August 2024: Online Film Festivals, In Theater Film Series, and Summer Under The Stars!
Monthly Roundup Post
Welcome to my monthly round up post. Here you will find all my writing from the previous month, plus a look at everything I watched.
I didn’t write much in August, at least not items that got published! But, I did make my Blu-ray essay debut!! and have written, *checks notes*, two more that haven’t been announced yet! I also have a Blu-ray audio commentary on the horizon, but that hasn’t been announced yet either. Here’s what has been published:
Female Filmmakers In Focus: Angela Patton and Natalie Rae on Daughters
Interview: Tina Mabry and Edward Kelsey Moore on The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat
Blu-ray Essay: Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us - Capitalism’s Suffocating Grasp
Another big milestone happened in August: the cover reveal of my book Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words! Please pre-order from your favorite bookstore or Bookshop (or I guess Amazon if you must; but I would prefer you support a small business if you can!!) and look out for more updates from me about book signings, film screenings, and more events in the coming months!
I also watched way too many movies in August. I watched 61(!) movies just during TCM’s annual Summer Under The Stars alone. 13 of them were, of course, rewatches of films starring my favorite silent film star: John Gilbert! Robert was out of town for the Gilbert day, so he missed the best stuff, but he did watch a few random films with me (I think when I was doing Eleanor Powell day and Jose Ferrer day) and asked if there were any good movies programmed during SUTS, and I had to laugh because of course the answer is yes, but I have seen so many old movies at this point that every year I use SUTS to fill in the C and D level films from the stars I like. So, yeah, I watched a lot of middling films, but I did find a few hidden gems (more on that below)!
On top of that, the Gene Siskel Film Center had this amazing Summer Pass special where you could pay $20 for the month and watch unlimited movies. UNLIMITED MOVIES. The only caveat was special programs were excluded, so I paid full member price for a 35mm screening of The Last Days of Disco during MUBI Fest, but it was worth it. I’m still dancing on the inside and reveling in how wonderful it was to laugh as a group at Chris Eigeman’s sublime comic timing. Anyways, I went absolutely hog wild between their Entrances and Exits series, the tail end of their Sidney Lumet series, and the Chi Film Fest’s Before They Were Big series. All in all, I watched 12 films at the Film Center in August; seven were films I’d seen before (I’ve seen Citizen Kane on the big screen at least six times now) and five of them were films I’d never seen before (more on that below). It was a wonderful experience and I hope they do it again next summer!
I also watched a handful of films online from two film festivals: Internationale Stummfilmtage Bonn and the Locarno Film Festival. You can see everything I watched in August over on my Letterboxd, and below are 12 standouts:
Gillian Armstrong’s student film The Roof Needs Mowing offers a surreal peek into the macabre lurking under the banality of suburban life. Like David Lynch before David Lynch.
I watched Věra Chytilová’s final film Pleasant Moments as part of Gene Siskel’s Entrances and Exists series and it was absolutely fascinating to watch this back to back with her debut film Something Different (which, funny enough, I have now seen on the big screen twice). There are lots of similar themes and concerns, but they are now brought to life with filmmaking thoroughly rooted in the digital age (sometimes the film felt very Dogme 95). Her use of the early digital camera technology is as innovative as anything she ever did playing with traditional celluloid.
Due to their Revive at 95 renovations, the Music Box Theatre did a smaller 70mm festival than they usually do. I only saw two films: The Searchers, which I had seen before, and Jacques Tati’s PlayTime, which I had not. Somehow Tati’s film is both the most joyous film ever and the absolute saddest. Cities are both a wonderland and a garbage heap.
The entire collection of Mexico City Punk films on Criterion Channel is great, but I particularly enjoyed Sarah Minter’s Alma punk, which feels like a film Sarah Jacobson would have LOVED. There's also a lot of Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens and dashes of Chantal Akerman’s News From Home in its bones, but then it becomes something totally, transcendentally its own.
My favorite film from this year’s Internationale Stummfilmtage Bonn was Franz Osten & Himansu Rai’s Prem Sanyas (The Light of Asia), which is basically an epic biopic of the Buddha. I loved its lush visuals and am a real sucker for this kind of heightened silent era melodrama. A lot of it was filmed outdoors, so that plus its poetic tone reminded me of The Cloud-Capped Star, one of my favorite films restored by the World Cinema Project and a big influence on Mira Nair.
Annemarie Jacir was the producer and co-cinematographer of Dahna Abourahme’s Until When, so of course this Palestinian documentary was a great. It’s a beautiful film that is filled with hope despite it being about the destruction of property and culture alike. The film ends with the participants looking towards the future, one they hope will be filled with peace for the Palestinian people, as well as the Israelis. One father hopes his four-year-old daughter will live to see democracy. A young boy explains that he wants to be a journalist because when journalists show the world horrible things that are happening in conflict zones, people stand with them. The final image is a photograph of a woman in the Khan Younis camp in Gaza. It makes for a very grim coda, considering this film is twenty years old and all that has happened there over the last ten months, especially the way that journalists have been indiscriminately slaughtered along with everyone else, while their stories have been largely ignored by those with power to stop the violence.
I had low expectations for Bryan Forbes’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, which screened during Katharine Hepburn’s Summer Under The Stars day, because it had such low ratings. As it turns out, the film is an anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-extremism, pro-environment and radically humanist satire. It plays with the filmic form, using sound and visual editing in a way that forces you to know you are watching a film (a la Godard). I can see why if you were expecting a frothy comedy you wouldn't like this film, but once you know that's not what it's doing and accept its rhythms and themes, it's quite something. Danny Kaye is particularly stellar in his final monologue, which basically takes down the logic of trickle down economics decades before Reaganomics. This is an angry film and its righteous fury still burns today.
Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence is one of those movies that gets you fired up and makes you want to burn everything down. It made me think about when I was a little girl and all the boys were so awful and the teachers wouldn't do anything so I started kicking them in the nuts with my red cowboy boots so they would leave me alone and then I was the one that got in trouble not them. The film also reminded me of the lyrics to the final verse of Taylor Swift's "Mad Woman": Good wives always know/She should be mad/Should be scathing like me/But no one likes a mad woman/What a shame she went mad/You made her like that
Another favorite from the Entrances and Exits series was Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets. Co-written with the great Polly Platt, this is an angry film about the violence bubbling underneath the surface of America and the numbness and isolation that has been wrought on our society by modernization and urban sprawl. I particular loved that this was set in Reseda (my dad’s hometown) because it’s the perfect symbol of this rot. Towards the end of the film Karloff’s character mentions how “ugly” the town has gotten as his limo drives past a gaudy car dealership on Ventura Blvd. My dad was born in 1950 and he remembers when the San Fernando Valley was still orange groves and farms. The he film came out in 1968, the year my dad turned 18, and it was in his lifetime that it became the concrete-covered urban sprawl it is now (think Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’”: It's a long day livin' in Reseda/There's a freeway runnin' through the yard). It’s an incredibly smart, incisive, and utterly depressing debut feature.
I’m not gonna write much about Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan because I watched it for a feature that won’t be publishing for a bit, but just know this film rips.
Seeing Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (part of Chi Film Fest’s Before They Were Big series) on a hot and sticky 95 degree Chicago evening and then coming out to hot, torrential rain was absolutely perfect. Glad I waited all these years to see it for the first time on the big screen. Such a striking, singular vision whose impact is felt so acutely; as I watched I thought back to a dozen or so films I've seen that are so clearly influenced by what Martel achieved here. Brutal, funny, uncomfortable, stunning.
One of my hobbies is watching supercuts of commercials from the 80s and 90s on YouTube, so of course I loved Radu Jude & Christian Ferencz-Flatz’s Eight Postcards from Utopia, which debuted at Locarno. You really do learn more about a nation's people from its advertisements than anything else really. Through clips of post-Soviet Romania, the co-directors examine the country’s gender dynamics, its odd relationship with its ancient history, and the creeping suffocation of rampant capitalism. I’m also going to be laughing for the rest of the year at the commercial that looks like a news broadcast where a woman goes "We interrupt the program with breaking news! Shrimp chips are back in Romania!" 📺 🍤
P.S. - Don’t forget every week on Friday afternoons paid subscribers get my Directed By Women Viewing Guide, with picks for new releases and streaming hidden gems.