Sessão Mutual Films: Nossa própria imagem, um espelho de beleza: Os filmes de Camille Billops e James Hatch [Mutual Films Session: Our Own Image, A Mirror of Beauty: The Films of Camille Billops and James Hatch]

March 11: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 22nd edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place between March 12th and 31st at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles and on March 23rd and 30th at the newly opened screening room of the Instituto's unit in Poços de Caldas.

The event provides Brazil-based audiences with the country's first-ever retrospective of the films of Camille Billops (1933-2019) and James Hatch (1928-2020), a team of American artists and archivists that made brilliantly self-reflexive documentaries, several of which are focused on members of Billops's family, who come to represent different aspects of African-American life. The films investigate with profundity, wit, and humor an American condition of cracked interiors covered up by smooth surfaces, with the eternal hope of creating a less hypocritical and more open world.

The series's three programs will present newly digitized copies of all six of the films made by Billops and Hatch (who, among other things, founded the Hatch-Billops Collection, currently stored at Emory University and one of the largest extant archives devoted to African-American art and culture). Five of the films have been remastered in 2K, an initiative undertaken by their longtime distributor, the New York-based Third World Newsreel. The sixth - the couple's remarkable early portrait film of one of Billops's cousins called Suzanne, Suzanne - has been restored in 4K by the nonprofit entity IndieCollect.

The filmic works of Billops and Hatch received much positive feedback during the directors' lifetimes, but their reception has experienced a renaissance during the past few years thanks in good part to the availability of these new copies. Among critical texts that have recently been published, a piece by Yasmina Price written in conjunction with a streaming series of the couple's films on The Criterion Channel is particularly full. Contemporary researchers are fortunate to be able to have access to multiple interviews that Billops gave, including a long conversation from 1996 with bell hooks (included in hooks's book Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, whose Brazilian edition was published late last year by Editora Elefante) and a 1992 talk with Ameena Meer for BOMB Magazine that we were fortunate to be able to translate into Portuguese for our website.

The series's opening screening in São Paulo on March 12th will include a public post-screening conversation about Billops and Hatch's films with Aline Motta, an important contemporary Brazilian artist whose multidisciplinary works contain points of resonance with the couples' projects. The series is dedicated to the memory of the German filmmaker and activist Renate Sami, and it could also easily be dedicated to the memory of Philip Shellard, a quiet and generous recently deceased cinephile whose accomplishments include being Mariana's father and a figure of unrelenting support.

Yvonne Rainer em 5 Atos [Yvonne Rainer in Five Acts]

March 5: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about a partial retrospective of films by the vital American artist Yvonne Rainer (born in 1934), which will take place on March 8th, 9th, and 10th at the Cinemateca Capitólio, in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

The series has been organized by the critic and programmer Juliana Costa (who also wrote the splendid curatorial essay) and produced by me. It includes screenings in DCP of four of the seven feature-length films that Rainer directed, all of which have been restored by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA): Lives of Performers, Film About a Woman Who..., The Man Who Envied Women, and Privilege. It also includes a beautiful compilation of Rainer's early short films, collectively called Five Easy Pieces.

The screening of Five Easy Pieces on March 10th will be followed by a public conversation between Juliana and the writer and dancer Priscila Pasko. The screening of Privilege on March 9th will feature a short video introduction from the researcher and film programmer Carla Italiano (who translated three of the films in the series). Institutional support has been provided by the Cinemateca Portuguesa, which hosted a retrospective of Rainer's films last year in conjunction with the festival Queer Lisboa.

Rainer herself will not be in attendance, but the lifelong dancer and choreographer remains hard at work with inspiring creativity. A recent Art in America profile of her aptly closes with the following line: "Throughout our conversation, Rainer never used the word 'retiring': for her, distinctions between what we think of as rest and what we think of as action remain irrelevant."

Sessão Mutual Films: A vida de dentro: Uma página de loucura + A esposa solitária [Mutual Films Session: The Life Within: A Page of Madness + Charulata]

January 17: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 21st edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and co-organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place on January 18th, 30th, and 31st at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event proposes a dialogue between two canonical films devoted to exploring the inner lives of their protagonists that involve images and words from four great artists. The avant-garde masterwork of Japanese silent cinema A Page of Madness (1926) was directed by the prolific and versatile Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896-1982) and based on a script by the writer Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), who in 1968 would become the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to write primarily in the Japanese language. (Kenzaburō Ōe would also win the prize in 1994.) Charulata (1964) became one of the enduring classics of Indian and world cinema of the 1960s thanks in good part to the artistic choices made by its esteemed director, Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), who adapted the 1901 novella The Broken Nest, by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first Asian author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1913) and his country's lone representative among the prize-winners to this day.

A Page of Madness will screen in a new digital copy prepared by the National Film Archive of Japan that differs from previously circulating versions of the film in multiple respects. The restoration efforts that have been made include bringing back a previously missing part of the original opening credits, the original projection velocity of 18 frames per second (fps), the original size of the frame (whose silent dimensions were diminished in the 1970s due to Kinugasa's choice to add a soundtrack), and, perhaps most notably, the original blue tinting of the image, something only discovered during the restoration process.

The version of Charulata that will screen represents a 2K restoration carried out in India in 2013 from the film's original negatives. This restoration process, conducted in Mumbai at Pixion Studios and the Cameon Media Lab, was overseen by Varsha Bansal on behalf of RDB Entertainments, the company that originally produced Charulata together with five other Ray films, all of which have been similarly restored. The screenings at the IMS Paulista mark the restoration's second set of showings in Brazil, with the first being the series "3x Satyajit Ray", which screened in December of 2023 at the Cinemateca Capitólio, in Porto Alegre.

The January 18th screening of A Page of Madness will be presented silently. (Although the film originally showed in Japan with narration by benshis - specialized storytellers and musicians whose accompaniments of silent films proved to be tremendously popular - we prefer to let the film's surreal and oft-ambiguous images speak for themselves on this occasion.) The January 30th screening of the film will feature live musical accompaniment by the Brazilian accordionist and composer Gabriel Levy, an aficionado of Japanese instruments and folk music traditions.

There is much more that could be said about the films, filmmakers, and writers represented in these screenings, and virtually none of it will be said here. However, readers that are interested in learning more about A Page of Madness could reasonably begin with the many pieces related to the film that have been written by the Yale University-based scholar Aaron Gerow, including the book A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan.

For our website, we were fortunate to be able to translate a short article by Gerow about Kawabata's relationship with cinema as explored in literary works like the novel Snow Country and some of his short stories. We have also translated a useful contextualizing article by Kaustuv Sen about the relations between the works by Tagore and Ray, who began as a kind of unofficial disciple of Tagore that eventually more than established his own ground in relation to the master of Indian music and letters.

Of additional interest is a fine short article that was published two years ago by the Indian author and filmmaker Ruchir Joshi about the experience of rewatching Charulata on the occasion of Ray's centenary. This blog's visitors may recognize Joshi as the center of a previous edition of the Mutual Films Session (including with a translation of his essay "The Death of a Tall Man", a much longer piece about Ray's work). Film programmers never act alone, but always in conversation with other researchers, viewers, and voices. For all the help that they have given in terms not only of research, but of inspiration for this project and other ones, people such as Joshi, Gerow, and many others are to be deeply thanked.

Two Year-End Lists

January 7th: This post contains links to two sets of year-end lists, both in the Spanish language, and both of which include my contributions (as have multiple past editions). One is “La Internacional Cinéfila” (“The International Cinephile”), a polling of various people that work with cinema in different contexts (primarily critics, filmmakers, and festival programmers) that is organized annually by the Argentinian critic and programmer Roger Koza through his website, Con los ojos abiertos ("With open eyes"). The other is a polling of a wide range of film personalities (that additionally includes scholars and moving image-based artists who work primarily with expanded cinema) for the website desistfilm that was organized by the site's editor, the Peruvian critic Mónica Delgado.

As I allude to in both of my contributions, I watched an unusually low number of new films this year, the vast majority of which were seen through preview screeners with my attention wavering – the major reason, of course, being the presence in my and my wife Mariana’s lives of a newborn daughter named Ava who has been recently joining us at the cinema. Under such circumstances, I find it hard to feel bad about falling behind, including because certain recently premiered works that I have not seen and that are beloved by peers (for example, Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes) will almost certainly stand the test of time.

As I have done in the past, I chose to send different lists of films to the two publications for the sake of drawing attention to a greater number of worthy works. I feel a few immediate reactions now as I peruse the two documents overall. One is the feeling of simple amazement at perceiving how many important films premiered in non-competition slots at the most recent edition of Cannes, including the latest works by vital contemporary filmmakers such as Erice, Lisandro Alonso, Pedro Costa, Jean-Luc Godard, Steve McQueen, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Martin Scorsese, and Wang Bing – a gathering that could credibly serve as a “year’s best” list unto itself. For all its problems (which have been discussed by critics elsewhere), to me this gesture of simultaneous consolidation and marginalization on the part of Cannes's organizers offers the hope of reminding cinephiles of the importance of looking beyond a narrowly defined center.

Otherwise, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many colleagues in the “La Internacional Cinéfila” gathering shared my regard for María Aparicio’s Undefined Things, a nuanced Argentinian metafiction about an older female film editor in crisis that observes its characters keenly and with tremendous love. And, although I wasn’t especially surprised at the outcome, I was nonetheless gladdened to see the top spot in both aggregate polls go to a film that appeared on my desistfilm list, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (which indeed premiered in Cannes’s main competition).

I find a charming and even heroic quality in the Finnish filmmaker’s decision to present something like a 1930s Hollywood urban romance for our own particular modern times. The film inspires with its commitment to human values and envisioning of a reality in which people continue to consciously regard each other in spite of the innumerable forces that tell them to look away. As has almost always been the case for me with Kaurismäki’s work, I find the care that the filmmaker takes with his actors on multiple levels (casting, framing, editing, directing) to be especially extraordinary. The key idea in the film, for me at this moment, is the necessity of living one’s life with full attention on the local. And, as is pointed out in Mónica Delgado’s marvelous review of Fallen Leaves for desistfilm, that attention has always been present on Kaurismäki’s part. The changes that have made his new film land so firmly with so many spectators, perhaps, lie with the contemporary needs that it addresses. In any case, we are fortunate to continue to find artworks that argue in favor of a more humane world.

On that note: One of the chief pleasures of perusing best-of lists, of course, is reading about great works of which one was not previously aware. I look forward to discovering these films for myself, both in 2024 and beyond.     

On Trying: An Exchange About Essayistic Film Writing

January 6th: The link above leads to an exchange of letters between me and the German film critic and programmer Patrick Holzapfel, which was originally published in print form in a special edition of the magazine Jugend ohne Film (aka Youth Without Film) during the most recent edition of the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) in October of last year. The occasion was a launching of a young film critic’s workshop (coordinated by Patrick) within the festival, and the theme of the exchange was the current state of essayistic film writing, around which we shared with each other a total of eight letters (four from each of us) sent by e-mail between the beginning of September and shortly before the Viennale’s start.

I had known and admired Patrick’s writing for some years, principally through the beautiful series of English-language articles called “Full Bloom” that he and Ivana Miloš co-authored for the web publication MUBI Notebook. What struck me most about the Austria-based critic’s writing was its quality of what Thom Andersen once called a “militant nostalgia” – a certain dedication to using art as a way to preserve the memory of human decency, and one which goes beyond the world of art to embrace the entire surrounding world in its deployment. Within Patrick's very personal approach, dissatisfaction becomes a necessary tool in the work of helping the world become a more wholesome place, and the Self appears less as an agent than as a witness that can usefully recall how aspects of it once were. I identify both with the style of writing and with its sensibility, and it strikes me as hardly coincidental that we both greatly value Straub-Huillet’s films and the vision of cinema that they represent – one in which the past is a living, breathing, tangible thing that works to make the future better.

Our dialogue and the shape it took grew out of Patrick’s initiative, which I believe was inspired by conversations that we were already holding with each other. The initial challenge that I felt to my participation was a basic one founded on a question: What on Earth is there to say? The broad nature of the topic at hand, combined with my narrow range of experience, at first led me to feel that the premise of the thing was somewhat farcical, and I chose to deal with my feelings by thinking of myself as a clown character who might gain courage enough to take off his make-up as the conversation progressed. An irony of such a move, of course, resided in how my effort to eventually reach a point of seriousness led me to making multiple claims that I regretted almost instantly after publication. Yet with that said, I also understood some regret to be an unavoidable outcome of any exercise that involves sharing oneself, which one could inevitably always do and have done better. The point was to try.

As I look at the exchange again, two components of my participation strike me in particular as being hopefully useful. The first is the emphasis that I placed on the necessity for a writer to reach out to voices beyond his or her own for reference and inspiration, together with the importance of feeling dissatisfied with too much self-regard. This is a point that I don’t think should be belabored, due to the difficulties of being specific about something general and the impossibilities of resolving a broader problem with a single quick fix (for instance, if Patrick had invited someone more ostensibly different from him in my place). At this moment, I feel comfortable saying that it involves a work of constant searching, which likely no one has the energy to do always, but which often leads to edifying results. I also think that it’s important to say that one should not need to look purposefully for value in that which is different; if one simply casts a net wide enough, that value will emerge on its own.

The second component is the emphasis that I placed on hope as something that both keeps us alive and propels us creatively, outside of questions of simple survival. I find hope to be embodied in my contribution through the figures of two people named Mariana and Ava, whose special qualities exist for me in ways far beyond the realm of words.

Sessão Mutual Films: As aventuras de Lotte Reiniger e Moustapha Alassane [Mutual Films Session: The Adventures of Lotte Reiniger and Moustapha Alassane]

November 20: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 20th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and co-organized by me and Mariana Shellard, which will take place on November 22nd, 29th, and 30th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event proposes a dialogue between works from two pioneers of animation-based filmmaking. Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981), a German master of silhouette-based filmmaking, will be represented with two films - the 1921 short The Flying Coffer (her first of several fairy tale adaptations, this time based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen) and 1926's feature-length The Adventures of Prince Achmed (freely adapted from episodes of The Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights). The multifaceted Niger-born artist Moustapha Alassane (1942-2015) will appear with five films, including a playful docufictional work of live-action filmmaking (The Return of an Adventurer), a lyrical fable told with hand-drawn animation and stop motion (Samba le grand), and three wonderful animated films (La mort du Gandji, Bon voyage, Sim, and Kokoa) starring Alassane's favorite animal, the frog.

The screenings include a mixture of films by the directors, as The Flying Coffer will screen together with four of Alassane's films and La mort du Gandji will screen before The Adventures of Prince Achmed. This second program will feature an in-person introduction by the Brazilian animation filmmaker Fábio Yamaji on the night of the 22nd.

The screenings of Alassane's films are supported by the Cinemateca da Embaixada da França no Brasil and the Institut Français (through the Cinémathèque Afrique), an entity that aided the recent restoration processes involving Alassane's films Samba le grand and The Return of an Adventurer. La mort du Gandji was restored by the Office national du film du Canada/National Film Board of Canada, and the two films from Reiniger in the series were restored by the DFF - Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum in collaboration with Primrose Productions.

Special thanks for their help throughout the process of assembling this series are due to Alassane's son, Razak Moustapha, who has written a short introduction that will be read before the program "In the Kingdom of Frogs"; Amélie Garin-Davet, a France-born film programmer who coordinated a recent touring retrospective of Alassane's films in the United States and provided high-resolution images for usage in conjunction with the Brazilian screenings; and Dennis Doros and George Schmalz on behalf of the North American distributor of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Milestone Films/Kino Lorber, for their invaluable work, including with Milestone's thoroughly researched presskit on the film.

Although Reiniger and Alassane likely never met, they shared similarly playful spirits, a taste for fables, and a desire to use art to reach and teach a broad audience (both locally and globally). This desire motivated Alassane in particular to advocate for greater and more inventive forms of distribution for African cinema, including through the organization of open-air screenings throughout Niger of his films in tandem with international classics that he loved. Like Reiniger, he believed that a filmmaker has the power to communicate with everyone, and often quite literally with the tools at hand.

Toshio Matsumoto in Recife

November 10: The link above leads to a listing of the complete line-up of this year's edition of the Brazilian festival Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife, which began on November 6th and will conclude on November 12th. The selection includes a program of eight short films directed by the great Japanese experimental artist Toshio Matsumoto (1932-2017), which Mariana Shellard and I organized following the festival's invitation and which will screen on Sunday, November 12th, at 2 P.M. in the Sala Derby of the Cinema da Fundação Joaquim Nabuco.

Matsumoto is known best today internationally for his stellar debut feature, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), and to some extent for his perturbing and equally remarkable second feature, Demons (1971), but the rigorous and tireless Tokyo-based theorist and teacher of experimental film practice also completed over 80 short and medium-length works of film, video, and expanded cinema that investigate a variety of artistic approaches in thoughtful and beautiful ways. The films that will screen in Recife, which were all originally concluded in 16mm, will be presented in high-resolution digital copies provided by the Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive, a nonprofit entity devoted to preserving the work of Matsumoto and of a few other Japanese film and video artists.

A version of the program "The Transformed Japan of Toshio Matsumoto" first screened in July of 2022 at the Cinemateca Capitólio, in Porto Alegre, within the context of the series organized by Mutual Films "Film as an Object in Space: A Look at Film Archives". For the Recife screening, a new general sequence for the program has been proposed to follow rhythmic and thematic lines, and the hardcore structuralist and materialist work Ecstasis (which is closely linked with Funeral Parade of Roses) has been substituted with the more ethereal, sutra-inspired piece Everything Visible is Empty. Matsumoto has many more films that are worth seeing in a projection context than could fit into one program (and the PJMIA's website offers an admirable cataloguing of these works). The hope exists for this program to serve as an entry point.

Mistérios e paixões [Naked Lunch]

October 15: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about upcoming screenings in São Paulo of a newly restored digital version of the film Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, which will take place on October 17th and 18th at the theater CineSesc. The amazing and frankly unique 1991 film tracks the inner and outer journeys taken by a writer named William Lee (played by Peter Weller) following an accident with his wife Joan (Judy Davis). It emerged as a result of a collaboration between the Canadian horror-cum-science-fiction master Cronenberg and the American writer William S. Burroughs (otherwise known as the man at the insect typewriter), whose 1959 novel Naked Lunch is used as a point of departure for explorations into diverse territories.

The screenings of the film Naked Lunch have been organized by me and Mariana Shellard on behalf of Mutual Films, and CineSesc's programming precedes them with screenings of two other films directed by Cronenberg - his most recent feature, Crimes of the Future (which shares its name with his second film, from 1970), and the film that he made directly before Naked Lunch, the unsettling Dead Ringers. The screening on October 17th will be followed by a public conversation between the filmmaker Fábio Leal, the film curator and publishing house coordinator Maria Chiaretti, and the philosopher, teacher, and author Vladimir Safatle. They will discuss a film that welcomes diverse perspectives and interpretations.

Sessão Mutual Films: Uma terceira criatura: Filmes de Ruchir Joshi [Mutual Films Session: A Third Creature: Films by Ruchir Joshi]

September 16: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 19th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, which will take place between September 20th and September 30th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles. (The Instituto’s Rio de Janeiro-based unit will remain in reform for the foreseeable future, and although we intend to eventually present the programs in Rio de Janeiro as well, the exact dates and showtimes can only be announced in the future.) The Mutual Films Session returns after a brief hiatus taken for what is perhaps the best possible reason: The birth in July of our daughter and first human child (following three cats), Ava, who will be a little over ten weeks old on opening night.

This time out, the event presents two programs containing four films. Three of the films were directed by the contemporary Indian filmmaker, writer, and photographer Ruchir Joshi during a period that lasted between 1988 and 1993. The films were originally shot on 16mm, and they were restored digitally under Joshi’s close supervision by the Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V., in Berlin, between 2017 and 2018. (An excerpt from a fine piece by Joshi about the restoration process, called “The Hiss and Scratch of Time”, may be read here.) The films embody Joshi’s belief in cinema as “a third creature” – neither fiction nor traditional documentary, but a creative nonfiction that treads its own winding path in dialogue with the works and thoughts of other artists.

The series’s fourth film is the 1980 short Arrival, directed by the late Indian filmmaker, teacher, and theorist Mani Kaul, whose nonfiction work served as a crucial point of reference for Joshi early in his filmmaking. Arrival will screen in a remastered digital copy that was prepared by the Indian governmental organization Films Division under the supervision of the scholar and curator Ashish Rajadhyaksha. To the best of our knowledge, both Arrival and Ruchir Joshi’s films will screen publicly in Brazil for the first time.

Though Kaul’s work has seldom shown in Brazil, his mastery has long been recognized worldwide. (A notable recent showcase, for example, took place in 2018 at the Courtisane Festival in Belgium, whose organizers printed a beautiful catalogue to accompany the screenings.) While Joshi’s filmmaking is far less known, both it and his writings deserve much greater exposure. One may follow his current work as a cultural commentator on Indian affairs through his weekly pieces in the English-language newspaper The Telegraph. Even in cases where the text is unsigned, the precision and clarity of a voice that strives for a more just world while recognizing its seemingly insurmountable absurdities is unmistakable – for example, his piece celebrating the work of the satirical scroll painter Dukkhoshyam Chitrakar, who plays a crucial role in his 1993 film Tales from Planet Kolkata.

This film will screen at IMS together with Arrival and Joshi’s film Memories of Milk City in a program called “Ahmedabad, Bombay, Calcutta”, whose trajectory was inspired partly by a 2015 essay by Joshi called “Ahmedabad Mutations”. (Joshi’s lone feature-length work, Egaro Mile, a vigorous and beautiful study of itinerant folk musicians in West Bengal called the Bauls, will screen on its own.) The series is fortunate to count with pieces of writing by Joshi, in addition to films. The phrase “A Third Creature” first arrived as the title of a new introductory essay that Joshi wrote to accompany the screenings, which may be read in its original, English-language version here in addition to its Portuguese translation on the Mutual Films website. And we were fortunate to be able to translate into Portuguese (with able work done by translators Gustavo Pinheiro and Mariana Shellard) a long English-language piece by Joshi from 1996 called “The Death of a Tall Man”, which commingles criticism, memoir, and political commentary as it seeks to understand the legacy of the auteur Satyajit Ray’s work in India, and in Joshi’s home state of West Bengal most especially.

The original version of “The Death of a Tall Man” cannot be found online; we first read the text thanks to Joshi himself, who shared it with us together with other pieces of his after we asked for recommendations from among his writings. It is quite rare (though on a small scale, common) to find an artist who works with a generous spirit to help those that are interested in his or her work. Though Joshi will not be in Brazil for the screenings, their shape would have been unthinkable without his warm and involved participation since the first steps.   

May 7: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 18th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, which will take place on May 11th, 18th, and 19th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles. (The Rio de Janeiro-based unit of the Instituto is currently undergoing reform, and although screenings will eventually be realized in Rio as well, the details of their date and location will be announced at a later time.)

The event presents two programs of short and medium-length films made between the 1950s and 1970s by the Italian photographer and documentarian Cecilia Mangini and the American artist, poet, and experimental filmmaker Storm De Hirsch. Each program contains six films, three of which come from each artist. All twelve of the films will screen in recent digitizations, which were prepared by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Metropolis Post (in the case of De Hirsch’s films), and the Cineteca di Bologna (in the case of Mangini’s films). Mangini’s film Being Women has been restored in partnership between the Cineteca di Bologna and the AAMOD - Fondazione Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico.

The screenings on May 11th will be followed by a public conversation with two Brazilian film scholars. Maria Chiaretti has been involved with the curatorship and organization of several film series in Brazil that have been devoted to figures relevant to the worlds of De Hirsch and Mangini, including friends and collaborators of theirs such as the filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the many documentarians and experimental filmmakers who have been overtly influenced by the films of the Lumière brothers. Juliana Costa has published what is likely the best piece of Brazilian film criticism about Cecilia Mangini’s work and has programmed a number of films by important female documentary and experimental filmmakers through her work with the Cineclube Academia das Musas in the city of Porto Alegre.

The fact that Mangini and De Hirsch were women artists operating in film genres that have historically been hospitable to female authorship is one of several points of connection between them. They were also artists that made their films in conscious dialogue with the world and with practices outside of cinema. Mangini looked to anthropology, ethnography, and social history for the formation of her political and aesthetic beliefs as someone engaged in recording for posterity the lifestyles that she filmed throughout the South of Italy. For her, cinema addressed what the anthropologist and collaborator of hers Ernesto De Martino called the “crisis of presence” by invoking a realm of magic within which individuals that felt lost could find themselves. (She elaborated on her references, and on the importance that she placed on documentary as a tool for social activism, in a 2006 interview with Gianluca Sciannameo, from which we have translated excerpts into Portuguese). And, as inspiration for her work, De Hirsch studied the histories of various religions, spiritual practices, and mystical traditions, as well as how they fed into the work of the New York arts scene that surrounded her. (De Hirsch developed her interests through her work as a poet, in addition to her filmmaking, and the Brazilian poet and translator Walter Vector has accordingly translated some of her poems for the website of Mutual Films for this occasion, including “Mythology for the Soul”, whose name also serves as the title of the volume of her collected poetry.) The works of both filmmakers remain consistently and even rigorously focused on their subjects, even while they stay guided by openness and profound curiosity.

Cecilia Mangini’s films are presented at the IMS Paulista with the support of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di San Paolo. The event has also been aided by a number of researchers, activists, and archivists from different countries who have dedicated themselves not only to preserving the legacies of Mangini and De Hirsch’s works, but also, to actively renewing and stimulating those legacies for the sake of present and future audiences.

March 28: The link above leads to a ballot submitted last year by me and Mariana Shellard (on behalf of Mutual Films) to the British film-oriented publication Sight and Sound on the occasion of the magazine’s once-a-decade culling of the greatest films of all time. (The Sight and Sound team’s decision to list our entries by their original titles led to one mistake - the correct name of Ozualdo Candeias’s film is Aopção ou As Rosas da Estrada, and the film is usually listed in English as The Option.)

The methodology by which we reached our list of ten films (arranged alphabetically) was fairly straightforward: We used the duration of a long car ride to write down a master list of candidates on a piece of paper, then went crossing off titles until we reached our final tally. Some ground rules entered our considerations while we worked. For example, each film on the final list had to hold great value for both of us; less obvious choices of films and filmmakers would be favored over other valid options that might place higher on the aggregate poll; a certain sense of balance among the group’s entries would be considered important; and we would use our comments accompanying our ballot to stress the value of the provisional. Above all else, perhaps, the list would be a record of our thinking at the moment we made it.

The overall general film rankings, which resulted from the magazine polling more than 1,000 voters, can be found here. Much has been said up to now, in particular, about the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’s placement in the top spot. My immediate personal reaction when I found out the news, more so than any thought or opinion that I have on the film itself, was of overwhelming happiness at the opportunity to celebrate the life and work of its director, Chantal Akerman, who continues to serve as an extraordinary source of inspiration for contemporary filmmakers and cinephiles due to a body of work that goes far beyond Jeanne.

Other valuable films are cited in the top 250, of course, including both familiar pleasures and welcome surprises. But, as might be expected, the individual voters’ lists offer many more rewards than does the aggregate. The act of perusing them provides for myriad discoveries and serves as a wonderful way to pass the time.    

March 13: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 17th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated by me and Mariana Shellard, which will take place between March 18th and 25th at the São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro-based units of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event presents four films directed by the great Iranian filmmaker, writer, photographer, and translator Ebrahim Golestan, who celebrated his centennial in October of last year. The films, as with all of Golestan’s filmography, were realized between the years 1957 and 1975, a window of time that also fell between the deposition of Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that removed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from power. They include Golestan’s first fiction feature, Brick and Mirror - a startling blend of neorealism and film poetry that unfolds from one long night into the following morning in Tehran - and three shorter works which, like almost all of Golestan’s short and medium-length films, proceed in essayistic fashion as documentaries that explore the depths of different facets of the modern and eternal Iranian soul: A Fire, Harvest and Seed, and The Crown Jewels of Iran. All four films will be presented in restored digital copies courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna, whose team continues to work on a larger project of the restoration of Golestan’s filmic oeuvre.

The two screenings of the shorts program in São Paulo will additionally include another director’s film that Golestan produced (and partly narrated) under the aegis of the Golestan Film Unit, Iran’s first independently run film production company. There is either a lot to say or not much at all to say about the poet Forough Farrokhzad’s lone completed film as a director, The House is Black (also restored by the Cineteca di Bologna), a compassionate documentary view of a colony inhabited by people who have Hansen’s Disease (commonly known as leprosy). It is a film that continues to productively challenge its viewers, in ways that hopefully can always be seen.

The House is Black screened on March 11th in Rio de Janeiro at the Cinemateca do MAM (the Cinematheque of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro), an institution that this month’s edition of the Mutual Films Session counts as a project partner, in addition to the PPGAV/UFRJ (the Post-Graduate Program in Visual Arts of the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). It screened together with the splendid 2013 documentary Fifi Howls from Happiness, about the important Iranian modern artist Bahman Mohasses, and in the presence of Fifi’s director, Mitra Farahani. In addition to her work as a filmmaker and visual artist, Farahani produced the restorations of several of the films in Bologna’s Golestan Film Unit project. On March 17th at the Cinemateca do MAM, she will present another restored short film by Golestan, The Hills of Marlik, together with her feature-length documentary from 2022, See You Friday, Robinson, which follows an encounter that she staged between Golestan and the Swiss-French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Farahani will then introduce both programs of Golestan’s restored films at the IMS Rio on the following day.

A special thanks for the realization of the screenings at the Instituto Moreira Salles also goes to the tireless and brilliant critic, filmmaker, programmer, researcher, and translator Ehsan Khoshbakht, who in recent years has worked as a crucial actor in the circulation and restoration both of Golestan’s films and of the pre-Revolution cinema made in Iran more broadly. The entire world of cinema is richer for his work.

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September 16: This postscript arrives a few weeks after the passing of Ebrahim Golestan, who died on August 22nd in England two months short of his 101st birthday. It was an honor to be able to present his cinema during his lifetime, and it is a great satisfaction to know that the films will continue to live on.

January 24: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 16th edition of the Mutual Films Session (and the first of 2023), co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, which will take place this week in the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo-based cinemas of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event brings together screenings of three recently restored films about musicians and children that were made by two wonderful filmmakers whose birthdays both fell on January 23rd. The Senegalese auteur Djibril Diop Mambéty (1945-1998) is represented through his final two, medium-length films, Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, which form the first-two thirds of an unfinished feature-length trilogy called Tales of Ordinary People. The Indian artist Aravindan Govindan (1935-1991, known frequently as “G. Aravindan”) is represented with his fourth completed fiction feature (out of ten in total), Kummatty, whose title is sometimes translated as “The Boogeyman”. The subjects of all three films include heroism, which they posit both as the basis of fairy tales and as something tangible and real.

The two films by Mambéty were restored in 2K in 2018 from their original camera negatives at Paris’s Laboratoire Éclair through the initiative of Silvia Voser (their Swiss producer) and the production company Waka Films in partnership with the Institut Français, which, together with the Cinemateca da Embaixada da França no Brasil [Cinematheque of the French Embassy in Brazil], has made the works available for non-commercial distribution in Brazil as part of the Cinémathèque Afrique’s project “20 films pour 2020”. Kummatty was restored in 4K in 2021 at the Cineteca di Bologna from two 35mm prints loaned from the National Film Archive of India, a project undertaken on the initiative of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, the head of the preservation and pedagogy-centered Indian organization Film Heritage Foundation. (Shivendra, who has written beautifully about the work involved in restoring Kummatty, has also recently coordinated the Cineteca’s restoration of another Aravindan film, Thamp.)

The screenings of Tales of Ordinary People at IMS will be preceded by a video introduction by the Brazilian scholar and film curator Janaína Oliveira, who has previously programmed, taught, and publicly discussed Mambéty’s cinema on multiple occasions. The showings of Kummatty will include a video introduction by Aravindan Govindan’s son, the photographer Ramu Aravindan, who actively participated in the restoration process and has publicly discussed the film in other contexts.

Part of the value of the presence of guest speakers for films is that their participation inevitably emphasizes how cinema belongs to the present. This idea rings poignantly in relation to the works of two independent filmmakers – both of whom were, in many ways, uniquely uncapturable artists and figures – whose lives ended much too soon. And, at this moment, it feels hard not to recall the many similarly vital and unique filmmakers that have passed away just since September, including Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Snow, Jean-Marie Straub, Alain Tanner, Paul Vecchiali, and Yoshishige Yoshida, among others. They live on through their works, of course, which continue to live through every viewer.  

January 5th: The link above leads to the 2022 edition of a Spanish-language annual poll conducted by the Argentinian film critic and programmer Roger Koza for his website, Con los ojos abiertos. The name of the survey translates to “The International Cinephile”, and its sampling of participants aims to give an overview of the past year of cinema from around the world. I have participated since 2014, and my selections for five strong new films, one strong debut feature, and some strong older films seen or reseen in the past twelve months (among other items) can be found amidst the selections made by the other participants (whose ranks are comprised largely of filmmakers, critics, and programmers of various kinds).

I tend to remember at least one notable new film only after clicking “Send”, and in this case (among other titles), I regret not highlighting Lewis Klahr’s extraordinary The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness, a feature-length compilation of short pieces in which the American collage artist continues to deepen his work around the theme of memory through expressions of the meeting point between concrete materials and an abundant imagination. With more space, I would have also praised the program of last year’s edition of the Viennale for its carefully wrought filmmaker focuses and special programs (Ebrahim Golestan, Med Hondo, Yoshishige Yoshida, Argentine noir, and other pearls). I would have further paid note to restoration work, which belongs in the conversation of any year’s important film events, and whose 2022 highlights included the Museum of Modern Art’s new restoration of Erich von Stroheim’s film Foolish Wives and the Hungarian National Film Archive’s ongoing work with the films of Judit Elek. The world of cinema and its most valuable aspects spread far beyond the reach of any list.

November 8: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 15th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, which will take place this week in São Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro in the cinemas of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event proposes a dialogue between two politically minded films from the Americas. One is the monumental Colombian documentary Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future, directed by the vital filmmaking team of Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, which will screen in a digital restoration realized in collaboration between the Fundación Cine Documental and the Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V. within the context of a larger project devoted to film restoration and digitization called “Archive ausser sich”. The other is an instigating and disquieting recent essay film from the United States called Nuclear Family, co-directed by the multifaceted artistic team of Erin Wilkerson and Travis Wilkerson, which premiered at last year’s edition of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and has played in a number of contexts around the world since then (including in this year’s edition of the Berlinale Forum, organized by the Arsenal), and which will be making its Brazilian premiere on this occasion.

The series also includes two public post-screening conversations, one in São Paulo and one in Rio de Janeiro. In São Paulo, the screening of Nuclear Family on November 10th will be followed by a talk between me, Shellard, and the film critic Neusa Barbosa, founder of the film news and criticism-themed website Cineweb, whose review of Travis Wilkerson’s previous film, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, is among the best appreciations of this important filmmaker’s work that has been published in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, the screening of Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future on November 13th will be followed by a talk between me, Shellard, and Fabián Núñez, a professor in the Department of Film and Video at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) whose research includes extensive work with the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and who (together with Marina Tedesco) has previously devoted a semester-long course to the work of Rodríguez and Silva. (A video recording of a Portuguese-language conversation with Núñez about another film by Rodríguez and Silva, Chircales, may be watched here.)

The series’s name, “Figure and Mask”, comes from an essay by the native Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti found in his 1960 book Crowds and Power, a landmark study of mass psychology and the different and shared roles that individuals play within larger groups. The films are connected by multiple themes, among them, the value of memory, the necessity of combating historical efforts to blot out indigenous existences, and the importance of protecting Nature from the tide of an aggressively destructive modern world. A number of recent election cycles (in Brazil, in the United States, and around the world) call to attention the timeliness of these works, in ways perhaps best left for each viewer to discern.

November 16: The reprisal screenings of both films at the IMS Paulista on November 13th unfortunately had to be postponed due to a technical problem in the space. They have fortunately since been rescheduled for November 27th.

September 13: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 14th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, which will take place this week in São Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro in the cinemas of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event places into dialogue three programs of works by two artists who were friends and briefly collaborators. The great contemporary experimental German filmmaker Ute Aurand has traveled to Brazil for the first time to present two programs of her films (seven short works and the feature-length Rushing Green with Horses), all in their original projection formats of 16mm. The first program of her work in both cities will adopt the format of a “show-and-tell” screening, with brief periods of conversation in between projections. The screening of the second program of her work in Rio de Janeiro will feature a Q&A with Aurand moderated by Lucas Murari, a Brazilian curator and researcher whose projects include the organization of the experimental film festival DOBRA. (This festival’s next edition, held at the Cinemateca do MAM between September 22nd and 24th, will include Aurand’s presence on September 23rd for a Q&A following a digital screening of her film Four Diamonds.)   

“Portraits” also spotlights the work of the great Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait, who was born in 1918 and passed away in 1999. On the occasion of her centenary in 2018, the UK-based distributor LUX prepared a program of six of her most important films in new high-resolution digital copies. This program, called “Where I Am is Here: Margaret Tait at 100″, will receive its first Brazilian screenings at IMS. One of the program’s original curators, Sarah Neely, has written a lovely new essay about the history between Ute Aurand and Margaret Tait, a text which can be conferred in Portuguese on the website of Mutual Films, as well as in the booklet containing the Instituto’s September film program. (Neely is additionally responsible for editing an invaluable collection of Margaret Tait’s written works called Poems, Stories and Writings.)

Aurand (who will introduce the first Tait screening in each city) came to know Tait and her cinema in the mid-1990s, and she has since written about, programmed, and helped distribute the films on multiple occasions. She considers Tait to be a reference and point of inspiration for her work, and she even made a film for the Tait centenary project with images from her visit to Tait’s home. Both artists value the everyday and encounter the sublime through interactions with their immediate surroundings.

Both artists are also authors of vaster bodies of work than can be encapsulated within a few screenings. One of Tait’s poems, “Now”, features a line that might sum up the constancy of their approaches: “The thing about poetry is you have to keep doing it.” The making of film-poems itself becomes an everyday action for them, with resulting riches to be discovered through future encounters with fellow travelers and audiences.

September 8: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about upcoming screenings of a newly restored digital version of the film Tommy, directed by Ken Russell and based on the eponymous album by The Who. The film will screen twice in São Paulo, on September 9th and 10th, at a theater called CineSesc, whose virtues include one of the city’s best cinema surround sound systems. Both screenings will be introduced by the Brazilian musician, radio host, and former MTV Brasil personality Luiz Thunderbird.

Sony Pictures Entertainment’s 4K restoration of Tommy premiered this year at the Berlin International Film Festival. The São Paulo screenings of this amazing journey (which were organized by Mutual Films in dialogue with CineSesc’s team) serve as the first presentation of the film’s new DCP copy in South America. Ken Russell’s filmmaking was often marked by a combination of outrageous visual stylings and fine attunement to music, with subjects including Gustav Mahler and Franz Liszt. The narrative of Tommy, in which a young man journeys from traumatized self-shuttering to full and confident self-expression, more than perfectly suited his talents. The film (which was made with then-revolutionary sound mixing techniques) also served as a showcase for work by a remarkable array of collaborators whose names, for now, are best saved to be discovered by people that come to see and hear the result.