My friends at Cinética have started a podcast and they invited me to join Marcelo Miranda and Raul Arthuso and talk about the work of M. Night Shyamalan. The podcast is entirely in Portuguese, and if you know the language I recommend you hear it. As a palliative for the non-Portuguese speaking readers, I selected […]
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Decree our extinction and bury us all
I’m happy to be a part of this panel at Hunter College tonight, revisiting two terrific movies, and mediating the conversation between Wewito Ashaninka, Amalia Cordova, and John Collins. RSVP here.
The words and the others
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS 1. Writing about film is an exercise of translation. It aspires to put into words an experience that doesn’t happen exclusively on a textual level. In attempt to deal with an apparent shift in filmic conventions that started in the post-war period and that has since proliferated in the arthouse circuit, critics […]
Film language
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS This past Wednesday, the Center for Culture, Media and History and the department of Cinema Studies at NYU held the event Béture Collective: Kayapó Filmmaking in the Amazon. The program included an introduction by Robert Stam, a conversation between filmmaker Bepkadjoiti Kayapó, the Béture collective director Simone Giovine, curator Amalia Cordova, and […]
Cat Skin (Couro de Gato, 1962), Joaquim Pedro de Andrade
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS |Class Carnival| In the introduction to the screening of The Priest and the Girl (O Padre e a Moça, 1966) last week at NYU, Robert Stam pointed out an ambivalence, or perhaps even a contradiction, in how Joaquim Pedro de Andrade understood Oswald de Andrade’s concept of “anthropophagy” – the Modernist embrace […]
The Priest and the Girl (O Padre e a Moça, 1966), Joaquim Pedro de Andrade
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The precision of uncertainty There was a running joke among the Cinema Novo filmmakers that Joaquim Pedro de Andrade could never quite figure out what the 180-degree rule was all about. In classical Hollywood cinema and beyond, the 180-degree rule – also known as “the line” – is a basic convention to […]
“The Priest and the Girl” at NYU
Last year, Kino Lorber released the blu-ray boxset The Films of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. The collection features the restored versions of every film made by the great Brazilian director better-known for the classic Macunaíma (1969), as well as an essay by me. On Wednesday, one of his very best films, The Priest and the Girl (1965), will be screened at […]
Rotterdam, Sundance, Berlinale
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Two feature films I’m involved with are having their world premieres this week. If you’re going to one of the three festivals, please consider watching them. While you’re at it, make sure to take a look at the other many Brazilian titles playing in each of them in this especially rich year. […]
Two films by Adirley Queirós at the Museum of the Moving Image
The Museum of the Moving Image will be showing the two latest features by Adirley Queirós this Saturday, as part of Reverse Shot’s series on 15 rising auteurs. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Adirley Queirós in recent Brazilian cinema, and how generative his work can be for international audiences while keeping an unshakeable […]
Mrs. Fang (2017), Wang Bing
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The disheartened eye Mrs. Fang carries the name of its protagonist as its title for more than one reason. The opening shots give away the most obvious of them: as we see the main character moving around her house, the film promptly announces itself as a portrait of her. However, after the […]