NYFF 2020 Report 1: HER SOCIALIST SMILE, FAUNA, MY MEXICAN BRETZEL, THE LAST CITY, THE LOBBY & STUMP THE GUESSER

This year’s virtual experience at film festivals brings a lot of pros and cons, but to be honest, I’m just glad I get to see some great movies despite theaters being closed. This year’s New York Film Festival started out with a bang, showcasing a whole slate of movies that really experimented with form and blurred the lines between documentary, narrative, and experimental filmmaking. There is also a greater concentration on political, racial, and class-based cinema that showcases the power of what this artistic medium can do to visually communicate the world views of its filmmakers. This first slate of movies is mostly from the Currents Section and is from newer or on-the-peripheries filmmakers who work outside of the main industries and as such, tend to push beyond the boundaries of our predispositions of what cinema is and what it can do.

 Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito)

In political cinema, the question always arises at the end – “now what?” – which aims to bring the ideas and theories of the movie into tangible action to better material conditions. The general process of watching political cinema however is still a distraction and a form of entertainment that uses resources, money, and often delivers very watered down arguments for current social and political events. Her Socialist Smile does the complete opposite. It’s spare, simple, barely cinematic, and might be the first movie I have seen which actively tried to get me to switch it off and go do something productive with its message, delivered in the form of text-block quotes of Hellen Keller’s speeches on socialism and labor rights. It starts off incredibly powerfully with Keller’s distinct voice – a miracle if there ever was one – forcing the audience from the start to imagine it being used in concerts and lecture halls to express hope for a brighter more socially and economically equitable future.

The rest of the documentary comprises of a narrator recounting Keller’s journey into politics as a socialist, along with intimate footage of the nature and surroundings of the house she grew up in along with her teacher Anne Sullivan. Keller’s words are delivered in large block paragraphs typed out over a black background, like a monolith of personal commandments. The contrast between these elements – the visual, audial, and the knowledge – characterize Keller’s unwavering belief in human empathy for the downtrodden and the poor. That even someone who since birth has never seen nor heard poverty and misery with her own senses and can understand the base value of human labor and the innate worth of people to be able to live equitably, suggests to us that we have no excuse.

Reading Keller’s speeches – and there are many of them – is the highlight of the documentary, which seems strange for a work of cinema, but director John Gianvito indicates his intentions with this. In an interview with Emerson College, he says, “the only reason I make films anymore is to remind myself and others that there are a lot more important things than films”. The deliberateness with which Gianvito presents these speeches during the film’s runtime urges us to read and seek more. I found myself writing down the names of books and political philosophers with the intention of seeking out more after the movie ended. In championing Hellen Keller’s relentless pursuit of knowledge, Her Socialist Smile successfully challenges us to do the same.

Fauna (Nicolas Pereda)

The first narrative film I saw at NYFF 2020, Nicolas Pereda’s Fauna, was a disappointing one. It features a play on story structure wherein the film is split into two parts, one inside the other, where the same actors perform different characters in two different stories. ‘Performance’ and what constitutes ‘acting’ is a major point of curiosity in the movie. A couple, Paco (Francisco Barreiro) and Luisa (Luisa Pardo) who are both actors, visit Luisa’s parents. Paco’s newest acting gig has no dialogue but, in one of the film’s more irritating moments, Luisa’s father and her brother Gabino (Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez) asks him to perform scenes anyway. The film then switches to Gabino, whose interest in a crime novella brings us inside his head, where he reimagines himself, Luisa, and Paco as three people embroiled in the mystery of a missing miner.

Unlike Raúl Ruiz’s revived/restored debut Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, a movie also split into two just like Fauna but with much more interesting experimentations on story structure, Pereda’s film never finds a cohesion of thesis and style. It has charming moments and a few laughs, but it is delivered in such an overly blunted manner that nothing sticks as memorable. I see these types of films in festivals a lot, where there is a conformity of self-congratulatory understated style – wry humor, muted colors, almost no music – that is typical of Euro-trash cinema. It has permeated over this century into global south countries who feel they need to imitate or conform to this style to really compete in any of these Euro-American-centric showcases.

Pereda directs the movie in a very straight-forward manner for something that is aiming to question not only the concept of story structure but also genre. The second story takes place in what is a noir, but its contents don’t really separate it in any way from the rest of the movie, which can only be either a conscious lack of imagination on the part of Gabino, whose head we are supposedly inside of, or a lack of imagination on the part of Pereda. I am going to say it’s the latter only because bringing us inside a character who has no imagination is almost an unfathomably clumsy decision for any artist to make, and Pereda, for all the faults of his film, is certainly a competent director. Base competency is perhaps the tragedy of Fauna, and many festival entries like it – they are adequate to the point of being unmemorable.

My Mexican Bretzel (Nuria Gimenez Lorang)

By contrast to Fauna, one of the most innovative uses of storytelling this year is in Nuria Giménez Lorang’s My Mexican Bretzel. It’s hard to categorize this film as either a documentary or a narrative or an experimental film, and it is pleasantly surprising how many movies at this year’s NYFF blend all three. Subtitled passages from the diary of one Vivian Barrett, a rich European socialite, recounts the parties, vacations, and escapades of her and her husband Leon, who has recently developed a new anti-depressant which is going into production, all superimposed over old 8mm footage of the couple taken by Leon.

Over the course of 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s, they experience a slow deterioration of companionship and trust in their marriage. They begin cheating on each other and Vivian’s diary entries become more depressive and existential. There is a creeping sense of doubt permeating throughout the movie, especially once her life starts to take many bad turns, on whether Vivian’s notes are real or made up and that is the crux of Giménez’s art. The combination of silent found footage, edited in whichever manner Giménez chose to present it to us, and the lyrical passages of a melancholy wife feeling neglected by her husband give insight into the ways we define the cinematic narrative.

If we consider ‘cinema’ in its rudimentary sense as the combination of words and images, then the association of those images with the words becomes what we can call a ‘story’. Add sound to this and we are assisted in the ways that we should feel about certain images that may be ambiguous. The soundtrack of the film features ambient noises that have gradual creeping crescendos and decrescendos, eliciting the slow onslaught of dread and then the dissipation back to normalcy. The movie’s hook for a wide audience is of course the twists and reveals, but these are in the service of the real magic that happens in the editing room with the found footage, where Gimenez impressively weaves the spare elements of what we call ‘cinema’ together into a breathtaking fable.

The Last City (Heinz Emigholz)

Here’s a movie I would never recommend to anyone, ever. I have a pretty solid reputation I think of enjoying films rife with philosophical discussions (Just this past week I loved Malmkrog, which also played at NYFF), but I have to say that if you want to listen to anyone talk about anything for more than five minutes, the two golden rules are that they need to be a charismatic speaker and they need to say something interesting. Heinz Emigholz’s The Last City is a movie that consists of nothing but uninteresting people with absolutely nothing interesting to say. A death sentence of a combination if there ever was one, not only for cinema but for any art.

We are subjected here to various Dutch angles with multiple couples – an archeologist and weapons designer, an incestuous pair of brothers, a Japanese and Chinese woman, and a museum curator and cosmologist – engaging in conversations that stem from deception to coercive dialogue and philosophical pontifications. None of this holds any attention, at least for me. There may be some people who enjoy this sort of thing and find humor in the quirky details but it rings monotonous. The satirical nature of whatever geopolitics and existential moral conversations are happening reek of off-putting smarm in the fact that all the actors are either terrible dialogue deliverers or worse, purposefully reciting the dialogue in a gratingly self-aware manner for some unfunny joke.

Emigholz built his name off of observational documentary work, similarly to Frederick Weisman, who’s brilliant City Hall also played at this festival and who’s four hours are certainly more worth the time. Emigholz’s observations are at work in the background, where the camera captures some nice-looking locations that provide almost computer wallpaper like aesthetics to the foreground of characters talking. Unfortunately, because this is a film with characters and scripted dialogue, there really is nothing to distract away from the monotonous conversations happening in the film. The editing and camerawork that features shots close to the subjects and switching rotely between them, all at the canted angles of the camera make this one of Emigholz’s most aesthetically displeasing work.

The Lobby (Heinz Emigholz)

Imagine my dread at knowing there was another Emigholz film in addition to The Last City playing at NYFF and by virtue of me feeling like I need to watch everything given my press pass, I had to take a big gulp and dive in here. Fortunately, The Lobby is at least watchable even if it is ninety-percent hogwash. Starring John Erdman as a straight-shooting Old White Male (literally, that’s the credit) inside of a hotel lobby reciting his thoughts on death, we are at once given the feeling of being cornered at a company party by someone we have absolutely no desire to talk to.

Erdman in this at least, unlike The Last City, is inflammatory and uncouth enough to not be completely boring. He continuously degrades and condescends his audience about their perceptions of reality and his seeming immortality within the ‘image’. Erdman’s awareness of his presence in a film is a central point of discussion – he postulates that he could be dead by the time we see this movie, only his immortal visage in the atoms of digital projection live on. The setting of hotel lobbies reflects the idea of purgatorial existence. Lobbies are specifically designed as places to wait for something, either concierge, or a friend, or a taxi cab. The discussion of death in these spaces creates a direct link between our existence as itself a purgatorial place with death as the eventual inevitable destination.

Despite an engaging idea, the problem of unengaging speakers appears once again for Emigholz and makes The Lobby feel overlong for what it’s trying to say. Erdman is fine for maybe fifteen minutes, but he’s nowhere near as fascinating a deliverer of sermons as say, Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, which is perhaps the pinnacle of this kind of film, and a near-masterpiece in its ability to twist nonsense into an enrapturing gospel.

Stump the Guesser (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson)

The funniest movie of the year. Put that on the poster of Stump the Guesser, which is an amusingly wacky, hair-brained mix of German Expressionist image manipulation and absurdist humor. A fairground worker who can guess anything correctly for a fee suddenly loses his ability due to his ‘guessing milk’ supply running dry. He then falls in love with a woman who turns out to be his long-lost sister. Guy Maddin and the Johnsons, Evan and Galen could’ve stopped there and it would’ve been crazy enough for almost anyone. Instead, we’re taken on the journey of the guesser to disprove heredity itself so he can marry his own sister.

Guy Maddin’s penchant for mixing silent-film era aesthetics with a very transcendently funny wry comedy gives his movie all an air of warmth amid its perhaps over-stuffed visual canvass. Memorable sequences include the Guesser’s home life where he consistently practices his craft by blindfolding himself and doing chores and eating dinner and challenging his housemates to test his abilities by moving the teacup around while he’s pouring it – a marvelous joke also present in an equally hilarious scene from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen.

This film, like all of Maddin’s movies, moves rather fast and jumps from place to place with rapid transitions, and bursts with superimpositions of silent film dialogue. Maddin is probably the singular experimental filmmaker who makes movies that exist structurally and aesthetically outside of anything in contemporary Hollywood, but thematically display all of its classical elements of cinematic entertainment. Stump the Guesser is like a cinematic ad-lib. Random plot-points are added on and added on and you truly never know which insane direction the story is going take you because the absurdity has no ceiling.