When artist Ericka Beckman premiered the first of her two partially animated tech-oriented 16mm musicals about gaming and labor, You the Better (1983), audiences were unwilling and perhaps even unable to pick up on all that it was putting down. The first, most obvious, and indeed most oft-discussed example of this came on the night […]
INTERVIEW: LULU WANG
Lulu Wang is an American filmmaker whose second film, The Farewell (2019), will be released in various Boston-area theaters this week. The movie begins with Billi (Awkwafina), who lives in the US, learning that her Nai Nai/grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen), who lives in China, has been diagnosed with a terminal illness—and that, in line with local […]
INTERVIEW: CHLOË SEVIGNY
Chloë Sevigny is an actress/writer/director/fashion designer who has been a staple of the American independent cinema since the mid 1990s, with her notable performances including those in Kids (1995), Gummo (1997), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), The Brown Bunny (2004), Zodiac (2007), and Love & Friendship (2016), among innumerable others. In The Dead Don’t Die (2019), […]
FESTIVAL REPORT: ON THE SOUND OF 70MM AT THE SOMERVILLE THEATRE
Most discussion on the subject of 70mm film exhibition places an emphasis on the texture of the images, for reasons both understandable and entirely justifiable. But what this inadvertently obscures is that advances in audio technology have been tied into the development of 70mm (and other modes of large-format film exhibition) just as tightly as […]
INTERVIEW: ALEX ROSS PERRY
Alex Ross Perry is an American writer/director who has made six films to date, including Listen Up Philip (2014), Queen of Earth (2016), and Golden Exits (2018). His latest film is Her Smell (2019), which depicts the lead singer of a fictional 90s rock band, Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss) in five long scenes (they make […]
FILM REVIEW: TWO BY JA’TOVIA GARY AT THE HFA
The Harvard Film Archive began the “Cinema of Resistance” series in May 2017, with the programmer at the time, David Pendleton, offering something of a mission statement in the notes accompanying the first screening. “Cinema has always been a method of examining the world the way it is, in order to understand it, to begin […]
INTERVIEW: CLAIRE DENIS
Claire Denis is a French filmmaker whose movies include Chocolat (1988), U.S. Go Home (1994), Beau Travail (1999), Trouble Every Day (2001), and Let the Sunshine In (2018). Her latest work, High Life (2019), opens in Boston on Friday (it depicts the deep-space journey undertaken by a crew of convicts; they’ve been sent out to […]
FESTIVAL REPORT: TWO FILMS BY SARAH JACOBSON AT BUFF
At most of the major international film festivals there are programs of older works exhibited alongside the new releases and premieres that ostensibly drew the crowds in the first place. With no small amount of pleasure, I’ve noticed (anecdotally if not statistically) that Boston-area festivals have begun to follow suit with greater regularity: Last summer’s […]
INTERVIEW: JODIE MACK
Jodie Mack is a filmmaker and experimental animator whose works include Yard Work is Hard Work (2008), Dusty Stacks of Mom: the Poster Project (2013), and Let Your Light Shine (2013). She has also made a series of textile-based flicker films that were semi-recently featured at the Harvard Film Archive under the program title “Jodie […]
CIFF REPORT #1: ON “HALE COUNTY”, “BABY BROTHER”, AND “NORMAN NORMAN”
The nonfiction feature Hale County This Morning, This Evening [2018] is first and foremost a sensorial experience, not a narrative one. With that said, filmmaker RaMell Ross does introduce his main characters very early on: first Daniel and Quincy, two young basketball players on the come-up in Hale County, AL, and then Boosie, who is […]
