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 wrote a lot less this month, mostly due to lots of final edits on my book (hopefully I’ll be announcing a pub date soon!), attending the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and prepping for the Chicago Critics Film Festival. But I did interview two of my favorite filmmakers, wrote A LOT about the silent film festival, and wrote about my favorite movie of all time. A small, but mighty month of work!
Interview: After Decades of Queer Filmmaking, Patricia Rozema Is Still Full of Ideas
San Francisco Silent Film Festival Highlights Unearthed Treasures of Film History
Podcast: Joan Tewkesbury's Old Boyfriends | Pod Casty For Me
Timeless, Rich, Revelatory: Gillian Armstrong's Little Women at 30
I also watched less new-to-me films this month. Partially because half the films at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival were films I’d seen before and partially because I’ve been screening films for a piece on a massive up-coming retrospective and I like to align my official “watched date” with the public screenings of films, so look out for that over the coming weeks.
As always, here are a selection of my fave first time watches in April:
Okay so Centennial is not technically a movie, but rather a 1020-minute miniseries with four directors (Virgil W. Vogel, Paul Krasny, Harry Falk, and Bernard McEveety) from 1978, but damn it was great. This was one of the last things I watched with my parents while I was staying with them after my dad’s hip surgery and it was really such a joy to watch this expansive piece of television over the course of a few weeks. I wrote a lot about it over on Letterboxd, but what I’ll say here is damn they don’t make television like they used to.
I wrote in-depth about each film that screened at the SF Silent Film Festival in the link above, but I think my three favorite new-to-me watches were Herbert Brenon’s Dancing Mothers (1926) which featured an effervescent Clara Bow, a tremendously layered performance from Alice Joyce, and a badass feminist ending; Julien Duvivier’s Poil de carotte (1925), which had some deeply emotional uses of double exposures; and Harry A. Pollard’s Poker Faces (1926), starring the great comedy stars Edward Everett Horton and Laura La Plante in a proto-screwball comedy.
Sasquatch Sunset was my first exposure to the Zellner Bros. (a big contemporary American indie blindspot for me), but what a first exposure! Like I wrote on Letterboxd, this starts out as a men ain’t shit movie and becomes a mankind ain’t shit movie. A truly moving ecological fable.
One of the guests at the silent film festival was the Danish Film Institute’s Thomas Christiansen, who has been working over the last five years to make every extant Danish silent film available streaming. I love this website and yet never remember to check it for new titles. After I returned from the fest I got the itch and watched Det Gale Pensionat (The Girls from Cafe Maxim) from 1911. It’s one of those chaotic women having a great time fucking up some dude’s lives films that make the 1910s such a wonderful era for cinema.
I missed Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker at two separate film festivals, but I am glad when I did finally see this singular work of art it was at a sold out screening at the Music Box Theatre (I was a few seats away from the Michael Shannon) followed by a riotous Q&A/therapy session with the filmmaker herself. Just amazing. Do not miss this film if it’s playing in a theater near you!
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.
If you are in Chicago, don’t forget to come out to the Chicago Critics Film Festival’s 30th anniversary of Little Women (1994) on 35mm at the Music Box Theatre this Sunday, May 5th at 11:30am!