Reading, Watching, Listening 12/6/2024
A few words about seeing
It’s been a busy week, hence no updates (though you all will be getting a fun one tomorrow!), but I got to experience a really special screening event on Wednesday that I have been buzzing about for a couple days now. Experimental filmmaker Blake Williams has programmed a series on 3D cinema for the TIFF Cinematheque, which I wrote about for Toronto Star. This week he presented the series’ shorts programme, comprised of six films, each using a different stereoscopic format. In fact, a couple of the films were actually 2D films given a post facto stereoscopic effect using special lenses. If you head over to my Letterboxd profile and check out my diary entries for Dec 4, you’ll get write-ups on each film, with some commentary on each format.
When it comes to experimental cinema, I’m very much a neophyte, but few things get more excited about film than challenging its very nature as a medium, both in physical terms (god, I love celluloid) and physiological ones. Stereoscopy, being its own kind of optical illusion layered on top of the illusion of the moving image, is an incredibly rich area to explore, and it’s no wonder Williams has dedicated his practice to 3D. I’ve always had an interest in stereoscopy, but I’ve never had an opportunity like this one before, to see these different kinds of 3D illusions put to work in pure experimental fashion. It was mind-blowing, and by the final film, the overwhelming kaleidescopic rainbow of Jodie Mack’s Let Your Light Shine, viewed through so-called fireworks glasses, I was basically having an out-of-body experience.
I would love to see more 3D programmes like this presented more often and in more places. It’s an extraordinary way to engage with the moving image. A new way of seeing.
Reading, Watching, Listening
A few fun things I’d like to share here.
Pulsars are a ‘90s band out of Chicago who put out one album in 1997, and then a compilation of unreleased tracks in 2021. I’d never heard of them before, but after tweeting about MGMT (more on this at a later date), someone recommended their song “Technology.”
I instantly loved the song, and looked up their album. It’s a wonderful combination of styles, with synths and guitars, and a soung that’s very ‘90s and yet doesn’t feel at all trapped in that era. Always fun to discover a new favourite record.
“The Power Broker: Roy Cohn on Screen”, by Mark Asch, is the latest essay from my number one boy, and it’s a great one as ever, tracing the history of Roy Cohn portrayals, from Jeremy Strong, to Al Pacino, to James Woods. Cohn, of course, was a terrible and fascinating figure in American political history, directly bridging the McCarthy and Trump eras. What I love about Mark’s approach to the essay is his treatment of Cohn himself as a screen figure, thanks to involvement in the McCarthy hearings. This is a real person who has since been refracted through media attempting to reckoning with his meaning in an American context.
Vox Lux, directed by Brady Corbet, is a film I’ve thought about quite a lot since I first saw it at TIFF in 2018, though I was unsure whether I actually liked it. I was positive on it at the festival, but nobody else (save one) agreed, and there were enough flaws in it to make me doubt my own response. With all the buzz surrounding The Brutalist, Corbet’s new feature, which is being rightly acclaimed, I decided to go back and give Vox Lux another look. It tells the story of a pop star who finds fame as a teenager after narrowly surviving a Columbine-like school shooting in 1999, using the tragedy as a launching pad. Her story is punctuated by intersections with terrible news events—sometimes you get laid for the first time and 9/11 happens. It’s a strange film, and one rested on a fundamental flaw, which is that the songs, by Sia, are not great and neither Natalie Portman, nor her younger counterpart Raffey Cassidy, can sing. But the movie is funny, and dramatic, and its vision of a culture contending with the macro and micro simultaneously at all times is fascinating and more than a little scary.