AGO, TFCA, Berlinale — oh my!
04.03.2026 22:11
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AGO, TFCA, Berlinale — oh my!
If the Hollywood Reporter account is true and a $70 million film didn’t budget for one of its stars to have accommodations for the length of production, then both the producers and Safdie (who has many stronger arguments against him) should just stop making movies.
The least you could have done in this case was exactly what you didn’t do. No principle.
But that the excuse is “no ethical consumption…” is eye roll inducing. It’s not hard to not use Amazon, AirBnB, etc, especially when they’ve been BDS targets for years now. You show ur ass making excuses going against collectively organized campaigns and weaken them making it about broad complicity
Loktev’s excuses to go against organized campaigns are lazy and sniveling. If she respected the work of FW4P, she’d put her power towards seeking an alternative home for the film that aligns with her values, and if not facilitate self-distribution, like so many films that were blacklisted did.
Had a dream that Hong Sang-soo died and we all organized a streaming marathon of his filmography.
But Sirat is also bad!
Cinephilic culture cares more for a list’s ranking than the world the films on that list reflect. This is how artwashing becomes an unscrutinized faculty of criticism, conceding to the cultural industries before even putting up a fight.
But Slow Cinema is, I think, a beautiful collection of aesthetic signifiers that don’t demean the work, but recognize the way they operate in the relationship built between aesthetic/temporality. His world’s move slowly, much like Apitchatpong or early Tsai. It’s a different register of reality!
The Plot Against Harry is definitely the film people were saying Uncut Gems was.
Bêla Tarr is a virtuoso. An imagination whose visions of fascism — and in response an individualized isolationism — perplexity, and wonder, all guided my way through the cinema at an early age. Still my heart beats for his observation. May his memory be a blessing.
Another short of mine, one that is more or less a COVID self-portrait, but I would say it’s really a film about discerning just how dysphoric you really are.
Watch here:
vimeo.com/479337721
Surely all of you Canadian or experimental film people would love to watch a cute landscape film about cultural history collapsing into a mnemonic ephemera?
I’ll be posting my films over the next little while, whenever I get the urge. This is an early short of mine, made of a single, static landscape shot. It’s an erratic piece, because I didn’t want to just remake Gottheim’s Fog Line. I like to call it my juke box musical.
vimeo.com/381732072
I need 8k to make a feature film. Who wants to hop on as a producer and help get the grant? 🫡
Lmfao, I feel the energy
The stupidity of our quotidian has become overwhelmingly comprehensible and incessantly maddening.
Everyone’s yelling to learn Chinese, but I’m just on my 11th day of regaining Hebrew via Duo… Yiddish definitely ones afterwards, but maybe I learn Chinese alongside Arabic? That won’t be difficult… two new alphabets? A breeze.
Images become motifs, and motifs become transparent symbols, caught in the rigidity of narrative expectation. I beleive the form is there to experiment with a reimagining of protagonism and its political implications, but the film cannot escape the orbit of classical narrativity, limiting its reach
Nickel Boys was, certainly, an expression of historical resuscitation— most acutely felt in the last moment of inferred spiritual exhumation — but its narrative confines grinds the momentum of its montage to a halt, containing, very tightly, the associational faculties of its archival essay…
Exactly those! Very, historically, well articulated and researched!
Recommend a few podcast episodes my partner got me to listen to, that of Behind the Bastards, which discusses the liberal media’s role during WWII and before, in providing legitimacy to the rise of fascism
These weeds haveent been cut in decades, and we’re all just trying to learn which of them don’t have thorns. It’s a complicated situation, but one we’ve all got to address head on and with seriousness.
Such an aesthetic inclination, too, is one that causes me trouble as I go to sleep. Is all this celluloid and its spectacle within the festival circuit worth the budget it takes up: what is cut in its favor? Priorities come back to methodological and ethical decision making
I think about the camera being developed to capture 3D space, rendering a focus puller obselete, so often. I think about the industrial development of all these labour roles as a certification of industrial rule, a point against pushing due to the money people make a living off of, so often
I do think thats an important questions with many answers that I beleive comes down to ethical judgements regarding the position of these tools in relation to their human counterparts.
I’ve many thoughts on the excess of labour on sets, just as I have issues with technology replacing it
These Twitter-like spaces are never good for this kind of analytical dialogue, which is in need to more in depth, flexible, and lucid modes of expression.
The core problem, I feel, is industrialism as an amorphous hegemony that slithers into all levels of praxis, unless that praxis is intent on rebuking such. I think developing technology and its uses fits well into this discourse!
I’m so sorry about how much is here, and perhaps its messiness.
Almost all productions operate on indsutrialist style modals, and this is I think a core issue, built with nostalgia, aspiration, and many other affective internalizations in collaboration with financial risk/vs/reward mentalities from financiers and the filmmakers beset by them
And, I’ll posit, working outside a studio system means little to nothing anymore, unless there is active attempt to confront its machinations and latent ideological faculties within your work and its production. The Brutalist does not do that.