Rewatching the films of Eduardo Coutinho, like I did yesterday thanks to Flaherty NYC, is very emotionally demanding. Being in the theater, seeing him and listening to him once more brings back his presence as absence: for Brazilian cinephiles, seeing a new Coutinho film was a ritual one could count on, but no longer can. Today, […]
Cinema
Creepy (Kurîpî: Itsuwari no rinjin), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Japan, 2016)
And this blog awakes from a long, restless sleep to find out Kiyoshi Kurosawa had a new film playing at the New York Asian Film Festival – a film whose existence I was completely unaware of, despite Kurosawa being one of my very favorite filmmakers and that the movie had premiered not too long ago […]
Gabriel Mascaro: Ebbs and Flows
I still haven’t gotten around to writing about Neon Bull for Cinética, but I didn’t want to overlook the beginning of Gabriel Mascaro’s first US retrospective, starting today at Lincoln Center. I’ve been writing about Mascaro’s work since 2009, when High Rise (Um Lugar ao Sol – literal translation: a place in the sun) premiered […]
Housemaids (Doméstica), by Gabriel Mascaro (Brazil, 2012)
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in Portuguese at Cinética in May 2013 and in English in February 2014, later republished in revised form in Victor Guimarães (ed.), Housemaids (Recife: Desvia, 2014) 22-27. Imponderable dramaturgy When I wrote about Gabriel Mascaro’s 2010 short The Adventures of Paulo Bruscky, one of the notes left out of the final […]
Frederick Wiseman
Notes from last year’s masterclass with Frederick Wiseman, at the Museum of the Moving Image (his words, filtered and probably reimagined by me), that came back to mind after yesterday’s (first and much belated) viewing of Titicut Follies (1967) on a stunning new 35mm print playing at Metrograph: “The institution thing is a bit of a gimmick. […]
New Directors/New Films
Cinética has started publishing a series of articles in English about some of the films we saw at this year’s New Directors/New Films. The festival just wrapped yesterday, but as usual we’re taking our time (hopefully not too much time) to avoid the pitfalls of quick responses and allow for slightly deeper dives into the […]
A Brighter Summer Day (Gǔ lǐng jiē shàonián shārén shìjiàn), Edward Yang, 1991.
Based on a real event from the early 1960s, Edward Yang’s 1991 masterpiece, A Brighter Summer Day, is set in the static tension found in the middle of a cultural tug-o-war. Taking place about 15 years after the end of the Japanese colonization in Taiwan, at a moment where the post-war geopolitical climate allowed for […]
France Is Our Mother Country (La France est notre patrie), Rithy Pahn, 2015.
About three years ago, I was invited to speak at a round table at a Rithy Panh retrospective in São Paulo. The fact that the conference took place right after the screening of Panh’s 2003 masterpiece, S-21: the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, made me focus less on the formal similarities his films shared with Chris Marker and […]