Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY
September 28-October 14, 2018
filmlinc.org/nyff
Searching for Ingmar Bergman
Directed by Margarethe von Trotta
Opens November 2, 2018
Margarethe von Trotta: The Political Is Personal
Runs through November 8, 2018
Quad Cinema, 34 W 13th Street, New York, NY
quadcinema.com
The New York Film Festival included several interesting documentaries, although the features in the main slate were for the most part underwhelming. Case in point: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War (opens Dec. 21). Although his last film, Ida—the Oscar-winning Best Foreign Film which explored the controversial question of how Poland treated Jews during WWII—was an impressively controlled drama, Cold War tries for a similar dynamic but fails. Again shot in exquisite black and white (by Łukasz Żal) and starring an affecting Joanna Kulig, this drama (partly based on the director’s parents’ relationship) about a couple attempting to leave behind the crushing controls of Communism feels like a trailer for a more involving and intimate study.
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| Happy as Lazzaro |
Alice Rohrwacher has been one of the brightest filmmakers around since her unforgettable debut, Corpo Celeste, played the 2011 New York Film Festival. Although her follow-up, The Wonders, relied too heavily on forced Felliniesque whimsy, Happy as Lazzaro (on Netflix and in theaters Nov. 30), gets the balance right. The film follows a good young man who’s part of a village whose inhabitants basically work as slaves for a rich landowner. After a tragic incident, the villagers are moved to civilization, but Lazzaro ends up on his own, and Rohrwacher freely and delightfully exults in him being unmoored from reality. Although at times labored, it’s rarely heavy-handed; even the final sequences, in which the surreal and magical clash with naturalism, have a sense of purposefulness, showing the director at her best.
In Frederick Wiseman’s latest immersive documentary, Monrovia, Indiana (opened Oct. 26), we visit the heart of tRump country, a rural Midwestern town in which people go on with their workaday lives. Long stretches of Wiseman’s consistently watchful gaze are given over to local community board meetings in which increasingly banal arguments are made about mundane matters. Although Wiseman takes no explicit political stances, the film ends with the funeral of one of the town’s elders, and the weight of the sequence makes it feel like an elegy for an America that’s been lost.
Director Christian Petzold—whose collaborations with that extraordinary actress Nina Hoss on films like Barbara and Jerichow are among German cinema’s high points over the past decade—disappoints with his latest, Transit (opens Mar. 1, 2019), which, coincidentally or not, does not feature Hoss. Instead, the camera is trained on Franz Rogowski, an inexpressive actor who sleepwalks through his role as an enigmatic drifter who takes on a dead writer’s identity and becomes embroiled in a convoluted narrative about refugees that belabors its lone point. Although she’s no Hoss, Paula Beer provides a far more sympathetic presence than Rogowski. In the end, sadly, Petzold’s elegant filmmaking skill is all for naught.
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| The Image Book |
In a sense, most Jean-Luc Godard films are essays, collages, the beautiful if sometimes inscrutable symmetry of placing images and sounds side by side, either complementing or pushing back against one another. But The Image Book (opens Jan. 25, 2019) is the closest he’s come in 30 years to something along the lines of his great Histoire(s) du Cinema. Unlike that marathon, multi-episode opus, The Image Book is a mere 90 minutes, but in that short space of time Godard lets fly with startling juxtapositions of old-time movie clips, newly-shot digital footage by his DP/editor Fabrice Aragno, and his own endearingly mumbled grouchy-old-man narration. His foray into politics—he shows Obama at one point, but pointedly doesn’t reference tRump—is as inscrutable as ever, but it’s glorious to see this grand old man of cinema at age 88, still passionately engaged, enraged and enraging.
Made in 1979, The War at Home (now playing)—in a pristine new print—remains a touchstone of documentary reporting on the effects of the Vietnam War on those in America: students on college campuses, families of those who went, and activists at schools and in neighborhoods who clashed with a conservative establishment trying to make an elusive case for the war’s worth. Directors Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown seek out people’s authentic responses and actions to make the point clearer than ever that this unwinnable war needed to be ended, and is valuable viewing four decades on to counteract a prevailing right-wing narrative that liberals lost a war that could have been won had we stayed in it.
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| Searching for Ingmar Bergman |
Searching for Ingmar Bergman, German director Margarethe von Trotta’s intensely personal look at the great director’s art, starts with her remembering seeing The Seventh Seal for the first time while in Paris. That memory triggers her journey to the places where Bergman’s genius was most felt: in Sweden, where she speaks to one of his muses, Liv Ullmann, and his sons—who discuss with candor their volatile and often distant relationship with their father—and von Trotta’s own Germany, where Bergman escaped to Munich in the 70s when he became a tax exile and directed plays and films (The Serpent’s Egg and From the Life of the Marionettes). Among a handful of luminaries (including French directors Olivier Assayas and Mia Hansen-Løve and Spanish master Carlos Saura), von Trotta’s most memorable moments are with German actress Rita Russek, who describes Bergman’s methods as a theater and film director in a foreign language. If Searching for Ingmar Bergman never really finds him, that isn’t von Trotta’s intent: rather, it’s an essay about the impossibility of separating genius from the flawed individual making art.
Von Trotta’s documentary is the centerpiece of Quad Cinema’s week-long retrospective of her films, The Political Is Personal. Too bad it’s very selective, with the emphasis on her earlier work as part of the New German Cinema of the 1970s into the ‘80s, although she made some quite impressive films after that: most recently, there have been two fine bio-pics, Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen and Hannah Arendt, both starring one of her muses, Barbara Sukowa.
But the films chosen here—except for her weak collaboration with then-husband Volker Schlondorff, 1975’s The Lost Honor of Katerina Blum—are apt reminders of the singular voice and perspective that she brought to German cinema. Von Trotta’s initial solo features frankly explore complicated female relationships: The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978), Sisters or the Balance of Happiness (1979), Marianne and Julianne (1981) and Sheer Madness (1983) are fascinating individually and in toto, and the performances by her actresses—Sukowa, Angela Winkler, Tina Engel, Hanna Schygulla and Jutta Lampe—are fierce and formidable.
There’s also Rosa Luxembourg (1986), von Trotta’s absorbing biopic about the Communist agitator, played brilliantly by Sukowa. It’s too bad that her followup films—Love and Fear, The Long Silence, The Promise and Rosenstrasse—aren’t part of this retrospective, which would have made a more complete, warts-and-all portrait of this still relevant filmmaker.
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