philippe Garrel
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in October 2014, at Cinética. The ruin of what was not met by Fábio Andrade Jealousy opens with a shot that is as synthetic as it is grabbing. Of being grabbed: Clothilde (Rebecca Convenant) with her teary eyes focused somewhere beyond the camera, and with a trembling, terribly trembling mouth, […]
In the Shadow of Women (L’ombre des Femmes, 2015), Philippe Garrel
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in October 2015, at Cinética. Shadowplay One characteristic that has remained remarkably constant in Philippe Garrel’s work is his predilection for setting his films in a gap, an interval between two people’s very distinct experiences of the same relationship. In movies as different as The Birth of Love (1993), […]
Lover for a Day (L’Amant d’un Jour, 2017), Philippe Garrel
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Sacrificial love An older man meets a young woman in what looks like a public building. They smile at each other and walk together towards a door: “Professors’ Restroom”. He has the key. The two have sex in the bathroom – an action we see mostly through the expression on her face […]
A Tale of Love (1995), Trinh T. Minh-ha & Jean-Paul Bourdier
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in Portuguese in Carla Maia and Luís Felipe Flores (ed.) O Cinema de Trinh T. Minh-ha (2015) Rio de Janeiro: Caixa Cultural. 87-91. A room of one’s own A Tale of Love begins with a wide shot of a mountain under blue sky, covered by dry weed that sways in the […]
Measuring Change (2016), James Benning
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Landscape Of all the signs of generosity present in James Benning’s landscape-based work (and one could easily argue that even Twenty Cigarettes and Readers are landscape films), there is one that seems especially counterintuitive: they are films that can fit neatly into brief descriptions. Descriptions are both essential and contentious in the […]