Rotterdam p4: all films seen/ranked

BEST SHORTS:

River Rites
Sack Barrow
The Return
Le tempestaire (1947)

ALL FEATURES SEEN & RANKED (loosely), w/ INITIAL TWEET-REVIEW WHERE APPLICABLE

1. Two Years at Sea
2. Eight Deadly Shots: Mikko Niskanen writes/directs/acts up a storm in this riveting 1972 miniseries abt an alcoholic farmer's plight… srsly one of the greatest acting performances I've seen; only discovered it was the film's maker afterward. Whadda dude
3. small roads
4. The Loneliest Planet: the volume of things left unsaid, made enough to fill the valleys in Georgia. Exquisitely sad
5. Eden's Ark: major find of #iffr so far. Gorgeous, suitably oblique essayfilm draws lines between film and nature preservation. Gr8 debut ft
6. Ballet aquatique: Raul Ruiz goes full Owen Land in this hilariously deadpan, surreal cheapo homage to Jean Painleve's science films
7. Neighbouring Sounds: uber-promising debut.
8. The Comedy: a skewering of white male hipster privilege that cuts deep; by turn abrasively funny & very sad.
9. Alps: at first this felt lacking in real-world resonance, then the unreality got under my skin. more formally distinct than DOGTOOTH
10. Anna (1975)
11. Jean Epstein, Young Oceans of Cinema: dreamy portrait of a dreamy filmmaker with lots of dreamy clips and dreamy ocean footage. Dreamy
12. Verano: Juggles a low-stakes narrative w/ intimate, purely sensual immersion in nature and flesh; not wholly successful, but a brand of unsuccessful that I prefer to a lot of brand of successes.
13. Damsels in Distress: total cornball delight, perfect for this point of the fest. Stillman should be working at a Woody Allen rate
14. O despertar da besta: Coffin Joe does Cinemanovo w/o losing psychotronic side, skewers hippies; my jetlag kicks in, nitemares ensue
15. Helsinki, Forever: City symphonies, never not lovely. Peter Von Bagh (its director + cinephile-extraordinary) was sitting next to me
16. O bandido da luz vermelha: anarchic, ultra-digressive, sublimely obnoxious Brazilian crime 'tale', makes PIERROT LE FOU look like Melville
17. Wavumba: Picturesque fic/doco hybrid portrait of Kenyan fisherman & his animist beliefs. Slight but gorgeous; promising debut feature… leans a bit 2 heavily on drone score for 'mystical' effect
18. The Pettifogger
19. Rua Aperana 23
20. Punk in Africa: Loses focus as the years go by, but I guess that comes with the territory. Wanna find some KOOS recordings now
21. Miss Bala: Fightin' objectification w/ objectification. Whatever this film has against beauty pageants, it does the same w/ steadicam
22. Black Dove: So frustrating; nearly every effective scene followed by an equally clumsy one, culminating in a really confused ending
23. L: Has its moments, but verrry overstretched; the DOGTOOTH crew's brand of deadpan absurdity is starting 2 feel very brand-like indeed
24. Egg and Stone: Chinese small town coming-of-age hardships observational static camera autobiographical festival-bait derp derp derp
25. Beyond the Mountains
26. Living: so singlemindedly intent on winning the title of Most Depressing Film Ever that I almost admired it's grim willpower (almost)
27. The Names of Christ: Yikes, Albert Serra should never do essay films. Although, I stayed for all 3hr and 20mins, so I guess there was something there…
28. Me Travelling Across the World to A Beautiful European City Only To Watch Movies: j/k, it was worth it.

Rotterdam p3: SMALL ROADS (dir. James Benning)

It is sacrilege for me to say that digital has been waiting for James Benning? His films have always demanded maximum engagement with what’s actually in the frame, and whereas I’ve occasionally found myself distracted by the grain of his 16mm films, the crispness and precision of HD just feels blatantly more conducive to taking a long hard look at what’s impressed him (by contrast, it’s impossible to imagine Nathaniel Dorsky or Ben Rivers abandoning 16mm). As befitting his background as a mathematician, there’s a schema here; nothing but American roads, loosely following the seasonal change, with the shot length occasionally dictated by how long it takes a passing vehicle’s engine to fade in and out on the soundtrack.

Beyond that, the chaos of artistic intuition and nature organises the rest, and as ever with Benning, it amounts to a hypnotic contemplation and appraisal of the manmade and natural beauty we often take for granted. And, a possible polemic against carbon emissions, esp. in light of the punishing, hour-long shot of a billowing coke tower cloud that closed his prior digital feature Ruhr (although, Benning’s cinema does allow a viewer’s latent conspiratorial bent to go wild…)

Rotterdam p2: TWO YEARS AT SEA (dir. Ben Rivers)

A supremely mysterious film; less narrative than pure recording of the activies of Jake, the film’s scruffy, bearded subject, who director Ben Rivers spent time with in and around his ramshackle abode in the British hinterlands, documenting his daily activities and solitary existence. Over the course of the film, Jake showers, sleeps, fishes in a self-made raft, reads, drives into town (contact with other humans remain unseen) and assembles a caravan atop the trees.. nothing too dramatic on paper, but each given grandeur through the aesthetic delight of the widescreen frame and swirling mosquito-cloud of film grain that the images are shrouded in. And eventually, the succession of tasks become fraught with melancholy, with the occasional photograph of (presumably) a loved one back home, intimating a life he's still vaguely tethered to.

It’s worth mentioning just how brilliantly Rivers uses the 16mm stock, probably the best use of the format I can recall in a contemporary feature film. It is, of course, a rarefied format apt for chronicling recluses living in social and geographic isolation, with the amplified grain of the widescreen transfer blurring man and nature together even further. And it helps that Jake is a pretty great camera subject – a wiry, weathered thing with a big white beard and soulful eyes that invite transference from the viewer at every step.

The film (barely) qualifies as fiction only because he never looks at the camera, although bestowing the ‘doco/fiction hybrid’ label also seems inadequate. Similarly, Rivers uses mostly diegetic sound and music for full immersive effect, but he isn’t too rigorous, and scores one scene of Jake taking a mountain stroll to the spare twangs of some string instrument (later identified in the post-screening Q&A as something Jake made himself), and the effect is some serious next-level-shit. It’s a film that presents us with little more than the actions of a man who governs his own time, which is of course the opposite of the position we’re put in as we observe him. Thus, he remains unknowable, with those actions providing the only key to understanding him, in turn raising a questions about what we can know about our fellow man based on what they do, whether he’s truly a ‘free man’, whether solitude is the purest form of freedom… there’s rarely a moment that isn’t suffused with the space for this kind of contemplation. This is a film that breathes.