TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL 2025
"What is cinema?”asked French critic Andre Bazin in 1967. I found myself asking the question again this year while musing on the 52nd Telluride festival. There were only two films which I felt rose to the level of cinema, which for the moment I will describe as film that somehow challenges the language of film. There were many very fine, engaging films which told compelling stories and had some ideas and varying forms of emotional impact–but Kelly Reichardt’s portrait of a largely ordinary man in his environment, The Mastermind, does not take place in never land or an elsewhere (which makes so many other films’ mise en scène look formulaic and mannered), but in a specific place and time. Her ability to observe and frame everyday life and follow her characters through overlooked quotidian landscapes disrupts the contemporary artificial conventions governing mise en scène to challenge the language of the medium.
British Actor Josh O’Connor played JB Mooney, the mastermind of the title. He was an everyday person living in an unassuming suburb with his wife and sons, who came up with a plan to steal three paintings by Arthur Dove from the local museum. Arthur Dove was a landscape painter whose very early 20th century abstractions have a wonderful metaphysical strangeness. The plan goes awry—it was what my father would have called a hare-brained scheme. Mooney was ratted out by one of his partners, named as “the mastermind” of the plan and has to flee. The failed, ill-planned theft is an inversion of the elegant heists of the movies where master criminals display their intelligence and craft. Reichardt, who teaches at Bard College, mentioned Jean-Pierre Melville, a master of that genre, in the Q and A after the film, but she largely abandons dramatic arcs, and Mooney’s haplessness breaks the conventional codes of identification with the main character in a fiction. We become uneasy about our own victories against adversity, our own romantic ideas about ourselves.
Mooney wanders, tries to stay with a friend who mysteriously mentions an art professor Mooney studied with, an expert on Dove. We never understand the connection, but we do learn Mooney dropped out of art school. There are other hints regarding his motivation, but the director lets them drop. Cut off from his family and friends, who do not want to be implicated in any way, JB ends up penniless, is arrested in Cincinnati for taking part in a protest against the war, when in actuality he joined the march as he fled another theft, this time of an old lady’s purse. The film is set in 1970 and subtle peripheral references to the end of sixties –– the film ends in Ohio, where the Kent State shootings signaled the end of the optimism of the sixties. The cultural moment resonates with the character’s lack of direction and his suspended future. I’ve more or less let the reader know what happens because, while there is suspense, one doesn’t just watch to find out what happens. Reinhardt’s cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, overexposes the film to set off the banality of the suburbs and the seedy sections of the small cities, creating a melancholy, elegiac poetry out of everyday life. The gloss of so much contemporary film is stripped away by the location shooting to reveal the loneliness, failures and isolation of American life.
A score created for the film by Jazz artist Rob Mazurek brings to mind the great collaboration between Louis Malle and Miles Davis for Ascenseur pour L’echafaud or Elevator to the Gallows (1958). Reichardt who edits her own films, just leaves Mooney at the end–– who can say what will become of him?––but the film does remind me somewhat of Agnès Varda’s 1985 Vagabond, another wanderer who falls off the map.
La photographie, c’est la vérité et le cinema c’est vingt-quatre fois la vérité par seconde.
“Photography is truth and cinema is truth at 24 frames a second.” J-L Godard
(photo: John Irvin, long time TFF staff member)
Editing flashbacks, and later multiple cameras and points of view, released film from the frontality of the theater, the dialectical structure, or in other words, arguments concerning a moral decision in It Was Just An Accident by Jafar Panahi. This recalled the Greek Theater, although Peter Sellars compared the narrative to a “Sufi teaching tale.” (Peter Sellars, famous for his revolutionary staging of opera, is a resident curator of the festival. In his words to the staff he advocated: “Pleasure, courage and love” to help face the current moment.) And lest that high moral seriousness put you off, there are some comic, Keystone Cops moments as the film’s main character Vahid assembles a group of former prisoners to help him identify their former torturer. The situation builds with all the technical faculty of contemporary cinema and the light touch of Iranian cinema in particular, when a man travelling with his family first hits a dog, then has car trouble. He manages to get to a building on a dark road in the mountains outside Tehran (not that I have been there —I only know the geography from films) and while one man is helping him, another man hovering in the shadows is listening and spying on him. Later, we find that the man who is spying on the man whose car broke down was a victim of torture while imprisoned by the regime. The next day, Vahid captures Eghbal. The dramatic problem is not just should Eghbal be killed in revenge for torture, it’s complicated by Vahid’s lack of certainty over the man’s identity. In order to be sure, he recruits one person after another, who assemble in his van where the man is tied up and captive in a box. There is a woman photographer, a bride in her dress, her groom and finally a man who is resolutely committed to revenge. Everyone asks Vahid if he will kill the man and he remains unsure. Arguments for and against revenge are presented by the various characters, all of whom have suffered trauma at the hands of the same torturer. The filming of the band making their way through the city is comic and tragic at the same time, the underlying critique of the regime and the damage it has inflicted on Iranians provides the dark note.
In addition to this complex and affective drama—there is a movement from low to high estate and a reversal –– there are several allusions to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. For anyone who knows the play, they begin with the tree. Vahid takes his captive Eghbal to a desert area, digs his grave and is about to bury him alive next to the bare tree under which–I recognized it at once—it must be on the cover of a book–– where Vladimir and Estragon sit as they wait. Panahi gives us Vahid and Eghbal: the resonances multiply. Much of the action is accompanied by the discourse of crows, which seems to be a kind of chorus whose deliberations we could not quite make out. Panafi ignites the language of cinema, not on a technical level (although, of course, the camera work in the streets and the views of the lighted city from the dark mountains are lyrical) but by delving into the deep sources of Greek theater and of Samuel Becket’s modernist absurd. As you may remember, Godot—certainty, truth, redemption– never arrives.
The language of the cinema as Bazin described it was bouleversé or turned upside down in 1961 by a film called À bout de souffle or Breathless. Richard Linklater takes us there to relive the shooting of the film and the birth of the Nouvelle Vague in his graceful homage to Godard: Nouvelle Vague. We are there to experience the elation of filming with the new lightweight Eclair cameras, and the appearance of the jump cut.
I first saw a Nouvelle Vague film as a teen-ager in, I think, around 1965 in Quebec in French. It was Godard’s Bande à part. I was captivated and saw every NV film I could in the coming years, and read every book, like Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema. I have seen À bout de souffle many times so I was a bit wary of what Linklater might offer in his film. I loved it. Not only did every character and odd detail –– Godard gets a ride and some advice from Rossellini, Raoul Coutard explains that he is adept at using available light because he was a war photographer, the film was Ilford –– delight me, but the names of the key players flashed in text across the screen and it was all in French and black and white. If you have studied the Nouvelle Vague, you would be familiar with the names of directors, actors, critics of the time and the collaborative nature of the New Wave. Readers of this journal will know that I find bio-pics questionable; Linklater’s film was more like film history on film than a vehicle for celebrity impersonation. It was also a light-hearted fantasy asking what if I was there when Patricia and Michel were walking down the Champs Elysées? What if I saw the cinematographer in a box rolling in front of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg? The actor who played Seberg, Zoey Deutch, wore the striped dress Patricia wears when she betrays Michel as if it were her dress and Godard just used it in the film. This may be the case; clearly Linklater has done a great deal of homework on the details of the shooting. Most importantly he catches the spirit of the time. I can’t wait to see it again. Pierre Rissient who had a special connection with Cannes, Clint Eastwood, Alexander Payne and Telluride, was assistant director to Godard on A bout de soufflé told us:
“It's not enough to like a film,” he says, “You must like it for the right reasons.”
If you have not seen Au bout de soufle, (recently) then let Linklater’s film lead you to it.
Francois Truffaut, while he was a critic for an influential film magazine called Cahiers du Cinema, before he made Le quatre cent coups (400 Blows) criticized what he called a “tradition of quality” in French cinema: the high production values, the formulaic narratives, the film forms which he felt could not capture the tempo of modern life or allow innovations that reflected new ways of seeing. Several very moving films at Telluride this year might in some ways fall into the category of a new tradition of quality. These films all had compelling and satisfying narratives, excellent acting and high production values. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value used the conceit of a charming house, and the multigenerational lives of its inhabitants, to frame his story of a director’s relationship with his daughters. At first, the director asks his estranged daughter, an actress, to act in his film. She declines and then later takes the part which concerns some problematic family history. The cast is notable: Stellan Skarsgård plays the father and Renate Reinsve, who charmed and saddened audiences in The Worst Person in the World (2023), plays the daughter. There is a direct quote from Bergman of an image of two actors overlapping. I enjoyed its play within a play structure, and others at the festival liked it as well. However, a Dutch filmmaker on the bus to Grand Junction commented that it was “filmed like an insurance advertisement.” Someone else asked: what does that mean? I am speculating here: I could mean first, that the film is a very good example of the “tradition of quality,” and second, it means that it is filmed in a way that makes you retain your belief in capitalism. It’s conventional, there is some drama, but it doesn’t in any way disturb you the way Mastermind or It Was Just an Accident do.
https://shortsblog.berlinale.de/2025/02/17/koki-ciao-interviews-press-etc/
Sorry to keep mentioning capitalism, but doesn’t it seem as if we are living in its apotheosis, with a predatory, unregulated, property developer steering the ship onto the rocks for the insurance?
(photo below: Producer: Maks Pilasiewicz and Filmmaker: Quentin Miller on the bus to Grand Junction)
I first saw a Nouvelle Vague film as a teen-ager in, I think, around 1965 in Quebec in French. It was Godard’s Bande à part. I was captivated and saw every NV film I could in the coming years, and read every book, like Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema. I have seen À bout de souffle many times so I was a bit wary of what Linklater might offer in his film. I loved it. Not only did every character and odd detail –– Godard gets a ride and some advice from Rossellini, Raoul Coutard explains that he is adept at using available light because he was a war photographer, the film was Ilford –– delight me, but the names of the key players flashed in text across the screen and it was all in French and black and white. If you have studied the Nouvelle Vague, you would be familiar with the names of directors, actors, critics of the time and the collaborative nature of the New Wave. Readers of this journal will know that I find bio-pics questionable; Linklater’s film was more like film history on film than a vehicle for celebrity impersonation. It was also a light-hearted fantasy asking what if I was there when Patricia and Michel were walking down the Champs Elysées? What if I saw the cinematographer in a box rolling in front of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg? The actor who played Seberg, Zoey Deutch, wore the striped dress Patricia wears when she betrays Michel as if it were her dress and Godard just used it in the film. This may be the case; clearly Linklater has done a great deal of homework on the details of the shooting. Most importantly he catches the spirit of the time. I can’t wait to see it again. Pierre Rissient who had a special connection with Cannes, Clint Eastwood, Alexander Payne and Telluride, was assistant director to Godard on A bout de soufflé told us:
“It's not enough to like a film,” he says, “You must like it for the right reasons.”
If you have not seen Au bout de soufle, (recently) then let Linklater’s film lead you to it.
Francois Truffaut, while he was a critic for an influential film magazine called Cahiers du Cinema, before he made Le quatre cent coups (400 Blows) criticized what he called a “tradition of quality” in French cinema: the high production values, the formulaic narratives, the film forms which he felt could not capture the tempo of modern life or allow innovations that reflected new ways of seeing. Several very moving films at Telluride this year might in some ways fall into the category of a new tradition of quality. These films all had compelling and satisfying narratives, excellent acting and high production values. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value used the conceit of a charming house, and the multigenerational lives of its inhabitants, to frame his story of a director’s relationship with his daughters. At first, the director asks his estranged daughter, an actress, to act in his film. She declines and then later takes the part which concerns some problematic family history. The cast is notable: Stellan Skarsgård plays the father and Renate Reinsve, who charmed and saddened audiences in The Worst Person in the World (2023), plays the daughter. There is a direct quote from Bergman of an image of two actors overlapping. I enjoyed its play within a play structure, and others at the festival liked it as well. However, a Dutch filmmaker on the bus to Grand Junction commented that it was “filmed like an insurance advertisement.” Someone else asked: what does that mean? I am speculating here: I could mean first, that the film is a very good example of the “tradition of quality,” and second, it means that it is filmed in a way that makes you retain your belief in capitalism. It’s conventional, there is some drama, but it doesn’t in any way disturb you the way Mastermind or It Was Just an Accident do.
https://shortsblog.berlinale.de/2025/02/17/koki-ciao-interviews-press-etc/
Sorry to keep mentioning capitalism, but doesn’t it seem as if we are living in its apotheosis, with a predatory, unregulated, property developer steering the ship onto the rocks for the insurance?
(photo below: Producer: Maks Pilasiewicz and Filmmaker: Quentin Miller on the bus to Grand Junction)
Tuner (dir. Daniel Roher), described by another discerning cinéaste as “charmingly middlebrow,” was the story of young man, Niki, played by Leo Woodall, whose acute sensitivity to sound prevented him from becoming a pianist. Instead he is a piano tuner, driving from one over-the-top Long Island mansion to another tuning the Steinways. He has had to learn how to crack a safe in order to find a pair of keys misplaced by Dustin Hoffman (!), his boss and father figure. Then one night, he runs into a group of thieves, the security company, who explain that rich people don’t really miss what is stolen; they blame the maid. He gives them a hand, then joins them, plus at the same time he becomes involved with a talented Asian pianist and composer. Loud noises affect him excruciatingly, something I identified with, though of course, not to his extent. It is also this acute hearing that allows him to hear the clicks as a lock turns. He becomes a thief—a safe cracker, a talent he employs when his boss had not paid his note on the Tuner’s van and it was about to be repossessed, leaving Nick without a business and a job. His situation is a mild comment on the current state of the American economy. Anyone who loves the movies, loves thieves and heists. Julie Dassin’s Rififi (1955) is one of my favorites, then Le Circle Rouge (1970) by Melville and of course, Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000) among many others. Thieves are almost always portrayed not as depraved criminals but as intelligent, talented men who probably deserve better, but were not given the chance. In other words, there is always at some level a critique of class. Tuner may have been middlebrow, but it certainly was charming.
History of Sound (dir. Oliver Hermanus) was a well-made film with a well-wrought story, winning actors and lush settings. Josh O’Connor plays another doomed man–a version of the character in Mastermind, although here he is intelligent and caring rather than alienated, but still doomed. Two years ago he was in La Chimera (2023), Alice Rohrwacher’s version of the Orpheus myth, in which he played a doomed dissolute Archeologist turned grave-robber. Is there something in the reoccurrence of this doomed man? Is it some reflection on the state of masculinity or love we need to think about? History of Sound follows the lives of two men, the other is played by Paul Mescal, who meet in a conservatory in Boston at the start of the 20th century. They bond over a ballad called the Silver Dagger about lovers who cannot marry. I love American ballads, so I enjoyed the music. However, these ballads are by nature mournful, so the film had to be a weepy. Mescal’s character, Lionel, knows the ballads because he grew up with them; O’Connor’s character, David, comes from a different world. The two go off together collecting ballads, then afterwards, they follow separate paths, because two men who were in love during the early part of the century would never be allowed to marry. The shifting of the meaning of the ballad was poignant and graceful.
A defense here of these charming films from Nestor Almendros, cinematographer for Truffault, Romer and Malick, who understood how intertwined politics and aesthetics were, and how to skillfully combine the two. ‘From that time,’ he writes, ‘I have never attacked the so-called escapist cinema as some people do, because I think it helps many poor souls get through their lives, as it helped me in those precarious days.’” ( Metrograph Journal, Carlos Valladares)
In another direction: David Erlich in IndieWire noted that:
Telluride, a wonderful festival whose need to appease its patrons has seen it become subtly but worryingly less adventurous in its programming, neglected to screen many of the recent films that feature the genocide as their primary subject (“Cover-Up” touches on Gaza with great purpose, but only in passing). Amid a lineup that was absolutely bursting with documentaries about everything from the American Revolution to the making of “Megalopolis,” and everyone from E. Jean Carroll to Elie Wiesel, I was disappointed not to see “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” and only took an uncertain measure of consolation in the fact that Telluride chose to screen Netalie Braun’s “Shooting,” a self-reflexive Israeli film about how the country’s unchecked militarism has poisoned its cinema (I wasn’t able to see it myself, but the movie’s Letterboxed reviews make it sound appropriately damning).
To be fair, at the end of the festival The Voice of Hind Rajab appeared in the App (I did not load the App, so I missed it). The film, directed by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, about the killing by the IDF of the five-year-old girl who was trapped in a car received a standing ovation at Venice.
Telluride did have a special showing of a film about Amy Goodman, who clearly is, and has been, not afraid to take risks producing Democracy Now. At the dramatic center of the documentary of her life and mission, Steal This Story Please, Goodman sings a Hebrew mourning song at a monument to her slaughtered Jewish relatives in Ukraine. A cut takes us to the genocide in Gaza. Clips from her reporting on the events of the last thirty years—the genocide in East Timor, 9/11, Iraq war, the climate, ongoing struggles in Gaza and the West Bank –– are intercut with the story of Goodman’s childhood and education. Her career dream, fortunately derailed, was to work on the Merv Griffin show. The doc emphasized her very traditional Jewish upbringing, including a grandfather who was a rabbi, attendance at temple, and her application of these moral teachings to her dedication to reporting the stories of those who are left out or silenced by the major news outlets. This connection is important at the moment when voices critical of the regime and the genocide in Gaza are twisted into accusations of anti-Semitism.
The film opens with Goodman running up several flights of stairs at a climate conference, chasing an uncooperative US delegate to get a statement about the US position on climate. Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin were present with Goodman at the Mason’s Hall Cinema—a large room above the hardware store in the Masons’ Hall which is converted every year into a cinema, significant for many reasons, but especially to the documentary filmmakers because in 1989 an unknown filmmaker premiered a doc called Roger and Me in this theater.
At a panel in the park before the film was screened Goodman, the Editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, Documentarists Marshall Curry, Ezra Edelman, Werner Herzog and Professor Jacqueline Stewart discussed the nature of truth. The assembled group embodied the dignity, intelligence, restraint and dedication to the principles of a democratic society that have been occluded in the current obstreperous and chaotic media world. Werner Herzog argued for a definition of truth as an “endeavor and a process.” Frank Zappa’s prescient dictum “Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex,” was hauled out for the occasion. It was more than a notable group. Remnick's brilliance and eloquence, Goodman’s intensity and Herzog’s towering accomplishments offer a glimpse of a rational world which we can still inhabit—at least in Telluride, in a box canyon 8,700 feet up in the San Juan Mountains.
(Amy Goodman)
History of Sound (dir. Oliver Hermanus) was a well-made film with a well-wrought story, winning actors and lush settings. Josh O’Connor plays another doomed man–a version of the character in Mastermind, although here he is intelligent and caring rather than alienated, but still doomed. Two years ago he was in La Chimera (2023), Alice Rohrwacher’s version of the Orpheus myth, in which he played a doomed dissolute Archeologist turned grave-robber. Is there something in the reoccurrence of this doomed man? Is it some reflection on the state of masculinity or love we need to think about? History of Sound follows the lives of two men, the other is played by Paul Mescal, who meet in a conservatory in Boston at the start of the 20th century. They bond over a ballad called the Silver Dagger about lovers who cannot marry. I love American ballads, so I enjoyed the music. However, these ballads are by nature mournful, so the film had to be a weepy. Mescal’s character, Lionel, knows the ballads because he grew up with them; O’Connor’s character, David, comes from a different world. The two go off together collecting ballads, then afterwards, they follow separate paths, because two men who were in love during the early part of the century would never be allowed to marry. The shifting of the meaning of the ballad was poignant and graceful.
A defense here of these charming films from Nestor Almendros, cinematographer for Truffault, Romer and Malick, who understood how intertwined politics and aesthetics were, and how to skillfully combine the two. ‘From that time,’ he writes, ‘I have never attacked the so-called escapist cinema as some people do, because I think it helps many poor souls get through their lives, as it helped me in those precarious days.’” ( Metrograph Journal, Carlos Valladares)
In another direction: David Erlich in IndieWire noted that:
Telluride, a wonderful festival whose need to appease its patrons has seen it become subtly but worryingly less adventurous in its programming, neglected to screen many of the recent films that feature the genocide as their primary subject (“Cover-Up” touches on Gaza with great purpose, but only in passing). Amid a lineup that was absolutely bursting with documentaries about everything from the American Revolution to the making of “Megalopolis,” and everyone from E. Jean Carroll to Elie Wiesel, I was disappointed not to see “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” and only took an uncertain measure of consolation in the fact that Telluride chose to screen Netalie Braun’s “Shooting,” a self-reflexive Israeli film about how the country’s unchecked militarism has poisoned its cinema (I wasn’t able to see it myself, but the movie’s Letterboxed reviews make it sound appropriately damning).
To be fair, at the end of the festival The Voice of Hind Rajab appeared in the App (I did not load the App, so I missed it). The film, directed by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, about the killing by the IDF of the five-year-old girl who was trapped in a car received a standing ovation at Venice.
Telluride did have a special showing of a film about Amy Goodman, who clearly is, and has been, not afraid to take risks producing Democracy Now. At the dramatic center of the documentary of her life and mission, Steal This Story Please, Goodman sings a Hebrew mourning song at a monument to her slaughtered Jewish relatives in Ukraine. A cut takes us to the genocide in Gaza. Clips from her reporting on the events of the last thirty years—the genocide in East Timor, 9/11, Iraq war, the climate, ongoing struggles in Gaza and the West Bank –– are intercut with the story of Goodman’s childhood and education. Her career dream, fortunately derailed, was to work on the Merv Griffin show. The doc emphasized her very traditional Jewish upbringing, including a grandfather who was a rabbi, attendance at temple, and her application of these moral teachings to her dedication to reporting the stories of those who are left out or silenced by the major news outlets. This connection is important at the moment when voices critical of the regime and the genocide in Gaza are twisted into accusations of anti-Semitism.
The film opens with Goodman running up several flights of stairs at a climate conference, chasing an uncooperative US delegate to get a statement about the US position on climate. Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin were present with Goodman at the Mason’s Hall Cinema—a large room above the hardware store in the Masons’ Hall which is converted every year into a cinema, significant for many reasons, but especially to the documentary filmmakers because in 1989 an unknown filmmaker premiered a doc called Roger and Me in this theater.
At a panel in the park before the film was screened Goodman, the Editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, Documentarists Marshall Curry, Ezra Edelman, Werner Herzog and Professor Jacqueline Stewart discussed the nature of truth. The assembled group embodied the dignity, intelligence, restraint and dedication to the principles of a democratic society that have been occluded in the current obstreperous and chaotic media world. Werner Herzog argued for a definition of truth as an “endeavor and a process.” Frank Zappa’s prescient dictum “Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex,” was hauled out for the occasion. It was more than a notable group. Remnick's brilliance and eloquence, Goodman’s intensity and Herzog’s towering accomplishments offer a glimpse of a rational world which we can still inhabit—at least in Telluride, in a box canyon 8,700 feet up in the San Juan Mountains.
(Amy Goodman)
Truth is a slippery, or perhaps shifty quality. The idea that a Prime Minister of a country, a leader, would construct a kind of fantasy for the people, here of Great Britain, in which they would be free, self-reliant individuals while the economic realities of a disintegrating industrial base and the shifting foundations of power would compromise their fates, is chilling. It is doubly chilling at the moment when we here, in the US are likewise on slippery ground, and many people are choosing to live in an incoherent make-believe world being offered, or rather sold to them. Shifty: Living in Britain at the End of the Twentieth Century, Adam Curtis’s latest, is a vertiginous economic and cultural history of Britain during that period. For anyone wearied by the comforting, if false continuity of conventional narrative, Curtis will shock you (in the Eisenstein sense) with his montage of clips: a woman with a grotesque dog explaining to a vet that he is changing his sex, Margaret Thatcher, Punk Rock bands and therapy groups, an old woman sitting alone watching the video feed from a high-rise lobby, Tony Blair. Curtis makes the point through his repetition of these absurd images, and many more, that the myths covering the dismantling of the collective, the safety net and the public sphere that drive the turn inward are feeble and sterile. Caught in the propulsive flow of sound and image are clips of Stephen Hawking: a voiceover explains that the universe has been found to be far more complex than previous models depicted, which means that reality is something we produce in light of the universe’s indeterminacy. This theory of the nature of the universe is haunting and frightening when paired with Curtis’s contention that politicians in the period deliberately constructed consciousness as well as economies to delude the citizens of their country. He never mentions David Harvey, the lucid economic and social theorist of this time, or neoliberalism, but I only saw something over two hours of the series of programs made for the BBC. All of Curtis’s work is available online.
I can’t help but think Curtis would like this Susan Sontag quote:
“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to anesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.” On Photography (1976)
La Grazia by Paolo Sorrentino engaged with the political from a very different point of view and at a much more stately pace. For some reason, Sorrentino causes me to suspend my critical judgment. I follow the flow of his moving camera and dwell in his opulent imaginary Roman worlds where people are kind and thoughtful, possibly frustrating, but usually honorable. In this case, a president of Italy, played by Toni Servillo, is a reflective, serious, dignified man, who takes his time to make decisions about granting pardons and casting a vote against the Pope’s wishes in favor of euthanasia. The Pope in this film is African and rides a motorcycle and the president listens to rap music on his headphones. Sorrentino films Servillo haunting the graceful, formal rooms of the president’s mansion near the end of his term, grieving for a lost wife. At some point perhaps, his daughter or the president made a comment about lightness and I remembered Italian author Italo Calvino’s thoughts about lightness: “Above all I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity.” Other Sorrenitino-esque, that is to say eccentric, slightly over-blown, but rich, in the sense of full, characters come and go. His main relationship is with his daughter who argues for the pardon, for the vote regarding euthanasia and a diet for Mariano.
Does taking revenge make you as culpable as the perpetrators of crimes against you? This question, central to Jafar Panafi’s film, has been around for a while. Shakespeare explored it in Hamlet. Aneil Karia, director, and Michael Lesslie, script, have set the play in the South Asian community of London but kept the Elizabethan language. Claudius is a developer, Polonius (Timothy Spall), Ophelia and Laertes are white and the ghost of Hamlet’s father leads Hamlet, well played by a graceful kinetic Riz Ahmad, through a dark, labyrinthine industrial or building site. There was a lot of rushing around the night time streets of London, alleyways and mysterious spaces, which kept the feverish, here explosive pace of the play. At some point, there was a shot of the Grenfell tower—a high rise building housing many people of color in London, carelessly clad with a flammable material, which caught fire and killed 72 people. The players at the wedding who Hamlet directs to “catch the conscience of a king,” were a glittering South Asian dance troupe. Full disclosure here, I did a stint teaching High School Honors English, so in addition to a rigorous semester of Shakespeare in college, I gained familiarity with the play. I also love it. I enjoyed guessing as I watched the film how the director would solve the problems of adaptation. Horatio was thrown out, I am not sure why. I wondered if the audience was supposed to be Horatio. It seemed that many people were familiar with the play and a murmur went up when Hamlet addresses Ophelia with the line concerning the ghost: “there are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Ahmad wears white, so one of my favorite lines: These are but the signs and suits of woe, I have that within me which passeth show,” had to be omitted. In the play, Hamlet needs to describe his inner state, but in a film, a close-up of Riz Ahmad’s face might do the work of revealing interiority. I thought it was an ambitious and intelligent project. Is the play an artifact preserving the world of the 16th century or a living text to be endlessly
reinterpreted to fit the times? Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973) is another film in which the corrupt generation of the fathers betrays the sons, and the final act or scene is like a bloody battlefield. Fortinbras comments at the end of Hamlet:
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field but here shows much amiss.
Another dark thriller, The Secret Agent (dir. Kleber Mendonca Filho) is set in 1970s Brazil, when the military dictatorship fostered corruption in all areas of Brazilian life. Wagner Moura who plays Marcello won Best Actor at Cannes for this role. He is handsome without the perfection of American actors and extremely sympathetic as a man who, as a scientist, had witnessed corruption in a government corporation and so becomes the target of a political hit. He is also searching archives regarding the mysterious death of his mother. The villains, the local police, the hit-men, are magnificently depraved and frightening, so the suspense is gripping as they chase Marcello through the back streets of Recife. Many twists and turns, surprises and many characters, all have real faces marked by experience and history and give the film heft and dimension. There is a lot going on in this film, including an incident in which a leg severed from a corpse makes appearances around town.
(Among the comedic episodes, the movie recreates an old myth from the 1970s: the hairy leg. “The hairy leg is a code made up by true journalists in this city in the 1970s,” said Mendonça Filho, who worked in a newspaper newsroom in the ’90s when he left university. “I got to hear many stories from the older journalists. And in the ’70s, you couldn’t write about certain things because there was real censorship. At some point, they developed the hairy leg as an urban legend, which was a code. ‘Last night the police beat the shit out of people in the park.’ And they couldn’t say that the police did it, or the military police.” They were targeting the gay community at the time. The journalists would use the code “the hairy leg attacked again last night.” To this day, the hairy leg is still remembered, but this is the first time it has been put into a film. “I had the opportunity of using stop motion, ” he said, “which I had never used in my films.” Kleber Mendonça Filho to Anne Thompson Indywire 10-8-25)
Love and loss, particularly loss, haunted the main characters in La Grazia, History of Sound and The Secret Agent, but love is the driving force for The Cycle of Love, a documentary by Orlando von Einsiedel about P.K.Mahanandia who narrates the story of his search for the woman he fell in love with over 50 years ago. The narration alternated with reenactments of PK’s story.
In the 1970s, a young Swedish woman on the “Hippie Trail” to Delhi falls in love with a young street artist who recognizes her from a prophecy regarding his destiny. They fall in love in India, but when Lotta fails to return, PK, more or less penniless, decides to ride a bike to Sweden in order to reunite with her. The reenactments of his ride and the many setbacks and obstacles he faced in mountains and deserts were dazzling. He finds out right away that as a Hindu he can’t cross Pakistan. A kind man gives him a plane ticket to Kabul, he collapses at the Caspian Sea and is saved by some Iranian women and he is just about to reach Sweden when racist German police threaten to repatriate him. Part of PK’s quest is to escape the prejudice against members of the Dalit class in India (once called untouchables), and we learn that he becomes an activist for this cause. I am not going to tell the rest of the story, but will say that there was not one false note. For those of you reading who might remember George, an intrepid cyclist who crossed continents, we think he might have loved this film and most certainly would have made reference to Dervla Murphy, the great Irish woman cyclist who also crossed Afghanistan on a bike.
Once again, sadly, the festival made no Land Acknowledgements to the Utes.
And a multitude of thank-yous to Wendy Thum who proofread this journal.
All photgraphs by the author
FIN
I can’t help but think Curtis would like this Susan Sontag quote:
“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to anesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.” On Photography (1976)
La Grazia by Paolo Sorrentino engaged with the political from a very different point of view and at a much more stately pace. For some reason, Sorrentino causes me to suspend my critical judgment. I follow the flow of his moving camera and dwell in his opulent imaginary Roman worlds where people are kind and thoughtful, possibly frustrating, but usually honorable. In this case, a president of Italy, played by Toni Servillo, is a reflective, serious, dignified man, who takes his time to make decisions about granting pardons and casting a vote against the Pope’s wishes in favor of euthanasia. The Pope in this film is African and rides a motorcycle and the president listens to rap music on his headphones. Sorrentino films Servillo haunting the graceful, formal rooms of the president’s mansion near the end of his term, grieving for a lost wife. At some point perhaps, his daughter or the president made a comment about lightness and I remembered Italian author Italo Calvino’s thoughts about lightness: “Above all I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity.” Other Sorrenitino-esque, that is to say eccentric, slightly over-blown, but rich, in the sense of full, characters come and go. His main relationship is with his daughter who argues for the pardon, for the vote regarding euthanasia and a diet for Mariano.
Does taking revenge make you as culpable as the perpetrators of crimes against you? This question, central to Jafar Panafi’s film, has been around for a while. Shakespeare explored it in Hamlet. Aneil Karia, director, and Michael Lesslie, script, have set the play in the South Asian community of London but kept the Elizabethan language. Claudius is a developer, Polonius (Timothy Spall), Ophelia and Laertes are white and the ghost of Hamlet’s father leads Hamlet, well played by a graceful kinetic Riz Ahmad, through a dark, labyrinthine industrial or building site. There was a lot of rushing around the night time streets of London, alleyways and mysterious spaces, which kept the feverish, here explosive pace of the play. At some point, there was a shot of the Grenfell tower—a high rise building housing many people of color in London, carelessly clad with a flammable material, which caught fire and killed 72 people. The players at the wedding who Hamlet directs to “catch the conscience of a king,” were a glittering South Asian dance troupe. Full disclosure here, I did a stint teaching High School Honors English, so in addition to a rigorous semester of Shakespeare in college, I gained familiarity with the play. I also love it. I enjoyed guessing as I watched the film how the director would solve the problems of adaptation. Horatio was thrown out, I am not sure why. I wondered if the audience was supposed to be Horatio. It seemed that many people were familiar with the play and a murmur went up when Hamlet addresses Ophelia with the line concerning the ghost: “there are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Ahmad wears white, so one of my favorite lines: These are but the signs and suits of woe, I have that within me which passeth show,” had to be omitted. In the play, Hamlet needs to describe his inner state, but in a film, a close-up of Riz Ahmad’s face might do the work of revealing interiority. I thought it was an ambitious and intelligent project. Is the play an artifact preserving the world of the 16th century or a living text to be endlessly
reinterpreted to fit the times? Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973) is another film in which the corrupt generation of the fathers betrays the sons, and the final act or scene is like a bloody battlefield. Fortinbras comments at the end of Hamlet:
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field but here shows much amiss.
Another dark thriller, The Secret Agent (dir. Kleber Mendonca Filho) is set in 1970s Brazil, when the military dictatorship fostered corruption in all areas of Brazilian life. Wagner Moura who plays Marcello won Best Actor at Cannes for this role. He is handsome without the perfection of American actors and extremely sympathetic as a man who, as a scientist, had witnessed corruption in a government corporation and so becomes the target of a political hit. He is also searching archives regarding the mysterious death of his mother. The villains, the local police, the hit-men, are magnificently depraved and frightening, so the suspense is gripping as they chase Marcello through the back streets of Recife. Many twists and turns, surprises and many characters, all have real faces marked by experience and history and give the film heft and dimension. There is a lot going on in this film, including an incident in which a leg severed from a corpse makes appearances around town.
(Among the comedic episodes, the movie recreates an old myth from the 1970s: the hairy leg. “The hairy leg is a code made up by true journalists in this city in the 1970s,” said Mendonça Filho, who worked in a newspaper newsroom in the ’90s when he left university. “I got to hear many stories from the older journalists. And in the ’70s, you couldn’t write about certain things because there was real censorship. At some point, they developed the hairy leg as an urban legend, which was a code. ‘Last night the police beat the shit out of people in the park.’ And they couldn’t say that the police did it, or the military police.” They were targeting the gay community at the time. The journalists would use the code “the hairy leg attacked again last night.” To this day, the hairy leg is still remembered, but this is the first time it has been put into a film. “I had the opportunity of using stop motion, ” he said, “which I had never used in my films.” Kleber Mendonça Filho to Anne Thompson Indywire 10-8-25)
Love and loss, particularly loss, haunted the main characters in La Grazia, History of Sound and The Secret Agent, but love is the driving force for The Cycle of Love, a documentary by Orlando von Einsiedel about P.K.Mahanandia who narrates the story of his search for the woman he fell in love with over 50 years ago. The narration alternated with reenactments of PK’s story.
In the 1970s, a young Swedish woman on the “Hippie Trail” to Delhi falls in love with a young street artist who recognizes her from a prophecy regarding his destiny. They fall in love in India, but when Lotta fails to return, PK, more or less penniless, decides to ride a bike to Sweden in order to reunite with her. The reenactments of his ride and the many setbacks and obstacles he faced in mountains and deserts were dazzling. He finds out right away that as a Hindu he can’t cross Pakistan. A kind man gives him a plane ticket to Kabul, he collapses at the Caspian Sea and is saved by some Iranian women and he is just about to reach Sweden when racist German police threaten to repatriate him. Part of PK’s quest is to escape the prejudice against members of the Dalit class in India (once called untouchables), and we learn that he becomes an activist for this cause. I am not going to tell the rest of the story, but will say that there was not one false note. For those of you reading who might remember George, an intrepid cyclist who crossed continents, we think he might have loved this film and most certainly would have made reference to Dervla Murphy, the great Irish woman cyclist who also crossed Afghanistan on a bike.
Once again, sadly, the festival made no Land Acknowledgements to the Utes.
And a multitude of thank-yous to Wendy Thum who proofread this journal.
All photgraphs by the author
FIN
