I’d not really expected to be taken by experimental films like this but sometimes the universe brings gifts.

Back in October, Film Nerve organised a night of experimental films made by Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie, entirely screened on a good ol’ whirring 16mm projector in the Black Box at Centre 42. Tuohy and Barrie were in attendance, projecting the films for us, and guiding us along their experimental approach.

In between films, Tuohy would go to the front of the makeshift theatre, his headlamp still on, describing the following film, while Barrie prepared the next film for projection. The physicality of the projection created a ritualistic mode for the presentation.. It is almost as if Tuohy must speak in between films so that we would not be sitting in silent darkness, and that he acted as spirit guide into a flickering world that first needed tending to. Moreover, his commentary gave useful context as to the making of each film, and the structural concepts that underpin them. Especially for someone who might only dabble in viewing experimental films, these explanations oriented me toward the patterns and sensations to look out for as I watched these films.

(I am reminded, of course, of Chantal Akerman, whose structuralist approach creates films that look and feel the way they do.)

When we moved from analog to digital filmmaking and projection, we lost a physical connection to the medium. Analog film was elemental, literally— the effects of chemical processes that created regions of light and dark on filmic elements. And, as in nature, there’s also unpredictability in the means of capturing, film processing, and projection.

Some of the films in the programme are “camera-less” in that the film sequences are created using chemical processing rather than subjecting the films to reality as shown through a lens. Using some sort of structural principle, the film elements are processed unconventionally to create moving shapes that turn into mesmerising sequences. Far from random, given Tuohy and Barrie’s experience in the chemical processing of film, they form patterns that cement and then contort. While they lack a narrative, they do feature arcs that can be sensed even if they are difficult to explain.

Tuohy and Barrie are intensely enamored by the way that the moving image tricks the brain into creating movement and feeling. These unconventional structural guidelines and chemical processes that they subject their film elements to are another approach to creating this illusion. Even the term “moving image” is itself a lie because the image does not move. It is always a series of still images flickering so rapidly that your mind stitches them together as if they were a singular object in motion.

Even with digital projection or screens of all resolutions, these illusions operate similarly. The moving image is still magic, and somehow, this night of films felt like a renewed cinematic awakening. Below are my descriptions and reflections on some of these films.

The films

Tooborac

Of the seven films we saw, I was most taken by Tooborac which features gigantic granite boulders, sometimes balancing on other stone plateaus, in the landscape of Tooborac, Australia (see: tor). The film is made in a “stop-motion” style, that is filmed frame by frame, where the camera whips around these boulders in a circular motion, always center-framing the boulder, sometimes moving in closer, but at immense speed.

Thinking back on the film now, the experience of viewing is so different from the act of making it, which must have been slow and laborious as the camera is moved from one position to another for every frame. As the film progresses, a sort of a circular fresnel-like filter is placed in front of the lens, distorting the shapes of the boulders. The effect of this filter is that it feels like we are peering through the boulder, seeing the sky behind them. The combination of the camera’s illusionary high-speed movement, camera effects and intense music creates an experience that feels like we are communing with the Earth, moving at the speed of its revolutions and able to penetrate and split its formidable landscapes with sight itself. This was wildly hypnotic, and awe-inspiring, befitting the subjects at its centre.

The Land at Night

Another film that lodged in my mind was The Land at Night, which for me felt almost like a horror film. The film moves rapidly, like Tooborac, with each frame taken individually in a natural landscape that is only illuminated with a flashgun. Tuohy notes that the flashgun creates an artificial quality to the images, and is also typically used in stills rather than in moving images. The camera moves through the Australian bush, showing tall grass, trees, leaves, and other natural elements as if one were flying through the bush in the dark with a flickering light. Tuohy “warns” us that there are human elements in the film, which show up as flash illuminations of a person’s hand as they move through the landscape. What he did not warn us of was the abandoned house the camera begins to explore, with disused chairs, run down walls and faulty cupboards which immediately gave rise to an eerie quality. Is the house haunted, or are we the ghost?

The movement through the landscape and the house and the subject of a person’s hand, give the film a “first-person” quality, which is further amplified by the starkly directional light from the flashgun. It feels like the only things that are illuminated are the things that we are perceiving, which creates a sort of psychological vignette. It reminded me of videogames, so-called “walking simulators”, in which one is typically moving through an empty house and picking up the narrative from objects left around the house. While many of these games might not even feature scares, the starkness of an uninhabited room with the remnants of human activity conjures ghosts that aren’t even there, and it functions similarly here.

Camera-less films: Fear of Floating | The Last Train

Of the camera-less films (although I might be classifying them incorrectly), the most affecting for me was Fear of Floating which features footage of a boat crossing in Mumbai shot on expired film that is then processed in a way that creates tendrils of light and dark on the footage. The expired film shows the boat crossing with immense fuzziness, where there are only impressions of silhouettes of boats, of people riding those boats, and sometimes of birds flying overhead. Coupled with watery sound effects, it’s a disconcerting film overall, as if one were thinking of a boat crossing, rather than being on one.

Another film that uses found footage is The Last Train that utilises deteriorated found footage from an old movie trailer from an old Indonesian propaganda film found in archive and then chemically reprocesses it. The film is processed such that the film’s own perforations form imprints onto the image, creating moving rectangles across the frame that leave a ghostly trail. Have you ever stood in an empty train wherein you can see straight through from one end to the other? When you observe the train as it follows gradual curves on the track, you see how the vertical grab handles begin to misalign in succession, and then find linearity again as the track straightens out. With its title, the mechanical movement of the rectangles, and the sound of trains, the film evokes this same sensation with its click-clackety rhythm.

Intermittently, we are shown snippets from the trailer that can sometimes barely be made out, which I can only recall being somewhat sinister or insidious in atmosphere. I guess the question is, where is the train going? Is it the last train of the night, or the last train you’ll ever ride?

China Not China

The thesis of this film feels obvious when you read its title and description: multiple exposures of streetscapes in Taiwan and Hong Kong edited together, both places that are not China and yet China and our atlases claim to be. Slow pans across city scenes are done handheld, repeatedly, and then superimposed, creating ephemeral impressions where city features don’t quite line up and the image is speckled with the bright spots of streetlights and vehicle headlights. Maybe in capturing these cities in this way and then juxtaposing them in the same film, it is portraying their changing natures with definitions unfixed and under threat. Or maybe, I just thought it looked really cool so I’m telling you about it here.

Closing

I think language can only fail to capture the sensations we felt as a collective watching these films, hypnotized and transfixed by these moving images, but I hope these attempts give you a sense of these, even without a single accompanying photo (edit: I’ve since added one photo). I can’t say the films have necessarily increased my appetite for seeking out the experimental, but they have at least expanded my capacity to receive them.

Leave a comment

Films in the Programme

For documentation sake, here is the list of seven films in the programme, in the order they were shown:

• In and Out a Window

• Fear of Floating

• Tooborac

• The Last Train

• The Land at Night

• Nude Descending

• China Not China

Notes / Updates

This sat on the backburner for a while, largely written, but I’m glad I managed to come back to send it. A lot has happened since my last piece on The Projector closing. I covered the 38th Tokyo International Film Festival for Deep Cut (with a dispatch episode, and two interviews), and we’ve also covered the 36th Singapore International Film Festival, where we just released our dispatch episode. I don’t think I’ll be writing festival write-ups for either festival, so do listen to the podcast if you’re interested in my thoughts.

For SGIFF, I also wrote for Sasha and Tracey’s Correspondence publication, The Daily. If you’re a new subscriber because of my piece, I hope you enjoy what I’m writing here. I got a great response for this piece, mostly in-person, which was lovely. I’m really glad people are engaging with the festival through the writing in The Daily. It signals that we have the capacity to engage with cinema and its surrounding culture and institutions in a deep and critical way in Singapore, and that we do have an audience for such writing or commentary. I love what Sasha and Tracey have done with The Daily, contributing greatly to the vibrancy of this year’s festival with a ground-up spirit, and can’t wait to see what else they cook up under the Correspondence umbrella. It makes me really hopeful for cinema culture in Singapore (not to forget what the FFIGS team is also doing), and I think it shows we can make the culture we want to see without large institutional backing. We can always start small, there’s always you and me.

Also, since I last wrote, I’ve launched filmbulletin.sg, which aggregates film listings outside the mainstream cineplex circuit in Singapore, including smaller film festivals and screenings from institutions like Asian Film Archive and Objectifs. If you’re in Singapore, I hope you find it useful, and do share with others! If you’re someone organising film screenings, especially something like what Film Nerve have done for this event I wrote about here, do reach out if you’d like to list!

Until the next one (maybe next year?)
— Ben

On Sunday, August 17, 2025, I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked with some friends in the Redrum at The Projector at Golden Mile Tower. We’d been getting together to watch movies at various venues in Singapore, but The Projector was the most frequently visited by us as a group. This group had been thrown together for us to watch a movie together a year ago: The Grand Budapest Hotel, also at The Projector. We’ve been watching movies together ever since.

Two days later, The Projector was shuttered abruptly, citing financial difficulties and changing audience habits. For those reading from outside Singapore: it was the only independent cinema in Singapore running regular screenings of independent and classic films. It lasted 11 years which, all things considered, was a very good run.

On that Sunday, we didn’t know it would be the last time we’d watch a film in those old theatres, or that it’d be the last time I’d pick up a ticket stub at The Projector. Or that it’d be the last time I ordered concessions from the bar.

On 23 August, 2025, they held one last party for The Projector. It was thronged with people. I’d never really connected with The Projector as a space for partying. I came for the movies. It felt like we were dancing on the corpse at a funeral, but I accept that everyone grieves differently, for different things.

As the party died down, I commiserated with different groups of cinephiles I’d connected with over the years. Many came to pay their respects. For those in their 20s and 30s, The Projector had always existed throughout most of their cinephilia. A cinephilia that The Projector fed with movies that let us see ourselves and our city against a myriad of other possibilities and stories.

And The Projector gave us more than the movies; it gave us each other.

The outpouring of grief, anger, and frustration from the closure of The Projector is understandable. There is violence here. It feels appropriate that my last screening at The Projector was in the REDRUM: it feels like a murder, but who holds the axe?

writing on the wall (state approved)

When I first returned from my studies to Singapore, my first internship was at The Substation. In my time there, the exhibition series I helped out with was called: Cities change. People die. Everything you know goes away.

I didn’t know it at the time, but in my time working in the arts in Singapore, that exhibition title has remained relevant. It seems obvious that cities must change, because the times they remain a-changing. However, growing up, you never realise how palpable change can feel. How your environment can lose vital infrastructure and it can feel like someone has taken a kidney.

We know the arts community across its many disciplines is small in Singapore. You would think that means we are in the process of building something bigger and that there is no way but up. Yet, our engagement with our arts and heritage is so intertwined with loss. How can we cope with loss when we already have so little? How can we build anything when it feels like the tide washes everything away just as we are beginning?

People die, that much is certain. We think cities will outlast us, and somehow this one is dying faster before we can reach middle age.

The Substation lost its physical space back in 2021. The government said it was because it was building something newer, bigger and better. I’ve walked past that space multiple times since 2021 with its facade still hidden behind hoarding. Nothing is going on there. What purpose does an empty building serve? The only squatters we seem to allow are ghosts, and when they serve the national narrative we’ll build gigantic, gaudy homes for them to haunt whether they like it or not.

gross proceedings

Singapore’s number one trait is its free market economy, something our government is immensely proud of, and is the chief reason Singapore is where it is today. We are ranked numero uno in the world in terms of economic freedom. Because of this, money flows in and out easily, fairly, and all the requisite numbers go up. Every dollar is treated fairly in Singapore, arguably more so than the people in it.

This free market economy, and its value, is predicated on the absolute faith that pegging every resource to a market-dependent dollar value is fair and moral. That the right business, the ones that can maintain a healthy lifeblood of capital flow, have earned the right to live. Life and death, both corporate and human, is dependent on supply and demand. When demand dries up, you deserve to die.

Make no mistake: money is not moral. Do we decide the value of cities, people, and things solely based on their monetary value? Their capacity to generate profit or maintain productivity? Can you really compare the value of a cinema to a museum to a grocery store to a restaurant to a Grab to a factory to a clinic to a hair salon to a mall to a hawker stall by their balance sheets?

If left to its own devices, capital's only goal, like a virus, is to replicate and expand. It will trade one asset for another to chase larger margins. When every asset is made interchangeable because we trust their market-dictated monetary valuations, we make people, history, and culture interchangeable for profits, asset valuations, and corporate acquisitions.

When your country is run by technocrats, who are themselves so enriched by the policies and directions they pursue that they cannot see past the numbers, they will make that trade for us every single time. GDP go brrrrrr means everything is going according to plan. The city remains sparkling clean, new high rises block out the sun, and investors keep calling, all while the cultural rot takes root, and when the sinkhole finally opens we will see that the value was imaginary all along.

everything you know gets taken away

The final pamphlet I picked up from The Projector is this one. I never keep these. I guess I'll keep this one.

It is plainly ironic that this now dead programme of films was named to jointly commemorate this nation’s birthday in August, and Singaporean cinema that has just had one of its lights dimmed while the nation soldiers on toward supposedly more important (profitable) goals. Majulah Singapura means Onward Singapore, but onward to what? Our country is obsessed with progress. Progress towards a “better” Singapore, but are we good yet? Singapore, where are you trying to go? We’re all already here.

Leave a comment

Over on my film podcast, Deep Cut, we’ve been busy preparing and recording a new series on Chantal Akerman. It has somehow fallen to me to become the “resident expert” (expert is putting it a little strongly of course) on Akerman and learning about her approach to the craft has been illuminating.

I don’t feel particularly strongly about Akerman’s work. There are aspects of her identity that are crucial to the kind of work she produces and the themes she explores: her queerness, her Jewishness, her womanhood, her relationship with her mother. These are critical elements that, if your own personal experience rhymes with any of them, Akerman’s work takes on greater power. They speak directly to you.

I think my co-hosts, Eli and Wilson, both take away much more from Akerman because they connect more deeply with these essential themes. I am envious of their emotional response. I wish I could say my time overseas made me feel the aching future regret of not contacting my mother more, as it does for Akerman, and as it does for Wilson. I wish I had the same understanding of experiencing Jewish culture that allows me to feel the resonance in Jeanne Dielman between domestic and Jewish ritual, as it does for Akerman, as it does for Eli.

With that all in mind, what can Akerman offer me?

I reference this Q&A with Celine Sciamma at BFI, where she discusses Akerman’s work, in our upcoming episodes on Akerman:

I love Sciamma’s response to the clip from La captive at 16:25: she raises her arms, gestures randomly and makes a soundless face. It is “pure cinema” in that the only response is not words or analyses or dissertations but a feeling inexplicable. Akerman’s work refuses intellectual analysis. It is pure in that any act of explanation through written or spoken language can only create a weak facsimile of the response created inside you.

Sciamma calls Akerman’s work one that is in love with the language of cinema, in what it can uniquely produce that other art forms, or even language itself, cannot. For Akerman, this language primarily manifests in your forced experience of her timing and rhythm, the power of a cut, and the effects of a rectangular frame on action. Of course, all this goes for many other kinds of cinema. These are fundamental building blocks.

Maybe “refuse analysis” is the wrong way to put it. If anything, they can be easily dissected. The programmatic structure of News from Home is easily elucidated. We can plainly lay out the predefined temporal and spatial rules she follows for the editing of Jeanne Dielman that result in slow cinema. As opposed to rules chosen because slow cinema was the goal; a subtle distinction. However, intellectual analysis can only go so far with some of Akerman’s works. There is some other element at play that creates the emotional response.

That element is you. The alchemy of all cinema is that the sights and sounds it produces, coupled with the time you afford it, creates a “third thing” that can only manifest within you, essentially unique to your experience because only you have the ability to conjure it. I say “thing” because it is necessarily abstract and open-ended: a feeling, a thought, a revelation, a sensation, an experience.

I think the key for Akerman is that she respects time. Yours and hers. She has firm conviction in her own time, her own sense of rhythm, and she also venerates the time you afford her. She talks in the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere about not wanting to steal time from you, but instead give it back to you and allow you to experience it. There’s a ritualistic nature to watching a film in the cinema: you “sacrifice” your time to the screen, relinquishing autonomy over the ensuing passage of time until the credits roll, and you hope for something in return.

For most films, the strategy is to engage and entertain across the runtime so you feel you get commensurate “return on investment” for that time, wherein it is full of action, intrigue, or emotional engagement. However, I think Akerman sees such strategies as distraction. A distraction from yourself, and your experience of that offered time. The deliberate slowness of her cinema creates the opportunity to align your time with Akerman’s time but still affording the opportunity to conjure your own response, something less immediate and reactive, something contemplative. With Akerman, you are allowed to sit with yourself.

I recently watched Akerman’s The Meetings of Anna, and once again the immediate response was, “I didn’t particularly enjoy it.” The pace of the film is slow, and we follow Anna, a film director, meeting lovers, family, and strangers as she travels around Europe, ostensibly travelling with a new film. In each encounter, Anna largely takes on the role of a listener as her counterpart unfurls a long monologue about themselves.

I can’t say these long conversations are particularly interesting, and many of them do little to uncover the full dimensions of Anna as a character. These conversations are generally self-serving from the perspective of Anna’s counterparts. Aside from Anna’s more intimate conversation with her mother, that finally allows us to hear Anna tell a story about herself, the encounters she has do not stick (neither with me nor her), and we can scarcely get a sense of Anna’s own emotional responses to these encounters.

Strung together like this, and interspersed with scenes of Anna travelling on cabs and trains, Akerman charges the film with a prevailing emptiness. It builds to a listless ending in which Anna, finally home, lies in bed listening to her answering machine as people try to set up even more meetings with her. Will they take on the same tenor as the meetings we saw before? Does she look forward to more meetings, or does she look back fondly on those past meetings? Even in her own bed, Anna is travelling from place to place, her face stricken with a despairing loneliness. Even at home, she feels lost.

Arguably, those interstitial scenes feel more critical to the film than the meetings Anna has. I am taken by the shots from the train of the stations it pulls into and through. Deserted and warmly lit with incandescent lights, there are people but few of them, some travellers, some station workers. These stations feel cold, in temperature and feeling, laden with inherent sadness. The emotional tenor of Anna’s meetings seep into these landscapes, there’s a deep sense of being adrift. Furthermore, even within these meetings, it is the wordless moments between characters that feel like Akerman’s true focus. Look no further than Akerman’s own Toute une nuit, and From the East for proof.

Toute une nuit (A Whole Night) from 1982 is organised around a series of late night meetings over the course of a single night, and takes on a similar tone to those in The Meetings of Anna. Throughout the night we join multiple characters meeting, separating, embracing, or existing alone hoping to be with another. On paper, it sounds like an expanded version of The Meetings of Anna, but we are treated to dozens of these scenes and characters. They largely lack dialogue and no characters are named. These scenes live in the realm of pure action. It’s as if Akerman is asking, “What if the entire film was composed only of the moments where characters most strongly feel together and alone?” It is slow dancing, rushed consummation, and elongated partings over and over again, without context, plot, or story; a tapestry of romantic yearning, dissolution, and climax. It is pure feeling.

From the East, a documentary from 1993, captures the general vibe of the Eastern Bloc after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It comprises sparse landscapes, wordless interior scenes, and many lateral tracking shots of people in transit: waiting for the train, the bus, or for the end to come. Despite the presence of a select few short scenes of energised partying or music, much of the film is focused on extended stasis. The landscapes of public transit spaces echo News from Home and The Meetings of Anna, and the interior scenes evoke Jeanne Dielman, frequently with a subject in the middle of their kitchen smoking a cigarette or doing a chore.

As in Toute une nuit, there is no single subject here, but rather a collection of scenes and landscapes that evoke some sort of pure feeling, of living ghosts and an eternal wait. The human subjects become part of these landscapes, imparting them with life, thereby making the physical spaces themselves “human.” It is as if Akerman is asking, “how can I make a scene of nothing make you feel something?”

There’s a funny phrase writers sometimes use where they call one work the “Rosetta Stone” for the rest of an artist’s work. Which is to say the work helps to unlock and understand the rest of the oeuvre. This is usually an early seminal work with clues towards an artist's predominant obsessions. I can’t say Akerman’s filmography has a singular Rosetta Stone, because it seems every single work associates to all the others in a tangled cat’s cradle of connections. Akerman has always been remarkably consistent.

As evocative as I might make these films sound, these are still not engaging films in the traditional sense. They are intriguing to turn over in one’s head, but they do not represent a fun time in the cinema or on the couch. However, there’s still value in that. They made me write these words. They made me contend with the value of cinema. They made me realise the power of sitting with myself. Akerman’s work can do that, you just need to give her time.

Leave a comment

Other Notes

Hello readers, it’s been a little while hasn’t it? I’ve realised how long it takes an idea to take root. In the preceding two months, I’ve been working on a few other side projects, keeping Deep Cut going, and trying to get a handle on more writing, both for this newsletter and otherwise.

For this newsletter, I’m hoping to get back into it more regularly with shorter pieces and try not to have essay ideas grow into untameable beasts. This is a piece where I’m trying to quickly get at a simple idea, even so it grew a tad larger than I’d expected. I hope you liked reading it. If you did, look forward to our upcoming coverage on Akerman on Deep Cut. We’ve recorded episodes on Jeanne Dielman, News from Home, and No Home Movie. I’m currently choosing another narrative feature that would be worthy to discuss alongside Jeanne Dielman. The Meetings of Anna is a possible contender, but I’m curious about her later work, as well as her foray into making more “commercial” work. I’m curious how the commercial work might upend my idea of her “artistic consistency” I mentioned above.

If anything this piece is merely another exploration of the ideas I was playing with in the first piece since this newsletter’s revival, read it here. I think much of my current thinking about cinema comes from this same point.

I’ve also been writing little monthly wrap-ups on my media consumption over at the Patreon for Deep Cut, if you’re interested in reading my little monthly check-ins (as well as Eli’s and Wilson’s, which I always enjoy reading myself), do head on over there. I’ve thought about reproducing some version of them for this newsletter, but don’t particularly like repeating myself, and prefer the more focused nature of the things I write here.

Before getting to Kyoto, I spent 2 nights in Nagoya near Aichi prefecture so that I could spend a full day at Ghibli Park. Upfront, I will say that Ghibli Park is probably going to be more fun to go to with other people. While there is wonder to be had alone, I think it would definitely have benefited from having company.

Ghibli Park is separate from Ghibli Museum which is in Mitaka, Tokyo, although it’s easy to get them mixed up (they’re hours away from each other by shinkansen). Ghibli Park is situated in a public park in Aichi, with distinct "zones" scattered around the publicly accessible park. It is crowded everyday, and the day I went was probably no different despite the cold weather.

In the Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse is Cinema Orion in which they play a short film from Ghibli a few times a day. This time they played A Sumo Wrestler's Tail, a cute short about rats in the forest wrestling as an old (human) couple discovers them and aids one team in winning by helping them carbo-load mid-match. There’s nothing to write home about with regard to this cinematic experience. The theatre is nicely designed with a somewhat ornate lobby harkening back to the days of “picture palaces”, but it’s mostly surface level set dressing.

Unfortunately, I come away from Ghibli Park with a strong feeling that most of the experience is not for me. Every corner of the park is a merchandising or photo opportunity, which I have nothing against, but is personally not how I relate to these films. Visitors would enter long queues to take a photo with figures from the films. The constant merchandising, which clearly there is a demand for, felt a little cheap to me. After hiking through Dondoko Forest, you arrive at a large statue of Totoro and a gift shop. That's it. The hike upwards to that point is merely a nice walk through a park, which by itself is perfectly fine, but when one expects magic and is instead offered yet another chance to take out a credit card, it rubs me a little the wrong way.

What is worthwhile at Ghibli Park are the "premium" interior spaces you can go into on a more expensive ticket which are recreations of famous locations, from the movies, e.g. Howl's Moving Castle, Mei and Satsuki's House from My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki's House from Kiki’s Delivery Service. I think if you are a fan of these films, the premium price and the time spent in those houses is worth the money and time.

Photography is not allowed inside these houses, but they are a production designer's dream. Every house is chock full of physical detail and minutia. Drawers and closets are stuffed with items like period-accurate clothing, and personal items these characters would have, whether fantastical or mundane. Howl's Castle is especially fully realized, with magical objects, a varied assortment of knick-knacks, and so much detail I can barely remember it with my mind's eye.

Less immediately impressive is Mei and Satsuki's house, but what it trades in wonder it gives back in period nostalgia. It was fun to listen to Japanese visitors exclaim with nostalgia (“懐かしい/natsukashii!”) for toys and foodstuffs in the house. Ghibli's films and merchandising traffic in multiple kinds of nostalgia: nostalgia for traditionally animated artistry, for the periods they depict, and for Ghibli itself. These are powerful emotional vectors.

I was very charmed by the house from The Cat Returns (spin-off from Whisper of the Heart), but actually have not seen the film! It's a smaller space to explore, but the basement has a violin woodworking space that is very serene and beautiful, with many woodworking tools and the like.

Because of the interactive nature of these exhibits, every room has a staff member constantly arranging and resetting items into their original place. The movement of tidying is constant! The popularity of Ghibli probably makes it immensely difficult to concoct an experience with a Ghibli sensibility. My favourite Ghibli moments tend to be the ones of open serenity or intense focus on specific detail. The visual experience of the exhibits might scream Ghibli, but the busyness of the crowd, the noise, and the congestion, work against the sense of immersion these exhibits seek to achieve. This is not a problem that can be solved of course, and the visitor numbers are already hard capped for every day (and always sold out).

Part of me feels a little crazy looking at the way every facet of every film becomes merchandise of all sorts, but then again I walk out of the gift shop after purchasing a bunch of stuff so what am I really trying to buy with my purchases? Still, it's nice that Ghibli can find a way to create this many revenue streams so that they can continue making films the way they want to make them. Not every studio gets that privilege.

I had not initially intended to see any films while I was in Kyoto but, while on an aimless jaunt, I walked into a small mall, Cocon Karasuma, and chanced upon its small 3-screen cinema on the top floor called Kyoto Cinema. My first instinct was to collect a few novel chirashi posters for my collection before attempting to figure out the film schedule. The cinema shows mostly recent independent films with special programmes, like its upcoming screening of Edward Yang's newly restored Mahjong.

Walking into the lobby of Kyoto Cinema energised me to seek out other cinemas, so I pulled up Google Maps to find another independent theatre only a 20 minute walk away. I bought a ticket for Jesse Eisenberg's new film, A Real Pain, for the next day and decided to trek to the other cinema.

I found the cinema Uplink Kyoto in the basement of a hip, modern looking mall called ShinPuhKan. The mall had an audio art installation on its open ground floor that played ethereal sounds in a sort of garden pathway alongside a Beams store and other upscale food, fashion, and home product stores.

A little confused by the Japanese language film schedule, I asked the counter for help and ended up in a delightful and friendly conversation with one of the staff working there (in English, helpfully for me). I was interested in their screening of the David Lynch documentary, David Lynch: The Art Life. Many cinemas in Japan were playing Lynch films after his recent passing. In our conversation, he also suggested I check out another theatre in Kyoto, Demachi-za, which was playing a wider retrospective of Lynch films.

In the back of Uplink Kyoto is a small gift shop with old film pamphlets and cinema books. I leafed through the entire collection and walked out with film pamphlets for The Decalogue and Court.

I'm especially pleased with the latter, because it's nice to think a small indie debut like Chaitanya Tamhane's could find an audience here, especially when distributing films to Japan requires additional subtitling and collateral design. It was one of my favourite films of 2014, it also won the best film prize at SGIFF that year.

Kyoto Cinema

The next day, I headed into Kyoto Cinema to watch A Real Pain on the smallest screen I have ever seen in a cinema. The seats stretched out on both sides of the screen, and it felt like the width of the seat rows were twice that of the screen. There were not too many rows, but the screen looked small from every vantage. Despite the size of the screen, I found the projection to be fantastic, plenty bright and sharp in a way that made me forget how small the screen was.

I was also surprised that they physically had someone come into the theatre to do the announcements for cinema etiquette (and maybe other information I did not understand). Typically this would be achieved by some sort of graphic or video on the screen, but I will say that the personal touch here makes the cinema experience feel less alienating, and more welcoming. Having staff come down to introduce the movie is a nice reminder that cinemas are still run by people not machines. We can automate many of the operations of running a theatre but, especially for a repertory theatre like this, somebody makes programming decisions, somebody cleans up after you, and somebody decides this cinema is worth continuing.

I was very charmed by A Real Pain which reminded me of a lot of talky French movies, like something from Mia Hansen-Love. While the heritage tour in the film forms a plot backbone, Eisenberg's writing is more focused on the characterisation of the cousins played by Kieran Culkin and himself. While Culkin and Eisenberg very much "play themselves", or maybe the archetypes they are most comfortable with, the nuance to their characterisation and relationships is exceptionally well tuned. It's impressive that Culkin is picking up so many awards for this performance because it's not an exceptionally "large" performance. In our upcoming Deep Cut episode with Andrew Ahn about his reimagining of Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet he mentions how the Oscars tend to go to the "most" of the category rather than the "best". Culkin’s performance is definitely not the “most” but it is winning in its complex mix of charm, abrasiveness, and vulnerability.

Demachi-za

Nestled in a little shotengai (covered shopping street) in Kamigyo ward is Demachi-za: a 2-screen cinema, with each accommodating a little over 40 people each. The theatres are in the basement and upper floor. The ground floor has a bar/cafe that sells food and drink. To put it simply, Demachi-za is cool: in vibe, aesthetic, and the palpable love for film in its atmosphere. Unfortunately, I don't have photos of the interior, but I also recall the restroom doors were given some sort of Lynchian decor to fit their ongoing retrospective.

I tried to buy a ticket at the counter but was guided to a ticket machine, similar to the ones you usually see at small ramen restaurants that only take cash. You insert cash and hit a button to get a ticket, which you then present at the manned counter to select your seats in the theatre. It's an old school system, and part of me wishes more of Japan would move on from these cash-only machines. Staff had to help me out because I only had a 5000 yen note, creating more friction than the machine was supposed to reduce. However, to take a contrary point against my perennial desire for efficiency and convenience, maybe it's more important my soba tastes incredible rather than saving the minute of labour a new cashless machine might be able to. Every process can be made more efficient. We can also, as individuals, become more productive and skilled, but why? Time is worth saving, and there are many ways to, but did you really have something better to do with that minute?

Well, before I get too existential... lets talk about Eraserhead, Lynch's self-proclaimed, "most spiritual film." I saw the film in the basement theatre which was nice and cosy. Like Kyoto Cinema, the film was introduced by staff in-person. A 40-person theatre is very small! Seats were probably arranged roughly with 4 rows of 10 seats each, but with a screen larger than the one in Kyoto Cinema.

I have no idea how to even begin with Eraserhead. Having seen more Lynch films after his passing, it is incredible that such an experimental filmmaker has become so well known (although that is probably more the result of Twin Peaks’ cultural moment). Lynch's films are predominantly strange. While Eraserhead is less well-known outside a general audience, his other films have equally odd constructions and fascinations, and still Lynch remains immensely popular.

From Lynch's words from The Art Life, it seems the making of Eraserhead at AFI was a wonderful time of creativity time for him. In these dark sets, he was able to make the objects of his fantasies come alive. During the filmmaking process, Lynch was already a father, and the film’s themes of parenting and marriage are clear. What is more elusive is what exactly Lynch is trying to say about it all. For me, it is a film you need to feel. It is an awkward, ungainly movie meant to disturb. The most memorable scene to me is when the “lady in the radiator” sings and side-steps on a tiny stage while stomping worm-like creatures falling from the ceiling. The grotesque nature of what is on display, juxtaposed with the woman's bright smile and cheery disposition is dissonantly ethereal. When the industrial world beats you down sonically and physically, and home life becomes a conglomeration of stressors, one might much rather retreat into oddly comforting nightmares.

After my screening, I head into the neighbouring bookstore, a "rare book store" according to Google Maps. The inside of the store is full of a variety of books in Japanese, but outside the store is a huge selection of film pamphlets which I spent a good amount of time leafing through.

I ended up getting these:

Hungry after the screening, I looked for somewhere to get dinner. Wandering down the shotengai, I saw a sign for SOU, a small cafe/bar on the second floor of one of the units. I headed in and ordered off the set menu. In my solo escapades in Japan, wandering into these hole in the wall establishments has been an opportunity to get into conversations with random locals. At the counter seats were a couple who had recently moved to Kyoto from Tokyo and talked a little about the difference between working in the different cities.

As we talked, a lady walked in bearing gifts. It happened to be Valentine's Day and after referring to me as a "person whose name she did not know", she handed me some chocolates. This was probably the first time I've ever received chocolates for Valentine's Day, which happens to be a classic anime trope (look up giri choco)! In a funny way, one of the most Japanese things to have happened to me on this trip.

Speaking of anime, at the corner of the counter I was sat at was a small selection of guest books with messages from previous visitors. As it turns out, this shotengai happens to be the location of an anime called Tamako Market and is an anime pilgrimage stop. Alongside Tamako Market materials were also materials from the more well known anime series Sound! Euphonium and its related film, Liz and the Blue Bird, which are set in nearby Kita-Uji. It's cute thinking about all the people who've come through the shopping street just because of anime, and the number who've sat in the very seat I was in.

I got into a conversation with another customer who does art on the side, and canvassed for some trip suggestions. He recommended the hike up Daimonji which I do end up going the next day. I spent a few hours getting up to the peak with a great view of the Kyoto cityscape. Daimonji's hillside is one of a few hillsides where they light up gigantic kanji character's during Gozan no Okuribi that closes out the Obon Festival in August. Here's a photo from the character for "大/big":

Share The Kinetoscope

Kyoto Uplink

After eating at SOU and downing a large pint of beer, I rushed to Kyoto Uplink in a bit of a stupor to catch the Lynch documentary. Armed with my ticket I walked into my cinema hall... and no one asked for my ticket. A little peculiar but either somebody stepped out or Uplink is operating within a very strong fabric of trust, which is not so unheard of in Japan.

The cinema hall I found myself in in Uplink was not very large, probably seating about 50-60 people at most. It felt like the most "standard" screen experience of the Kyoto cinemas I went to, especially with its modern self-service ticket kiosks. For this cinema, there was nobody in-person to begin the film, which I now found myself missing, and there were maybe only about five people in attendance.

David Lynch: The Art Life, released in 2016, tries to capture a sense of Lynch's ethos and how his early life led to his art. Mostly guided by Lynch's voiceover from what seemed like a single interview, it consists of a montage of archival images of Lynch, his family, and his peers, additional clips from his early work, and "present" day footage as he works on paintings. It mostly covers Lynch's early life up until he begins work on his early films, and the meandering path he takes to becoming a filmmaker.

It feels like a fool's errand to try to capture Lynch in this way, especially when his body of work operates to give a full vision of his worldview. Film Crit Hulk recently published an essay about Lynch which I do recommend reading if you're interested. We sometimes want to know artists better through behind the scenes content, personal interviews, snippets from their private lives, but their actual works, whether filtered through fiction or stylistic flourish, are themselves already the truest version of an artist's self to me. Sometimes we want to know too much about our artists, and maybe it's better to let go and let these makers remain unknowable mysteries. Lynch certainly wanted that, refusing to explain his work, and yet we know him well: his primal attraction to darkness, but always finding a way to turn the light on.

Leave a comment

Closing

I had not expected this to be quite so long, but if you've read both of these travelogues, I appreciate your attention. I can't say I'm an expert of Japan's cine-culture in the slightest, but I hope my glimpse into it was a worthwhile dip. And like last time, here are the stubs from Kyoto below:

The last stub is a little teaser for next week: a short write-up about Ghibli Park. Talk soon!

Rather than tell you about my trip in general, here’s a little travelogue focused on the cinemas I visited in Japan. I may not fully speak Japanese yet, but that was not going to stop me from watching some movies while I was in Japan, subtitles available or not.

Okura Cinema

The first film I saw in Tokyo could not be logged on Letterboxd and I can barely find a translation for its title. Google Translate spits out the following title: LoveJuiceArt.

It’s (softcore) porn.

From a friend’s suggestion (really) I visited Ueno’s long-standing Okura Cinema that’s dedicated to screening pink films, both vintage pinku and new releases produced by the same company that runs the theatre. Vertically integrated, baby. In Okura, the films run back to back throughout opening times, looping the same 3-film-program across the day’s opening hours. You could stay in the theatre throughout all the showings, and continue watching repeated screenings, all on a single ticket. The person managing the theatre was certainly a little surprised by the small group of foreigners who had wandered in. We waited awkwardly around the lobby before realizing we could go in anytime while the previous showing was already running.

The theatre was very warm and there were many men, looking to be in their 50s or 60s, seated generally spread out in what looked like a 150 person theatre. Men would totter around, giving us tourists a passing stare as they found a place to get seated. One of my friends accompanying me was a woman, which was probably a more peculiar sight for the regular patrons. There were multiple men with their feet propped up on the seat in front, shoes off. Every so often a female staff member would make a round around the theatre, presumably to make sure everyone was only watching the film with their eyes.

We caught a few minutes of the ending of the preceding film, Madame Lesbian, which seemed to be about a school-going step-daughter having a clandestine relationship with her stepmother. The film looked a little “retro”, maybe made in the 80s, with a DVDrip quality.

That film felt particularly more risqué in plot than the film that followed, the one we thought we were buying a specific ticket for. LoveJuiceArt follows a man, in his 50s, who is a painter who has lost his spark for painting until a young woman takes an interest in him and reignites his artistic drive. Along this story thread is also a friend asking for the painter’s help to reignite his relationship with his estranged wife. Aside from that, the painter sleeps with basically every woman in the story in drawn out sex scenes.

It’s interesting to see how the director attempts to make this more than just a pornographic film with a plot centred on artmaking even if the story lands very flat. I would have expected the film, with its inability to show explicit sexual intercourse, to approach filming sex with more deliberation to make up for its missing tools (haha). However, it feels like the people behind the camera were not interested in filming sex scenes, which felt included because they had to be, and focused their efforts on ancillary scenes in between sex. It mostly feels like porn with genitals strategically avoided (instead of pixelated) rather than using the form to ratchet up sensuality or titillation. Putting little effort into these sex scenes would’ve been laudable if those other scenes were more entertaining, but unfortunately they are not.

Pink films have existed alongside Japan’s entrenched pornography industry for a long time, and access to more explicit pornography is always available with the internet today, which makes me wonder what place pink films have in this landscape. What function do they fulfil? Broadly speaking, pink films are analogous to sexploitation as a genre but sexploitation has largely died out. The “erotic thriller” is occasionally still being produced today in Hollywood with an eye toward adding some form of “artfulness” to add a publicly acceptable prestige to it. If this film is an example of the quality and craft of modern pink films, I’d say that artfulness is largely absent with flat cinematography and performance. Yet, there’s clearly an audience for these films, and for new iterations of pink films, but I wonder what this audience expects from this subgenre and how it justifies Okura continuing to produce pink films today. Is the market big enough? Or is it just big enough to sustain the level of production that goes into it?

In the cinema, there was a sense of loneliness in the air, and yet maybe also a sense of comfort. Purely from conjecture, I’d imagine that for this older audience that has been attending these screenings for decades of their adult life, the ritual of watching one of these films with others is not something they want to give up yet. It’s clear that these films, and watching them in a theatre, fulfils something more than pure arousal, and I’m curious to find out what intangible quality this audience is here for.

Or maybe it really is just porn. I’ve read there’s a special “VIP” room upstairs… one can guess what it’s used for. It’s a shame the film we saw felt so limp (haha), I wished we had watched Madame Lesbian instead.

Cinema Blue Studio

In Kita-senju, to the north of central Tokyo is the Art Center of Tokyo which houses Cinema Blue Studio, a film theatre that only plays films on 35mm, which is a privilege I’ll likely never have again in Singapore. There, I watched Louis Malle’s debut feature Elevator to the Gallows for the first time with Japanese subtitles.

The Art Center is a fairly modern building of 22 floors, with floors for offices, fitness activities, and studios for a whole range of artistic pursuits. In Tokyo, I found that people find ways to engage with the arts in their many niches and facets, whether as spectators or practitioners. It makes me wonder what is necessary to sustain something as specific as Cinema Blue Studio that has to maintain a library of 35mm film and its projectors.

When you're seated in the cinema's dark blue retractable seats that feel more meant for lectures than movies, it's hard to imagine there's a huge 35mm projector whirring in the room behind you. There's something cold about Cinema Blue's environs, maybe because the cinema feels a little too large for its screen size, and the walk up to the cinema feels like you're about to clock in at the office. However, there's also something charming about how this neighbourhood outside the bustle of Tokyo's more well-known districts is playing films on 35mm everyday throughout the year in what feels like a community centre, and that there's an audience for every screening. It doesn't really matter how a space looks or feels, it matters what you do inside it.

While there were sections which tested my understanding in the film, it was largely visual and understandable. Even without English subtitles, most information can be understood from context. However, reading Japanese subtitles did help me understand a little more than someone who didn’t understand French or Japanese. It’s a novel experience reading subtitles in a non-native language for a film in another non-native language. There’s also the peculiar additional layer of understanding where some of the kanji (Chinese characters) in the Japanese subtitles I can somewhat read because of their Chinese origin and could glean meaning from even if I could not sound them out in Japanese.

I enjoyed the digressive nature of Malle’s film, both procedural and moody, like a filmmaker pulling from different cinematic influences to form a new concoction. In one instance it’s a procedural crime film, in another a delinquent film, and in yet another, a film of romantic yearning.

Waseda Shōchiku

Near Waseda University is Waseda Shōchiku that plays a double bill every day it is open. On a single ticket, you can watch 2 films that run back to back! A great value. They were playing a double bill of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's recent films, Cloud and his recent remake of his own Serpent's Path. As a bonus, they were also showing his short film Chime. Kurosawa was having a productive year last year. I didn't have the time to catch the double bill, but there's a reduced price for the last screening of the day. Not all the double bills are related by director, with some thematically linked double bills.

Interestingly, Shōchiku is the first theatre I've been to that explicitly allows you to buy food and drink from elsewhere and bring it in because they've only got vending machines at the cinema. I got some candy from a nearby FamilyMart before heading in.

The cinema has a screen that's placed fairly high, with very little incline to the way the seats are placed, and the cinema runs quite deep. If you're not so tall, there's a good chance the person in front of you is going to block some portion of the screen for you.

Typically for Kurosawa, Cloud is a confounding affair. I had no idea that it would be about a man selling counterfeit products online, but it slowly unravels into the mode of a slow thriller. Kurosawa is king at jumping between disparate tones and Cloud is similar in this regard, although I don't personally feel he is as successful here. There's a B-movie nature to the film that can be enjoyable, although for much of it I was wondering what kind of movie it really wants to be. It’s probably a little too serious and slow for an audience to fully escape into and enjoy B-movie trappings, but it does have a wild final act that feels oddly funny like a looney tunes cartoon.

109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku

This is the most expensive cinema I've ever bought a ticket for. It recently opened with the Toyko Kabukicho Tower skyscraper that was completed in 2023. I bought a ticket for Tony Takitani on 35mm which cost a whopping 4500 yen, but it felt like it was one of my few opportunities to watch a film on 35mm in my lifetime. Even so, that choice probably defeats the purpose of this cinema, which is a finely tuned soundsystem overseen by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto. Tangentially, I went to the Sakomoto exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and the lines were out the building. Japanese people really like Ryuichi Sakamoto. I'm sure using Sakamoto's name to sign off on this sound system is also a great marketing tactic.

The Tokyo Kabukicho Tower has been described to me as a venture to gentrify the surrounding Kabukicho area which is famous for being home to Toho Shinjuku Tower which houses a Toho Cinemas outlet and a hotel with Godzilla's life-sized head popping up above it. It's also the most prominent red light district in Tokyo: full of host/hostess bars and progressively more explicit adult entertainment. It's also thronged with tourists hoping to soak up the Kabukicho vibes. The tower hopes to clean up the image of Kabukicho and also house these tourists, but its many floors felt especially vacant and the food options on its lower floors felt like another country's idea of what a Japanese food court should look like (just imagine any of the "Japanese food streets" in Singapore).

109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (what a mouthful) is one of the quietest cinemas I've ever stepped into. I was the first to enter the cinema for my screening and it was dead silent. It seemed fully soundproofed. However, I'd assume the 35mm print would barely utilise the breadth of what this supposedly premium sound system can offer. The seats reclined and were comfortable, with plenty of space to put whatever you've brought into the theatre. The concessions were equally expensive and fancy, but I did not partake after the sting of the ticket price.

As for Tony Takitani, I asked some friends if it was advisable to watch without subtitles and received a resounding "no". The film is nearly all voiceover and confusing doppelganger antics, with Issey Ogata (who one might recognise playing the Japanese man in Yi Yi) playing both his character and his character's father.

Despite my lack of understanding, Jun Ichikawa's film maintains a lonely tone of wistfulness as we watch this couple come together and still feel equally alone. Scenes frequently transition with slow lateral dolly glides that slide right into the next scene. The 35mm projection also greatly aided the film's sense of yearning and nostalgia.

After the screening, I stayed in the theatre for a little while longer to enjoy its silence.

Kawagoe: Scala-za

On a day trip from Tokyo, I visited Kawagoe on a cloudy and quiet day. While wandering the streets, known for preserving a smattering of buildings and streets in the Edo-style, I chance upon Scala-za, a small independent theater. What I thought would be a quick detour turned into me entering a screening of the 2024 independent film At The Bench, which happened be screening shortly after I had arrived.

The projector in the theatre has definitely seen better days, with the edges of the projection splotched with many dead blue pixels, with stray dead pixels finding themselves in the middle of the image. The image was shrunk to avoid the edges of the projection that were most affected by dead pixels, and the image was also a little soft– although that could be chalked up to the film being filmed in 16mm. Even with the theater’s poor projection, I was surprised by the relatively well attended afternoon screening and am largely jealous of Japan’s filmgoing audience. People yearn for cinema even in a theatre as dinky as Scala-za. Is it a search for culture or community?

Maybe it was a bad idea to watch a somewhat Rohmerian / Hamaguchi-esque film centred around conversations around the same park bench without any English subtitles, but it was a novel experience nonetheless. The film is structured with 5 short episodic vignettes as people have mostly 2-person conversations around this park bench. Most notably, there’s a middle section in which it is revealed that the park bench is some sort of alien as it communicates with its mothership. Somebody correct me if I am wrong!

Stubs

For fun, here are the ticket stubs from the films I saw:

Leave a comment

Other Cinemas / Side quests

In my research, I discovered a few other cinemas that I did not managed to go to screenings for, but if you're using this as a sort of guide to Tokyo's cinemas they may be worth a look:

• The National Film Archive of Japan has a theatre that plays old classics, and not just limited to Japan. I didn't manage to catch a screening but did check out the small permanent exhibition there. Every 30 minutes they play a montage of clips from (very) old films, think something like 1916’s Shoes. This montage is played on an old-school projector that you can step right next to. I had thought it was a new montage of clips, but the print is duplicated from a montage from the 50s, if I remember correctly, which is very cool.

• In the middle of busy Shibuya is the recently opened Le Bunkamura theatre that plays independent films. They were playing a few Shinji Somai films during my time in Tokyo. Looks hip! It’s also a venue for other kinds of stage performances.

• Shin-Bugeiza in Ikebukuro shows a variety of recent releases as well as older classic films. The programming looks pretty eclectic and interesting.

• I also visited Yasujiro Ozu’s grave in nearby Kamakura. Here it is, surrounded by sake bottles:

Next time, we explore Kyoto. Talk soon.

For me, I think there's a sense of overconsumption. I sometimes fantasize about being in a place wherein I have no access to any of the possibilities of engaging with any of this media. Would life be any lesser? The answer is, of course, no. A year spent looking at the same flowing river outside your cabin is probably just as meaningful as trying to watch a movie a day. Heck, it might be much healthier.

There is a deluge of content online about anti-consumerism habits, to reduce our desires to buy more things, but I wonder if there's an intangible version of this, wherein we reduce our desires to consume more media and more experiences; to stuff our lives and time with an unending series of distractions and entertainment. Maybe sometimes these are distractions from existential doom, or a false goal we create to purpose meaning out of the torrent of content. What drives the desire to see everything, or do everything? What does trying to do everything take away from?

Sometimes I look at my lists of things I want to watch or play or read and get overwhelmed by the number of items. Frequently, I go on little "cull breaks" where I deliberately decide that some things will never be experienced, striking them off my lists, and still at the end of these culls I feel the weight of wanting to do too much.

So if I have any sort of resolution with regard to my media consumption, it is to be even more deliberate with my time and my choices. Maybe the numbers won't fall but at least the time spent on each thing might be more meaningful.

As I put the finishing touches on this piece, I am currently reading bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions. In it, she draws from Erich Fromm with this quote:

"the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible." He contends: "Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves." The cultural emphasis on endless consumption deflects attention from spiritual hunger.

I think that consumption extends further to the ways in which we engage with media and entertainment today. In hooks’ and Fromm’s view, gluttonous consumption comes from a lack of love received or spirituality, and also takes away from the capacity to extend love to others. Material items and intangible distractions that consume time and money (in my mind the only two quantifiable resources, which are one and the same) are both convenient balm and principal source for lovelessness and spiritual emptiness. It’s making me rethink how I approach media, of which I spent thousands of hours on my life on, and what I actually want to spend those hours on. I cannot help but agree with hooks and Fromm, and feel like there are better ways to engage with and produce art of any sort, where monopolisation of the time and money of others is not the main pursuit. How can films, and everything else, be a locus for building community and expanding love?

Let’s hang on to the overbearing weight of irony as we look at my year of consumption:

Films

Some statistics from my Letterboxd Year in Review

• 153 diary entries on Letterboxd (around 5 are TV specials/shows)

• 113 new to me films

• 60+ 2024 films watched

• 103 films watched on the big screen

Compared to 2023, I managed to more or less match the number of movies seen, and I think I've come to terms with this rate of film watching, which is already substantially higher than the average person, of course. Incredibly, I managed to go beyond 100 films in the cinema this year, a lot of it helped by my time watching films at SGIFF35 (Recap Part 1, Part 2) and three fantastic director retrospectives at the Asian Film Archive (Lee Chang Dong, Yoshimitsu Morita, Edward Yang).

If you look at how I rated new films from 2024, half the time I find myself disappointed, hoping the films were better (3 stars or less). Every year I resolve to watch fewer new releases and every year I end up watching too many. Not to say that this is a waste of time per se, but there's still so much left to see from the decades before, and I'm hoping to tilt my time more toward the past than the present for 2025.

Top 10 Films from 2024 (so far)

No year end list is complete without a top 10 list, so here's mine (correct as of the end of today, possible shake-ups for Deep Cut's annual year in review coming in March):

1. Look Back

   This is not even a feature film. This 59 minute adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's one-shot is precision machined for me. Best friend cinema, isolation, grief, a desire to make art. Thematically, this film homes right into my soul.

2. No Other Land

   This harrowing documentary is one of the most urgent pieces of media of the year. I hope it gets a wider release wherever.

3. Challengers

   Guadagnino's (second) latest is a shot in the arm for cinema. Great performances, fantastic cinematography, pulsing music. Good fucking fun.

4. A Different Man

   Aaron Schimberg's off-kilter exploration of identity, performance, and ego is nuanced and strange. Creating what I feel is a fresh surreal New York tone that I've not really seen for a while. (Feeling shades of Scorsese's After Hours)

5. Ghostlight

   Always teetering on the edge of over-sentimentality, but threading its nearly twee premise expertly, directors Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson create something affecting, beautiful, and heartwarming. Ranked especially highly for me because I love movies about acting and performance, see A Different Man above as well.

6. A Monk and the Gun

   While my memory of this film has faded somewhat, I remember its perfectly formed screwball bones that prop up its laughs; finding comedy in stacking situations about a monk and a gun. Its Bhutanese setting makes the film feel novel, but its comedic mechanics are universal.

7. An Unfinished Film

   Lou Ye's probably made my favourite Covid film. It's funny how many have become tired watching films set during Covid, but when's the last time the whole world experienced something at the same time like this? I think that thought hopes to forget it happened, but it did happen and we did not come out unscathed, and films like these are needed to help us collectively process it. Even better that it is as life-affirming as An Unfinished Film.

8. Trap

   I'm not a Shyamalan fanboy, but I am here to sing the praises of his tricksy Trap. It's a high wire act to put your villain as your protagonist but Shyamalan plays his game with aplomb, this time making the narrative twist the foundation of his story rather than the final word on it.

9. Conclave

   A late game addition to my top 10, Conclave is pulpy fun. The 12 Angry Men comparison is apt; how do you turn a series of voting and vote-counting into an infectiously engaging affair? Have an all-star cast and catty machinations to power the plot. Takes itself seriously, and still seriously silly: this slaps.

10. Black Box Diaries

    Shiori Ito's personal documentary of her journey bringing the man who raped her to justice feels like essential viewing, just as No Other Land in this list. It captures the journey and its emotional peaks and valleys. Beautifully, Ito finds some joy in the darkness, with her supporters, her allies, her friends, and herself.

Be sure to listen to Deep Cut's 2024 wrap up when it comes out, where some of this list might change as I catch up on some more 2024 releases. Let me know your favourite films from 2024 in the comments below!

Leave a comment

Television

If I have any resolution for next year, it is to watch less television (anime not included, I will explain...). I'm sure we can find the statistics of the relatively massive amount of television produced per year compared to yesteryears, but it seems to be the case that television is not quite worth the time in comparison to betting your time on a film. While there were television series I enjoyed this year, very few feel like essential experiences. There has not been more television being produced than now, and yet it is frequently a choice between "good enough" options rather than the high watermark of the so-called "golden age of prestige television" (the late 0000s and early 2010s) in which time spent following a multi-year series was worth the investment. At the time, there were both fewer options, and it was also easier to sift out incredible work that everyone was tuning into together. I am a little sick of good enough. If the attention economy is here to monopolise our time, we need to fight against the glut of good enough.

TV

I watched around 20 different TV series (anime not included) this year. I won't list them all, but here are some honorable mentions: Evil, Doctor Who's return, We Are Lady Parts, Shogun, Fallout, What We Do In The Shadows.

Of these, I'd like to shout out We Are Lady Parts because season 1 and 2 combined are short, hilarious, excellent, and well worth your time. The others are good, but none feel as essential.

The only series I would like to categorically recommend from last year is the Italian HBO series My Brilliant Friend, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, named after its first novel. The adaptation wrapped up this year, turning 4 books into 4 seasons of epic, intimate television. I frequently mention my Best Friend Cinema Canon list on Letterboxd as I collect different films that feel like exemplars of this genre, and I think this series stands very tall in comparison. Ferrante's story portrays friendship as supportive but contentious, with temperatures ranging from warm to scalding. Over four seasons, Lila and Lenu swing wildly within, around, and into each other's orbits. It's a stunning portrait of a friendship, a town, a country, an era.

Anime

Earlier in October I decided to begin learning Japanese in earnest considering I had a "head start" already knowing how to read basic characters from trying to learn it almost 2 decades ago. After completing a formal basic course, my next steps have been to try to learn the language through daily vocabulary/grammar lessons on my own, and more importantly to "immerse" in "native" content. Considering the amount of anime I am already watching, it feels like a good excuse.

If you'd like some recommendations, here are some bangers released last year: Dan Da Dan, Frieren: Journey's End, Delicious in Dungeon, Oshi No Ko.

Books

This year I rediscovered a love for reading. I read more this year than I think in the last 10 years combined (my tracking is a little spotty in some years however). A lot of them land in the realm of personal development (they’re trashy reads mostly) and business books, but I have also been dosing more fiction into the mix (17 in total). I read a total of 61 books, which feels like an absurdly high number for me considering most of them were read from June onwards. You have more time in the day to read than you think.

A nice graph from Storygraph:

I re-read all of Marilynne Robinson's works, one of my favourite authors, which was rewarding. I find I can visualise her characters and worlds more vividly than before, and I wonder why that is.

Of the new-to-me fiction books I read, I'd like to highlight three:

• Pachinko – Min Jin Lee

  • Probably my favourite book that I read this year, Min Jin Lee's book has epic scope, and manages to turn the story of multiple generations of a family into an examination of Korea's history through the times. It's incredible.

• Stoner – John Williams

  • John Williams is my favourite writer discovery this year and Stoner's prose is elegant and sharp. The mundane academic premise of a man, Stoner, living a life, is told with such clarity that its narrative and emotional power feels undeniable.

• The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

  • Kazuo Ishiguro's classic is told with such period detail in its epistolary form that it feels real. It is a narrative of tremendous stealth, about the lies we tell others and ourselves.

Some non-fiction that felt revelatory this year:

• Quit – Annie Duke

  • Annie Duke's book on learning how to decide to quit effectively is an odd recommendation from someone trying to instill more good habits. By reframing my approach to the idea of quitting, it has been one of the more consequential books I've read. It has changed the way I think about the product of effort, and the ways I intend to spend my time and exert that effort. Everything boils down to the value of time, and being able to see the invisible upside of dropping something completely is a valuable skill.

• Range – David Epstein

  • David Epstein's book makes the argument for generalisation over specialisation. In an exploratory year, it helped to validate my desire to try and learn from a more diverse set of experiences. We all need to try more things, and it is through the amalgamation and confluence of our uniquely diverse experiences where creativity lies.

• Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss

  • Chris Voss' book about hostage negotiation is surprisingly useful when laterally applied to how we relate to and communicate with each other. All relationships are negotiations, and Voss gives a toolset for getting what you want, but also to understand that everyone wants something. On the surface it sounds like a selfish goal to only achieve your end of the negotiation, but Voss lays out tactics that chiefly embrace empathy. What we want tangibly is not always related to how we want to feel.

Video Games

I rolled credits on 18 games this year. I rarely play recent releases and am eternally working through a backlog but here's some fun games I played this year.

• Balatro

  • This game is heroin in videogame form. I quit deliberately before becoming fully addicted. I will never touch it again. While there's no actual gambling involved, Balatro manages to create the sensation of pushing your luck and going for "one more pull" until it's suddenly 3 o'clock in the morning. A pinnacle of "eternal" game design. If Microsoft shipped every computer with it instead of Solitaire, the human race would end. They should.

• Pikmin 4

  • Early in the year I got really into Pikmin for the first time with its latest iteration, Pikmin 4. The concept of "dandori" that girds Pikmin will haunt me forever; a Japanese word that can be roughly translated as "the procedure (for carrying out a plan)". Dandori is life. Dandori your life.

• Neon White

  • This indie masterpiece turns every person into a speedrunner. In every level you attempt to get from start to finish in record time. There are shortcuts, and there are shortcuts. Shaving seconds off for a medal is pure adrenaline.

• Alan Wake II

  • Alan Wake II leans into its Lynchian aesthetics and Remedy creates one of the most unique video game narratives and worlds in recent memory. As a game, it's passable mechanically, but it does utilise the medium to tell its story in a way that is not completely possible in something like television. Ironically, I still hope someone adapts it into a movie or television. It feels like a waste to cloister Remedy's world to the realm of video games.

• Resident Evil 4 (Remake)

  • Like playing an action movie, I understand Resident Evil 4's pedigree now. It's fun to be badass Leon Kennedy roundhouse kicking zombies. It's campy and fun.

• Chants of Sennaar

  • One of the more unique indie games I played this year, in Chants of Sennaar you slowly uncover the meanings behind a series of made-up languages to move from one scenario to another. The game tracks as you learn new words and you figure out the class structure of its inhabitants. Fascinating and novel game design.

• The Case of Golden Idol / The Rise of the Golden Idol

  • I played both of these this year, and they're both available with a Netflix subscription. These are deduction style games with grotesque pixel art in which you solve murders and uncover the mysteries behind the titular Golden Idol. Once I started sherlocking my way through the game, I couldn't stop until I cleared each game.

• Persona 3 Reload

  • I'm still working my way through Persona 3, but decided to tackle it after finding Dungeons of Hinterberg to be an engaging experience (I write about Hinterberg here) While it was difficult to find the time to fully commit to Persona's mammoth length, its day/night social calendar structure is moreish and keeps you engaged with small scenes of narrative. While the writing can be a little video-gamey and direct at times, its explorations of grief from the perspective of multiple characters slowly gets its hooks in you.

Music

Quickly, some 2024 album releases I liked this year:

• brat – Charli XCX (my top spotify artist)

• Charm – Clairo (All of my top 5 songs on Spotify were from this album)

• Chromakopia – Tyler, The Creator

• GNX – Kendrick Lamar

• I Lay Down My Life For You – JPEGMafia

• Dark Times – Vince Staples

• People Who Aren't There Anymore – Future Islands

• Only God Was Above Us – Vampire Weekend

• Imaginal Disk – Magdalena Bay

Not listed above, but I got obsessed with Le Sserafim this year, but anyway…

This Newsletter

I came back to the newsletter hoping to publish writing every two weeks, and on average I did achieve that to a certain extent. Including this one, I wrote 12 articles starting at the end of June, which works out to an average of two a month. I guess it feels obvious to note, but writing is difficult! There’s more time spent waiting for ideas to percolate than it is to actually write the damn things. Because I had set out to specifically not write film reviews, it takes a long time to land on an interesting subject to tackle.

The “What I’ve Been Doing Lately” experiment was a nice diversion to shore up my posting frequency, but ultimately felt a little constricting in being a time-bound structure. I rather let the writing dictate itself. Returning to the newsletter was meant to be a way for me to continue exercising my film analytical muscles, and to record how I approach and think about film. Based purely on my ability to keep up a somewhat regular publishing cadence, I’d categorise this return as a success, and I’m hoping to keep it going. Becoming a “producer” instead of merely a consumer pertaining to film does change how you think, and ultimately is more fulfilling.

What's next for The Kinetoscope?

I'll be away in Japan for about a month starting in January so I'll be taking The Kinetoscope on a short hiatus, unless some inspiration strikes me in Japan. Otherwise, I’ll be picking up things again when I return. I’m expecting to publish a piece every 3 weeks as a new goal, but I’m also expecting 2025 to be a little busier on many fronts.

As a writer, 2024 has been a year of establishing good habits to keep the writing going. Letterboxd has been a good outlet for writing quickly about the films I'm seeing, and it is a subtle art to write the most cogent diaristic paragraph for myself. A new habit I have also been cultivating since August has been "morning pages," as described in The Artist's Way (which I've not read). I spend about 30 minutes each morning free writing the first things that come to mind onto paper and it has been great for staving off writer's block and to start the day in the right tone. I'm going to continue it for 2025. Physical pen and paper writing has also been a great tool I’ve reintroduced to my writing practice.

How do I end this column that’s now 3000+ words long? I have no idea! Thanks for reading, and see you later this year!

If you're looking for more podcast discussion content, do also check out other SGIFF35 coverage from Chapalang Film Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, with Part 3 coming soon. They also have great interviews with film industry folk from Singapore and the region in their other episodes.

Otherwise, here's the rest of what I caught at SGIFF this year, in the order I watched them. Please drop a comment if you agree, disagree, or have your own thoughts about the films. Let me know your best of the fest!

An Unfinished Film - Directed by Lou Ye

Lou Ye's latest was one of my standouts in the festival for releases from the year. I had only previously seen Suzhou River, but was very impressed by its formal inventiveness. An Unfinished Film scratches that same itch, and is essentially a COVID-19 film concerned with the initial quarantine in China.

While experimental in some formal aspects, the film's narrative is straightforward. A film crew trying to finish production on a stalled film from 10 years ago gets stalled again when the pandemic strikes. As the crew try to return home, many are locked into the hotel they are staying at and spend the first few weeks of the lockdown alone in their rooms, but together.

There's frequent use of video call footage and split screen to show how they communicate and find community even as they cannot physically see each other, culminating in a life-affirming montage as they ring in Chinese New Year away from their families. There were plenty of sniffles in the audience, and I think for a mainland Chinese population watching the film, the film will hit hard. However, it's a pity it is banned in China.

While I was expecting some sort of reflexive element in the film, the film is largely played straight. Its experimental narrative beats come from mixing real world phone footage of the days during the lockdown, both the good and the bad. The film's narrative as well as the real footage on display make you realise that relatedness is the most important human desire. It is impossible to be alive and alone. Loneliness and isolation has been exacerbated because of the pandemic, and I think the world is still very slowly waking up from the pandemic.

No Other Land - Directed by Basel Adra & Hamdan Ballal & Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor

There is probably no film more important in the festival than No Other Land. It lays out the crisis affecting the Palestinians living in the West Bank as Israeli settlers and military seize their land, and in so doing, their lives. For many around the world, this conflict only became more openly discussed because of the events of 2023, but for Basel and his village, the encroachment on their land has been happening for decades.

Under the guise of building a military training zone (itself a poor excuse), Israeli forces forcibly displace the Palestinians living on their rightful land in the West Bank with guns, vehicles, and the destruction of sources of food, water, and shelter. It was horrifying to watch the footage that Basel and team have collated here, and it makes clear the imbalance of power and human rights between the Palestinian villagers and Israeli settlers hoping to eradicate them.

This should have a wider release. It is essential viewing.

Việt and Nam - Directed by Truong Minh Quy

I had a difficult time accessing Truong Minh Quy's Viet and Nam, which I found to be obtuse in its intentions and fairly monotonous in its storytelling style. I am finding it difficult to succinctly express my thoughts on this in writing, so I'd like to point readers to the podcast episode where I do talk about this at length!

In Conversation: Jafar Panahi

It was an immense privilege to see Jafar Panahi in person for a little conversation. I won't try to summarise what was discussed, but my main takeaway is that we need to break more rules when it comes to filmmaking, whether cinematic or legal. I've been thinking a lot about my relationship with filmmaking, about what subjects will "choose me" and whether I can find something that feels impossible to not do. It's inspiring to hear how Panahi's urge to create films is not at all dampened by the restrictions he is placed under, and is probably strengthened considering his social realist approach to filmmaking.

However, it was a bit of a shame to hear multiple questions fielded about Panahi's predecessor Abbas Kiarostami when Panahi himself is already a legend in his own right. It felt a little disrespectful to Panahi's legacy to keep tying his work to another filmmaker's when we are here trying to celebrate his life's work.

Also, please stop using AI-powered subtitles for foreign language Q&As. It's inhuman, and hurts clarity of understanding. Glad that Panahi and the audience rebelled against it halfway through when it was clear it was unable to translate what was being said into intelligible English.

HAPPYEND - Directed by Neo Sora

Neo Sora's narrative debut turned out to be far simpler than its premise made it out to be. Its near-future dystopian surveillance setting, complete with impending earthquake, seemed to point toward something more political and angry, but it is largely a film about the dissolution of a friendship. Kou and Yuta are best friends from young, but as Kou begins to become drawn to protesting increased surveillance and racism, and Yuta remains obsessed with music, their friendship and extended friend group begin to pull apart as high school comes to an end.

I especially liked the way their rift is created through the establishing of a situation, where each member of the friend group is somehow pulled away. It’s impressive how we mostly understand how Kou and Yuta change their perspectives on each other through reaction shots and facial expressions rather than dialogue. We come to understand their viewpoint because of how they are characterised and are able to project their interior states based on the evolving situation.

There’s really delicate and subtle work from both a writing and acting standpoint that makes their collective friendship feel particularly believable. The film is well acted across the board, with frequent moments of humour and levity that keep the film light and fun, appropriate for a film set in high school. It is also particularly well shot, with influences from Edward Yang and Hou-Hsiao Hsien, and the soundtrack by Lia Ouyang Rusli is also a highlight. A very strong narrative debut!

Time To Be Strong - Directed by Namkoong Sun

I did not have many expectations going into Namkoong Sun's Time to Be Strong, only going in because of a new interest in K-pop this year, and was surprised by how much I was taken by it. This film about three retired K-pop idols retreating to Jeju Island to figure out the next phase of their lives was the only film of the festival to make my eyes water; go figure.

I think the three leads put in authentic, lived-in performances, and the sadness that envelopes them is palpable from the first frame, even before you come to understand the details behind their ennui. There's a Linklater-esque hangout nature to the film as they find fun and work within Jeju island, and their interactions with the locals help them to understand their own experiences from a secondary perspective. The little kindnesses they receive are especially heart-warming, and the ways in which the central three lean on each other and also irritate each other felt well considered. Even with its sad streak, the film is also frequently light-hearted and funny which is a nice counterpoint to their collective depression.

It was also a good reminder that films about something as far-flung from ordinary experience as being a K-pop idol can still be transmuted into something relatable through the medium of film. Films are empathy machines, and humans are built to empathise.

Crimson Gold - Directed by Jafar Panahi

Crimson Gold begins in arresting fashion with the main character Hussein, a pizza delivery man, robbing a jewellery store, before flashing back to show the events leading up to his drastic action. Primarily, the film uses that opening as a catalyst to show the class inequalities that Hussein observes in his work and daily life, and approaches a sort of "justification" for Hussein's motivations behind his burst of violence.

It presents Hussein's delivery travels and preparations for engagement in episodic fashion to articulate a sense of the class structure in Tehran. Hussein is afforded no attention at the jewellery store when purchasing a ring, and when he delivers to rich apartments, he becomes observer to lives he cannot expect to have. While Panahi's point of view is crystalline, there's a languid nature to the plot, with extended dialogue scenes, that might be trying for some viewers, as it was for me after a general lack of sleep during the festival.

Familiar Touch - Directed by Sarah Friedland

Sarah Friedland's narrative debut is a simple but assured one, telling the story of an octogenarian coping with a transition to assisted living as she struggles with memory loss from dementia. Friedland affords a lot of dignity to her main character, played by Kathleen Chalfant, and there's a real sense of grace in the way she directs and tells this story. While the film is a little too placid for me, I think it is in line with Friedland's own experiences in elder care and is deliberately avoiding stylistic sensationalism of dementia narratives like in The Father. The film is intimately observational, and it also shows the light touch that the caregivers must have with those requiring “memory care”, as their realities can quickly shift from one day to the next.

It was also a breath of fresh air during the Q&A segment with Friedland, when the audience took turns sharing stories of caregiving from different countries. We heard about the nature of and public perception of elder caregiving in Singapore, the Philippines, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Indonesia (and even caregiving in Japan done by workers from Indonesia). The audience clearly had a different makeup from the typical film festival audience that was drawn to the subject of Friedland's film. It was a good reminder that films show stories and in doing so, create conversation and sometimes social change.

Friedland also shared that in the pre-production process they taught a filmmaking course with the residents of the assisted living facility they filmed at, and then had those residents also work on the film in the cast and crew. A wonderful idea of intergenerational creative collaboration, that shows we can produce art that works with the subjects of the film in new ways.

The Circle - Directed by Jafar Panahi

In comparison with Crimson Gold, The Circle feels much sharper in its social commentary and stylistic construction. In episodic fashion, the film follows various women, many “ex-prisoners”, some recently escaped from prison, as they deal with the ways that women's lives are oppressed in modern Iran. The issues Panahi raises cut across many domains, whether marriage, abortion, parenthood, freedom, or labour, and many point toward the subjugation of women under the dominant patriarchy of Iran. There are also many subtle stylistic flourishes and motifs that equate women's existence in Iran as one of “imprisonment”, further driving home their lack of agency. The writing is also masterful, linking these episodes together effortlessly as these women cross paths throughout the film, and Panahi quickly immerses us into a new character’s struggle each time.

Wish this and Crimson Gold could have been in better quality for the screenings however; both seemed to be in DVD quality.

The film was also followed by a quick Q&A with Panahi, in which my main takeaway is him saying “self censorship is worse than censorship” and I couldn't agree more. It feels especially salient in Singapore in which staying within explicit and implicit OB markers is par for the course.

April - Directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili

I had not initially intended to see Kulumbegashvili's April for fear that it would slide easily alongside other “miserabilist” fare from its region, but was convinced to give it a shot. The film concerns Nina, an OB-GYN at a hospital that also does illegal abortions in the countryside. Largely a character study, it has small flights toward the fantastical, to paint Nina's psychological interiority as she copes with her seeming duty toward providing this essential service and her own debilitating loneliness.

The film has a few interludes in which Nina imagines herself as a sort of monster, naked with sagging skinfolds all over her body, but these images are largely unexplained and left up to viewer interpretation. There are also frequent digressions where we are shown extended takes of portentous landscapes that I believe serve to heighten the sense of dread. While these are interesting elements in and of themselves, they do feel somewhat tiresome and feel like unnecessary additions to what I think is a worthy story at its core. Of course, this is just my own personal taste, and I know of many who seem to get a lot out of the film and its austere beauty.

Late in the film, Nina's supervisor explains to her that “sometimes the laws do not follow what we think is moral,” which dovetails nicely with an idea that has been knocking around my head due to the confluence of the festival's programming: “legality is not the same as morality.” Laws are merely tools to enforce social order, and order is not intrinsically moral. Especially in Singapore where social order is highly prioritized, sometimes that can be a huge hurdle to the production of artistic work. However, as Osama Mohammed, Lou Ye, Daniel Hui, Truong Minh Quy, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, and Jafar Panahi are testament to: don't let that stop you.1

Leave a comment

Final Thoughts

The Youth Critic's Programme, which I was a part of during the 2022 edition of the festival (my essay here), was not part of the festival this year which feels like a shame. While there are not many avenues for film criticism or writing as a career in Singapore, the programme at least afforded a chance for a few to experience writing film criticism during the hubbub of a festival in a structured manner. Consider SGIFF's supposed goal to “offer an alternative to junk food”, you need writing about films to critically contend with SGIFF's programming slate. While the Cinephile pass seems to be this year's answer, something more formal alongside can actively encourage people to discuss the films (whether recorded in writing or not) and can help to form community.

Also, to be honest, short form content about films does itself feel like a sort of junk-foodification of film criticism, but, from a marketing perspective, is maybe a necessary evil (see: Deep Cut also producing reels…check out our TikTok at deepcutpod_film). Outside the festival, I think there's a lot we can do to build out Singapore's own cinema culture. If you're at all interested in something in this vein, do drop me a line.

Share The Kinetoscope

In the order that I watched them:

Stranger Eyes - directed by Yeo Siew Hua

The festival opened with Yeo Siew Hua's follow-up to his Golden Leopard winning A Land Imagined, Stranger Eyes. Featuring a familiar plot structure from his previous entry with distinct perspective shifts, Stranger Eyes concerns a young couple searching for their kidnapped daughter as a strange man (played by Screen Icon Award recipient Lee Kang-sheng) observing them begins to reveal himself. Lee Kang-sheng's involvement is a highlight, and he still lights up the screen. Even in scenes where he is just sitting on a park bench, he can imbue it with a cinematic strangeness that is compelling to watch.

Thematically, director Yeo has a lot on his mind regarding the pervasive surveillance culture within Singapore, both imposed by the state, as well as the organic social surveillance we practice as we observe each other among stacked apartments and crowded malls. The film's thesis presumes an intrinsic suspicion of our neighbours, to suspect ill intent from innocent gestures and how we project upon others to turn ourselves into the heroes of our own stories.

The film plays like an arthouse riff on Rear Window, with telephoto lenses observing from across apartment blocks. The film is at its best when scenes remain wordless observations of characters tailing each other. I enjoyed the depiction of quotidian public spaces like malls and playgrounds that remained unembellished and distinctly bland Singapore, even if they can be at odds with the more stylistically heightened sections.

The film remains a largely unemotional affair despite the horror of a kidnapped child, preferring to engage with the ways the two male leads become obsessed with each other. Unfortunately, I think that emotional quality is necessary to increase the stakes of the situation. Without the threat of tragedy, the film comes across as a formal exercise with only a cursory engagement with its themes of surveillance.

From a narrative structure perspective, there's an inelegance to the way the film is built, especially when Xenia Tan's supporting character finally appears in the film's final quarter. However, despite its unbalancing of the film's shape, her character's arc introduces a dimension of compassion that had not been explored previously. It suggests the possibility that our constant looking over each other can manifest as an act of love. Even if it does not work completely, I think it's commendable how Yeo moves us into completely new territory when it seemed he had already exhausted what he wanted to say.

All Shall Be Well - Directed by Ray Yeung

Ray Yeung's follow-up to 2019's Suk Suk was quite a surprise for me. In All Shall Be Well, Pat and Angie, an older lesbian couple in a loving relationship, seem to have been largely accepted by their respective families. When Pat passes away suddenly without a will, Pat's family begins to eye their legally entitled inheritance from Pat's death, and Angie has to wrest control over Pat's death rites and the apartment that's rightfully hers.

While the film's setup seems to lay out a typically melodramatic plot, Yeung practices immense restraint with his subject material, inspired by true stories, and chooses instead to present the situation quite plainly, showing an approach that is both mature and intelligent.

I went into the film hoping for a sweeping emotional experience, and Yeung presents something completely different to what I expected, crafting a story that is sober and pragmatic. Scenes are presented simply, with simple fade outs to close out scenes. Angie is consistently met with tiny injustices from Pat's family, and yet she largely maintains composure, making decisions that honour Pat without disturbing the hornet's nest. While part of me still wishes it had greater immediate emotional impact, I think any effort toward grand catharsis might have cheapened Yeung's intentions here.

The writing has further details that elevate itself. Characters routinely refer to Angie as "Pat's best friend" rather than romantic life partner and for nearly the entire film we never hear anyone refer to Angie as Pat's lover or partner. The only time this pattern is broken is in a late reveal of Pat's will wherein Angie is referred to as her life partner. This unspoken relationship, only manifesting in this elusive legal document operates as a subtle surprise that affirms their relationship while most of the film has strategically elided defining it in concrete terms. The film may not be the cryfest I was hoping for, but for people who have had experiences close to what Pat and Angie have, the film will surely ring true.

Don't Cry Butterfly - Directed by Linh Duong

Linh Duong's debut feature Don't Cry Butterfly showed promise with its turn towards the mystical and spiritual. In it, Tam deals with the discovery of her husband's infidelity by approaching a spiritual “master” and her daughter dreams of studying abroad. I appreciated that Duong imbues the film with humour, and utilises a diverse colour palette that lightens the tone of the film, which feels rare in contemporary Southeast Asian cinema these days. There's a great gag of policemen needing to meet their "suicide saving quotas" and mistaking the main character as a woman on the brink because she's standing on a bridge.

There are nice details in the film's tiny world building, like Tam's job as a wedding planner, but I find that the film relies too heavily on its surreal and mystical elements to engage, without building actual dramatic arcs for its characters. Mother and daughter's plots feel distinctly unrelated, and despite their blood relation their relationship is neither explored or juxtaposed in a way that points toward any grander purpose of its investigation into its themes of womanhood in Vietnam.

Universal Language - Directed by Matthew Rankin

Matthew Rankin's Universal Language was a confounding affair which I was not quite sure how to approach. The director himself appears in the film playing a character named Matthew Rankin in Winnipeg, Canada looking for his mother, as two young children look for a way to retrieve a cash note encased in ice. The film presents Winnipeg as if it were Tehran as a sort of homage to Iranian cinema, with characters largely speaking in Farsi and the landscapes rendered flat and beige.

The film makes direct references to Iranian cinema, with a shot of a car descending a multi-story carpark looking very reminiscent of a similar one in (I think) Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, where a car descends down the winding path of a hill. There's an off-kilter charm to the film's comedy, with odd characters like the world's most boring tour guide bringing tourist's around Winnipeg's mundane sights, and kids exasperated by adults looking to establish their authority.

There seems to be a personal bent to the film's emotional core that feels impossible to access without knowing Rankin personally which I think makes the film feel a little distant, like a game that Rankin plays that we do not know the rules of. Then again, a lot of famous Iranian cinema has also had self-reflexive bent, so it could be Rankin playing into those tropes as part of his homage. However, the obtuse nature of his approach and in presenting Winnipeg as specifically Iranian, he flips the power of the best Iranian cinema: the ability to make their specific stories in Iran somehow feel like the rest of the world.

La Cocina - Directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios

I had high expectations for Alonso Ruizpalacios' La Cocina having read some comparisons with The Bear. Having seen the film, I think those comparisons matched setting on a superficial level but not tone. While The Bear similarly depicts a high tension kitchen with frequent arguments and flared tensions, it has an underlying degree of tenderness among its characters that keep the kitchen and relationships afloat. La Cocina, however, has an insufferable character at its centre, with very little to redeem him even if the film tries to make him sympathetic with his dreams of becoming a naturalised US citizen. Raúl Briones' Pedro is frequently mean to everyone: peers, superiors and his lover played by Rooney Mara. He wants but rarely does he give. While I have loved films with horrible main characters, Pedro's construction as a character gives you very little to align with, whether from a goal perspective (understanding what he wants and how tries to get it) or an experiential one (enjoying his badness).

The film is based on Albert Wesker's 1957 play The Kitchen, which I know next to nothing about, so can only judge it based solely on the film itself. It does have impressive sequences, with a central set piece where the kitchen floods with cherry coke, but it is in service of very little narrative purpose. Without any characters to root for, the chaos of that scene feels feckless and further appeals to audience sympathy are also fairly ineffective. Oddly, the film begins with Anna Díaz's Estela coming to the restaurant for work as an underaged undocumented worker but her arc goes nowhere, immediately subsumed into Pedro's journey to make everyone hate him. The film postures toward being thematically about undocumented migrants or working class concerns, but seems too busy trying to impress you with bravura sequences or fits of crude vulgarity to say anything at all.

Stars in Broad Daylight - Directed by Ossama Mohammed

I had never heard of Ossama Mohammed or his films prior to the festival, and am glad to be introduced to him and his work through the festival's Landmark programme. Mohammed's feature debut, Stars in Broad Daylight, was banned from public screening in Syria and he now lives in exile in France.

Mohammed was in town for the Q&A for the screening which gave the necessary context to help parse the film. I am not the right person to appropriately analyse the film which is an allegory for Syria's totalitarian regime through the realm of family and marriage. The brother of the family, Abbas, hopes to control his family through marrying his sister off to the right cousin, ignoring any of her true desires. Even as she resists his patriarchal power, Abbas enlists family to further his subjugation of her autonomy, while secretly keeping tabs on his entire family through the telephone operator job that he has. Abbas is an obvious stand-in for the secret police, except in this film his domain is the family.

Mohammed's image making is metaphorical, with frequent maps of Syria in the mise-en-scene and a marriage scene being played live on television screens like a national broadcast as Abbas and co-conspirators flaunt their patriotism. There's also frequent playful deployment of mirrors to expand the space, and these can sometimes function metaphorically as well. As Mohammed explains, in one scene the mirror sits high in the frame like a framed picture of a president high on a wall, as the power dynamics shift in the scene, the individual framed in that mirror changes to reflect shifting control.

To think that this is Mohammed's first feature from way back when, supported by a remarkably casted troupe of first-time actors, is astounding considering its density of ideas and ability to match image to message. Mohammed watched his film again with us for the screening, and you can tell he still pines for his home in Damascus where he shot it. It's an immense pity he will never be able to return. Sometimes, the more you love a country, the more it will want you out.

Vive l'amour - Directed by Tsai Ming-liang

The Vive l'amour screening was introduced by its stars Yang Kuei-mei and Lee Kang-sheng which was an unexpected highlight. I wasn't able to attend their In Conversation event, but I heard it was very entertaining, with the two balancing each other's energies very well. This year is the 30th anniversary of Tsai Ming-liang's arthouse classic, and it was a real treat watching it with an audience that resonated with it.

I had completely forgotten that I had seen it 6 years prior and it felt like an entirely new experience. Tsai has always been a difficult filmmaker for me to engage with due to his style's inherent slowness but I now think Vive l'amour is his most accessible work. It is consistently engaging despite its lack of dialogue because at every turn you either know what a character is trying to do, or are trying to figure it out. Revisiting a film always has a chance for a reassessment, and I came away this time completely spellbound. I've loved seeing how my tastes have evolved over the past decade.

Despite being a portrait of urban loneliness and ending with Yang Kuei-mei's famous crying scene, it exudes immense warmth. The unexpected friendship between Lee Kang-sheng and Chen Chao-jung's characters is a highlight; a display of how quickly suspicion and animosity can soften and turn into a warm meal around a hot pot.

By the Stream - Directed by Hong Sang-soo

New Hong Sang-soo always merits a watch because, even despite his prodigious output, he finds new ways to innovate and experiment within his carved out niche. The Kim Min-hee starring By the Stream is a light comedic affair, as they all are, and concerns a skit being performed by students at a women's arts school and the surrounding drama around this seemingly tiny and inconsequential performance.

There's a political reading of this that I was clued into by Emerson Goo's very detailed review here which completely went over my head watching it. In a way it forms a nice complement to Stars in Broad Daylight in the way it uses allegory to make a political point. Hong's approach however, is exceedingly light, side-tracked pleasantly by minor romantic entanglements and conflicts. There are fun scenes here, but I did wish he was sharper with his intent this time round. Watching Hong's films have always felt like a narrative game where the audience must figure out the elusive story underlying Hong's simple plots. However, in this one, figuring out the possibly metaphorical intent does not feel quite so satisfying.

On a separate note, it is always a joy to see Kim Min-hee again, even if it's only in Hong films. Her performances are always so immediate and empathetic, and she plays anger in a way that feels mercurial and endearing. I'm also enjoying the continued presence of recent Hong regular Ha Seong-guk who plays the student director three-timing three of the students in the skit with an insecure pompousness that's a delight to ridicule.

Don't You Let Me Go - Directed by Leticia Gorge & Ana Guevara

I have been collecting films to add to my Best Friend Cinema Canon list for a while now and was hoping that Leticia Gorge and Ana Guevara's film might be a worthy addition. It presents a flashback to an idyllic autumn between best friends Adela and Elena, before Elena's untimely passing. Opening with Elena's funeral and then whisking Adela to the past, the film is chock full of playful banter and idealised friendship.

However, I long realised that the best Best Friend Cinema requires some level of conflict between its central pair. With Elena's passing, Adela's remembrance of her friend is of pure love and admiration, and is lacking any friction. Without any measure of interpersonal conflict, the relationship depicted in this film instead feels hollow and untested. It is only with the rough edges that true friendship takes shape; without the bad, how can the good be perceived?

The Shrouds - Directed by David Cronenberg

It is always exciting to see new work from David Cronenberg, one of our greatest warriors of freak cinema. Eli previously saw it at NYFF and covered it on our podcast and was unfortunately underwhelmed, and I came away feeling similarly. In The Shrouds, after the overwhelming grief of his wife's death, Karsh invents GraveTech, which allows one to watch the bodies of your loved ones decomposing in their graves. There are promising diversions into Cronenberg's exploration of new technology, and I'm still impressed by Cronenberg's ability to come up with fresh, specific, and somehow believable sci-fi contexts with a strong technological bent.

However, Cronenberg strays too far from his roots of body horror, finding himself (literally, Karsh is a clear stand-in for Cronenberg) in stilted scenes of unnecessary extended exposition. There's too much world building here without any emotional release or visceral catharsis, and it is frankly a bore. The performances are also extremely stiff, maybe intentionally so, as if every character were a walking and talking corpse.

Notes

• It’s been quite nice chatting with old and new friends during the festival, which I mostly missed last year. I think the nature of having the theatres all spread out is that there is not really a natural or central place to congregate except when outside the theatres. Discussing films while in the rush queue / outside theatres after films have ended has been quite fruitful, and they do make the viewing experience more social and meaningful. I’m wondering how we can cultivate a culture like this outside the festival setting.

• Anyway, that's all for the first half of my festival watches, up to Tuesday. There'll be another piece like this after the end of the festival to cover the second half. I'll also be chatting about all the films I caught with Wilson and Eli on Deep Cut, stay tuned!

• Also, films I’ve seen since Tuesday: An Unfinished Film (I got turned away at the first screening, and missed the Q&A!); No Other Land; Viet and Nam

• Remaining films I’m planning to see: Happyend; Time To Be Strong; The Circle; This Is Not a Film

Leave a comment

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest sits on the line of this tricky balance, with Glazer and team approaching its portrayal of the Auschwitz death camp and its Commandant with a deliberately arthouse approach, attempting to treat the material with as little sensationalism as possible. However, while Glazer’s film employs dissonance for audience effect, the effect of its stylistic choices are fundamentally discordant with its postured intentions. It is a film at odds with itself: pretending to tread lightly when it does not; projecting intellectualism when it has nothing new to say. 

As presented, The Zone of Interest is detached and unemotional. Its chief function is to depict the Commandant and his family as a seemingly regular family who happen to be living next to and also responsible for the taking of human lives. Sandra Hüller's character barely regards what happens beyond her backyard walls, which are actually the walls to Auschwitz. She is more concerned with the beauty of her garden, while her husband considers better operational procedures for mass murder in the living room. 

We know all of this from the synopsis of the film, pulled from Letterboxd:

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.

For me, filmgoing tends to be an affair of looking for an emotional experience. While the film’s approach is detached, its emotional response comes from a precise dissonance rather than from the construction of an emotional arc or narrative. We know of the horrors within the camp’s walls. The film alludes to them and is dependent on your knowledge of the Holocaust to imagine horrors beyond the walls. However, what does the film achieve in its existence and specific construction that the knowledge of its context does not already achieve on its own?

While the film is effective in its supposed chief purpose to unsettle, especially with its use of sound design, there are stylistic choices here that have me questioning the film's approach to the material. These questions primarily stem from the gulf between the film's actual effect on me as compared to what Glazer has intended. 

Inverted vision and intention

One recurring stylistic device is the use of thermal cameras to show a Polish girl leaving food for the prisoners in their work sites. Glazer explains the use of the thermal camera in a Vanity Fair interview which you can read an excerpt of here. Glazer makes repeated mentions of how he wants to present the film in “the present tense” with 21st century equipment, as plainly and starkly as possible. Conceptually speaking, capturing these sequences without lighting is as realistic as possible a situation to film, however presenting them as thermal signatures is as far from realistic as we can see it with our own eyes. 

These are alien sequences, and as much as I want to read into the Polish girl as a sort of “light in the darkness”, the immediate sensorial experience is more disconcerting than inspiring. There’s an otherworldliness to her depiction which is in contrast to the banal evil we see. As a piece of the whole, it is a discombobulating stylistic choice. What does it mean to have her presence be the off-putting while presenting the life of the Hoss’ as mundane? I think this disconnect is telling, because it shows that Glazer is more interested in his act of capturing rather than the audience's act of seeing. Films are primarily made to be seen. 

This is on top of the fact that, as a technological device, it is anachronistic of the time. It is the present tense of today, not the present tense of yesterday. While I know he is trying to draw a throughline to the present tense of today conceptually speaking; i.e. the horrors of today echo the horrors of yesterday, etc– this is not an argument that is necessarily in the text of the film. 

Sound and the approximation of reality

I find this idea of “presenting things in the present tense” does not align with quite a number of the tools that Glazer uses in his film: basic cinematic language he utilises that interrupt his approach to crafting the film as if it were filmed reality.  

In the sound department, you have voiceovers, and phone calls playing out over other action instead of the people on the phone themselves. These are specifically not filmed reality. In one scene, we hear the Commandant's voice on the phone with his wife while watching him look over a party that he is bored by, the subject of his phone call. We are entering a subjective reality here, both experiencing an event (the phone call) and observing what it is referencing at the same time (the party). This is not the camera capturing events as it unfolds. It is a storytelling device, used to juxtaposed disparate elements in a way that only cinema can. These choices subtly heighten the story of the Commandant and his wife, bringing us away from reality towards cinematic storytelling, an approach that tends towards character alignment. Glazer's supposedly objective presentation of events becomes a subjective one, from the perspective of the Commandant. While such sonic devices are not inherently wrong per se, they interrupt the stylistic patterning of the film (supposed objectivity) in a manner that does not feel tuned to any specific purpose. 

I think the one aspect that we can easily applaud The Zone of Interest for is its sound design and mix. It is eerie, strange, and effective in crafting a mood of disturbing dread. It is also telling that this is the least flashy of the devices employed by Glazer and his team, and it is also one of the most fundamental elements of filmmaking. There are few gimmicks here aside from being a well honed combination of sonic elements. A low hum that pervades the whole film, alluding to the constant whir of the machinery of death next door. Sudden sharp screams and wails that pierce the sonic fabric to suggest singular deaths among a countless many. 

While there's obviously no need for sound design to be literally real, it is itself an exercise in approximating objective and emotional reality. These soundscapes are equally crafted to create an emotional reality based on what you might be able to hear. Devices like voiceovers do not approximate reality, they are specifically used to give a subjective experience, creating an emotional reality from what you would not be able to hear. It feels like splitting hairs to make these distinctions, but we are so used to the basic building blocks of the moving image accompanied by sound that these effects bypass logical processing; we feel these things without knowing it. 

Thomas Flight has a great video breaking down the sound design of the film, and how it is both an invisible but perceptible element of the film: we feel like the film is somehow different from a typical one. The sounds feel more grounded, more rooted in reality, at least relative to our experience watching other films. The sounds are not real, but they give the impression of reality. 

Avoiding the “artifice of cinema”

Another approach that Glazer employs to “avoid the artifice of cinema” is to shoot the house with cameras embedded in the set and “no film lighting” so that the actors can embody these characters within a more realistic environment. Take a look at this behind the scenes featurette:

 Creating a believable home, more so than a typical set, is merely a means to aid performance and it is impossible to gauge the effectiveness of those means aside from the quality of the outcome (i.e. the performance itself) and that relationship is not necessarily causal. An actor’s craft is an internal one, and a director’s job is to craft a suitable environment for the actor to create believable imagined realities within themselves such that their outward performance approximates reality. However, many actors have turned in immensely believable performances in typical or perhaps even more challenging acting scenarios. 

If Glazer’s intention is to present his manufactured reality as a very close approximation of a true one, is that something we can perceive as the audience without the knowledge of the film’s intention? On the visual front, the noteworthy cinematic choice is that many shots are perpendicular to a wall, as a result of cameras being bolted to walls around the home. The consequence of this stylistic choice is a rigid display of home life, turning interior spaces into boxy showrooms. 

However, this depiction of mundane family life still utilises cuts as we are articulated throughout the house’s rooms and gardens. With the use of cuts between rooms, it is difficult to ascertain the utility of all these behind the camera machinations. Even with the oddities of its schematic depiction of events, the film still operates like any other movie with frequent cuts around the home. It does not feel more real than any other film. No matter how well Sandra Hüller plays Hedwig Höss, we rationally know she is playing a part on a set, but we wilfully and automatically suspend our disbelief for the sake of receiving a story: it’s what our brains are inclined to do. That is to say, The Zone of Interest approximates reality just as well as any other film, to purport it does it to a more significant extent due to some elaborate method of cinematic craft that is invisible to the audience feels like marketing. 

All films are artificial. The entire point of the craft (and this applies to documentary and reality television as well) is to blur the boundaries between artifice and reality, so that you believe what’s happening in front of you emotionally. You know what you’re looking at is not real. You know Glazer did not film the real Höss family. 

If the film's chief purpose to present an objective reality crumbles, does it actually achieve anything else? There's nothing wrong with the use of these devices in any case, but it puts into relief the glaring lack of purpose in approaching the film in this way when making it. Why go to all the trouble to ape reality when you're going to cut and sound design in a way that bends reality anyway?

The future is present, the present is past

Late in the film, Glazer cuts abruptly from Rudolf wandering a deserted hallway to, finally, the inside of the death camp, except now in the present. We watch as staff clean and prepare the site for visitors. The exhibits show the remnants of the many who have died there: shoes, crutches, clothes, and the like. This cut into present “documentary reality” further puts what we have seen before into the realm of artifice, a drastic act of de-immersion jolting the viewer into the present, after spending an hour and a half intending to present the past as present. I can only guess at Glazer’s intentions at this choice. Maybe it is to remind us of the actual atrocities the Höss’ family was both responsible and literally next to despite the near quotidian hour and a half that precedes this cut. 

However, so disturbing is this consequence that the cut travels back in time to cause Rudolf’s stomach in the past to churn and his throat to choke on the horror of his work. In doing so, does this not also in effect redeem Rudolf a tiny bit? That even he can feel the moral weight of his work, when Glazer’s whole intention has been to present this evil as mundane? It is a confounding contradiction of intention. 

There's a fundamental rift between Glazer's intentions and his film's effect on an audience. So many of the film's choices and marketing come through as “dressing” to marshal it as an “important” arthouse film with a fresh approach to the Holocaust film. However, the fact is that the film is not saying anything new about the Holocaust at all. It merely uses it as a site for stylistic experimentation. These moments that mess with the continuity and contiguity of time and space are relatively novel to the film's stylistic patterning and they disturb Glazer’s intentions of objective reality. The result is that it feels as if he has constructed an elaborate Nazi dollhouse, and he is playing with it. 

Notes

• For an eloquent deconstruction of the film, read Richard Brody’s review on The New Yorker.

• Oddly relevant, Deep Cut just released an episode discussing one of the all-time best movies, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, and there’s a section where we discuss the artificiality of cuts, and how being “anti-cut” helps to approximate reality. A cut always creates a moment of artifice. 

• It's been more than a month since my last piece, but hopefully I can pick up the pace again. There's a lot of movies to watch in November and December with the current Edward Yang retrospective happening at the Asian Film Archive, and the upcoming Singapore International Film Festival which I'll be covering in some capacity.

• Tr*mp just got his second term in The White House. It feels ironic to be writing about Nazis this week, when a new era of fascism continues to turn its gears. It hurts.

The film concerns Umi and Xiao (played by Umi Ishihara and Xiao Deng) who are librarians working in a small and largely deserted university library. Most of the film is set at night after opening hours as Xiao puts books back on shelves and Umi vacuums. Or rather, that's how I'd most plainly describe it on its surface because this is actually a film about visual and linguistic rhyme and recurrence. Umi and Xiao narrate the going-ons within the library and the wandering thoughts in their minds as the film glides and cuts across the library and its contents; aisles and carrels and shelves and books and pages and words. 

The film is constantly delightful as it plays with language and image in meandering fashion. Early on in the film, there is a fun sequence where Umi talks about the criss-crossing in the letter X in Xiao's name, followed by a montage of rhythmically cut criss-crossing aisles in the library from her point of view, and then glancing upwards towards the the diagonal patterns of the overhead fluorescent lights. There’s a gently pleasant surprise to the film’s explorations of visual and aural recurrences and rhyme, constantly provoking with tiny diversions, and having fun in the elements of the library amidst the tedium of bookkeeping and cleaning. There are visual jokes here that remind me of How to with John Wilson, where lines of narration are punctuated with little punchlines delivered by a sudden cut to a word, or a book, or a thing, or an action: like a tiny gust of wind (blew) moving a strip of paper, rhyming with the word “blue”. 

For this film, the library is its chief world, a world that contains worlds. Even in its network of aisles and carrels and shelves, Lam’s chief focus is the relationship between Xiao and Umi, two people who have found themselves orbiting each other in the library’s Dewey Decimal system. As Lam plays with words and develops the ways in which these two women think and feel about each other, she builds to the climactic reveal of Xiao's gift to Umi when she finally turns 21. It's simple, precious, and joyful, I hope you can find a way to experience it.

There are sequences where Lam will cut rapidly through pictures in books, like a sequence on the universe quickly cutting through many pictorial references of planets from textbooks and encyclopaedias. The rapid cuts barely give you enough time to process the series of images, except to know the subjects presented, like flipping quickly through interleaved pages from different books. There are many such sequences, suggesting the vast amount of knowledge, and the extent of other worlds that are contained in these books, but Lam does not linger on them. She does not give you a chance to focus on these tangents. The library is the universe. Umi and Xiao are its planets, and the books are their moons.

On the linguistic front, Lam delights in the voiceovers where Umi and Xiao turn words over in their voices, realising their multiple meanings. In fact, “turn” is one of those words, where they dance around the many ways we may turn a corner, or turn a page, or turn an age, before we are hit with the non-sequitur visual punchline of images of Saturn and book return slips. 

Which in turn, reminds me of the concept of a “Saturn return”. If you have at least a vague interest in astrology, you may have learnt that the year of your Saturn return is a pivotal moment of change in your personal timeline. It is the year Saturn makes a full orbit around the Sun since your birth, which takes 29 years. Of course, even without any bearing from astrology, the year on the cusp of your 30s is definitely one of major significance. A temporal site ripe for major life changes or reinvention. I'm guessing that moment has passed for both actresses and their director during the 10-year long gestation of this film, which means it has somehow also become a marker of their personal histories, a time capsule of their befores in contrast to the nows they currently live.

What fascinates me about the film and the meta narrative around its making is that it is a film made by three people seeking clarity about their future, and now those same three people look on the finality of its completion as a piece of the past. It’s a film that is wistful about the future instead of the past, embellished with the nostalgia for personal history, and the yearning for physical spaces, physical books, physical film. I guess, invariably, all art ends up being about the past, no matter their subject matter. Actors age, ideas evolve, circumstances change, the universe keeps expanding. Art about the future can only be made by elements of the past. Films are time machines that only go backwards. 

During the Q&A, Umi talks about how the film captured her boredom in her youth, a feeling she now misses as an adult. There’s a sort of precociousness to the speech in the voiceovers, of playful thinking, of aimlessness. There are moments of elongated time and restlessness in this film that translate to the viewing experience, forcing you to shift and stir in your seat, wondering where Lam and co are going with it all. I imagine it can be a difficult movie for some to sit through. In recent months, I have been thinking a lot about how drastic the world has shifted in the last decade, both personally and globally; how we can no longer afford the time for stillness and boredom. 

Lam laments a little the digitalisation of physical libraries in this interview, and I also personally feel a nostalgia for the analogue nature of both books and the libraries themselves. I have found myself leaning towards e-books for their convenience, but there is some charm in the wear and tear of a book that has passed through dozens of pairs of hands. Even better still, a book that needs to be stamped and checked out by a librarian, a process that increases friction in transaction, but induces the static of pleasant interpersonal interaction. What do we lose when we digitalise every single process? Is a library merely a way to check out books? Is it not also a way to check out people?

Watching the film also reminded me of the grand Olin Library at Wesleyan University, full of aisles no one frequents, and books many are not going to read, mostly used as a place to do homework and read lecture notes. Nearly 10 years out, I can’t imagine those aisles have seen much other action (although probably still the site of a certain other kind of action). I miss it also because I shot a little film myself on 8mm reversal film during our sight and sound class. It’s not incredible by any means, but if you’re interested, I have embedded it below. In many ways I am thankful for Lam's film that serendipitously has met me in this moment, similarly yearning to reacquaint myself with the sensations of boredom and restlessness which I never knew I would miss.

Leave a comment

Notes

• AFA’s Rest and Relax programme also screened Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour on the big screen which was a real treat! Still my favourite Hamaguchi film. I wrote a long review on Letterboxd way back when.v

• I never got around to scanning this sight and sound project, so the video is just me recording the film running on a Steenbeck which explains the poor quality! Editing by hand on a Steenbeck is probably the best thing the film department at Wesleyan let us do.

I’ve recently read Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. The book follows Sam and Sadie, two childhood best friends who go on to form a game company and make video games together. It spans decades as their relationship is tested. 

As a life-long gamer, I found the references to real-life videogames and use of interviews in gaming publications to create an immersive reading experience, as if reading a very long and intimate New Yorker article profiling the lives of two game developers. I think the central relationship is well-realised, although I find the dialogue can be a little on the nose in some sections, and am personally not a fan of very long sections of exposition into the thoughts of characters. The friendship between Sadie and Sam is tenuous and abrasive, with streaks of professional and personal jealousy, but it is also loving and supportive. Friendships are messy organisms. I would love to see it adapted into a film or series. 

Video games really got me into storytelling narratives and piped me into discovering cinema. I was always drawn to games with compelling narratives, and that told cinematic stories. The Mass Effect trilogy and Red Dead Redemption really made an impression on me when I was younger and they pushed me to find more stories with their moral complexity. While films now better fulfil my search for narrative, I still find myself seeking out novel concepts in video games, like the fictional ones outlined in Zevin’s novel, which are able to tell stories in a way a non-interactive medium cannot. And when I think of unique video games, my mind invariably wanders to Double Fine.

Double Fine is most known for being led by creative designer and writer Tim Schafer, who acts as a sort of frontman for the company and its ethos. The company is most known for Psychonauts, its sequel, and Brutal Legend (starring Jack Black). I have always loved their innovative approach to crafting games with a strong focus on unique stories, typically comedic, and mechanics that complement the story. Psychonauts will always be, one of my favourite games. In it, a young boy named Raz runs from the circus to join a summer camp for psychics. Each level has Raz transporting into the actual minds of characters replete with literal “emotional baggage”. Every level is unique in its expression of the characters' mental worlds. An old general imagines the world as a large war board game, a dentist’s mind filled with terrifying teeth, and my favourite: a milkman who is a conspiracy theory wonk that imagines a suburb where every person is a poorly disguised CIA agent trying to blend in. 

While reading Zevin’s novel, which goes into particular detail about the game development process, it reminded me of Double Fine Adventure which is a long 20 episode documentary series chronicling the development of Double Fine’s Broken Age over a period of three years. I backed Broken Age more than a decade ago. While the game was kind of a dud for me, I followed the documentary throughout the development process and felt it was immensely rewarding. The series goes in depth into the emotional journey of the game’s creation: needing to keep people employed as an independent studio, finding the creative spark for the game, balancing personal lives, and not wanting to disappoint their backers (at the time one of the largest Kickstarter projects ever).

I think the fact that the game landed with a bit of a thud shows that sometimes you pour literal years into a creative pursuit with zero idea if it’s going to land for people. The series at least shows that, regardless of outcome, these games come from a special place of sincerity. A sincerity well-captured by Zevin’s novel as well. Video games are a form of art, although some have more artful direction than others. I’m less likely to argue on the artfulness of a blockbuster like Call of Duty or Candy Crush which are machined to generate income more than to express a unique vision. I am glad a studio like Double Fine exists, and still does. Independent video game development is at the forefront of innovation, and with the recent pressures on the video game industry, it has become much more difficult to stick around and make unique video games for niche audiences. 

I highly recommend the documentary series if you have the time, and there’s a follow-up documentary: PsychOdyssey which follows the studio over 7 years as they develop their phenomenal sequel to Psychonauts. I haven’t seen it but I’m sure if you have an interest in the inner workings of a very creative game studio, it’s worth checking out. 

I’ve also recently completed the game Dungeons of Hinterberg which reminded me of the charm and sincerity of Double Fine. It tells the story of Luisa, a burnt out junior lawyer, who goes to Hinterberg, a town in the alps in which magic has suddenly appeared, and joins tourists in slaying magical demons as a retreat from her career. In it, there’s commentary on the effects of tourism on the local environment and community, career burnout, finding a purpose, finding identity, and creating community. Now, where have you ever heard of a concept like that? While the combat and Persona-like social systems in the game are rudimentary at best, somewhat clunky and repetitive, the game wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s awfully twee with Luisa very successfully helping every single tourist or villager with sorting out their personal issues. Yet I find the game so sincere in a cosy way as I get to know its characters. These arcs are simplistic but satisfying, and incredibly moreish. The way it held my attention makes me think I might finally be ready to tackle one of these mammoth Persona games.

Revisiting

August has also been a month of reacquainting myself with old classics. (Click through the links for my sometimes long, sometimes short Letterboxd reviews)

With The Projector’s recent Kubrick retrospective, I was able to revisit both A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975) on the big screen. Kubrick is one of the first filmmakers one will discover on a journey towards cinephilia and I was interested to see how I would feel about him now. I’ve been a slight Kubrick detractor in recent years, and my vague memories of his films have not aged terribly well. I find him to be a cold and detached director, whereas I prefer films with a certain earnestness. It was surprising to find that A Clockwork Orange with its provocative subject matter feels more relevant than it did before in our modern age. I thought it would be the film I found more gratuitous and instead the opposite has happened. I find Barry Lyndon to be the more hollow film despite it being my previous favourite Kubrick. I rarely rewatch films but it is a treat to revisit films that have long faded in my memory because they teach you more about you than the film itself, which has, of course, remained unchanged. I was also able to rewatch Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), and there are few movies with better production or costume design. A masterpiece of imagination. 

On the reading front, I have decided to return to the books of Marilynne Robinson after a jaunt through the library had me finding her most recent novel, Jack, part of her now four book series beginning with the Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead. I was lucky in that my literature cohort in junior college was made to read Robinson’s luminous debut novel Housekeeping which is one of my favourite books. Robinson’s prose is beautiful, elegiac, and probably the reason I am a sucker for writers with poetically inclined prose. I have finished re-reading Gilead, and its form, an epistolary reflection from an aged pastor to his son, is spellbinding and immersive. Robinson’s ability to first obfuscate and then elucidate the actual “story” behind the letters is effortlessly deft. The next novel, Home, shifts perspective to another character, switching from first-person to third, and casts new light on characters in Gilead to build further dimension to the community of the fictional town of Gilead. I’m currently re-reading the third novel, Lila, and cannot wait to sink into the most recent novel. And at the end of that, a little Housekeeping. I might go long on Robinson's work on a separate piece, because their tone and thematic concerns remind me a lot of a television show I watched and loved a long time ago: SundanceTV’s Rectify. 

Other older films

I had a really good time watching Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant doing their thing in the Stanley Donen classic Charade (1963). It’s fun, twisty and their old Hollywood charm is as vibrant as it always was. 

For something way less palatable, I also saw David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) which is gross, strange, and fun. There’s a flatness to the proceedings which makes all the icky stuff much starker in juxtaposition. Jeff Goldblum is so odd in this, even before he starts turning into a fly. 

I am also suited up and ready for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II (2024) now that I have finally seen the original film. I have been thinking a lot about what happens after Scott and his peers stop making movies. Hollywood has already changed so much, and I’m worried it will not evolve for the better when the old guard stops making films.

New releases

Here are some newer releases I recommend from the year that I watched recently. I won’t write more on them but you can click through to read my brief Letterboxd reviews: Trap (2024), Alien: Romulus (2024), Ghostlight (2024).

Otherwise, if you’ve been reading, I hope you’ve been doing well lately! 

Leave a comment

I will not purport to be any expert on the subject of ‘camp’ which is a slippery term that has both been academically studied and casually bandied about in colloquial contexts. For me, the most evident marker of camp is an exaggerated, heightened visual palette and/or tone that tends toward irony or overly sensational melodrama. With its roots and influences from LGBTQ+ culture, camp is frequently rooted in feminine aesthetics as a performance or expression of femininity, like in drag or the films of John Waters. 

I could not possibly try to summarise the myriad forms that camp can take, and the subjects that we can take as camp, so if it helps, here’s the definition from the first sentence of its Wikipedia entry: 

Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element. Camp is historically associated with LGBTQ+ culture and especially gay men.

I am not a fan of the “so bad it’s good” classification of films like Showgirls, although I concede that it is a perfectly okay way for one to craft their tastes and sensibilities with. While Helter Skelter and Showgirls might be ironic, melodramatic, exaggerated, and indulgent, they’re clearly sincere when it comes to their messaging, satire, and pursuits of artfulness. They may be created outside the realms of traditional good taste, but these areas outside the dotted lines do not automatically fall in the category of “bad taste.” I love these films for their sincerity, while pushing the extremes of melodramatic plot, sensory overload, and heightened performance. They are not camp in the pursuit of bad taste, but rather the genuine surface pleasures of a camp aesthetic. Most importantly, they’re fun. 

There’s a smattering of video essays on YouTube that go into further depth into the aesthetics and themes of Helter Skelter as it relates to the beauty industry, and the way it critiques society’s commercialisation of female bodies. I particularly like chai tii’s analysis of the style (fashion, cinematic) and themes in the film, which also gives a good overview of Erika Sawajiri’s star image and why she’s perfect for the part. 

However, while Helter Skelter largely plays in the hyper feminine world of commercial modelling, I found myself drawn to one of the male characters in a film mostly about women. This frickin’ guy:

Nao Ômori plays Prosecutor Asada who is searching for the aesthetic clinic giving life-threatening plastic surgery to top models for them to keep up their perfect appearances. From his first scene, I found myself laughing at every single line of dialogue coming out of his mouth. This man says the most out of pocket, overly dramatic, and unhinged dialogue in a film where Erika Sawajiri’s Lilico is already swinging for the fences. While his scenes and performance style might be aesthetically different from the rest of the film, they feel tonally on par with the rest of the film, and form a masculine complement to the hyper-feminine camp aesthetics of the film’s visuals and storytelling. To me, it is a form of ‘masculine camp’ that is less frequently categorised under the umbrella of ‘camp’, but that can be found across mediums without such a label.

What is “masculine camp”?

It is difficult to define an ideal of ‘masculine camp’ because its parent term is also slippery. In writing this, I struggled to find some semblance of language that could define the line between mere masculine signifiers towards something that could be considered camp. Many of these elements form the core of films that we can consider “for the boys” and yet maybe not necessarily camp. I think what becomes critical is the need for any of these elements to be pushed to some level of extreme for the principal work to be considered camp in a masculine fashion. The notion of what is “extreme enough" leaves much to one’s own interpretation and intuition. Feel free to suggest your own ideas for how best to define masculine camp, or other examples you might have.

If camp is an exaggerated expression of hyper-femininity, its masculine mirror is the pursuit of the extremes of macho cool. These masculine expressions can manifest in a film's stylistic choices, whether through visual language, costume choices, world building, and performance styles. 

In aesthetic choices, colour and frivolity is weakness. Prosecutor Asada’s outfits are shades of grey. His scenes in his office are also grey, noir-ish, and full of dramatic side lighting, complete with the stylised shadows of vertical blind slats. They are in direct opposition to the world of the female lead and her opulent, colourful, overly saturated home and work environments. Asada’s world is utilitarian. There’s no place for beauty because beauty has no bearing on his professional endeavours. 

In speech, there is a tendency towards terseness and stoicism. If words must be spilled, strive for badassery. Every line delivery from Ômori is hyper-serious and stark, and better still Prosecutor Asada’s dialogue reaches unnecessary levels of esoterism and metaphor. Classical art and mythology become subsumed to allow him to perceive the world in his eyes of law and order. One of my favourite line readings is when he finally meets Lilico. He declares to her, quite abruptly, that she is “Ariadne’s ball of thread.” A piece of myth-dropping I had to look up to mean that Lilico is the answer to the problem he has been trying to solve. Completely unnecessary, random and odd, Prosecutor Asada equally lives in his own version of a mythically lawful reality as Lilico lives in her warped world of beauty. 

Ômori’s heightened performance of Asada is of cool, maximum professionalism, emotional suppression, and a singular dedication to his job. With his glasses, he projects an analytical facade, as if he is constantly processing information. His masculine effort is in his intellectualism, and ability to see through the fog of evidence to find the aberrant clinic he is after.

In themes: masculine camp heroes can go off on the slippery slope pursuit of revenge, perfect versions of violence, ceaselessly protect loved ones, or die while fiercely adhering to age-old principles. In the face of evil, the masculine hero is never outraged, for evil is constant in his world and his only response is to squash it. Asada’s reaction to images of violence and depravity is nonchalance. In his worldview, that is just how the world is and his role is to constantly push back against the threat of evil. The masculine hero’s job is never done, and it is in his unending execution that he derives his worth. It is no wonder that so many of these hero’s journeys must end in death, because death is the only way to stop the constant toil. 

Subscribe now

Mr. Wick 

The John Wick series is one of my favourite modern action franchises and I think with each chapter the films have gotten more macho, more campy, and I love them for it. Wick himself is a prototypical masculine lead, gruff, quiet, and highly skilled in various forms of violence. Masculine camp heroes stop at nothing to protect their number one, be it family, love, or principle. For Wick, his entire journey and trail of death is predicated on righting a wrong made against him and his already dead love interest. He has absolutely no good reason to go on his blood soaked, kill-crazy rampage, but for Wick it is necessary. I love that Wick’s catchphrase is quite simply a flatly delivered “yeah.” A masculine hero gets the job done, and the only thing he knows how to do is to get the job done, which is typically at the expense of his softer side.   

The series also has some of the most opulent and frankly ridiculous world building in a modern action movie in recent memory. In the city of New York, half the population are hyper skilled assassins looking to kill Wick. There are dedicated hotels to the assassin trade, and a sophisticated underground intelligence network of disguised homeless people run by Laurence Fishburne. Every subsequent chapter has taken large strides towards a higher camp aesthetic. John Wick: Chapter 4 is one of the most beautifully rendered action movies because of a heightened production design. There are beautiful, gothic touches to the world building of John Wick and they are all in service of its world of over-the-top professional assassination. 

Because the John Wick series has steadily increased its levels of exaggeration over each movie, it has raised our ability to accept the kind of world building it achieves at a measured rate. I believe if some of the elements that are present in the later chapters had been present in the first movie, they would have come off as more clearly “camp”, and would have been far more difficult to accept in a supposedly gritty action movie that the first film presented itself as. (Also, RIP Lance Reddick.)

While I have not seen any of the modern Fast and the Furious movies, I would imagine the later entries and their ubiquitous “family” memes suggest they land their heroes and their escapades into a version of masculine camp. If anyone is an expert on these films, please let me know. 

To further expand on this concept, I would like to also go on a tangent and present my favourite execution of masculine camp from a proper visionary: the works of Hideo Kojima. 

Share The Kinetoscope

Super Hyper-cool EX Ultimate, or masculine camp in video games

As a disclaimer, I have not actually played any of the Metal Gear Solid series, but have some handle on it thanks to some video essays from Jacob Geller, one on Metal Gear Rising, and the following that references the final fight scene in Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots. 

I think when you watch Geller wax lyrical about these incredible looking games, the common thread is a go-for-broke aesthetic and storytelling style, where logic takes a backseat to emotional satisfaction and nostalgia. Like camp melodrama, Kojima’s goal with storytelling aims for emotional and sensational pleasures at the expense of quaint ideas of logic, reality, or expectation. 

While I have not dabbled with MGS, I have played Kojima’s more recent work Death Stranding, an odd masterpiece about saving the world as a high tech postman played by Norman Reedus. In terms of world building, character design, and storytelling, Kojima’s approach eschews ideas of predictable taste and goes for unadulterated emotional clarity. Reedus’ postman is called Sam Porter Bridges for god’s sake, could his name be any more on the nose? He is a man with only one purpose, to carry shit across bridges. You have characters called Heartman and Deadman (modelled after Guillermo del Toro and Nicholas Winding Refn respectively), whose names tell you exactly what they are obsessed with or are trying to come to terms with. My personal favourite character being Léa Seydoux’s Fragile and her ridiculously quotable “I”m Fragile, but I’m not that fragile”, perfectly encapsulating her strength and vulnerability. Also, if you’re completely unplugged from video games, this is me letting you know Léa friggin’ Seydoux is in this, with Margaret Qualley playing ‘Mama’ who’s always holding an invisible ghost baby. No, I will not explain Mama’s whole deal, but if you need to know.  

Each of these characters, in their run-ins with Sam Porter are helped along with their emotional baggage, typically a physical defect that forces them to be a certain way. Their physical problems are thus a metaphorical extension of their emotional ones. There is very little subtlety to the way Kojima executes his storytelling or paints his characters, but the power of this clarity and heightened melodramatic stakes are memorable characters that are exceptionally effective vehicles for the themes and emotional states that Kojima wants his characters to carry. The exaggeration here is rooted in a pure sincerity. 

Death Stranding’s convoluted world building also functions as a kind of camp exaggeration. To create a world that makes absolute logical sense to contain its disparate post-apocalyptic science fiction elements, the details and history of the world become so dense until their details become unperceivable. Yet, there’s no need to understand how this world works to the nuts and bolts, although you surely could if you wanted to, because the sci-fi world and its details become a sort of maximalist noise that ties everything together and you trust it all makes sense because the emotions make sense. 

At this point I have only touched on the aspects of performance and storytelling, but the surface aesthetics of Kojima’s games are also exaggerated, and you can find aspects of this in many other Japanese video games. Death Stranding’s colour palette is variations of black and grey with pops of caution yellow. There’s a utilitarian nature to these designs, and in costume design I think this “masculine camp” shines through visually. Aside from the baby in a bottle attached to his front torso, Sam’s outfits are heavy on straps, carabiners, ropes, attachment points, lugs: all put together with a reinforced polyester-esque tracksuit finish. His visual design is hyper-utilitarian. Everything is for the execution of his job, even the baby, but his job is a lot. It is an exaggerated uniform that is in contrast to the understated, but also inversely exaggerated, bulletproof suits in John Wick which I neglected to mention in the previous section. 

Staying within the Japanese video game context, the Final Fantasy series flirts with masculine camp as well. Final Fantasy XV’s surface aesthetic, emo boys with spiky haircuts and big ol’ swords going on a boys road trip, are a projection of a boyish or even juvenile idea of cool. 

Some entries of Resident Evil might also be considered campier, see: Chris Redfield punching a boulder in Resident Evil 5. Japanese anime and video games have been at the forefront of masculine camp! 

If an ironic bent is a fundamental component of camp, one must then ask: how can it also be sincere? I have been trying to reconcile this contradiction because my favourite performances of camp feel utterly sincere in their execution. Maybe it matters in the intentions in execution of these media. These examples of ‘masculine camp’ do not knowingly signal that they are self-aware that their expressions of masculinity are maximalist, which suggests they are meant to fall within typical spectrums of masculinity. They are thus unknowingly camp rather than intentionally so. However, I think because we have never thought of these expressions of masculinity as exaggerated in a ‘campy’ manner, we’ve never really considered the manner in which we find pleasure in these masculine exaggerations. None of us are punching boulders out of the sky on the daily. Is it enough for the audience to enjoy a piece of media for its exaggerations and affectations for it to be considered campy? Can irony stem from the beholder rather than that that is being perceived? 

I think the utility of looking at supposedly masculine themes and aesthetics through a camp lens is that we can uncover or outline new spectrums of masculine aesthetics rather than assuming men are interested in a singular monoculture of guns, muscles, and automobiles. A few days after the screening of Helter Skelter, a friend commented that it was surprising that I (a cis-straight dude) liked Helter Skelter because it has a “high-femme” aesthetic. I’m not going to unpack that at length, but it would be a shame for all the d00ds and br0s to not find something to love in worlds they find unfamiliar, both masculine and feminine. These examples of ‘masculine camp’ are also here to show that the underlying mechanics of their pleasure: artifice, heightened affectation and exaggeration, are agnostic of the masculine/feminine dichotomy. Fun is fun.

Notes

• As I was thinking about this I started wondering if aspects or manifestations of film noir could be considered camp. I found this article by Nandia Foteini Vlachou about parodies of film noir that proved quite interesting. I think Classical Hollywood tows the line quite well to not tip over into camp, but are there instances of neo-noir that specifically push the extremes into campier territory? Film noir and its trappings of the doomed, serious hero feel ripe for campier explorations. Maybe David Fincher’s recent The Killer could be considered a sort of self-serious parody of the hitman genre. Another genre to think about: Hong Kong kung fu movies. Some have a slapstick bent, some are hyper serious and grim. Donnie Yen has already appeared in John Wick… There's a connection.

• This article is late for my own schedule and was inordinately difficult to write. I was recently watching OliSUNvia’s video essay on video essays and my personal takeaway is the feeling of “scope-creep” as you expand on any one idea. A written essay feels decidedly more significant as an intellectual vehicle than a video, and there was a growing pressure as I was writing to be “accurate” or “correct” (see: me qualifying I don’t know much about camp). In fact, I was originally going to make this as a video reaction, but I kept delaying recording until it became more of an extended essay in my head. I think there is a feeling like all essays are inherently argumentative, in that they must present some defined perspective with proper substantiation, but I am finding that burden of proof to be quite a burden indeed. I’m not saying I want to make more floppy and poorly argued essays, but maybe it is important to give oneself the space to merely explore ideas through writing rather than define specific arguments. Partially a large reason why this was hard to write and put out is: I am not entirely sure I know what I am talking about. So why don’t you let me know if I make sense? 

  Leave a comment

• This is more of an exploration of an idea, I also know that masculinity can show up in our prevailing ideas of camp, i.e. drag can be performed in pursuit of exaggerated masculinity as well. Maybe there is a better name for what I am describing here. 

Films

Look Back (2024)

This is the frontrunner for my film of the year and it’s not even long enough to be considered a feature. The linework in this is gorgeous. There’s an elegant simplicity to the montages in this, and its straightforward overall  narrative structure. It sings. The music will play you like an instrument. Ready yourself, bring a friend. An easy entry into my Best Friend Cinema Canon, which I’m thinking of going long on here…

Ti West’s X Trilogy

I’ve finally watched all of Ti West’s X trilogy, beginning with X (2022) and then the sequel MaXXXine (2024) in the theatre, before rounding it out with Pearl (2022). They’re definitely trashy movies but there’s some surface level enjoyment here. While I’m all for cinema leaning back into exploitation-esque filmmaking (with all the necessary safety and consent considerations to make them ethically), I’m finding these films pull their punches. They’re not at all lurid or out-there enough to warrant the marketing behind them. It feels like they cosplay the affect of the films they homage but don’t quite understand how those films actually operate, or the cheap pleasures they are trying to evoke. If anything, they should all have been shorter, maybe as a small anthology mini series, because the ideas behind each of the films don’t justify their runtimes. 

The Big City (1963)

I recently rewatched Satyajit Ray’s The Big City (1963) on the big screen. As I mentioned in my Letterboxd review, I think the film would be so much more exciting if it were in colour! Lipstick colour plays an important role in the film… and yet we have no colour! Bummer!

Didi (2024)

A fun little watch on premiere day. Joan Chen is luminous as friggin’ always. It’s a solid debut even if it feels like it’s been sanded down a little bit. I think there’s a lot of promise here from first-time director Sean Wang, where he makes some bold, less predictable choices in the way he constructs the narrative, and the tone he’s going for. The era of the early internet is captured authentically here in a way that hits the cringe-nostalgia button really hard. This is a much more emo film than the trailers let on, which I appreciated, because teenage years can be rough and you don’t come out unscathed.  Also, saw this in person with Wilson and Eli in Singapore, which was special and we’re planning something special for our Patreon ;)

Twisters (2024)

I had fun with this! I think Lee Isaac Chung does a good job overall with this “90s Hollywood” style in keeping up tension in the action-disaster bits. It’s effective all around with clear story and character motivations. 

The Plot (2024)

Oh man this was so self-serious and boring, but I found out after watching it that it’s a remake of Soi Cheang’s Accident (2009), a director whose work I’ve been meaning to catch.

Deadpool and Wolverine (2024)

Yeah, the two characters that can’t die are a great emblem for a franchise that needs to die but just can’t. 

Black Dog (2024)

My review here!

Television/Anime

Oshi no Ko Season 2

I started this anime series because of its completely wild premise but am now really digging its exploration of the entertainment industry. Season 2’s first arc is a dive into what acting is all about for theatre (specifically “2.5D theatrical manga adaptations”) and is honestly fascinating in how it explores different acting “styles”. I’m absolutely here for all this behind the curtain theatre drama. Theatre kids need to chill.

Evil Season 4

Everyone is sleeping on this weird ass show about demons coming to New York. It’s off-kilter with demons possessing smart speakers, Large Hadron Colliders, and YouTube, among other things. It’s awkwardly trying to take old fashioned demonic possession and combine it with 21st century elements with sometimes mixed results, and is absolutely charming for its effort. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s corny as hell (pun intended), but it's still confidently and sincerely done. Nothing like it is airing. It’ll build up plot and drop it immediately in haphazard ways and I honestly have no idea how they’re going to wrap it up in this final season. It’s prestige TV with old-school TV writing bones (monster of the week format), which probably contributes to its odd construction, but it represents an intriguing inflection point in TV writing. 

I’ve also always found myself drawn to biblical narratives and imagery despite not being personally affiliated or interested in that kind of religiosity in any way. And honestly, I can’t really figure out why. Maybe the cleanliness of absolute immoral evil in fictional narratives feels comforting compared to the moral spaghetti mess we live in.

Books

Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come — Jessica Pan

The author Jessica Pan goes on a journey of deliberate extroversion as a self-professed shy-introvert: she tries standup, improv, networking, all things introverts despise. This was a fun read for a born introvert who has, at various points in my life, taken huge and terrifying steps towards extroversion. Extroversion can be a trained skill, and there are distinct benefits for extroverts in a society that likes gregariousness, performance, and presentation. I recently did an online Big Five test and my extraversion landed solidly on 50%. I have clearly crossed some kind of line because people I’m meeting for the first time seem to flip a coin guessing where I land on the extrovert/introvert dichotomy. And no, I will not be doing improv or doing standup comedy any time soon.

Kafka on the Shore — Haruki Murakami

I understand this is some people’s favourite Murakami novel, but it felt overlong and meandering to me considering the pretty limited set of characters. However, I still enjoy the surreal, mundane worlds Murakami conjures. Maybe the joy of Murakami is in the journey, like a well told shaggy dog story. 

Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope — Mark Manson

I don’t know how people feel about Mark Manson generally, but I do like his perspective on life: a mixture of stoicism and Buddhist philosophy. I feel like he’s able to take difficult existential topics and write them in a digestible layman way. It flips the script on what we think the value of hope is, and that it can only exist when suffering exists. He defines most problems as emotional problems rather than rational ones, and that only in getting a handle on our emotions can we actually solve anything. In the end, I do agree we need to embrace suffering to be happy. He gets a little loopy at the end about embracing our AI overlords (really). 

How to Know a Person — David Brooks / Supercommunicators — Charles Duhigg

I’ve been digging into some books about communication, but they tend to cover the same ground. Sometimes they’ll literally be rehashing and quoting from the same landmark books in the field. Manson and Pan’s books above also do. I think these are okay introductions, even if repetitive, but I do like reading different writers repackaging of the same concepts so I keep the concepts fresh in my mind. 

Games

Humanity

I’ve finally finished this puzzle game about moving humans from one door to the other. It’s so very Japanese in the kooky meta-narrative about a dog tasked with shepherding humans through doors to finally become whole and fit to be reborn. I think. It’s a modern take on Lemmings. The puzzles are mostly quite solvable but there are a few stumpers here with solutions that tend to be exceedingly simple. I love when a puzzle game can obscure simplicity.

Flock

I spent an afternoon catching birds in this little Annapurna Interactive game. I’m a big fan of the studio/publisher which consistently comes out with novel indie games. This one’s a nice cosy game although it’s a little too aimless for me, so I shelved it after catching most of the birbs. 

An Outlier

On the Wings of Hermes

I managed to get into this and it was more entertaining than I expected. These are seven short “films” performed live and shot in a single take on stage for the fashion brand Hermes. It’s extremely extra in having to do everything in camera. My favourite of the seven being an overhead shot that films a couple flying through the sky, in which the sky is projected onto the ground (so they’re lying on the ground) but also being filmed live in the background (see below). The plot is light here, befitting the Hermes theme of “lightness”, but as a seven-piece vibesfest it was a nice way to spend an evening. In the end this was essentially an elaborate puppet show, and I do love me some puppetry. 

Notes

• I hope this was interesting to read. I’ll see how long I keep this up.

I told myself when restarting this newsletter that I would avoid writing film reviews because I’ve fallen out of love with the form of writing from a writing perspective, and yet here I am with a review. The fine folks at Singapore Film Society gave me a ticket for this film in exchange for a review which I’ve reproduced here. 

I think I find the process of writing a review to be odd. In speaking I can elucidate what I think is good or bad about a film, but the act of writing and polishing writing to make those arguments can feel too declarative. My polishing of my writing here is largely removing instances of “I think”, “kind of”, “sort of”, and variations of “I’m not sure… but..” I don’t know if I enjoy the feeling of authority the act of film reviewing can have, because I know that in the end it is largely my opinion and I feel the need to constantly remind you of it. It sure seems like many film reviewers seem to write in this style, without foregrounding that their value judgments come from specific perspectives and backgrounds. 

As a reader though, the utility of reviews to save time not watching bad movies is still something I value, and finding a writer who echoes your taste, or at least has a perspective you admire is really useful. I particularly enjoyed Jessica Kiang’s review of Black Dog which you can read here. She has easily become one of my favourite film critics in recent years. 

I think it’s because writing a review has certain formal requirements, the plot summary, a sense of whether you thought it was good/bad, two paragraphs on aspects of form, etc, that can feel restrictive. Sometimes I just want to talk about my feelings, and my feelings on the film. Sometimes the form and plot feel irrelevant to the writing I want to do. Film reviews are written for other people, and I think I’m a little selfish because I want to write mainly for myself.

Anyway, my review below:

Black Dog: stray station

Black Dog was not what I expected. I had imagined it might go down the road of a stripped back Man and His Dog movie, something along the lines of Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy. However, Guan Hu’s film, with its wide open landscapes, and taciturn lone (bike) rider, evokes grander Western genre tropes with art-house sensibilities, crafting a film that is expansive, reflective, and visually arresting from first frame to last. 

Eddie Peng’s Er Lang returns to his hometown after a stint in jail for manslaughter. With the town teeming with stray dogs in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Er Lang joins a dog patrol capturing strays to make some money, befriending the titular nameless dog as they form a connection. As Er Lang and the dog slowly solidify their bond, Guan Hu with his fellow writers opt to do a surprising amount of dense world building. In this fading town overrun with stray dogs, we have the looming Olympics, an oncoming solar eclipse, impending demolition, a dilapidated zoo, a travelling circus, local gangs, and a man obsessed with locks holding the keys to every single one. While this abundance of plot elements might seem excessive, they collectively evoke a profound tone of wistfulness as Er Lang grapples with inevitable change. 

The town and its natural surroundings act as a way station for fleeting events, like a rest stop town that no longer needs to exist: the perfect environment for strays (man or dog) to thrive. Peng’s Er Lang is written to be a man of few words, and Peng carries the film capably across the film’s runtime. In entangling himself with the film’s various narrative threads, he navigates his familiar but strange environment searching for kinship and belonging. It feels inevitable that the kinship Er Lang gravitates to is in the form of an aggressive, possibly rabid, dog. Er Lang is a man that wishes to be alone, but not lonely, and the only companion that fits that bill is man’s best friend. There is an existential ennui that hangs over the film's proceedings, even with its darkly comic tone, where retracing your steps and figuring out your next one feels one and the same. 

The film’s mood is immensely bolstered by its beautiful visuals, captured in a stark and measured manner. Natural vistas are characterised by inky blacks and cool greys with gorgeous landscapes in the Gobi Desert. Urban locations have a post-apocalyptic quality with its largely empty streets, as if the town has been hollowed out of most human life, aside from those travellers passing through it. Shot largely in wide or extra wide shots and with camera movement restricted to mostly simple, confident pans, there’s marvellous blocking on display across the film. The film announces itself boldly in its opening shot where a horde of dogs blitzes across an arid mountain landscape causing a bus to overturn in the far distance. 

During an audience Q&A on the premiere night of 25 July at The Projector Cineleisure, director Guan Hu positioned the film as a return to independent filmmaking after a slate of popular blockbusters, and cinematographer Gao Weizhe’s desire to go back to a “simple and honest” style of filmmaking pays great dividends here. More than with camera movements and cuts, what drives the film’s visual grammar is the action within the frame, through performance and blocking. 

The cast is rounded out by a solid supporting troupe, with an assortment of background actors and animals that give the town a strong lived-in feel. Also, watch out for an extended cameo from well-known Chinese Director Jia Zhangke. The film's constituent story elements might not hold up on their own, but like a ragtag army of dogs, they bark beautifully together, with the film nabbing the Un Certain Regard prize this year at the Cannes Film Festival. Black Dog is confident and assured with a strong back-to-basics quality that makes for a transporting and meditative trip to the cinema. 

Notes

• Yes, I know I missed my last bi-weekly deadline; I’ve been busy. The Deep Cut gang was recently in Singapore with me and we recorded some fun bonus stuff that’ll be landing on our Patreon sometime soon. Also, I was writing this!

• I’m also planning some smaller, regular formats to fit in the in-between weeks, so that the writing comes out a little more consistently across the board. They’ll be shorter, and simpler~

  Thank you for reading The Kinetoscope. This post is public so feel free to share it.

  Share

I have been struggling to understand what LSOO is hoping to achieve with this video. His arguments are scattershot, but his provocations are incisive, possibly even unknowingly insidious. Telling an entire group of people they are “failing” is a polarising charge. How can one “fail cinema”? 

In my opinion, the essential argument here feels a little irresponsible considering LSOO’s reach and cache among a large global audience of cinephiles. It’s a message that riles people up, draws battle lines and creates antagonism, no matter the gentleness of his soft, droll voice. As advocates for cinema, I think he and we can do better. 

In writing this piece, I actually find myself largely in agreement with LSOO and the nuances he brings to each of his points. Unfortunately, I think he has placed many contradictions and uncertain questions under the single umbrella of a provocative title, which has oversimplified his position. There’s a knowing messiness to LSOO’s underlying arguments, which is by design because he is equally searching for the right answers, sometimes the right questions, to his own discomfort with modern audiences. 

How do you “fail” cinema?

Films themselves are inert, conceptual objects. They have no feelings or desires. There are no obligations to appreciate or understand a film. Neither do we have obligations to the filmmakers who have made them. The cinematic conversation is only between film and audience. A film’s life is dependent on the zeitgeist that sustains it. Culture has no obligation to film. All art is a part of culture, until it isn’t. Cinema can die. It dies not because we fail it, or because the films themselves become worse. I believe cinema dies when we stop communing with each other about the stories they contain.

There’s a false dichotomy here of the “anti-intellectual” camp and the “faux-intellectual” camp. Notice how the names of each side is what each side calls the other. We are making enemies of each other, not because we hate each other, but because we want to protect our corner of cinema and our way of engaging with it. It’s tribalism. Nobody is wrong in their approach in cinema, and yet we find the need to defend ourselves.

While I cannot quite pinpoint LSOO’s main point, I thought I would go through his supporting arguments to poke at the points he is swirling around: 

Relatability

LSOO’s point here seems to be the inverse of the title of his video. He argues that cinema, both mainstream and independent, is failing audiences by leaning into relatability in trite and generic ways. He argues that #literallyme memes show a superficial understanding of characters in films and that audiences who engage in such a fashion are maintaining a “wilful ignorance.”

To try to guess at what’s happening behind the minds of people who make and engage with #literallyme memes is pretty presumptuous. Sure, maybe some are engaging with cinema in a vapid, superficial way, but we cannot paint an entire audience so nonchalantly. For example, people making political memes aren’t doing it because they don’t care. They do it because they do care, but the world is absolutely mental, and sometimes you need to shitpost to cope. Cinema is not immune to that. While cinema can be a form utilised for the discovery of complex meaning, or posing difficult questions, it has largely been marketed and used as an easy means of escapism. Relatability gives audiences an easy way to “feel good.” 

#literallyme is also a signal of identity and meaning formulation, sometimes ironically so. Which is what we do when we watch any film. We are trying to see ourselves in them, which can be deep or superficial, and that journey is personal. Not everyone’s means of engaging with cinema is writing long essays or creating analytical video essays. Sometimes the search for significance within a film is private. 

My sister, for example, would not proclaim to be a cinephile, and she found herself loving Past Lives. While I did not appreciate the film as much as she did, merely knowing that it meant something to her in a profound way helped me understand what she cared about and responded to as a person. Films can be a medium of communication with each other. A Letterboxd four favourites is a means of forming identity and a projection of taste.

The irony of this section is that LSOO’s video similarly invokes a “he’s just like me frfr'' response from the so-called intellectual cinemagoer. He falls right into the same trap. His content only exists because there is an audience who can relate to it. Relatability is not a trap, of course we tend to consume content we can relate to. All people want to find their tribe. Everyone wants to feel comfortable. Big corporations and indie filmmakers lean into relatability, whether intentionally or not, because they need an audience to justify the existence of their product. Whether that push towards relatability is good or bad is dependent on how the audiences react to the product. It’s a matter of market and social forces. As much as we want to think of film as a significant art form, it is still a product. Products need customers.

If we are worried about an overall engagement with cinema, we should not be gate-keeping the way others engage with it, regardless of which camp you come from. Cinema is vast and diverse. We can win together. However, I also understand that LSOO wants to encourage audiences to seek cinema that is less relatable to them because of what they can gain from it. I agree, but I think adopting an accusatory angle against modern audiences is a needlessly antagonistic way of beginning that process. 

Cinema as self-righteous moralism

In this section, LSOO finds difficulty with the way we use the action of consumption as a means of self actualisation, and that we think of the movies we watch, or the movies we deem “good” as moral actions. Watching a “good” movie becomes a personal moral “good” as does attacking a “morally bad” movie. Generally, LSOO venerates the more “difficult” movies with complex moral positions, films like Killers of the Flower Moon, Tár, May December, and The Zone of Interest. He thinks general audiences avoid or even dislike these films because they require one to “invite conflict into one’s inner being”, a discomforting experience compared to the easily relatable “morally good” films that people can use to self actualise. 

Even though I enjoy and admire these types of films that create uncomfortable moral positions, I find that LSOO’s perspective thinks of these films as objectively better cinematic experiences. He positions intellectual or moral complexity above emotional engagement. While that can absolutely be his personal taste which I cannot discredit, it does not mean we can denigrate the way others prefer to engage with film. I could argue that his perspective extols these films because complexity fulfils a certain “moral good” in his act of media consumption. He posits that “discussion and conflict” are a fundamental part of how we appreciate the cinematic medium that we are now losing, but I don’t think that is necessarily true. Some films will evoke more discussion and some will create more conflict among their audiences, but it does not mean it is a “fundamental” outcome of any film. 

Do I wish more mainstream audiences could give these more “complex” films a chance? Do I agree that “human beings are complicated” and that “history is messy”? Yes, of course! However, it is also totally okay to love movies that make us feel “morally good.” For the longest time, Bicycle Thieves sat in the top films in the Sight and Sound top movies polls. It’s a simple, sentimental melodrama about the plight of the working class. There’s very little complicated or complex about it, but people love it for how it makes them feel. Loving it also signals that they care for the people who are struggling below the poverty line. I believe there’s a moral action here, but who is wielding it? Is the audience using the film to prove their moral good? Or has the film used powerful tools of cinema that can evoke empathy to engender an audience toward a cause for moral good?

To tackle a more recent example that LSOO references in his video: Does America Ferrera’s monologue in Barbie merely echo a general sentiment that people find easily relatable, or does it effectively create a sentiment that people find easily relatable resulting in a winning film critically and commercially? Chicken, egg, etc. It is difficult to ascertain the intent in the making of these films, but we know films are largely empathy machines which generally appeal toward a sense of moral good, whether generic or novel. Sometimes those tools can be utilised for morally bad aims, some films can be “problematic.” It is up to us to talk about these things and that can be the discussion and conflict that we can have, regardless of the kind of films that are part of the conversation. 

Overwhelming constant stimulants

I am the last person that will disagree with LSOO’s prevailing sentiment here. There’s too much content, too much noise, too much choice, and we defer to algorithms to make our choices (leaning towards relatable, catered for you type content) because the paradox of choice is paralysing. The debilitating effect of this overwhelming noise is that we, as audiences, cannot carve out the space to engage with something more complex or demanding of our attention. We rather wilfully discard our attention in a thousand pieces to the most convenient bidder because it is easier. We present the choices between mindlessly scrolling on TikTok, and spending 2 hours in a movie theatre as equal propositions. 

I agree that this is a huge problem, but it is clear the real villains are not the audiences but the corporations that value our attention and are clamouring to claim it. However, I think we forget that our attention does not need to be given. Sometimes we need to spend that time and energy on ourselves. We lead stressful lives and events that we demand “escapism” from, or “mindless comfort” to cope with, but maybe the answer is not mindless comfort, and maybe it also is not cinema. Seeking good cinema is not the solution to “bad content”, and audiences are also not the problem. To put it in blunt and bleak terms, the problem is the context we currently live in can feel hopelessly fucked. Our attention is shredded to bits, and our ability to commune appropriately with each other is dulled. Cinema is not the salve.

I also see the irony here writing my little newsletter hoping to find my own little audience, as another drop in the content bucket that’s already completely overflowing. If you’re reading, I appreciate you and the attention you’re granting me. I hope these pieces provide a sort of mindful comfort. Anyway, here comes my subscribe button:

Towards true nourishment

At the opening of this section, LSOO declares there is no “absolute death of cinematic curiosity”, a rebuke of his original alarmist title: “The Death of Cinematic Curiosity” (which is the reason I clicked on the video). LSOO admits he is also contending with his own existential crisis with cinema, finding himself falling into the same traps as the “modern audience” he is painting, and hoping to immerse himself in better cinema. The video is not really about other people. 

He’s disappointed that he himself has recently indulged in popcorn entertainment instead of more “nourishing” and difficult complex films. Tom, there’s no need to feel shameful for your diet of cinema. There is cinema for every moment, and sometimes escapism or relatability is the answer. You can contain multitudes, my guy. There’s no need to be so hard on yourself, or on others. 

It’s why I am frustrated by something as simple as the title of a YouTube video. The title pins the blame when the video does not. Even for Tom, he is beholden to the algorithm, stoking emotional flames for clicks. I guess it has worked on me to engage with it to such a high degree, but the litany of YouTube comments show many who only grasp the emotionally incisive main point but none of the nuances he tries to pair with the video. 

Still, I find myself also commiserating with Tom’s journey here, also realising that there’s content I consume, be it television, video games, or film, in a mindless fashion. I am always culling the need to consume. My lists grow ever longer, and every once in a while I have to aggressively cut them down or the pressure to do it all becomes too stressful. Heck, I’ve been trying to completely quit television because of the outsized time commitment but the desire to keep up with the latest dragons can be hard to kill.

If there’s anything I implore others to think about, is the need to reconsider our relationship with the content we consume and to be a little more mindful with how we spend our time. This is completely generic, and could have nothing to do with cinema, but I think spending the time to think about what is important to oneself is a necessary act of identity forming. The most important algorithm for deciding how to spend your time is in your skull: cultivate and listen to it. 

I find my own discovery of cinema as a hobby to be equally a crutch to escape, even if the films I aim to watch are supposedly more complex or nourishing. Films are inert. The value they produce is aligned with the effort and attention you pour into them. A supposedly good, complex, and nourishing film can still be used for “mindless comfort.” This year, I decided I wanted to watch fewer films, but spend more time engaging or thinking about them to glean better insight. It has little to do with the films themselves, or their inherent quality, but with my approach to the medium. This is something no one else has control over, not the movies, not the audiences, just me. 

I say Tom’s argument is meandering, but I know my response here feels similar. We both see an issue with how we, as a larger general audience, engage with cinema, but we don’t know what the right solutions are. Maybe we can only be observers to how attitudes shift, and any agency we hope to exercise in shaping those shifts is lacking. 

Some films will die, despite their excellence. We can try our best to champion them to those that remain unaware of them, or even unwilling to engage. We need to extend hands across these supposed battle lines and invite others in. Compel them to give them a shot. If it doesn’t work out, so be it. Most importantly, we need to share cinema, not because it makes us feel good about our taste, but because we think cinema is good for others. Like I said earlier in this piece, I believe cinema dies when we stop communing with each other. This year, I’ve come to realise how important community is when it comes to any hobby or interest, niche or otherwise. People sustain and nourish each other, not cinema. It’s difficult to appreciate cinema alone, find others. 

We can’t fail cinema, but we sure as hell can fail each other. Be kind.

Notes

• I added photos mostly to break up text, but they’re not doing much else. Would a wall of text be equally digestible? Someone let me know!

• This turned out really long which I was not expecting at all! I think Like Stories of Old tapped on something latent that had also been bothering me.

• Deep Cut just released an episode on Cure (1997) , now that’s a film that’s complex and challenging!

Recently, I rewatched Kelly Reichardt’s fantastic Showing Up on the big screen. Seeing Williams’ portrayal of Lizzy on the big screen elevated my experience of it. I rave about Williams’ performance here: 

I previously saw it on my television for our Deep Cut podcast episode on it. Listen here. In the age of streaming and convenient content on our phones, there has been a shift away from the cinemas. I am not the first to recognise this and there’s a marked decrease in cinema-going in Singapore despite previously having one of the highest per capita visits to the cinema per annum.

We lose a lot for a film like Showing Up if we watch it at home. As a “small” film rooted in the quotidian life of a single character with subtle emotional arcs, the big screen amplifies important information, and makes the viewing experience more worthwhile. I have often heard people think of films like Showing Up as films that are “good enough” to watch at home. I say emphatically NO. If anything, it is even more important you watch them on the big screen compared to the latest action-heavy and CGI-laden extravaganza.

In Showing Up, observing characters is the number one activity we are engaged with as an audience. Blowing up those performances on the big screen gives us clarity into those performances. Williams’ micro-expressions, her posture, her ways of moving through space, these are more easily observed when made large. Especially in wide shots, when characters move through space at the rhythms of daily life, the quietness of atmosphere and the tactility of the space can be better felt. In the opening scene, Lizzy peeks out at Jo in the backyard from the yard door. She remains there, exceptionally still, and she never closes the distance. That combative distance is much better felt when we can see her near life-sized on a larger screen.

In contrast, that big action film is so overstuffed with stimulation that watching it on a smaller screen allows you to see the mechanics of its making more clearly rather than being completely bowled over by it. Maybe we should invert our ideas of what deserves to be big and what deserves to be small. 

Additionally, with the inability to pause, the theatre cares not for your distractions. Cinematic time moves forward independent of your schedule. As an easily distractible person, I need that sanctity of time and space of the cinema to better appreciate slow or simple films. Films that do not use the most aggressive attention-grabbing tools of the trade. These “small” films require more effort from an audience, and going to the cinema gives you the capacity to better engage. 

To be frank, I am not the biggest fan of slow cinema. Being in the theatre affords the opportunity to sit with characters and the unfolding events in time. Submitting to the pace and rhythm of a film allows you to let go of control. With no avenue to do anything else, you are better able to create the mindful space I describe here, to actively receive and respond emotionally and intellectually. By letting go of temporal control in the darkness of the theatre, you can let it in. 

Even if the mind wanders in a screening, you are locked in your seat, unless you choose to leave the theatre. To be distracted at home while watching a film, is to be distracted by events outside the film, like your wife asking you to go to bed, your child wanting to play, or your sibling asking you why you only ever watch the oddest movies. In the theatre, your attention can only stray to the margins of the film, to what is on-screen, and being distracted in a cinema is to be distracted by the film or the thoughts and feelings it conjures. It is how I realised the white dog that’s in the college office is Lizzy’s mom’s dog when I noticed it in her home later. At first, I thought the dog was merely a fun little detail at the college until I noticed him sleeping conspicuously again at a door threshold in Lizzy’s mom’s home. Having a sense of the owner of the dog creates this tiny connection that makes the world come a little more alive. Reichardt’s films in particular thrive in these minute details.

This sanctity of the cinema experience is a big reason why I find people who check messages in theatres so infuriating. You willingly introduce a source of distraction into the space for yourself, and, worse still, for others. It is not the film’s fault you have no attention span, or that you need to be constantly stimulated! I rather you allow yourself to fall asleep, which I flagrantly do all the time in the cinema, and wake up discombobulated and grasping for the current narrative thread. That can be an interesting cinematic experience in itself. I sometimes wake up in the cinema dreaming of the film I am still seeing. 

Of course, a fruitful experience at the cinema assumes the film is good. Even if it might not cater to your taste, at least cinema-going gives it a chance, and you approach your conversation with the film in better faith. On the television, that small film might be dead on arrival. I have seen many small films at home, and I know I am not meeting them with the respect they need for me to appreciate them fully. I hope I can someday revisit some of these films on the big screen.

Mindsets and art making

Recently I was sitting in the library in a non-quiet section listening to someone berate another on the phone, consistently saying “you don’t bullshit [sic]”, “you stupid [sic]”, etc. I assumed it was a business partner or employee, but after eavesdropping for a while I realised they were talking to their child, calling them out on lying about doing their schoolwork. It was appalling and while I am not ready to start fights in libraries yet, I was tempted to ask whether they thought their behaviour was good parenting. I think most would be in agreement that this is not, but Showing Up engages with a different kind of poor parenting.

In the video, I briefly mention Magaro's character Sean being labelled a “genius” early and how it affects him in living up to the label. I have recently read Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, where the term “growth mindset” comes from, and she addresses this same phenomenon. Labels are dangerous. It is a poignant little sub-theme that Reichardt sneaks into the film and contrasts with Lizzy’s tenaciousness because she is not considered to be particularly talented. Sean is coddled by his mother who has a firm belief that her son is a talented artistic genius. While Reichardt’s narrative does not dig particularly deep into the way the mother’s perspective has warped Sean’s own self-narrative, the consequences are plain to see. Sean is broken by the need to live up to this label of genius.

On the flip side, for Lizzy, to hear her mother talk of another sibling’s artistic genius, while she herself is trying to produce art, feels trying. It is as if her mother has already picked a winner early on in both her children’s artistic careers, and she will only see this initial bet through. Lizzy’s mother cannot see her responsibility in what is happening to her son, nor can she see how it affects her daughter. There’s something dour about the family dynamic here, as lightly funny the film can be. There’s a curmudgeonly perspective to the film, refusing to depict the “middle-aged” art making life as an entirely joyous pursuit, like how the young art school students behave. Art making is tough, competitive, lonely, and it can make you feel insignificant searching for insignificance. If you make it your life, life becomes difficult.

However, this is not a narrative of hard work trumps talent. Lizzy is as afraid of success as she is of mediocrity, and she will probably feel safer being unseen her whole life. Lizzy is fixed in a mindset that no one appreciates her or her work. It is the source of her grouchy temperament, and she feeds on this. She is her number one obstacle in her career, and it is only in the moments of opening up, to Jo, to the bird, that she realises she can find joy in the work. I find much kinship in Lizzy and Sean; they feel like the two halves of my id; they still have wounds to heal, room to grow. 

Notes

• In Singapore, The Projector is still showing Showing Up. Please go see!

• Yes, I am doing video now. This first one is part of a series I’m calling “One Thing”. Less film reviews, more me talking out one idea from a single film. For video, I intend to only talk about films I am seeing in the cinema for now. The release schedule will be irregular. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to making more analytical video essays like my Kore-eda one on Still Walking, but I might!

• Bhargav, loyal listener to the podcast, has a great piece about Showing Up here.

  Thank you for reading The Kinetoscope. This post is public so feel free to share it.

  Share

Hello readers, I am back!

2023 was a period of violent hibernation for me. Imagine I’m Stephen Chow in this scene from Kung Fu Hustle:

While it was a turbulent year for me personally, it was also one with a huge opportunity for change and growth. I find myself in the middle of 2024 with clarity about what I want to achieve with this newsletter and my podcast, Deep Cut, that I record with my dear friends Eli and Wilson. I want to write or talk about films I enjoy because there is inherent pleasure in the process, and I want to more consistently share them with you. I have also realised the motivation to write should come from the act of writing itself, on films and topics I am excited about, rather than a hope for my insight to be deemed meaningful by someone else. 

When I was younger, the main guiding lights of “film criticism” I had were the videos by Every Frame a Painting and the writings of Film Crit Hulk. While I am indebted to their content for opening the valve for my love of film, I realised that the quality standard of their criticism, rooted in specific and thorough analysis, became a toxic goal for me. I only wanted to write what would make me sound smart. I was always searching for some insight that was absolutely original, which is extraordinarily difficult to do. I took a similar approach with my film essays at Wesleyan, and now that I am in my 30s I have realised how much that desire has curtailed me from consistently producing any kind of writing. My need for the writing to be deemed intelligent or novel meant there were few writing ideas that fit that high standard even before I even began to write them. Both Every Frame a Painting and Film Crit Hulk have their tremendous, seemingly effortless insight from years of doing the work. I need to put in the work.

Which is to say I want my writing here to be unpolished, experimental, and maybe even a little stupid. I want to give myself the licence to write whatever comes naturally to me, without a need to hit some arbitrary standard of quality others or I may set for myself. While people have complimented me about the quality of my film criticism or analysis, and I have even won an award for my writing, I now feel wary regarding the ways we cultivate competitiveness in film criticism. I think the process is more important than the product. Film criticism is an act of learning. 

I have heard the sentiment that some do not consider themselves “cinephiles” because they do not have the education for it or do not know where to begin to think about film. They think they need some kind of syllabus to learn to appreciate film better. It is as if there needs to be a learned identity shift from layman to “cinephile” before they may even approach less mainstream films.

I hate that. I hate that we have inadvertently cultivated this sentiment among people outside our cinephilic circles, because I think film is simple. 

The reason I love film is because it is a set of tools rooted in sound and image that can immediately and easily give rise to both emotional and intellectual reactions in an audience. Film is meant to be accessible, regardless of dichotomies of “mainstream” versus “art-house.” Like magic, you do not need to know the way the trick is done to be wowed by the performance of it. It either hits for you, or it does not. 

In an effort to democratise my own learning about film, the following section is a simple guide on How I Think About Film. This is years of me watching, thinking, writing, and talking about films boiled down to what I think to be the bare essentials to deepen one’s experience and appreciation for any film.

How I Think About Film

In my year end list on Letterboxd for 2023, a piece of writing I am actually really proud of, I wrote this:

It can be pointless debating on end with others or yourself about what makes a film sing or sink for you. Ranking is a meaningless exercise in the grand scheme of things but it reflects inwards, and forces you to contend with what you find most meaningful. I've found that when I've struggled with how I felt about a piece of art it was helpful to lean on a little phrase I've used to anchor myself in a year of change: "Go with the feeling."

So when I say “how I think”, I don’t actually mean think. I mean “feel” and how I take that feeling to discover personal insights from any film. 

My journey in learning to appreciate film has been an exercise in deliberate mindfulness. The viewing experience should be active and split into two directions. One where I process information the film is projecting to me through the elements of sight and sound, and another where I am noticing the physiological and intellectual reactions that arise in me. I am turning the self into a subject of observation. In a theatre, that observation of the self can even extend to other audience members where I get to see if my reactions are in alignment with the crowd or not. In connecting with the self, I am discovering what is having an effect on me. 

As I note these feelings or thoughts bubbling up inside me, I am asking a set of fairly basic questions (feel free to come up with other kinds of questions for your own use):

• What am I feeling or thinking right now?

• What made me feel or think this way?

• How much of this reaction is a result of what the film is doing, and how much of it is something arising from me?

• How did the film make me feel or think this way?

• What is making me laugh?

• What is making me cry?

• What am I empathising with? Why?

Typically these will have answers rooted in film form, storytelling devices, or patterns across multiple films. Some examples:

• The edit was rapid and it made me feel stressed.

• Before she got her goal, all hope felt lost, so the ending felt triumphant. 

• The lens used made me feel like I was far away, so it felt like I was spying on them.

• The silence was accentuated by creepy sounds, so it felt like there was heightened danger

• I thought the actor only played a certain kind of a role but this role surprised me. They exhibited new range to me.

• The director usually favours close-ups but this film uses more wide shots, so it feels more objective to me. They are trying something different because of the change in subject matter. 

• Knowing more specific technical film terms might help better articulate these answers, but I believe the questions are more important.

There, that’s my very expensive film education in three paragraphs. If you’re thinking Ben, that’s overly simplistic, well, it is simple! Keep asking questions, then begin asking more complex questions to find more complex answers. Then those personal insights into film form get more valuable, more insightful, and slowly one discovers what it is about any film they most respond to. While I say it is “simple”, this process might not be easy. More difficult questions beget richer answers, but may require deeper reflection, whether alone or with others. For me, this process of questioning has been a long and fruitful journey in defining and redefining my taste and I am still excited to discover further dimensions to that taste.

Largely, the exercise of trying to connect more closely with a film on either an intellectual or emotional level is a process of self-reflection. If you were to try to objectively argue that a movie made you feel a certain way, but the film actually doesn’t have an effect like that on you personally, it would ring hollow. There are no right answers, only right answers to you. 

Films live in the conversation between screen and audience. The former never changes and the latter is always changing in the grand scheme of things. An audience from Japan will have different reactions from an audience in Morocco. And guess what, you don’t get a choice as to which kind of audience you are. You are who you are. Your only tool for experiencing film is yourself. 

While you don’t get to change who you literally are, maybe the act of engaging with the film on screen can change your own relationship with the self. That’s the magic trick I keep talking about. I have learnt so much about myself and the world around me from watching films. Some of my favourite films have changed me. 

So, no, you do not need a rubric, special class, or silly newsletter article on substack by some random dude to learn how to appreciate how a film works. Go with the feeling; go with your feeling. 

What’s Next for The Kinetoscope

I have some ideas but I am not fully certain yet. Some possible pieces of writing and formats I am mulling are:

• Reviews but I mostly dive into one specific element or scene I find fascinating, maybe in video form.

• Personal reflections revisiting directors whose films I have not seen in a long time.

• I really thought this list would have more ideas when I started it.

The goal here is simple: to find out what excites me and write about it. The Kinetoscope looks at films but really it peers inwards towards myself. Yes, these are probably going to be writings about film, but I am tracking my personal journey into discovering cinema and what it means to me. This is still mostly for me. Unless there ends up being thousands of you subscribing, then maybe it really is for you (and me again, making money, hopefully).

Maybe, by writing a bit more and sharing it, I can help to cultivate a more personal appreciation of film for myself, and also encourage you to do the same. I would love for this artform to feel more accessible and rewarding for others.

I am hoping to write on at least a bi-weekly basis from here on out. So if you like where I am headed with this and want me to keep it going, subscribe to this newsletter. Feel free to scream at me in the comments to keep me accountable. I will not take it personally. 

If you are one of my existing 10 subscribers, thank you for not unsubscribing after receiving this. If you are new here, I hope you enjoy whatever lies ahead. 

Notes

• Thanks to Eli and Wilson for reading the first draft of this.

• I’ve already recorded my first video for the video version of The Kinetoscope. You can subscribe here if you want to see it the moment it goes live. ;) 

I still think about Keiko sometimes— I wish I could have more of her tenacity.

I Didn’t Hear No Bell: Small, Slow But Steady Triumphs and Missteps in Deaf Representation

Amidst other recent prominent films about deaf experiences such as Oscar best picture winner CODA (2021) and Criterion-anointed Sound of Metal (2019), comes a quiet new contender: Small, Slow but Steady (ケイコ 目を澄ませて, 2022). The film is the fifth narrative feature by Japanese director Shô Miyake, and is based on the autobiographical book Makenaide (2011) written by Keiko Ogasawara, Japan’s first deaf female pro-boxer. Miyake approaches the biopic as a slice of life story set during the COVID-19 pandemic in Tokyo. Between training sessions and boxing bouts, the film also explores Keiko’s life outside the ring and parallels her character’s arc with the deteriorating health of her boxing gym’s chairman.

When a new film comes onto the scene with a central hearing-impaired character, issues of accurate and sensitive representation naturally arise. Film is a medium characterised by two sensory elements, sight and sound, and most filmmakers have unencumbered access to both senses. Small, Slow but Steady being directed by and having its deaf protagonist played by hearing persons inherently raises questions as to whether they will approach their subject with sufficient care. 

Driven by Miyake’s confident directing and lead actress Yukino Keishii’s subtle and expressive performance, Miyake’s film largely avoids the pitfalls of other films with regard to deaf representation. Eschewing heavy dramatics and the high professional or personal stakes that other boxing films might build, the film’s stripped back approach is empathetic and affirming. It generates sympathy for Keiko without sensationalising her deafness. 

Miyake is careful to depict Keiko as a boxer who simply happens to be deaf, not one who must specifically overcome the difficulties of deafness in her boxing career. The central conflict for Keiko is her sudden wish to quit boxing and how she mulls over the decision and hesitates to bring it up with the chairman. That conflict is not inherently tied to her deafness. Keiko’s interior struggles are presented as universally relatable, irrespective of one’s ability to hear. She searches for validation from her mother and wishes to be left alone yet also desires to feel less alone. She embodies the contradictions of being human and is wonderfully realised. Ultimately, she is the underdog all of us want to root for, and Keishii plays her beautifully. 

In reaction shots, Keiko’s facial expressions give remarkable access to her underlying emotional states. The moments where her bright smile breaks through her steely exterior are some of the film’s most heartwarming moments and when tears well up in her eyes you feel so close to her even without fully knowing what she's thinking. When the film does finally grant access into Keiko’s interior life, it comes through in the form of the chairman’s wife reading out Keiko’s journals in voiceover. While the content of these journals is largely the mundane and methodical records of her daily training, having that direct access is profoundly moving. It is a window into her passion for boxing, and the sense of purpose and belonging it gives her.

When it comes to specifically representing the effects of deafness on Keiko’s daily life, Miyake’s approach is observant without over-emphasising differences. Keiko is frequently the only hearing-impaired individual in scenes. Thus, the film finds Keiko communicating with others through simple, universally understood hand gestures. 

These interactions are presented as mundane, as a fact of Keiko’s daily life and how she would operate within a hearing world that does not always cater to those who are hearing-impaired. They are daily difficulties, but not insurmountable obstacles. They are presented as matter of factly as the soundless devices Keiko must rely on, such as an alarm clock fan or a blinking light in lieu of a doorbell. 

By embracing the need to communicate with non-verbal actions throughout the film, Miyake together with cinematographer Yûta Tsukinaga, and editor Keiko Okawa, allow that plain and matter-of-fact approach to frame Keiko’s boxing training sessions. With longer takes and wider shot choices, training sequences become wonderfully engaging choreographed dances of jabs, hooks, and uppercuts, steadily building percussive rhythm and speed. If the film reminds me of any boxing film, it most resembles Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Boxing Gym (2010) rather than the typical boxing action film. Miyake builds up a snapshot of a gym and its people, just as Wiseman does, creating a sense of camaraderie among the boxers and trainers. Even if Keiko is the protagonist, she is a crucial part of their community and it makes her feel less alone. Keiko is neither constrained by or needs to dramatically overcome her deafness, she merely lives from day to day among family and friends. It is in this patient and sensitive portrait that I find Small, Slow but Steady, a resounding success in representing a deaf character in a considered manner. 

However, Small, Slow Steady still makes small and specific choices that have inadvertently marginalised Keiko. In the few instances that she communicates with others who share her knowledge of Japanese Sign Language (JSL), the film falters and begins to treat this mode of communication as a novelty, consequently othering and objectifying the experience of deafness. While a deaf audience might have different concerns regarding the film’s representation, or even none at all,  as a hearing individual the effects and implications of these directorial choices nevertheless feel apparent to me.

The most straightforward way to incorporate sign language in a film when one expects it to be mostly watched by hearing audiences is to use subtitles. Subtitles are a simple tool for broadening access to films, most notably in the realm of spoken languages. Filmmakers have lamented that the “one-inch barrier of subtitles” seems to be a deterrent for audiences.1 Some might say they are less a filmmaker’s choice but rather an aspect of exhibition. In home-video settings for example, subtitles are a viewer’s choice, either out of necessity or preference. In Small, Slow But Steady however, Miyake boldly makes the choice of subtitling into a directorial one which foregrounds and complicates the ways JSL is included and decoded in his film.

When Keiko communicates with others in JSL, subtitles are typically used, such as in casual small talk with a co-worker. In using subtitles, JSL is presented as simply another language, much in the same way that I, as a non-Japanese speaker, must use subtitles to understand every line of dialogue. In these instances, JSL is presented on equal terms with the spoken language as simply another mode of communication. If this were the case throughout the film, subtitles would seem unremarkable. However, Miyake throws a peculiar choice into the mix: intertitles. 

In the very first instance of JSL in the film, Keiko taps her brother on the shoulder and signs with no accompanying subtitles. Immediately after, the scene cuts to white text over black translating her message. The rest of their conversation cuts between signing and intertitles. The effect is jarring, interrupting the moving image, and emphatically highlights Keiko’s seemingly ‘different’ mode of communication. This is further complicated by a later scene in which Keiko is out to lunch with two friends. Notably, their entire conversation over brunch is signed completely through JSL with the glaring absence of subtitles. 

When asked about that choice, Miyake justifies that “if subtitles were added, [he’s] sure that the beauty of the hand movements would be lost.”2 By omitting subtitles, Miyake wishes for us to focus on the expressiveness of JSL and not on the actual information being communicated. While I agree that there is beauty to the hand movements of JSL, it is unfortunate that when we see her most relaxed is when we least understand her. 

Knowing Miyake’s reasons for omitting subtitles for this scene, we can infer his intentions for using intertitles. Intertitles translate sign language asynchronously. We can thus appreciate the expressiveness of JSL without the distraction of subtitles, and still understand what is being communicated after. 

In the second and final appearance of intertitles, Keiko’s brother tries to get Keiko to open up about her feelings. The choice of intertitles here has some merit if we consider Miyake’s concerns. He wants us to closely observe Keiko’s expressions in one of the few scenes where she opens up about herself, but he still wants us to understand her. It is in line with his observational approach. I find the use of intertitles to be a double-edged choice that only confers a benefit for hearing audiences at the expense of foregrounding Keiko’s deafness. The interruption of the moving image also results in the loss of the reaction shot to make room for intertitles. By pushing focus onto sign language, we lose sight of how Keiko perceives and reacts to her brother’s questions. The benefit is detrimental, especially since subtitles would have sufficed.

Unintentionally, Miyake has turned sign language into a novel spectacle. By focusing only on the visual beauty of sign-language movements, it objectifies the method that signing individuals communicate with one another and robs Keiko and her hearing-impaired friends from being understood on their terms. Who says sign-language cannot be beautiful while being understood? Here, it seems that Miyake is equally afraid of the one-inch barrier, and his fear has resulted in othering the experiences of the deaf.

Furthermore, the scene which most betrays the curtailed limitations of deaf representation in Small, Slow But Steady is a seemingly minor moment between Keiko and the chairman. In an early scene speaking with a reporter, the chairman mentions the first time he heard Keiko’s voice out loud is her verbally saying “yes” to wanting to go pro. This sets up a payoff moment in a later conversation where the chairman implores Keiko to rediscover her will to fight in the ring. She mutters, “yes.” He tells her to say it again, louder. 

Using Keiko’s speaking voice for the only time in the film in a critical scene that solidifies the bond between mentor and student is suspect. It implies that audibly asserting herself is somehow a more emphatic expression on Keiko’s part compared to her non-verbal communication. To set up a motif of Keiko’s determination with her infrequent participation in a hearing world feels insensitive when we have seen it in her training, in her fights, and in the ways she reaches out to the world around her in spite of her introverted nature. 

Despite my misgivings on some of the film’s choices, Small, Slow But Steady remains,as a whole, a remarkably well-made film. Miyake’s film tells Keiko’s story with considerable grace by avoiding sensationalism, prioritising Keiko’s perspective, and giving her a rich interior life. While it may have been more enriching for the film to have cast a deaf actor in the lead role in terms of representation, Miyake’s empathetic approach is still commendable and quietly generates considerable emotional power. Coupled with Keishii’s tender portrayal of Keiko, now that’s still a heck of a one-two punch.

Leila’s Brothers (2022)

At every critical juncture of Leila’s Brothers (2022), I found myself fully resigned to the ways in which Leila and her family will make the single worst decisions possible for their economic situations and social standing. I cannot imagine a more dire set of circumstances for a group of characters so blind to the ways they have set themselves up for failure and yet Saeed Roustaee’s Leila’s Brothers (2022) announces itself as a riotously funny feel-bad movie that had a man in the front row laughing his head off and me shaking my head with a smile tinged with schadenfreude.

While the film may draw comparison to the moral quandaries of fellow Iranian Asghar Farhadi, it operates much more like a tragic farce, and is all the funnier for it. While Farhadi might tie you in a complex moral knot, Roustaee sets in motion a cascading set of decisions toward destitution. 

Leila, played with great urgency and intensity by Tarane Alidoosti, is the seemingly only sensible and gainfully employed member of a family of four layabout brothers who cannot catch a break and two parents who cannot stand her meddling. When a sudden bit of wealth is discovered, she concocts a plan to ensure the economic security of her brothers, while her father fights to use that same wealth to buy the respect he has never had.

It may seem cruel to call this funny, but I think it would have been far more miserable and difficult to watch had it been dead serious. The humour is rapid fire in the acidic barbs that the family hurls at each other as casually as the next breath they take. However, even as the siblings insult each other, there’s familial warmth. Everyone genuinely wants to do right by their brother, their father, their mother, but still everyone chooses to put themselves first. It’s a tricky balance but Roustaee nails it. 

Leila’s scheme involves buying a set of shops in a bustling mall, one each for each of her brothers, the site of which currently resides in the washroom that brother Parviz currently cleans. You can smell the irony of putting all their dreams in the toilet as they present the site to their father amidst the spluttery sounds of men doing their business. It is at points like these that it feels like Roustaee might have pushed it too far in comically amplifying the situation of his characters, but he has walked the line so finely throughout the film that a scene as ridiculous as this is still welcome.

Despite the broad, sometimes juvenile humour, Roustaee manages to characterise each family member in a way that allows you to see their perspectives no matter how warped. Even amidst tragedy, the family finds ways to laugh at their own plight; we laugh with them and not at them, and there lies all the difference. 

Notes:

• Tarane Alidoosti is currently under arrest by the Iranian government for denouncing the authoritarian regime and supporting the ongoing protests. My heart goes out to her and the Iranian people who are fighting against oppression.

R.M.N. (2022)

Named after the Romanian acronym for an MRI, the obliquely titled R.M.N. (2022) suggests director Cristian Mungiu’s intention to expose the insidious darkness of the Romanian psyche, but all he uncovers has already been on the surface all along. The film centers on the stoic Matthias, who returns home to a quiet Transylvanian village to involve himself with his son Rudi’s upbringing after abruptly quitting his job in Germany with a headbutt response to a colleague calling him a “gypsy.”

Gruffly masculine, unlikable, and obtuse, Matthias is frustrated by what he thinks is the overbearing care Rudi’s mother is giving the child who has been spooked by a horrible sight in the woods that he refuses to speak about. On the side Matthias hooks up with his on and off again lover, Csilla, who runs a bakery with her boss. The bakery, the largest factory in the village, is forced to hire migrants from Sri Lanka to fill up job postings that have been left unfilled by a village population that would rather find work elsewhere in Europe.

Csilla, Hungarian and assimilated outsider, becomes employer-protector to the Sri Lankans, defending them from the racist hatefulness of the village and emerges as the true protagonist of the film. Csilla being a key figure in this central conflict makes one wonder why Matthias is the entry point into this film. He cares nothing for and has nearly nothing to do with the brewing public outcry. Matthias acts as mercenary to both camps, on one hand allegedly participating in violent behavior against the Sri Lankans, and on the other giving them rides on his motorcycle. 

Much ink has been spilled heralding the virtuosity of a seventeen minute long-take wherein members of the community attempt to debate whether the Sri Lankans should be allowed to stay. The shot is masterfully scripted, staged and blocked from the viewpoint of an unmoving camera, but the hatefulness on display is rudimentary. We’ve heard all these things before. In the repetition of racist vitriol, Mungiu achieves little than to make apparent what is already obvious. Bigots, regardless of geography, have been saying the quiet part out loud for centuries. The quiet part was never quiet. 

Mungiu’s film is not built or directed at the people whose minds he most wants to change, his film is made for the Csillas in the audience. By anonymizing the bigots as a herd of hatred, there’s little to latch onto and to question how they have come to be this way and how they remain so. The irony of a people who meet discrimination outside their borders, but similarly will spurn the migrants that come to their village for employment is clear, but what of it? If anything, the film only functions as a validator for you, the supposed enlightened non-racist, to agree that, yes, bad people do exist and you should be proud you are not one of them. However, it offers nothing constructive nor insightful about this state of affairs. Mungiu merely points things out. 

The most interesting remark that arises from the town hall meeting is the brief criticism leveled at the factory that has decided to hire the migrant workers: they do it to keep wages low. Csilla and her employer are exploiting global labour and it is their financial interest to protect the Sri Lankans. They know the intolerant atmosphere of their town, and yet they bring the Sri Lankans in anyway and put them in harm’s way. However, the film spends little to no time investigating this, presenting Csilla entirely as a virtuous employer, even though profitability is the ulterior motive.

Even with the film’s supposedly noble intentions, it is frustrating that the Sri Lankans, the target of all this condemnation, remain ciphers. They have families, they cook good food and that is all we know. They are used to help delineate the good and bad Romanians, but they are not characters of their own. They function only as subjects to be fought over, attacked or protected. The film cares little for their perspective and, as characters, they are defined by the hate they must endure.

Maybe the most curious stylistic choice in the film is the use of Yumeji’s theme by Shigeru Umebayashi, the famous lilting and longing tune that is the emotional girder to Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). An assuredly distracting choice for anyone steeped in global film culture, I found its inclusion utterly confounding. Csilla plays the tune on her cello at various points in the film. I have read that other critics understand it as a motif and signifier of culture and that it presents Csilla as one of “higher culture” and thus a little removed from the people she is trying to help. Unfortunately, I think the argument holds little water, and Mungiu positions Csilla as heroine and little more. With its obtuse storytelling and simplistic moralism, R.M.N. (2022) aims for profundity but ends up being perplexing, frustrating, and leaving me in the mood for something to love.

Share The Kinetoscope