Container #25 Circumstantial Pleasures screening
...and thoughts on Venice and Locarno Film Festival plus our upcoming retrospective...
Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.
Next Tuesday’s Screening:
Circumstantial Pleasures, Lewis Klahr, 2020, 65m
A feature-length animated collage in six episodes, Circumstantial Pleasures is a dazzlingly upcycled treasure trove of found materials. Utilising a variety of surprising techniques—from cut-out and stop-motion to live-action—Lewis Klahr crafts an indignant mosaic of late-capitalist iconography.
Circumstantial Pleasures bypasses the iconography Klahr became famous for—the texture and id of cheap halftone comic, noir and ad imagery—for high DPI images of planes, shipping containers and pills, creating a unique film in Klahr’s body of work and one that though made over eight years, taps into our paranoid times.
Unrated 15+
With thanks to Lewis Klahr
Additional Readings (for those who have the time and curiosity):
Two pieces around Circumstantial Pleasures: Lewis Klahr’s detailed and honest interview for Bomb Magazine here and the film’s review by Manohla Dargis in The New York Times here.
Upcoming Screenings:
15 August: Lewis Klahr’s Circumstantial Pleasures
29 August: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds
12 September: Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka
Neighbouring Sounds starts our Kleber Mendonça Filho mini retrospective. One of the key new filmmakers of the current generation, Filho’s films have never been screened before in Brisbane: it took a while for the Brazilian filmmaker’s debut film Neighbouring Sounds to receive recognition so it was missed here, his next Aquarius was optimistically (but incorrectly) intended for a theatrical release here, and Bacurau encountered covid. So we thought we might take advantage of his latest, Pictures of Ghosts which debuted at Cannes 2023, to present these significant works.
Locarno and Venice Film Festival notes:
The big end-of-year film festivals are starting to appear. We’ll have a few notes on Toronto and New York with our next newsletter—this email is already too long.
Locarno has already wrapped and the two key standouts are:
1. Teddy Williams’ The Human Surge 3* a study of endless circulating people filmed with a 360degree camera (typically used for AR/VR immersion but broken towards Teddy’s needs.)
2. Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. The follow-up to his breakout Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, DNETMFEW is a state-of-the-world address that follows the overworked movement of Angela, an overworked film production assistant undertaking chores throughout Bucharest and folds in footage from Angela merge mai departe (1981), in which another Angela , this time a harried taxi driver, drives around the same locations during the Communist era. We’ll confirm that the two Angelas meet, but we won’t say how.
*There was an original Human Surge, but no Surge 2.
Venice is big. A few notes that seemed to strike most people (and likely in this order.)
1. Oh this is where the problem people turned up. Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Luc Besson all appear with new films. We guess if you’re taking the flack for one, you might as well take the flake for all.
2. This is where all the films are. 2023 has been a disappointing year for films so far—this is the year we can really see the damage to the pipeline caused by Covid. Rotterdam, Berlin and Sundance were uninspiring and even Cannes was relatively thin. However if just some of the promising premieres at Venice pan out, the year could become much stronger.
In addition to our most anticipated titles with Betrand Bonello’s The Beast and Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft (pictured above), other world premiers from name directors include: Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, David Fincher’s The Killer, Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Human Sugar, Richard Linklater’s The Hitman, Frederick Wiseman’s Menu Plaisirs, and Céline Sciamma’s short This is How a Child Becomes a Poet. The brothers Bill and Turner Ross are not name directors, but their last film, a quasi-documentary called Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, was one of our favourite films of 2020, so we’re deeply looking forward to their debut feature Gasoline Rainbow.
3. Vale William Friedkin who passed away last week. His latest film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial also debuts at this year’s Venice, alongside a restoration of his most famous film The Exorcist. There have been many appraisals and re-appraisals of his work over the last few days, so we won’t offer too much more, bar that he worked his material: every shot and cut given a twist to ratchet up the intensity—whether in boundary pushing content, near camp performances, overwhelming music, or just unexpected but apt compositions—giving his best films a lysergic expressionistic heat. Which is why his 1985 film, To Live and Die in L.A. (trailer below), is probably our favourite work of his.
Thank you. We look forward to catching you on Tuesday for our screening of Lewis Klahr’s Circumstantial Pleasures paranoid animated collage, and then a fortnight later for Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds a study of Brazilian class relations through the lens of a slow-burn thriller.