Marco Bellocchio sets history a-twirl in the opening minutes of his Cannes-buzzed melodrama Vincere, cutting between set-ups in Trent 1907 and Milan 1914 and back again, tripping the wire on linear narrative with rapid-fire bursts of under-contextualized, nonsynchronous events. We are somewhere in time. A young Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi), then-editor of Avanti!, addresses a meeting of union representatives by challenging God to strike him dead. He gives the nonexistent deity five minutes to prove he exists. We get far less. Cut. Mussolini evades capture by embracing and passionately kissing a beautiful woman in the street. His blood stains her hand. Cut. Mussolini grinds away at his adoring lover, his ferocious, bulging eyes fixed at a distance far beyond the bedroom. Cut. Black flags unfurl from balcony windows. Cut. War is brewing. Flyers are distributed. Cut to archive. Soldiers march, warplanes roar overhead. Proto-fascist slogans blazon the screen in white scream type. Cut. Cut. Cut.
It’s a whiplash-inducing, noisily theatrical entrance for Il Duce, the full-throttle barrage of images emphasized by Carlo Cavelli’s fittingly bombastic orchestral score. History is thus spread into a thin paste, all the better for Bellocchio to smear it with broad strokes of impasto impressionism. Read Damon Smith’s review of Vincere.
South by Southwest traditionally features a strong documentary program, particularly showcasing those that deal with politics or music; the latter even have their own category entitled 24 Beats Per Second. Curious to see some of the nonfiction films outside of these highlighted topics, I ended up discovering my first unexpected gem of the festival, Marwencol, a portrait of a strange and gifted man in Kingston, NY. One night after leaving a local bar, Mark Hogancamp, an outgoing but troubled artist, was attacked by five men and beaten to within an inch of his life. The resulting brain damage left him unable to draw and deeply afraid of the outside world. Mark built a 1/6 scale WWII era Belgian village in his backyard, populated it with alter egos of real people in his life, and began developing incredibly complex storylines about his town, allowing him to work through his anger and keep his imagination alive.
Director Jeff Malmberg’s sympathy coaxes Mark into several shockingly intimate confessions about his life, and his creativity brings his subject’s eccentric, original spirit to the fore. Marwencol features frenetically shot 8mm, home video, old photographs, and Mark’s own still photos of his beloved town; the variation in visual technique mirrors Mark’s traumatized mental state and fractured memory. Marwencol won the SXSW Documentary Award at this week’s ceremony, and it was a pleasant surprise to see its accomplishments thus recognized, as docs as offbeat and low-key as this one often fly under the radar.
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Though few aesthetic experiences are as necessarily social and participatory as concert-going, when live music is captured in that other communal art form known as cinema it is difficult for it to feel anything but awkwardly isolating. Sitting in the darkness of the theater, watching others experiencing the performance at some previous time, the concert-film viewer is always stuck on the outside, unsure whether to clap, stomp, or sing along or just watch reverently. A successful product of the genre, like 2006’s Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, can reduce our awareness of this chasm between ourselves and the onscreen stage, inviting us to bask in the good vibes. Or, like Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold (also released in 2006) and its new follow-up Neil Young Trunk Show, it can ignore the live audience altogether and emphasize its own meticulously designed theatricality. Read Andrew Chan’s review of Neil Young Trunk Show.
Dispatch from SXSW 2010: Kick-Ass, Cold Weather, and Cyrus
While the South by Southwest festival may remain the uniquely good time that industry and locals alike have come to cherish, there have been a few hiccups this year as the festival staff has tried to wrap their minds around how to logistically deal with a 25% increase in ticket sales. To wit: a line three blocks in length for opening night film, Kick-Ass, which, to be fair, was probably just as much a result of cult status of the Mark Millar comic book from which it was adapted as festival planning. Kick-Ass’s unconsidered filmmaking and clunky, self-consciously hip writing laid bare its makers’ lack of ingenuity, and Aaron Johnson, the handsome, broad-shouldered young actor playing Dave Lizewsky and his titular alter-ego also stretched believability as a hapless every-nerd. At least this was true for the film’s first half. By the third act, Kick-Ass evolved into the cheeky fanboy superhero movie it promised, featuring ingenious action sequences and a surprisingly thoughtful meta-critique of aestheticized violence.
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Last year’s programming was such a success that we had to prep a 2010 edition. Sorry for the wait, superfans.
April 1-15: Lifetime Batting Average .167: The Complete Filmography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
April 16-25: Is My Childlike Awe at the World Reflection of Some Inner Perversion?: The Films of Steven Spielberg
April 26-30: Great Dude, Shitty Movies: Let’s Watch Some John Waters
May 1-13: Mikhail Kalatozov: In Soviet Russia, Movie Watches You
May 14-15: I’ll Underwrite Your Drug Habit and I Fuck Teenagers: Larry Clark, Still Not in Prison
May 16-30: A Life In Pictures, Or: How I Inspired the Scream Mask, Won a Pity Oscar, Fathered a Hottie, and Got Brian Grazer Into an American Express Ad. The Achievement of Ron Howard
June 1-30: Till It Hurts: The Films of Tom Shadyac
July 1-8: We’d All Secretly Prefer It Was a Michael Ritchie Retro: But Here’s Some Dreyer!
July 12-21: Maximum Effort, Minimal Impact: Stan Brakhage and the Dawn of the Screensaver
July 22-August 5: The Director’s Best Work Is the Unavailable One That I Have Seen and You Haven’t: A Tour of Cinema with Jonathan Rosenbaum
August 7-29: Art-house George Burns: Manoel de Oliveira Likes Soft Foods
September 1-10: Fair-Trade, All Things Considered, 8.7 on Pitchfork, Obama Tote Bag, Ramin Bahrani, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
September 11-22: Audience Members Pointing Out Hitchcock Allusions Will Be Shot on Sight: The Brian De Palma Film Festival
September 24-30: Politics as Usual: Costa-Gavras’s “Wait, the Sixties aren’t over?” Cinema
October 1-3: Some Stephen King Adaptations and Little Else: The World of Frank Darabont
October 4-31: Y’all Know My Motherfuckin Name: Michelangelo Antonioni, Make That Money, Nigga, Str8 Mobbed Out
Special thanks to programmers filmenthusiast2000, seanmcavoy, eshman, mjr, robbiefreeling, bugs meaney, and clarencecarter.
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