Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we showcase the debut features of some of today’s modern visionary filmmakers with a year-long series dubbed Women Direct. Our fourth selection is Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga [2001] with an introduction by Riverrun Global Film Series curator Tanya Shilina-Conte.
Tickets:$8 general, $6 students & seniors, $5 members
Event Sponsors:
Venue Information:
341 Delaware Ave, Buffalo, NY 14202
Synopsis
Courtesy of Criterion Collection:
The release of Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga heralded the arrival of an astonishingly vital and original voice in Argentine cinema. With a radical and disturbing take on narrative, beautiful cinematography, and a highly sophisticated use of on- and offscreen sound, Martel turns her tale of a dissolute bourgeois extended family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel. This visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways that political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships is a drama of extraordinary tactility, and one of the great contemporary film debuts.
Tidbits:
Berlin International Film Festival – 2001 – Winner: Alfred Bauer Award
Toronto International Film Festival – 2001
New York Film Festival – 2001
Director Bio
Photo: LA NACION
“From the very beginning, even when I’m writing, I think a lot about the sound. Many elements of my work in cinema come from oral storytelling and oral tradition. I think about sound and the rhythm of the sound.”
Courtesy of Zama‘s press notes:
Born in Argentina, filmmaker Lucrecia Martel has positioned her work in the international film community. ZAMA (2017) is her fourth feature film after writing and directing LA MUJER SIN CABEZA (2008, The Headless Woman), LA NIÑA SANTA (2004, The Holy Girl) and LA CIÉNAGA (2001, The Swamp). Her films have been acclaimed at the most important film festivals: Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, New York, Sundance and Rotterdam, amongst others. Retrospectives of her work have been widely exhibited in film festivals and prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Berkeley or the London Tate Museum. She has taken part in the official juries of Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Sundance and Rotterdam, and has dictated masterclasses around the world.
Filmography:
Zama (2017)
La mujer sin cabeza [The Headless Woman] (2008)
La niña santa [The Holy Girl] (2004)
La ciénaga [The Swamp] (2001)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
4/15/18 – “With only three features (The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman are her follow ups), Martel quickly established herself as one of the most radical narrative filmmakers working today. If you only watch the first four minutes of her debut work, a darkly comic vision of a bourgeoisie family, it is immediately apparent how brazenly exciting her methods are, creating her own cinematic language to teach us how and what to watch.” Peter Labuza, The Film Stage – link
4/16/18 – “When the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel expresses admiration for those directors who challenge reality, she could be talking about herself. Although known mainly to cinephiles, Ms. Martel is considered by many to be her nation’s, or even Latin America’s, pre-eminent filmmaker. In an essay about her first feature, La Ciénaga (The Swamp), the Argentine film scholar David Oubiña praised ‘a body of work that from the beginning, has radiated a rare perfection.’” J. Hoberman, New York Times – link
4/18/18 – “I’ll never forget first seeing Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga at the New York Film Festival in 2001. It was one of the most assured first features I’d ever seen, a complex, atmosphere-drenched portrait of a middle-class family barely hanging on during a torpid summer. The film marked the emergence of a fully formed artistic sensibility, and remains one of this century’s defining films.” Dennis Lim, Film Society of Lincoln Center – link
5/9/18 – “As Lucrecia Martel demonstrates in La Ciénaga (The Swamp), there is more twisted banal horror and caustic humour to be discovered in the forms of personal narrative than found within the boundaries of the horror genre itself.” Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Senses of Cinema – link
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we showcase the debut features of some of today’s modern visionary filmmakers with a year-long series dubbed Women Direct. Our third selection is Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits [2016] with an introduction by Buffalo International Film Festival director Tilke Hill.
Screening Date: Thursday, April 12th, 2018 | 7:00pm
Tickets:$8 general, $6 students & seniors, $5 members
Deal: We will also be raffling off two limited edition screen prints of The Fits‘ poster courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Event Sponsors:
Venue Information:
341 Delaware Ave, Buffalo, NY 14202
Synopsis
Courtesy of press notes:
Toni trains as a boxer with her brother at a community center in Cincinnati’s West End, but becomes fascinated by the dance team that also practices there. Enamored by their strength and confidence, Toni eventually joins the group, eagerly absorbing routines, mastering drills, and even piercing her own ears to fit in. As she discovers the joys of dance and of female camaraderie, she grapples with her individual identity amid her newly defined social sphere.
Shortly after Toni joins the team, the captain faints during practice. By the end of the week, most of the girls on the team suffer from episodes of fainting, swooning, moaning, and shaking in a seemingly uncontrollable catharsis. Soon, however, the girls on the team embrace these mysterious spasms, transforming them into a rite of passage. Toni fears “the fits” but is equally afraid of losing her place just as she’s found her footing. Caught between her need for control and her desire for acceptance, Toni must decide how far she will go to embody her new ideals.
Tidbits:
Venice Film Festival – 2015
Sundance Film Festival – 2016
Gotham Awards – 2016 – Nominee: Tribute Award, Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award & Breakthrough Actor
National Board of Review – 2016 – Winner: Breakthrough Performance – Female & Top Ten Independent Films
Independent Spirit Awards – 2017 – Nominee: Someone to Watch Award & Best First Feature
Director Statement/Bio
Courtesy of press notes:
Director Statement:
We collaborated with Queen City Boxing Club and the Q-Kidz Dance Team to cast real teenagers from the West End of Cincinnati. Working with young athletes allowed us to focus on the physicality and nuanced movements we needed to tell the story from beginning to end. Casting all of the girls from the same real-life dance team meant that we could emphasize the authentic sisterhood and collective memory-making that young women experience when they bond on a team. We filmed The Fits in an immersive environment, living on location and inviting the young cast to see themselves not just as performers, but as co-authors of the characters on screen.
At its heart, The Fits is a meditation on movement as seen from the perspective of adolescent girls. The film explores the particularly young female phenomenon of mass hysteria, also known as mass psychogenic illness. The rapid spread of symptoms affects members of a cohesive group whereby physical ills have no corresponding organic cause. The Fits juxtaposes the precise, powerful, and intentional movements of drill with subconscious, spontaneous, and uncontrolled movements of collective hysterics.
I directed The Fits as a dance film, considering the movements of the actors and camera to be choreography in each scene. From stand battles to obsessive workouts, from the way Toni carries her body down the hallway to the freedom in Beezy’s play, we approached storytelling from the physical performance first. Through these movements, we explored our thematic questions:
What are the indications of belonging to a group and how do those markers develop? How do girls use their bodies as a mode of communication? What is the self? Is the body separate from the self? Is identity a performance? How does one differentiate between self and other? Is it possible to truly betray one’s self?
Director Bio:
Anna Rose Holmer was listed as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2015.” Her narrative directorial debut, THE FITS (Venice International Film Festival 2015), is a selection of the Venice Biennale College 2014/2015 and the Sundance Institute Editing Intensive Fellowship. She recently produced Jody Lee Lipes’s BALLET 422 (Tribeca Film Festival 2014, Magnolia Pictures) and Mike Plunkett’s SALERO (IDFA 2015). With filmmaker Matt Wolf, Anna co-directed and produced A BALLET IN SNEAKERS: JEROME ROBBINS AND OPUS JAZZ, a companion documentary to NY Export: Opus Jazz, (SXSW 2010 Emerging Visions Audience Award) which aired on the PBS Great Performances/Dance in America Series. Anna’s first documentary feature, TWELVE WAYS TO SUNDAY, was one of ten films to participate in IFP’s 2009 Documentary Filmmaker Lab and premiered with Rooftop Films in 2010.
Filmography:
The Fits (2016)
Twelve Ways to Sunday (2015)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
3/18/18 – “First-time writer-director Anna Rose Holmer crafts a meticulous mood of psychological isolation and beguiling mystery through her metaphorical tale, which exhibits less interest in traditional dramatic conventions than in situating viewers in its protagonist’s particular headspace…this immensely promising debut suggests a bright future for its maker.” Nick Schager, Variety – link
3/26/18 – DP Paul Yee on The Fits, Achieving Close Eyelines and Getting an Unexpected Steadicam Bump. Matt Mulcahey, Filmmaker Magazine – link
3/28/18 – “I started in camera, and the numbers are worse in camera. It is top of the pyramid, all the way down. It is everywhere you look in the industry and in our representation in government. This is not unique to cinema, and if you look at the numbers for women of color, it is even worse. I am very aware of the numbers and data. It is depressing. Our film was very gender balanced, with female heads of departments. I look at filmmakers like Ava Duvernay who is making progress in leaps and bounds, in terms of who she is hiring. Awareness is one step. The ultimate privilege is to be able to create and fail, and that these failures are representative of you, not an entire group’s ability to create work. We are far from that.” Anna Rose Holmer, director of The Fits – link
Buffalo is full of people helping to cultivate cinema and we want to celebrate those involved. The Cultivators is a new monthly feature in which we highlight individuals who are integral to the presentation, promotion and production of film here in the queen city.
You know … I think it all starts with Disney’s Hercules. It’s my earliest movie memory. I was very young—so it’s a bit hazy—but we were all at the drive-in and I was small and able to crawl myself up towards the back window of our van. The scene was filled with bright animated clouds and I wanted to get as close as possible. Face and hand on glass, I was in it.
… but it was really the family trips to Disney World and Universal Studios later on that would truly set the spark. Back in the peak when Universal Studios still had the Jaws ride and King Kong and everything smelled vaguely of gasoline. When you could hear the pops and mechanics and you were always slightly in danger of losing something. All of that excited me.
And then there’s The Great Movie Ride—which is the most important, because it offered me my first glimpse into the world of classic cinema and the Golden Age of Hollywood. There was a special air to the place, filled with heavy nostalgia. Waiting in line, I knew nothing of the faces on the wall or the props in the cases. I had never heard the sweep of Hollywood strings or seen any Bogart movies, but it all burned into my mind. I became fascinated with this stuff and Robert Osborne’s voice and presence made it an adventure.
What is your favorite movie related memory?
Watching a movie, at its core, can really be sort of a lonely experience. If you’re by yourself, that is. I mean, it’s just you and your television and maybe your dog. But that’s okay—because if a movie’s good, it becomes something more. That said, some of the films I cherish most are the ones I’ve shared with others. Every year I get together with family and friends to watch Bad Ronald and it’s always a blast. We do the same thing for Picnic around Labor Day and it’s one of my favorite traditions. Those are the memories that I’ll look back on down the line … not when I was sitting alone watching Ozu.
How did you end up in Buffalo?
I shot a man in Ireland and had to flee the country.
What do you want to see more of in Buffalo?
Any sort of silent cinema retrospective would be super welcome. Can you imagine watching Safety Last! with an audience—especially with people seeing it for the first time? My god, that would be a dream.
What are your essential film books?
My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles by Peter Biskind: In a way, I’ve always felt that Orson Welles was his own best character—a brilliant, difficult mountain of grace who told better yarns than just about anyone. The conversations published here, no matter their dubious origin, make for a fun read. He’s never less than captivating, even when the stories are less than factual—but hey, that’s showmanship.
Roger Ebert: Not a book, but I used to spend a lot of time on his website. I can’t say that I agreed with him all of the time, but he was a wonderful writer. Passionate and insightful, his very best work rose up to the art of the movies he loved.
TOP TEN FILMS
This is an impossible list to make, but here are ten that I like right now. (In alphabetical order.)
After Hours [1985], directed by Martin Scorsese
I’m a big fan of all-in-one-night plots and this is absolutely one of the best. It’s at least the wisest—dark and funny and honest about lonely people trying to find company at the end of the day.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford [2007], directed by Andrew Dominik
I’ve carried this movie with me for so long, it’s easy to forget why I even like it in the first place. It’s a big, depressing teddy bear. An old friend. Why would I bother breaking it down?
Brief Encounter [1945], directed by David Lean
My favorite unconventional noir. For me, noir exists in the interior—the decisions characters make and the consequences that result. Here the choice to begin an affair carries the same weight as taking a life—to the point where the emotion of it all bleeds into the film itself. It takes what could be just straight melodrama and abstracts it in such a way that an incoming train can be as foreboding as the hit men from The Killers.
F for Fake [1975], directed by Orson Welles
The film that made me fall in love with Orson Welles. This slot could have easily gone to Touch of Evil or Chimes at Midnight, but I think on a deeper level this one matters most to me. How Welles dances between illusion and reality and the general prankster nature of the piece … it’s all very inspiring.
Miller’s Crossing [1990], directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
For my money, the ultimate Coen Brothers movie. The script is aces and it’s all delivered by one of their best casts—including personal favorite Coen regular Jon Polito. For such a messy and violent film it ultimately becomes a story of friendship—and that’s actually kind of sweet. Also: name a movie made in the past thirty years that has more hats than this one …
Modern Times [1936], directed by Charles Chaplin
I love silent comedy. It’s one of my favorite genres. While I tend to lean towards the Harold Lloyd side of things these days, it all began with Chaplin. You could make a good argument that City Lights is his masterpiece, but Modern Times is perfect. From the frenzied Metropolis-esque factory sequence to the episodic structure and brilliant finale, it just keeps on giving.
Phantom of the Paradise [1974], directed by Brian De Palma
My favorite schlock horror musical. Like many of De Palma’s films, this one is deliciously sleazy and really just a hell of a fun ride. But make no mistake, there is something beneath the spectacle. And, of course, the Paul Williams soundtrack is sublime.
The Third Man [1949], directed by Carol Reed
Oh man, this one is so atmospheric. With broken-down postwar Vienna providing the backdrop, it almost has a spooky, haunted quality. That alone would make it one of the most memorable noirs, but it hits on all other levels. Joseph Cotten and whoever plays Harry Lime are exceptional.
Three Colors: White [1994], directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
Of course the Colors trilogy is fantastic as a whole, but this is the one I usually come back to. I suppose I’m just taken with the idea of a man shipping himself home in a suitcase.
Topsy-Turvy [1999], directed by Mike Leigh
Leigh is such a master with his ensembles—each character and performance so well-observed to minute detail. They always feel like real people … flawed, foolish, loving, hopeful. This is true of all his works—but this one has Timothy Spall singing Gilbert & Sullivan, so it wins.
Honorable Mention
Breakdown [1955], directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Yes, this is technically television—but I consider it to be a really fine short. It’s a fascinating work in that Hitchcock seemingly finds every possible angle to show a man’s face.
The Man Who Planted Trees [1987], directed by Frederick Black
The most lovely animated short. So peaceful and knowing that it would appear to come from nature itself.
Phantom Thread [2017], directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
It’s a bit fresh, so I can’t say for sure. But the more I think about it, the stronger it gets. It’s a very a musical movie in score and form and I can’t help but get locked into its groove. The world needs more Vicky Krieps …
The Room [2003], directed by Tommy Wiseau / Troll 2 [1990], directed by Claudio Fragasso
Seriously. Most of my friendships, or at least the ones that matter, have been punctuated by watching these terrible movies at least once. That should count for something.
Film stills from left to right, top to bottom are Hercules, The Great Movie Ride, Bad Ronald, Picnic, and Safety Last!.
Extras: Stop in early for FREE Breadhive baked goods while supplies last!
Event Sponsors:
Venue Information:
420 Connecticut St, Buffalo, NY 14213
Synopsis
Courtesy of press notes:
Strong Island chronicles the arc of a family across history, geography and tragedy – from the racial segregation of the Jim Crow South to the promise of New York City; from the presumed safety of middle class suburbs, to the maelstrom of an unexpected, violent death. It is the story of the Ford family: Barbara Dunmore, William Ford and their three children and how their lives were shaped by the enduring shadow of race in America. A deeply intimate and meditative film, Strong Island asks what one can do when the grief of loss is entwined with historical injustice, and how one grapples with the complicity of silence, which can bind a family in an imitation of life, and a nation with a false sense of justice.
In April 1992, on Long Island NY, William Jr., the Ford’s eldest child, a black 24 year-old teacher, confronted Tom Datre Jr., an auto body shop owner about the quality of a car repair. The interaction turned deadly when Mark Reilly, a white 19 year-old mechanic on the premises, shot Ford once in the chest, killing him. Although Ford was unarmed, he soon became the prime suspect in his own murder. When an all-white Grand Jury decided that no crime had been committed, the killer returned to his life, and the Ford family retreated into a devastated silence that persisted for decades.
Made over the course of ten years, Strong Island is an inquiry into the muted implosion of the Ford family after William’s murder, and a sense-making of the still unanswered questions that surrounded it. Bringing together family archives, domestic tableaux, penetrating conversations with friends and family, and interviews with prosecutors and police, filmmaker Yance Ford creates a revelation of loss, fear and accountability. And though Strong Island indicts the US judicial system and social structures of blackness, and draws a direct line from them to William Jr.’s death and the atomization of the Ford family, the film is not ultimately concerned with finding closure in these institutions. Instead, it seeks truths within the process of filmmaking itself and suggests that justice can be found through a reclamation of narrative from history; through owning and telling the story of a loved one.
Tidbits:
Berlin International Film Festival – 2017
Sundance Film Festival – 2017 – Winner: Special Jury Prize (Documentary)
International Documentary Association – 2017 – Nominee: Best Feature
Gotham Awards – 2017 – Winner: Best Documentary
Academy Awards – 2018 – Nominee: Best Documentary Feature
Director Notes
Photo by Simon Luethi
Courtesy of press notes:
Background
On the night that riots engulfed South Central Los Angeles, I sat in my college dorm room transfixed by the televised images, silent and awake. On April 29, 1992 four LAPD Officers were acquitted of the most serious criminal charges from their beating of Rodney King. The Defense made the argument that the videotape did not represent reality, that the jury could not believe their eyes, that “something else” had happened to justify the beating.
Twenty-two days before, my older brother had been shot and killed by a 19 year-old white man who claimed he fired in self-defense. William, who was unarmed, was described as “the nicest guy in the world, but then something would happen, something would come over him” and the police pursued a line of inquiry designed to characterize William as a menace.
This is what blackness means in America: that what you see is not actually what you are seeing. Blackness is a visual disturbance. You are visible and invisible all at once if you are black. You are rage and you are danger if you are black. Most importantly, blackness must be contained.
My parents were grade-school sweethearts who became middle-class strivers. For 38 years they lived the American Dream: three kids, two jobs, two cars, and the split-ranch they called home. Until their first born son was murdered. Sitting there watching the riots, I resented the choice that my parents had made – to contain their rage – a choice they felt they had to make to keep me and my sister safe from retribution by the killer’s associates. It was an act of love, but in the end, that choice did not keep us safe. My sister and I lost ourselves in a world frozen in time, and the people we could have been are unknown to us. The Dream had become a nightmare. In order to live, I had to try to understand it. I realized I did not need permission to tell this story. I needed courage.
About the film
When I first began this film my goals were simple – uncover why my brother’s murder went unpunished and look at what injustice lived out over time had done to my family. Beginning with intimate conversations with my mother about why she and my father did not do more after William was killed, I moved on to the Detective for the Suffolk County Police Department and former Assistant District Attorneys who investigated the case, asking for any bit of information they could remember – any fact they could share. I learned that when a Grand Jury declines to press charges and the accused goes home, the official record is permanently sealed. The only document available to me was William’s autopsy report. Then there was the day my mother gave me William’s diary, and my line of inquiry shifted. I began to learn more about who my brother was and what he wanted for his life, in his own words. In these pages was a William I had never known. In order to make the film, I had to stop keeping secrets, stop keeping William’s secrets and open the door. And I realized that because it was now going to be a different kind of investigation, I had to draw on every creative resource I had and assemble a gifted creative team that included my DoP, editor, producer, coproducer and composers.
Strong Island is mindful in its construction, from the choice of each frame to the length of each shot- the film is meant to be an immersive experience: exposing you to what you know exists but hopefully have never experienced. I try to offer a pacing and a style that returns the very thing that is stolen from us each day – our ability to reflect – and offer it back. While the narrative of Strong Island is an investigation that unfolds in layers, the formal aesthetic balances the tension between reserved observation and intense intimacy. The formal interior shooting style and photographic composition of images help establish that William is both there and gone. If the content is fraught, it is held within a stable constant frame, reflecting the simultaneous dynamic of suspense and suspension. We are both safe and trapped in these rooms. This home. This world. This is how we live in a family that has suffered through tragedy. It is as a close as I can take you.
Many films have told the dark, unsettling lesson about the elusive meaning of ‘justice’. Most people leave these films at a considerable distance from the characters. The door into an intimate and challenging knowledge is rarely if ever opened, rarely if ever offered as a possible place of engagement. But how else can we interrogate our fear? How else comprehend the relationship between loss and history. How else, change.
Filmography:
Strong Island (2017)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
2/7/18 – “If my nomination can help in any way to advance the issues of trans equality and protection of LGBT people under the law, I am as humbled by that as I am by the nomination.” – Yance Ford
2/16/18 – “We often hear about the need for ‘closure,’ but when the very fact of systemic racism helps set a killer free, what would that closure even look like? And then, there is the question of how that racism, and the anger it provokes on a daily basis, may have been a factor in shaping William as a personality. In a manner unlike any documentary since Capturing the Friedmans, Strong Island continues to unfold with increasing layers of complexity over its running time.” Michael Sicinski – link
2/18/18 – “Black, queer, and transgender: Ford stands at the intersection of America’s most marginalized groups — and he is so much more than the sum of his parts. Throughout the 10-year process of making Strong Island, Ford transformed painful personal tragedy into art as he inched towards the deeply personal decision to medically transition. “Strong Island” deals with masculinity, race, and class, but it is not directly about gender identity and queerness, at least not on the surface.” Jude Dry, IndieWire – link
2/24/18 – “I have been gender nonconforming my entire life. One of the things I discovered last year was my brother knew that I was gay, and he had told all of my friends, “Listen Yance is gay, and off limits. I’m taking Yance to everything, prom, this thing, that thing.” It reaffirms that my brother saw me for who I was. I can with this nomination remind people that trans people in general and trans people of color in particular are subject to violence at higher rates than most any other group. There was just an article about how trans women feel targeted by the N.Y.P.D., and were assumed to be engaged in sex work. If my nomination helps people at all think about the transgender folks in their lives, in their communities, and treating them as humans and equals deserving of protection, I’m happy.” Yance Ford, director of Strong Island – link
Please join us for a one-night event screening of the brand new 2K restoration of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s cinematic masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc (La passion de Jeanne d’Arc) [1928] accompanied by Richard Einhorn’s acclaimed “Voices of Light” score.
Screening Date: Thursday, February 15th, 2018 / 9:30pm
Spiritual rapture and institutional hypocrisy are brought to stark, vivid life in one of the most transcendent achievements of the silent era. Chronicling the trial of Joan of Arc in the final hours leading up to her execution, Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer depicts her torment with startling immediacy, employing an array of techniques—including expressionistic lighting, interconnected sets, and painfully intimate close-ups—to immerse viewers in her subjective experience. Anchoring Dreyer’s audacious formal experimentation is a legendary performance by Renée Falconetti, whose haunted face channels both the agony and the ecstasy of martyrdom. Thought to have been lost to fire, the film’s original version was miraculously found in perfect condition in 1981 in a Norwegian mental institution, heightening the mythic status of this widely revered masterwork.
Long available only in rare prints that necessitated live accompaniment, The Passion of Joan of Arc returns to screens in a new restoration, partnered with Richard Einhorn’s acclaimed score “Voices of Light” for the first time theatrically.
About the Restoration:
The Passion of Joan of Arc was restored in 2015 by Gaumont, with funding from the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée.
The restoration was created from a 2K scan of a duplicate negative made from the Danish Film Institute’s nitrate copy of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s original cut.
Notes on the score:
Unlike many other large-scale productions of the time, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc was not released with a prewritten score for venues with live orchestras. Over the subsequent decades, many musicians and composers have filled that absence. For this release, Janus has offered two scores: Richard Einhorn’s acclaimed, Joan-inspired operetta Voices of Light, and, in its first recording, a new score by Adrian Utley and Will Gregory.
Voices of Light is a work for voices and amplified instrumental ensemble, created in celebration of Joan of Arc. The libretto is a patchwork of visions, fantasies, and reflections assembled from various ancient sources, notably the writings of medieval female mystics. The texts may be thought of as representing the spiritual, political, and metaphorical womb in which Joan was conceived. The performance on this DCP dates from 1995 and features the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Steven Mercurio, with vocals by the Netherlands Radio Choir, Anonymous 4, Susan Narucki, Corrie Pronk, Frank Hameleers, and Henk van Heijnsbergen.
Born in 1952, Richard Einhorn graduated summa cum laude in music from Columbia University, and has written opera, orchestral and chamber music, song cycles, film music, and dance scores. Among many other projects, he composed the music for the Academy Award–winning documentary short Educating Peter (1992); the score for the New York City Ballet’s wildly popular Red Angels (which premiered in 1994); and an opera/oratorio based on the work and life of Charles Darwin, The Origin (which premiered in 2009).
Tidbits:
National Board of Review – 1929 – Winner: Top Foreign Films
Despite only screening in butchered, incomplete versions, if at all, for much of the twentieth century, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was considered one of cinema’s great masterpieces, regularly finding its way onto Sight & Sound’s renowned list of the best films of all time. When a print of the original version was finally discovered in 1981, the film world breathed a sigh of relief, and archivists began to untangle the story of a film that seemed almost as doomed as its subject.
The Passion of Joan of Arc premiered in Copenhagen on April 21, 1928. Its French premiere was delayed by a campaign against the film by many on the nationalist right, who did not believe that a foreign director should be entrusted with the myth of Joan of Arc. The archbishop of Paris demanded several excisions, and further changes were made by government censors, before the film was finally screened in the city in October 1928.
Six weeks later, on December 6, a fire consumed the labs of the famous Ufa studio in Berlin, where Passion’s cinematographer, Rudolph Maté, had developed the film stock. The original negative was destroyed, and Dreyer was devastated.
However, there was an available work-around. Famous for demanding repeated takes, Dreyer had enough outtakes to create a second version. Using one of the few remaining release prints for comparison, Dreyer and his editor, Marguerite Beaugé, created a new negative that matched the original almost shot for shot. Tragically, even this second negative was lost to fire, this time at the labs of G.M. de Boulogne-Billancourt in 1929.
In 1951, the French film historian Joseph-Marie Lo Duca discovered an intact copy of the negative of Dreyer’s second version that had escaped destruction. Unfortunately, Lo Duca made significant changes. Wherever possible, he replaced intertitles with subtitles, and when that proved to be impossible, he replaced the original intertitles with text on images of stained-glass windows and church pews. The negative of Lo Duca’s version was also lost, but prints of it endured for many years. This was the version of the film that most audiences saw over the next three decades, and the one that Anna Karina famously watches in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962).
Finally, in 1981, while cleaning out a closet in the Dikemark sykehus, a mental institution just outside Oslo, Norway, a worker found several film canisters, which were then sent to the Norwegian Film Institute. When they were opened, the canisters revealed not just a print of The Passion of Joan of Arc but wrapping paper bearing the Danish censor’s stamp of approval, dated 1928. Dreyer’s original version had finally been found.
How did the film end up in a closet? Harald Arnesen, the director of the institute at the time, may have wanted to screen it for staff and patients. (There are no records of it being screened in Oslo upon its release, but the print had been projected several times.) Regardless, the film was immediately preserved and new negatives created. Still, with very few 35 mm prints having been struck, the film remained difficult to see in a proper theatrical setting.
But no more. In 2015, Gaumont scanned a negative created from that fragile nitrate print discovered in Norway, creating a restored DCP for worldwide distribution and ensuring that Dreyer’s original vision not only exists but can be seen in theaters, in public, once again.
Director Bio
Photo by Henny Garfunkel
“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”
The creator of perhaps cinema’s most purely spiritual works, Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer is one of the most influential moving image makers of all time, his arrestingly spare and innovative approach echoed in the films of Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, and countless others. After making his mark with such narrative silent films as the provocative Michael (1924) and Master of the House (1925), Dreyer created The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which, though deemed a failure on its release, is now considered, with its mix of stark realism and expressionism (and astonishing, iconic performance by Maria Falconetti), one of the great artistic works of the twentieth century. For the next four decades, Dreyer would continue to make films about people caught in battle between the spirit and the flesh and to experiment technically with the form. Vampyr (1932) is a mesmerizing horror fable full of camera and editing tricks; Day of Wrath (1943) is an intense tale of social repression, made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark; Ordet (1955) is a shattering look at a farming family’s inner religious world; and Gertrud (1964) is a portrait of a fiercely independent woman’s struggle for personal salvation.
Filmography:
Gertrud (1966)
Ordet (1955)
Slot i et Slot, Et (1954)
Storstromsbroen (1950)
Thorvaldsen (1949)
De Naaede Faergen (1948)
Landsbykirken (1947)
Kampen Mod Kraeften (1947)
Vandet pa landet (1946)
Day of Wrath (1943)
Modrehjaelpen (1942)
Vampyr (1932)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927)
Glomdalsbruden (1925)
Master of the House (1925)
Michael (1924)
Die Gezeichneten (1922)
Der Var Engang (1922)
The Parson’s Widow (1920)
Praesidenten (1919)
Leaves From Satan’s Book (1919)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
1/18/18 – “Dreyer’s most universally acclaimed masterpiece remains one of the most staggeringly intense films ever made.” Tony Rayns, Time Out New York
1/22/18 – “The miracle of Joan is that it manages to be spiritual and visceral. It was conceived as a sort of documentary. Makeup was forbidden. The sets were constructed as actual rooms (although they were never fully shown), and the movie was shot in chronological order. This ‘realized mysticism,’ as Dreyer termed it in a 1929 essay, is reinforced by the score, Richard Einhorn’s 1995 oratorio ‘Voices of Light.’” J. Hoberman, New York Times – link
2/13/18 – As Adrian Curry explores over at MUBI’s Notebook, The Passion of Joan of Arc has had some incredible poster art over the years. – link
2/15/18 – “Although it might be tempting to save the best till last, Dreyer’s most respected film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), offers the most accessible introduction to his work. The apotheosis of Dreyer’s silent film craft, the film is rightly considered to be one of the true masterpieces of the pre-sound era.” – link
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we showcase the debut features of some of today’s modern visionary filmmakers with a year-long series dubbed Women Direct. Our second selection is Dee Rees’ Pariah [2011] with an introduction by Beyond Boundaries Film & Discussion Series curator Ruth Goldman.
Screening Date: Thursday, February 8th, 2018 | 7:00pm
A world premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, the contemporary drama Pariah is the feature-length expansion of writer/director Dee Rees’ award-winning 2007 short film Pariah. Spike Lee is among the feature’s executive producers. At Sundance, cinematographer Bradford Young was honored with the [U.S. Dramatic Competition] Excellence in Cinematography Award.
Adepero Oduye, who had earlier starred in the short film, portrays Alike (pronounced ah-lee-kay), a 17-year-old African-American woman who lives with her parents Audrey and Arthur (Kim Wayans and Charles Parnell) and younger sister Sharonda (Sahra Mellesse) in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. She has a flair for poetry, and is a good student at her local high school.
Alike is quietly but firmly embracing her identity as a lesbian. With the sometimes boisterous support of her best friend, out lesbian Laura (Pernell Walker), Alike is especially eager to find a girlfriend. At home, her parents’ marriage is strained and there is further tension in the household whenever Alike’s development becomes a topic of discussion. Pressed by her mother into making the acquaintance of a colleague’s daughter, Bina (Aasha Davis), Alike finds Bina to be unexpectedly refreshing to socialize with.
Wondering how much she can confide in her family, Alike strives to get through adolescence with grace, humor, and tenacity – sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, but always moving forward.
Tidbits:
Sundance Film Festival – 2011 – Winner: Dramatic (Cinematography Award) & Cinematography Award (U.S. Dramatic Competition)
Toronto International Film Festival – 2011
National Board of Review – 2011 – Winner: Freedom of Expression Award
Gotham Awards – 2011 – Winner: Breakthrough Director
Independent Spirit Awards – 2012 – Winner: John Cassavetes Award
Independent Spirit Awards – 2012 – Nominee: Best Female Lead
Q: There was originally your short film entitled Pariah. How did you conceive of the idea, and how did you decide to expand it into the feature Pariah?
Dee Rees: Actually, it all started out as a feature. I wrote the first draft of the feature script in the summer of 2005, as I was going through my own coming-out process. I’m originally from Nashville, Tennessee. Being in New York, I was kind of amazed to see these young women who were teenagers and totally out and proud. Even if I had figured out my sexuality at that age, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to be that person, and that’s how the idea for the film came.
I was interning on Spike Lee’s Inside Man, and on lunch breaks and during some of the downtime, I would write the feature script in longhand in notebooks. At the time, I was also finishing NYU’s Graduate Film program and I needed a thesis. So I took the first act from the feature script, and shot it as a short. But the feature has always been the original vision.
Q: Can you elaborate on the title a little, since it has never varied?
DR: Well, each of the main characters is a “pariah.” They all have their fears, desires, strengths and weaknesses, and isolations. One thing I definitely worked on in the writing was showing the characters’ struggles to connect, and their worlds away from their families – where there are attitudes and expectations that they might not know how to handle.
Q: Is Alike’s story at all in line with your own coming-out story?
DR: It’s semi-autobiographical. As I was coming into my sexuality, I started to become comfortable with who I was. But I didn’t know how to express that. Alike struggles in the same way. In going out to clubs – and by the way, I’m totally not a club person – it felt very binary; it seemed like you had to check a box, butch or femme. And I’m neither one of those things. I struggled with myself; how should I be in this world? Should I wear baggy jeans and baseball caps? Or should I wear a skirt? None of those identities is really me, and I finally came to the conclusion that I can just be myself and don’t have to fit into any category. I don’t have to put on any personae; I can just continue to be who I am. And that’s what Alike comes to realize in her journey.
Q: So Pariah does encapsulate your personal story.
DR: Yes, it’s all mixed in there although a lot of specific things are fictional. The characters are fictional, but some of the experiences and feelings that Alike is going through are the same. Much was coming from my own experience of this new world opening up to me. Nekisa, in fact, took me to my first gay club and this explicit song was playing. I walked in and went, “Oh my God, I’m going to hell. This is it, my mom’s right.” I was in awe of that type of space. I’d never been in a place like that before. So some of the awe and some of the anxiety the lead character feels were things I experienced when I was coming out, coming into this world.
The principal conflicts are also similar; parental conflict is something that I really went through, although it is dramatized differently for Alike. When I came out, my parents weren’t very accepting. At first my mom said, “Oh, you’re in film school, this artsy thing, whatever, it’s a phase.” When they realized I was serious and that it wasn’t a phase, both my parents came in and staged an intervention. For a few months, they sent e-mails and cards and letters and Bible verses to make me think and change. It got to the point where I told them, “Don’t communicate with me if that’s what it’s going to be about, because my sexuality is not an option and it’s not a choice.” We eventually started talking again, and things are better.
Q: You mentioned Bible verses. What was your spiritual upbringing like?
DR: I’m Christian. I was raised in a Methodist church, and I still believe in God. My spirituality was another thing that I struggled with early on. Because I initially wondered, “Is this going to be okay? Does God still love me?” On a real basic level, I struggled with that and it was painful. But later as I grew, I came to the acceptance and peace of mind that God does love me and I’m okay as I am. So that’s one element, a layer, of this film in addition to the love story and the search for identity. If anything, it’s my spirituality that got me through the past six years. My spirituality and spiritual practice have actually gotten stronger than they were before going through this.
Q: Did you draw inspiration from other artists?
DR: Yes, Alice Walker has been my biggest influence as an artist, and I’m also inspired by writers from the Harlem Renaissance; and especially the writings of Audre Lorde – her work Zami, in particular. When I read her story, I felt that I wasn’t alone and it gave me hope for my own journey. I always loved to write, and in learning about screenwriting and film, I knew I wanted to bring characters to life in that medium.
In specific preparation for shooting Pariah, I was inspired by the documentary Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston for the tone of the film, and I also used it as a reference to help educate the actors about this world of the characters they were entering.
Q: Nekisa, how did you get into producing?
Nekisa Cooper: I met Dee while she was working with me at Colgate-Palmolive – her former life. She left the company to go to NYU’s film school. When she came to me and a couple of friends and told us she was going to film school, we said, “What? You’re leaving the security of this space to become a starving artist?” I didn’t really get it but I remained friends with her, and wound up helping with her second-year film, Orange Bow. After that experience, I thought, “Wow, this is what I do for toothbrushes and toothpaste, but this ‘product’ is something I can be more passionate about.” So I told Dee, “I don’t really know what this producing thing is, but I enjoyed working with you and I would love to support you in whatever you’re doing next.” It turned out to be Pariah, and I had a very personal connection to the story. I remembered being like Alike before coming out – a chameleon – one way with my family, and other ways with other people in my life. So I quit my job, took three months off, and produced the short film – mostly to figure out whether producing was really something I wanted to do long-term. It was a huge learning curve, but pretty awesome. It was the perfect intersection of my strengths from previous work as a basketball coach and as a businesswoman.
Q: How did the feature finally come together?
DR: When the short started hitting the festival circuit in early 2007, we got a call from Rachel Chanoff at the Sundance Institute. She’d seen the short and asked if we had a feature that she should consider. I said, “Heck yeah,” ran back and polished up the feature script in two weeks, and got in. So we got to workshop it at the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab in 2007, and then came back again in 2008 for the Directors’ Lab.
The Directors’ Lab was great because we got to bring in Adepero Oduye, who’s always played Alike, and Aasha Davis, who plays her love interest. We were able to workshop that relationship, and some of the more difficult elements of the story, in a creative safe space. The whole Lab experience was a life-changing thing for me – as an artist and person. Nekisa then did the first Sundance Producers’ Lab in 2008, which was the icing on the cake – one which really had lots of time to bake, and is I think the better for that.
NC: It did take a long time for things to come together. Strategically, we thought that developing the film through the Sundance Institute gave the project a certain pedigree which would open doors to reach private equity investors. Based on the success of the short, we’d gotten a lot of interest from production companies wanting to know more about Dee and more about our thoughts for the feature. While on the festival circuit with the short film, we had the na”ive idea that someone would just hand us the money to make the feature. We put a lot of thought and planning into assembling a package that people would invest in, but fundraising was incredibly difficult. It became apparent that people thought the script was really good and edgy, but a bit “small” and “specific.” That’s what people would say in terms of funding the actual feature.
So there was a very quick awakening to reality; we had submitted to a ton of people, but now just about everybody had seen the script and turned the movie down. We knew right then that private equity would be the way to go. We were able to attach Spike Lee as our executive producer because he had been an advisor to Dee on her feature documentary Eventual Salvation – and had given feedback on the Pariah script over the years.
We built a list of people through our network, wrote a business plan, and went into battle. We really leveraged the independent film community to find advocates who believed in us, believed in the story – the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Institute, the Independent Feature Project, and Film Independent. Those advocates introduced us to other people who were either connected to money people or were money people themselves.
DR: Nekisa shook every financing tree she could think of. She is so resourceful, and it was a lonely business for her at times.
NC: But it was important to me to that I bear the burden without Dee or anybody else knowing about it. That made it stressful for me, but I felt that carrying the stress on my own was necessary so there could be an environment created where Dee and our crew could work and vibe.
Going into shooting, we still weren’t fully financed and the financing didn’t fall into place until 30 minutes before the shoot wrapped. It was literally a weekly, and sometimes daily, cash flow exercise. That made it stressful for me, but I felt that carrying the stress on my own was necessary so there could be an environment created where Dee and our crew could work and vibe. I was exhausted by the end, but so happy with the way it worked out.
Q: You filmed on location in Fort Greene, Brooklyn –
NC: It’s a neighborhood that we’re familiar with; we’d lived there for seven years, so we accessed our community connections. We were able to centralize and take advantage of being in Fort Greene. We worked with a local real estate agent, and she found us an amazing brownstone location where we filmed all of the homes’ interiors for Pariah. When you don’t have money, you need to spend a lot more time in pre-production, and we did. So the production ran efficiently.
Q: Dee, beyond making the most of the real-life locations, what was your approach to visualizing the story?
DR: [Cinematographer] Bradford Young had filmed Pariah and other works of mine; he will add meaning to every shot. He and I collaborate from the heart to tell the story better, while maintaining a constant creative flow.
For over three years, we discussed and developed the language we wanted to use on Pariah, and as with Pariah we were shooting on 35-millimeter film. In closer angles on the characters, the camera is handheld so it becomes more kinetic and personal and “breathes” with them. For wider angles, the camera is more omniscient and moves more subtly on dolly-mounted shots. Whether handheld or mounted, the camera is always moving with fluidity and motivated by the action that’s occurring in the scene. This is particularly true for the coverage on Alike, which consists of a lot of “peeking” or “eavesdropping” camera movements behind or between objects with long lenses that further enhance the sense of her being secretive and hiding.
Alike is a chameleon, and all of the camera movement and production design around her serves to heighten that. We used lighting in such a way that Alike is “painted” with whatever colors are predominating at the moment in her environment. In the nightclub, she’s “purple;” on the bus, she’s “green;” in the bathroom, she’s “orange,” et cetera. She’s only “white” towards the end; she’s “sunlight” in the final scene of the film.
In contrast, Laura is a proud peacock and although her world is also a little subterranean, she is in natural light a lot and is far more colorful; purple, blue, and fuchsia in the nightclub environment and lighter, freer colors like periwinkle and lavender in the home environment that she has made for herself. Laura’s wardrobe has much brighter, flashier hues than Alike’s, including blues, greens, and pinks. That underlines her basic spiritual freedom and independence.
Q: In addition to these visuals, the music in Pariah is also varied and plays an integral role in the storytelling. Can you speak to how that worked?
DR: The music plays an important role in the film as it heightens the voice of each character. Alike is acoustic soul, Bina is punk, Laura is hip-hop. As Alike is coming into herself and struggling to find her own “voice,” we see and hear the different styles of music clash and intertwine. In the end, Alike’s voice becomes a singular and rich melding of all those different styles.
NC: We are so proud to feature a number of incredible independent music artists, from Sparlha Swa – whose music serves as the voice of Alike – and Tamar-kali to Honeychild Coleman – whose punk/rock music echoes Bina’s voice – to MBK Entertainment, who provided us with all of Laura’s hip-hop.
Q: What has always made Adepero ideal to play Alike?
DR: Back in 2006, she showed up on the very first day of auditions for the short film. She came in wearing her little brother’s clothes, and was completely focused. It was like she had walked out of my pages.
She is brave, and has these beautiful qualities of innocence and vulnerability. That’s all at Alike’s core. Also, as a first-generation Nigerian immigrant who has grown up in New York City, Adepero has experienced being an outsider and the struggle to try to define her identity. Adepero is very specific in her craft.
Q: Overall, what was the biggest challenge during the actual filming?
DR: It was an 18-day shoot with 1 pick-up day. Everybody, no matter what their crew title, went above and beyond to make it happen.
NC: For the biggest challenge, I’d like to add, “the money.”
Q: Did you personally invest in Pariah?
NC: Yes. We sold the apartment we owned in Fort Greene. We put everything that we are into making the film.
Q: And now audiences can see it in theaters –
DR: And now we can give back to everyone who sacrificed and believed in us, and believed in the story and its being beneficial to people.
Q: On that note, who do you hope to reach with Pariah?
DR: I think questioning and affirming your identity is a universal theme, and I definitely want gay teens to connect with the film and see that it’s OK to be them.
Q: What about those close to these teens?
DR: I want parents and people who may not be open to better understand that they should allow their children to be who they are. Just think about how important relationships are; once they’re fractured or damaged, it’s hard to get them back. Everyone has someone in their life that has gone through this; just be more accepting of them. Love them unconditionally.
NC: In terms of changing hearts and minds, we joke about how it’s possible one-popcorn-bucket-at-a-time. But we do want to open people’s minds and expose them to a world they haven’t seen before. Pariah might not change people’s minds, but it will at least get them talking.
I was raised Catholic. My parents don’t accept that I’m gay, but they love me. I guess that’s as good as it gets, because we never have arguments. But we also never talk about it. I’ve been out to them since 2002 and it’s still a really scary prospect to think about sitting down and watching Pariah with them. That’s the intersection, of fear and hope, where this movie sits. We want Pariah to give people the courage to discuss coming out.
Director Bio
“It’s a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know – we have to be able to imagine different worlds.”
Courtesy of Mudbound‘s press notes:
Writer/Director Dee Rees is an alumna of New York University’s graduate film program and a Sundance Screenwriting & Directing Lab Fellow.
Dee’s Emmy-Award winning HBO film Bessie (2015) starred Queen Latifah as the legendary American Blues singer and was nominated for a total of twelve Emmy Awards, including Dee’s individual nominations for Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Directing For A Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special. Bessie was also nominated for four Critics’ Choice Awards and Dee was the recipient of the 2016 Director’s Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for Television and Miniseries as well as the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Television Movie.
Dee’s debut feature film Pariah starring Adepero Oduye and Kim Wayans premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival where it was honored with the festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition “Excellence in Cinematography” Award and was later released by Focus Features. Pariah went on to win numerous awards including the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards (2011), the Gotham Award for Best Breakthrough Director (2011), Outstanding Film–Limited Release at the GLAAD Media Awards (2012) and it received seven NAACP Image Award nominations including Outstanding Motion Picture, Outstanding Directing and Outstanding Writing and won the award for Outstanding Independent Motion Picture.” Pariah also earned Dee a spot on New York Times’ 10 Directors to Watch list in 2013.
Previously, Dee was selected as a 2008 Tribeca Institute/Renew Media Arts Fellow and appeared on Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film that same year. She is a 2011 United States Artists Fellow and her notable residencies include Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony.
Dee Rees was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee and currently resides in New York.
Filmography:
The Last Thing He Wanted (2020)
Mudbound (2018)
Bessie (2015)
Pariah (2011)
Colonial Gods (2009) (Short)
Eventual Salvation (2008)
Pariah (2007) (Short)
Orange Bow (2005) (Short)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
1/14/18 – “While it shows heartbreak and emotional brutality, there’s much beauty and even joy too, Rees revealing a wide spectrum of queer black female experience with bracing honesty. To paraphrase one of Alike’s poems, Pariah is a film that the light shines out of. It’s one of a kind.” Grace Barber-Plentie, British Film Institute – link
1/24/18 – Dee Rees, writer/director of Pariah, made history yesterday as the first black woman to be nominated for an Oscar by The Academy for Best Adapted Screenplay for her new film Mudbound! – link
2/5/18 – Presented by actress Kim Wayans, star of Pariah, writer/director Dee Rees was awarded the 2017 Sundance Institute Vanguard Award which celebrates emerging artists with creative independence. Her acceptance speech is a must watch. – link
“…It has been 13 years since I came out. It has been 432 hours since the demagogue banned transgender citizens from serving in the military. It has been 44 days since the Muslim travel ban took effect, and that the bulk of black and brown immigrants who, solely on the basis of their sheer existence, have effectively been criminalized.
And it has been 191,625 days since the first arrival of European immigrants, whose criminal acts of theft, rape, subjugation, and genocide systematically destroyed and continue to destroy this country and the many nations that lived here first.
So you see, our position in the universe is elastic. It’s hard to know exactly where we are, impossible to measure progress, except in relation to what happened just before…”
10/25/18 – “The opening scene of PARIAH was inspired by my first experience going to a lesbian club. It’s about shock, and attraction, and repulsion, and feeling guilty and exhilarated.” – link
Buffalo is full of people helping to cultivate cinema and we want to celebrate those involved. The Cultivators is a new monthly feature in which we highlight individuals who are integral to the presentation, promotion and production of film here in the queen city.
I have always loved watching movies but really got hooked when I discovered independent film. I grew up in Cincinnati, OH and for a period in the 70s we had a little independent theater called The Movies. My siblings had all left home so my parents took me along with them to see independent films and I just couldn’t get enough of them!
What is your favorite movie related memory?
Watching Thelma & Louise in a theater in Northampton, MA with an all-woman audience.
How did you end up in Buffalo?
I moved here to do my MFA at UB and then ended up staying to do a PhD in American Studies.
What do you want to see more of in Buffalo?
I’d like to see more cross-cultural and cross-community conversations, cultural collaborations, and activism. This city is so stubbornly segregated! I’d love to see more of us getting outside our comfort zones and really talking to and working with one another to make this city more just a place for all who live here.
What are your essential film books?
Uh-oh—this is a hard one! For Film Studies these are the ones that come right to mind:
Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream by Sherry B. Ortner
Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
Film History: An Introduction by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell
The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film by Erik Barnouw
Introduction to Documentary by Bill Nichols
TOP TEN FILMS
Choosing just ten was really hard! These are the first eleven that came to mind but this list is missing lots of my favorite filmmakers! (In alphabetical order.)
Brazil [1985], directed by Terry Gilliam
Frozen River [2008], directed by Courtney Hunt
The Gleaners & I [2000], directed by Agnès Varda
Granito [2011], directed by Pamela Yates
Man with a Movie Camera [1929], directed by Dziga Vertov
Moonlight [2016], directed by Barry Jenkins
Orlando [1993], directed by Sally Potter
Pariah [2011], directed by Dee Rees
Silverlake Life: The View from Here [1993], directed by Peter Friedman & Tom Joslin
Smoke Signals [1998], directed by Chris Eyre
Tongues Untied [1989], directed by Marlon Riggs
Film stills from left to right, top to bottom are Thelma & Louise.
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we showcase the debut features of some of today’s modern visionary filmmakers with a year-long series dubbed Women Direct. Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass [1995] kicks things off with an introduction by Beyond Boundaries Film & Discussion Series curator Meg Knowles.
Screening Date: Thursday, January 11th, 2018 | 7:00pm
Tickets:$8 general, $6 students & seniors, $5 members
Deal: We will be giving away two copies of Kelly Reichardt by Katherine Fusco & Nicole Seymour courtesy of University of Illinois Press.
Event Sponsors:
Venue Information:
341 Delaware Ave, Buffalo, NY 14202
Synopsis
Courtesy of press notes:
River of Grass, Kelly Reichardt’s darkly funny debut feature, brought the writer/director back to the setting of her adolescence, the suburban landscape of southern Florida, where she grew up with her detective father and narcotics agent mother. Shot on 16mm, the story follows the misadventures of disaffected house-wife “Cozy,” played by Lisa Bowman, and the aimless layabout “Lee,” played by up-andcomer Larry Fessenden, who also acted as a producer and the film’s editor. Described by Reichardt as “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime,” River of Grass introduces viewers to a director already in command of her craft and defining her signature style.
Thirty-year-old Cozy lives in the middle of nowhere. Her one-story house sits on a soggy acre in Florida’s Broward County — a nondescript stretch of land sandwiched between Miami and the Everglades that boasts a shopping mall every fifteen miles. Cozy’s a daydreamer of the highest order, endlessly fantasizing that some nice couple will drive up in a big station wagon and take her kids away, that she’ll start a new life.
Cozy’s Dad is a detective with the Dade County/Miami police department. Distracted and in his mid-fifties, Ryder spends his nights on the job and his days drinking gin in jazz clubs. Lately, he’s been drinking a bit more since he seems to have misplaced his gun (again) and has landed a stiff suspension until its recovery. Unfortunately for Ryder, an aimless, enigmatic loser named Lee Ray Harold has already found it.
Worlds collide when Cozy, following an uncontrollable urge to get out of the house, meets up with Lee who is packing his new toy (Ryder’s gun) and following his own uncontrollable urge — to drink. Cozy and Lee soon find themselves embarking on a night of serious beer drinking and backyard pool hopping, which is cut short when Cozy accidentally fires the gun and apparently kills one of Lee’s old high school teachers. Instead of taking their cue and hitting the road, like any good outlaw couple would, Cozy and Lee shack up in a Miami motel to try to figure out how to raise gas money for their escape.
What follows is an escapade of misdirection and wrong turns, while Cozy and Lee try to go on the lam and revel in what they consider the outlaw life — without ever getting it right. Lee botches a convenience store robbery, they try to sell an old record collection in the age of compact discs, they find themselves short a quarter for the highway toll as they attempt to leave town and, in the end, they find out that they didn’t even commit the crime they are running from.
What’s left is a love story without the love, a murder mystery without a murder and a road movie that never makes it onto the road. Kelly Reichardt’s debut feature is a quickwitted take on the classic B road movie. She describes her characters as “the lackluster outlaws of the TV generation who have plenty of renegade role models but not the wiles to live up to them.” Playing off the clichéd elements of the genre, River of Grass ultimately illustrates how real life just ain’t like it is in the movies.
Restoration:
This new 2K DCP (Digital Cinema Package) of River of Grass has been restored from the original 16mm negative elements. During the restoration process at labs in Los Angeles, an interpositive film element was made at Fotokem from the original A/B negatives. The interpositive was then scanned in 2K at Modern VideoFilm for digital restoration and color correction. Deluxe Audio Services, working from an approved print made from the original negative elements, transferred the optical track into digital files for the sound clean-up and restoration. Digital protection tape elements LTO5 and HDCAM SR, along with the interpositive preservation film element will be archived at UCLA in their state of the art facility for generations to come.
This restoration was made possible by our generous partners Sundance, UCLA Film and Television Archive, TIFF, and hundreds of Kickstarter backers.
Tidbits:
Berlin International Film Festival – 1994
Sundance Film Festival – 1994
Independent Spirit Awards – 1996 – Nominee: Best First Feature, Best First Screenplay, Best Debut Performance & Someone to Watch Award
Director Bio
“I like working in a really private way. I mean, we got as far as a cut of [Old Joy] without speaking to any kind of lawyer or anything. We got into Sundance before we thought we should form a company. Aside from a lot of sound work and stuff still to go, it was all very private, and that’s a dream for me.”
Courtesy of press notes:
American landscapes and narratives of the road are themes that run throughout Kelly Reichardt’s five feature films: RIVER OF GRASS (Strand Releasing, 1994), OLD JOY (Kino International, 2006), WENDY AND LUCY (Oscilloscope Pictures, 2008), MEEK’S CUTOFF (Oscilloscope Pictures, 2010), and NIGHT MOVES (Cinedigm, 2013); and the short narrative ODE (1999).
Grants: United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Renew Media Fellowship.
Screenings: Whitney Biennial (2012), Film Forum, Cannes Film Festival in “un certain regard,” Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival.
Retrospectives: Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the Moving Image, Walker Art Center, American Cinematheque Los Angeles.
She has taught at School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, New York University, and is currently an artist-in-residence at Bard College.
RIVER OF GRASS marks the third collaboration between Kelly Reichardt and Oscilloscope. Previously Oscilloscope released WENDY AND LUCY and MEEK’S CUTOFF, both to great acclaim. Oscilloscope is looking forward to a fourth collaboration and will next be following Kelly wherever she may lead them (hopefully to the grocery store to get some snacks).
Filmography:
Owl (2019) (Short)
First Cow (2020)
Certain Women (2016)
Night Moves (2013)
Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
Travis (2009) (Video short)
Wendy and Lucy (2008)
Old Joy (2006)
Then a Year (2001) (Short)
Ode (1999)
River of Grass (1994)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
12/7/17 – “Kelly Reichardt might be the most important independent American filmmaker working right now. Over six features, she has built a body of work that stands in sharp contrast to the prefab stories and festival-friendly satisfactions of much of what passes for independent cinema today. Reichardt’s movies are immersive, even gripping, and they often reflect (albeit sometimes obliquely) the social and political issues of their day.” Bilge Ebiri, The Village Voice – link
1/1/18 – “Reichardt defines River of Grass as, ‘a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime.’ It’s also a window into what her career would become and a brave example of what female characters can be. Like the Everglades, River of Grass is a movie beautiful in its brazen strangeness.” Elena Sheppard, HelloGiggles – link
1/4/18 – “Reconstructing the classic cinematic narrative of film, Kelly Reichardt presents everyday lives while actively questioning why we accept reality as it is.” Illnois Press – link
We’re giving away Kelly Reichardt (written by Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour) at our January 11, 2018 screening of River of Grass.
1/5/18 – “Her movies, from River of Grass to Night Moves, are not mere idiosyncratic curiosities. Reichardt’s preoccupations are emphatically, though not exclusively, American ones: ennui in the land of sunshine; the juvenility-responsibility tradeoff; the monetary cost of freedom; the obdurate reality of westward expansion; the prohibitive cost of true radicalism and criminality. (Certain Women may add post-feminist struggle to the list.) She nests these concerns in an unobtrusive, tacit existentialism whereby people keep making the same missteps because they are, irreducibly and inexorably, human and quietly desperate. As mordantly Beckettian as that may sound, it marks Reichardt as an artist of her time. This unassumingly brilliant filmmaker illuminates the sense and flavor of this disconsolate epoch in all its unheroic vexation.” Jonathan Stevenson, Brooklyn Magazine – link
Ebbo and Vera Velten have been living in Africa for a long time. Ebbo is managing a sleeping sickness program. His work is fulfilling. In contrast, Vera feels increasingly uncomfortable with her life in the expat community of Yaoundé and the separation from her daughter Helen, 14, who is attending boarding school in Germany.
Ebbo has to give up his life in Africa or he loses the women he loves. But he has become a stranger to Europe. His fear of returning increases from day to day.
Years later. Alex Nzila, a young French doctor of Congolese origin, travels to Cameroon to evaluate a development project. He hasn’t been to Africa for a long time. But instead of finding new prospects, he encounters a destructive, lost man: like a phantom, Ebbo slips away from his evaluator.
Tidbits:
Berlin International Film Festival – 2011 – Winner: Best Director (Silver Berlin Bear)
New York Film Festival – 2011
Director Bio / Interview
Bio courtesy of The Match Factory:
Ulrich Köhler was born 1969 in Marburg /Germany and lived in Zaire (now Dem. Rep. of Congo) with his family from 1974 to 1979. He studied Fine Arts in Quimper/France, Philosophy in Hamburg and later on Visual Communication at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (Diploma 1998), where he made his first short films. His feature films Bungalow (2002) and Windows on Monday (2006) were successful at numerous festivals and won national and international awards, including the German Critics Award for Best First Feature in 2003.
Interview courtesy of press kit:
You tell the story of a man lost between two worlds. Was Ebbo’s character the starting point of the story? I was interested in the world of the international aid workers in Africa. I asked myself how do people live in an environment in which they will always remain privileged outsiders. My parents were aid workers in Zaire. I grew up in a small village on a tributary of the Congo for a few years. My brother and I spent a lot of time on the water and very little time at school. My mother was our teacher.
Is that where the story about the hippo comes from? Yes, there were hippos there and my father used to take us out in a small log boat to follow them. The villagers had warned us, but my father didn’t take it seriously. After we left the village, an American doctor was killed by one of the animals and the villagers believed that it was the hospital director, who had transformed himself into a hippo to kill her.
That sounds like an exciting childhood. Which made our return to Germany even more difficult. We had lost our friends and were forced to give up a free life in nature for a small town in Hessen. It was also a moral shock: Even a nine-year-old could not overlook the unjust distribution of wealth between these two continents.
I pushed Africa far away and in a short time I forgot how to speak Kituba, the local dialect that had become my second mother tongue. My parents on the other hand really wanted to return. Later they worked in the hospital where we shot the film. If I hadn’t wanted to visit them, I would have probably never returned to Africa.
And now you’ve made a film there. Yes and for a long time I couldn’t quite imagine it. Even though my first visit to Cameroon had been a powerful experience, it seemed presumptuous of me as a European to make a film about Africa.
I didn’t want to exploit it thematically. Perhaps it was the novel “Season of Migration to the North” by the Sudanese author Tayeb Salih that finally sparked my courage to examine my relationship to Africa. He tells the story of a Sudanese who returns to his country after having lived in England for many years only to discover that he has lost his homeland. For me, “Sleeping Sickness” is not a film about Africa; it’s a film about Europeans in Africa. It’s a film about Europe.
You begin the second part of your film with the lecture given by a critic of developmental aid. Do you share his views? No. African experts who are advocating the abolition of international aid are popular in the western press. Their solutions are just as dubious to me as the paternalistic activism of Bono and Bob Geldof. On my travels I met many foreign experts that are in a schizophrenic situation: Although they feel that the actual work they do is very useful, they doubt the sense of developmental aid in general.
I don’t believe there are any simple answers and perhaps it’s not even our job to give answers. We ought to above all be more honest and examine which governments we work with and for what reasons. Rich countries can help improve the situation of the poor but that requires sacrifices we are not prepared to make. For example, most experts agree that agricultural subsidies in developed countries hinder development in Africa.
The second main character, Alex, gets quite upset about the neoliberal lecture. But on his first assignment as an evaluator in Africa he loses all illusions. At the end Alex is rather helpless… I can highly identify with his character. I have often felt this way on my trips to Africa. The wish to do things right and have a natural relationship with the people there clashes with our fear of being cheated and exploited. The evaluator Alex Nzila is forced to realize that he cannot assess things from his European perspective.
Alex is in some way Ebbo’s counterpart. A man caught between two worlds. The conversation in the institute’s canteen shows that Europe is a difficult home for him. Alex feels like an outsider, even when he counters his colleagues’ provocations with humor. Despite Sarkozy, French society is far more cosmopolitan than in Germany. In France you find people with African roots in all social classes and professions. But during the casting, I discovered that even there dark-skinned actors are often left to serve stereotypes of illegal immigrants or drug dealers. A character like Alex is rare.
Did you find your African actors in Cameroon? The casting was quite complicated. Ulrike Müller and Kris de Bellair did a great job. The casting makes up 80% of the work of directing actors and that’s often underestimated. Little can go wrong for a director with a good script and the right cast. It’s what saved me on some days. All the African actors came from Cameroon where Kris de Bellair had searched for them. We had wanted to work with amateurs. Professional actors in Cameroon love illustrative acting and exaggerated gestures. Finally we also worked with a few professionals. We realized that they were able to adapt very well when we asked them to concentrate on the situation and go with it.
You have worked with Patrick Orth for quite a long time. Did you have a storyboard or did you decide from situation to situation? The shooting conditions were tough and the preparation time too short. We made a lot of decisions on the day of shooting. I was busy working with the actors and so Patrick had to prepare a lot of things without me. There is tremendous trust between us. We had established a few basics. The night scenes had to be realistic. We wanted to work a lot with flashlights. It was also clear that some scenes would be filmed in several classical angles and not in sequence shots.
The dinner at the Chinese restaurant was the first time I ever used a shot-reverse shot. I am surprised how well the film works with these stylistic breaks.
The film begins with the transport of tropical wood on trucks. Nothing is in place. No one has a home. Even the traditional African clothes come from China. Only at the very end do you get the feeling that Ebbo is where he belongs. Who is the hippo? Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to ask him. I don’t think he even noticed that he was being filmed.
Filmography:
A Voluntary Year (2019)
In My Room (2018)
Sleeping Sickness (2011)
Montag kommen die Fenster (2006)
Bungalow (2002)
Rakete (1999) (Short)
Palü (1998) (Short)
Feldstraße (1993) (Short)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
11/14/17 – “One of this year’s very best films, and one that directly addresses Europe’s fraught relationship with its colonial and post-colonial relationship with Africa…Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness not only focuses on two socio-politically entangled physicians — a German ‘gone native’ and an Congolese-Frenchman with no direct ties to the continent — involved in an African aid mission. It deals quite directly with the multiple levels of corruption and bureaucratic failure built into European NGOs and their African governance, a system of mutual exploitation and double-dealing.” Michael Sicinski at Cargo – link
Buffalo is full of people helping to cultivate cinema and we want to celebrate those involved. The Cultivators is a new monthly feature in which we highlight individuals who are integral to the presentation, promotion and production of film here in the queen city.
Connection. Doing something together with my family that did not involve debates … though of course those would follow. A common experience between humans with which to provide a seed for discussion.
Storytelling. Discovering humanity.
Escape. Sitting in the dark and going on an adventure.
Popcorn. My mom used to make this giant batch of popcorn in a pan and fill up a paper shopping bag full of it. We’d then sneak it into the theatre.
What is your favorite movie related memory?
Throwing up a little in the bathroom after watching Requiem for a Dream by Darren Aronofsky. I had no idea … that you could make films like that. And then affect someone in such a visceral way. Until then.
But also … Labyrinth.
How did you end up in Buffalo?
I moved here due to an illness—my family was here.
What do you want to see more of in Buffalo?
I’d like to see the Buffalo International Film Festival reaches its goal of becoming a top tier festival. I’d like to see a film stage built that could house larger budget films and television shows. I’d like the AMC rebuild to be awesome.
I’d like to see more local underrepresented writers and directors. For example, I walked onto a set yesterday of a few kids I know and there were 15 bodies making a film, none were women and all were white. Its endemic. This is a small scale example of a large scale issue. We only started talking about change 2 years ago, it will take thousands for parity.
What are your essential film books?
I don’t really read film books. My storytelling school was devouring plays and watching films.
I’m of the Quentin Tarantino mindset … consume, figure out what you like, discover your voice, make your work.
As far as the production/sales side … no story is the same and everyone is making a buck telling you how you should do it. Just like we’re all snowflakes, all of our paths to success in film is unique.
TOP TEN FILMS
This question would be easier if you said top ten per genre … because I had to leave so many off …
True Romance [1993], directed by Tony Scott
Badlands [1973], directed by Terrence Malick
Postcards from the Edge [1990], directed by Mike Nichols
What We Do in the Shadows [2014], directed by Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi
V for Vendetta [2006], directed by James McTeigue
Wild at Heart [1990], directed by David Lynch
Betty Blue [1986], directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix
Sophie’s Choice [1982], directed by Alan J. Pakula
The Hurt Locker [2009], directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Wonder Woman [2017], directed by Patty Jenkins
Film stills from left to right, top to bottom are Requiem for a Dream, Labyrinth, Marshall premiere as part of the 2017 Buffalo International Film Festival (photo courtesy of North Park Theatre), and Market Arcade Film & Arts Centre (soon to be AMC Theatres).
Cultivate Cinema Circle 