Finnegan Howard ’30
Contributing Writer
A lot of the cinematic public discourse this year has been devoted to the question of whether or not film is an inherently political artform. Kicked off by director and head of this year’s Berlin Film Festival jury Wim Wenders asserting, “We have to stay out of politics because… we are the counterweight for politics,” this discussion has lingered over the course of the festival circuit and has served to frame every film premiering along the way as a response (or lack thereof) to the current moment. Looking at this year’s New York Film Festival through that framework, the 64th edition of the festival has not failed to meet the moment or shy away from the conversation at all. In the introduction to the festival’s program, artistic director Dennis Lim writes, “Our slate is full of reminders that cinema has a unique ability to reflect and make sense of the world. You could take almost any cross section of the lineup and come away with a vivid picture of what our present looks, sounds, and feels like.” As a result, the outside world has never felt like such an overbearing presence in Lincoln Center’s theaters, a space once defined through its escapism, and I’ve seen audiences respond to it in funky ways. On one hand, I’ve found audiences more willing to tackle a diverse slate of films than previous additions; but on the other hand, I’ve found an audience that at some point can be marked as too excitable. Whether it’s raucous standing ovation or incessant laughter throughout stretches of serious social dramas, this year’s NYFF audience is one that seems determined to “create moments” to aid an artform threatened by AI and looming mergers. As a result, it feels unavoidable to look at this year’s films from a lens other than that of the outside world, and doesn’t the context of its existence make a piece of art political?
The Revivals section, composed of new restorations of old films, has often been regarded as the most overlooked section of the festival. But, during the festival’s opening weekend, the festival received an event only rivaled by Godzilla itself: the North American premiere of the 4K restoration of Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils. Finding a second life along the festival circuit, it’s hard to imagine why audiences might connect with a film about a leader with a ridiculous hairdo leveraging the institutions of fate as a means of gaining unprecedented control of political institutions. “Ken always said this was his one political film,” his widow Lisi Tribble remarked in an introduction for the film, and it’s hard to imagine a film mixing the sacred with the sacrilegious as anything but. Certainly it was taken so at the time, as American and British censors demanded that two scenes of the film (one “perverting” communion, the other reckoning with the violation of a nun’s autonomy throughout the film) be cut so the film could be widely released, but those scenes have been reinserted to remarkable effect in this new restoration. The restoration has also served to lend the film a newfound timeliness in its crystal-clear visual fidelity reflecting our present moment with such urgency you wouldn’t think it was a 55-year-old film. “The thing that it means to each generation is different,” British critic and overseer of the restoration Mark Kermode observed in a Q&A following the film, and I’m excited (and scared) to see how the film evolves upon subsequent revisits.
A good flipside to The Devils is also found in Revivals in Malayali filmmaker John Abraham’s 1986 film Report to Mother, which fails to capture its political backdrop with any sense of urgency. The film follows Purushan, a college student on his way to Delhi who discovers the dead body of a man he recognizes along the way and gets sidetracked in the quest to rally the man’s community and inform his mother of his death. Intercut along the way are brief glimpses at the man’s life, his previous political beliefs (or lack thereof) and the political violence he witnessed that drove him to take his own life. Fusing documentary footage and recreation of class revolts across various villages throughout, Abraham attempts to contextualize Purushan’s quest as a rallying cry for communities to come together in response to their material conditions. However, the splicing of these different timelines fail to evolve the film in any meaningful way, leaving the film to ceaselessly repeat itself about the various successes of communities uprising in an uninspiring attempt to call the audience to action. Left with no political engine, the film’s narrative is left to sputter on with the same scene of Purushan’s group meeting someone new, informing them of the man’s death, and having the new person join the group over and over again in a drab attempt to portray the process of rallying. All of this repetition serves to render Report to Mother dramatically inert due to a lack of trust in its audience, which is something you don’t want when your film opens with voiceover directly calling for membership of your artistic movement.
Speaking of dramatically inert: Godzilla Minus Zero! As someone who adores Godzilla Minus One, it brings me no joy to report that Takashi Yamazaki’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning kaiju blockbuster fails to live up to the original by any metric. Taking place in 1949, two years after the events of the original, the film follows former kamikaze pilot Koichi and his partner Noriko’s life with their adopted daughter being upended by the emergence of a new monster: King Ghidorah. With Ghidorah actively evolving and the Americans breathing down their necks, Koichi and the team from the first team are left with no other choice: fighting fire with fire and bringing back Godzilla. Using the monsters as a muddled allegory for the arms race and resistance under American occupation, Yamazaki’s script fails to imbue the melodramatic core of the film with any sort of emotional propulsion, the very thing that made Minus One so special. As a result, Godzilla Minus Zero has no counterbalance to the effects-driven monster battles, leaving the film running on the fumes of the original. While not entirely meritless (I found the film’s subversion of genre expectations remarkably inventive), Godzilla Minus Zero feels like empty calories compared to the buffet of the first, and I can’t help but leave with a bad taste in my mouth as a result.
Much of the little dramatic tension in Minus Zero is derived from Minus One’s expression in the belief of life persevering, which I found to be articulated much more succinctly in Hong Sang-soo’s Nowhere to Lay My Eyes. Hong’s 26th film to play NYFF’s Main Slate (breaking the record previously set by Jean-Luc Godard) follows Sang-hee, an experimental filmmaker, coming home for the first time in a long time and being confronted by her mother questioning her way of living and her documentarian stepfather. The film is thus propelled by the tensions bubbling at the surface as Sang-hee attempts to convince her mother of the validity of her way of living as the mother attempts to impose her life on Sang-hee, trying to draw her from Seoul to their small island with promises of land and running a restaurant. Further complicated when Sang-hee meets her stepsister, a painter bankrolled entirely by her parents while Sang-hee struggles to make ends meet in Seoul, Hong paints a portrait of the societal tension between pursuing the life you want versus the life that brings you comfort and who is or isn’t allowed to pursue one life or another. One of the reasons for Hong’s prolificacy at the festival is due to his efficient means of production, regularly writing, filming, and editing his features within his month, and you can feel that efficiency in the breeziness of Nowhere to Lay My Eyes’ 72 minute runtime. Hong’s minimalist approach to the camera allows for events to unfold without fuss, giving the film the breathing room to meditate on these relations so eloquently. Even if it gets tripped up in its didacticism from time to time, Nowhere to Lay My Eyes is a beautiful grace note of a film ____.
Also in the Main Slate is another film by a South Korean festival regular about the unspoken tensions sewn by class division featuring a main character as a documentarian: Possible Love by Lee Chang-dong. A decade in the making and partially based on Lee’s experience reckoning with what it means for his camera to be in the spaces of striking workers, Possible Love follows the family of Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu in the hollowed-out performance of the festival so far) as they attempt to move on from the emotional, physical, and financial trauma in the aftermath of mass layoffs until a documentarian and her rich boyfriend intrude on their life. Beyond the superficial comparisons to Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, Possible Love shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses as Hong’s latest, as a first half insistent on driving its point home and setting up framework fails to truly move into a realm of its own. However, the second half that follows is so delicate and revelatory that I’m left to wonder if the ends justify the means. Like the documentarian, once Lee gets the camera out of the way of his subjects, Possible Love is able to strike gold in capturing how material conditions inhibit our ability to truly connect. After all, how can one be romantic when the threat of company and state violence is constantly breathing down their back? How do you reckon with living with people who have never even been confronted with that threat? What role does the camera work in breaking down or creating barriers in our ability to connect? Possible Love so effortlessly glides between these contemporary issues, confronting the viewer with such a prescient portrait of today that it feels like it’s being live-streamed.
Similarly prescient (although nowhere as nearly contemporarily set) is Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, a fable about control over the narratives of our life. In the mid 1600s and the aftermath of the Thirty-Years’ War, Rose (played by Sandra Huller) is a woman who has assumed the identity of her fallen male comrade coming to a small, rural village to claim a deed to farmland in his name. After being accepted by the village and in an attempt to grow their farmland, Rose makes a deal with a figurehead of the community for partial ownership of a river in exchange for marrying his daughter, and the story unfolds from there. In a time where women were treated as property and outright forbidden from owning property, Rose’s story, although fictional, falls into a lineage of thousands of other women throughout the time period who adopted the identity of a man. These women’s motivations are varied, whether it’s to serve for their country or the greater level of freedom allowed by trousers, and Huller’s performance as Rose captures the peace all of these women seek in contrast with a society attempting to strip them from it at every point. As a result, what happens in the third act is haunting as Huller’s Rose stares the viewer down as everything occurs around them, confronting them with the absurdity of how little has changed and underpinned in the countless stories of assumed identities left unrecorded. Like The Devils (and, to a lesser extent, Godzilla Minus Zero), there remains truth to be mined about our present in stories about our past, and Rose proves that in the portrait of the consistent disenfranchisement of marginalized groups.
For a story that can’t be set in any other time than today, look no further than Sebastian Brameshuber’s London. In a time where society has never placed a greater level of importance on therapy but meaningful connections are few and far between, London paints a portrait of the people left to carry the burden of society’s stories: gig workers. As retiree Bobby (played by actor Bobby Sommer) shuttles passengers from all over Europe between Salzburg and Vienna, Bobby serves as a human bounce board for people and their stories, prompting the passengers to go further and further into themselves. From this focus put on the passenger’s stories, the viewer learns little about Bobby directly, only catching real glimpses of Bobby’s life in cutaways between episodic encounters with passengers. As a result, every piece of information the viewer gains about Bobby throughout the conversations feel like small wins, strung along by the intrigue Bobby excavates from his passengers’ lives, all while the threat of a global conflict boils over in the background. If I’m to be frank for a second, conceptually this is extremely similar to Wenders’s Perfect Days, which is a personal favorite of mine, and London is so clearly indebted to Perfect Days that I was always in the bag for this one (there’s even a direct allusion via a shared needle drop). However, London more than stands on its own merits as a film that knows what it is, keeping its sublime drama to the confines of a car that has more than enough fuel in the tank to go for miles.
However, the most important film I saw at this year’s festival was NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli directors of No Other Land. A term used by the Israeli military as code for the estimated amount of civilian casualties in the bombing of Palestinian households, NAZA details the tools of systematic oppression and surveillance used by the Israeli military in carrying out the genocide of Palestinians told through the anonymized confessions of Israeli military officials. Set against the backdrop of Tel Aviv’s rooftops as military officials describe the destruction of entire Palestinian cities off-screen, NAZA uses the contradiction of these officials’ removal from the devastation they’re causing to highlight the tragedy of the continued dehumanization of Palestinians. Abraham and Szor offer no remorse for these officials, their faces obscured to prevent them from being humanized as they so casually confess their crimes against humanity. While the information disclosed in the film offers is often not new (all of the information in this film has been rigorously fact-checked by multiple sources and has already been reported on in Abraham’s journalistic work), what NAZA offers is the intervention of the camera in highlighting the dissidence of the day-to-day life unfolding in the background with the cold descriptions of Palestinian surveillance. While Israelis sit in their homes without fear of being watched, Palestinians are under the threat of constant surveillance and violence for the act of existing, a crime perpetuated by the same military leaders who tell the world not to believe the testimony of the Palestinian people recording the destruction of their communities while they admit to it in the comfort of anonymity. In that way, shots peering into windows of the day-to-day life of Israelis without their consent serves as NAZA turning the camera of the security apparatus back on the people benefitting from its use in the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population to the land they’re living on.
The response to NAZA has rightfully brought into question why this film has received such a platform while Palestinian stories haven’t. For example, Palestinian films Conversation with the Sea and Citizen Osama also premiered at the Venice Film Festival and currently lack distribution; NAZA won a prize and has already begun to self-distribute itself in US theaters. At NYFF itself, Edward Said: Between Worlds, a documentary about the Palestinian-American scholar who spent his career advocating for Palestinian sovereignty, also doesn’t have distribution of any kind. However, universal to the response of these stories is Zionist backlash and casting doubt on the validity of their claims. On opening weekend, trucks with the text “UNVERIFIED” flashed in front of the theaters showing NAZA, with Zionists rallying on the streets rallying against the validity of the film’s testimony. I believe that’s why the producers of the film placed such importance of the rigor in the journalistic process behind the film when introducing it, as time and time again these stories have been attacked on the validity of their claims. But how can you deny the existence of a crime when its perpetrators testify to its perpetuation?
At NYFF, usually when a screening ends it’s met with a round of applause. When my screening of NAZA ended, there was complete silence; the man next to me openly sobbed through the second half of the film. How can you not cry for a crime being actively committed that the world attempts to pretend isn’t happening?