New Directors/New Films, The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual Spring retrospective of hits, overlooked gems and conversation starters from the recent festival circuit, opens tomorrow night with Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Frozen River. I won’t be covering the series extensively this year, partially because I was in Austin when the press screenings started and partially because we’ve already covered several of the films on the schedule at previous festivals. For full coverage, I’d recommend Slant Magazine; I imagine we’ll see some stuff from our friends at The House Next Door as well. After the jump, you’ll find a look at some of the films on the schedule that we’ve had previous encounters with.
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The surreal, virtually non-narrative first feature from filmmaker Michelange Quay, Eat, For This is My Body is the rare Sundance title that unquestionably bears the mark of an obstinately independent vision. It’s by turns exhilarating and totally confounding, and it’s certainly not always successful, but it is always a challenge, and for that alone it pops out of the pack. It’s also incredible to look at. The opening series of arial sweeps across Haiti, from postcard-perfect coastline to inland slums to desolate mountain terrain, is absolutely breathtaking.
The film begins and ends with slow, deliberate montages depicting contemporary Haitian life, from a sea of black faces in a marketplace to a pregnant woman sweating in a slum, to a late night dance party. It looks like ethnography, the nameless subjects eyeing the camera with suspicion, and it’s clearly delineated from the main section of the film, which takes place in a massive mansion, home to a middle-aged white woman, her aging, ailing mother, and their black servant.
It’s in this section that the film settles into a series of dreamlike tableau, designed to illustrate the relationship between colonizer and colonized, a loosely-woven series of discreet moving paintings about the dynamics of difference. Some of these scenes and setups are more conceptually effective than others, but even those that miss their mark on a theoretic level are impressive as pure images. Imagine if David Lynch suddenly became interested in the interplay of race and power, and you’re almost there; much like Inland Empire, Eat’s blend of surreal, almost dialogue-free humor and painterly obfuscation remains compelling, even when what’s on the screen seems to drift further and further away from a discernible relationship to a concrete idea.
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Yesterday, I made a list of five films amongst Sundance’s four competition slates that I’m particularly excited to see. Today, here’s a look at another film films that I’m looking forward to, culled from the Spectrum, New Frontier, and Park City at Midnight sidebars. This list was MUCH harder to weed down to five, and as you’ll see, I had to cheat a bit. Here we go…
Momma’s Man (Directed by Azazel Jacobs, Spectrum)
Excerpt From the Official Synopsis: “Humorous and poignant, Momma’s Man wrestles with universal themes, but its strength lies in its deeply personal details. Writer/director Azazel Jacobs cast his own parents and shot the film in their apartment, where he grew up.”
Why I’m Interested: Jacobs “own parents” are Flo Jacobs and experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs; in the film’s press notes, he says he cast his own family because he “couldn’t picture anyone else in their bed, in their kitchen, or in their place (although Peter Falk and Shelly Duval would be in my movie-movie version of it).” If the notion of the guy who made Star Spangled to Death channeling Columbo isn’t enough for you, I don’t know what would be.
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