At Home With… July Picks
Friends of Metrograph Chase Hall, Randy Kennedy, Sloane Crosley, and Theo Anthony each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
Moments Without Proper Names, dir. Gordon Parks, 1987
Gordon Parks is the pinnacle of a multi-disciplinary artist. This documentary showcases Park’s compositional expertise, storytelling, as well as his truth-seeking images and words. It isn’t often that the camera and the subject see eye to eye, but within Park’s practice he evokes a true reciprocity. His love of humanity and life oozes through whatever and whichever medium he deemed necessary. This documentary is a beautiful, resonant film that catalogs some of Park’s stunning work, both with a camera and a pen.
WATCH MOMENTS WITHOUT PROPER NAMES
Chase Hall is an artist living and working in New York, where he is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Steinhardt Department of Art.
The Grey Fox, dir. Phillip Borsos, 1982
It always seems like a miracle when quiet movies get made, even if they were made back when the film industry was less risk-averse—movies of small, honest registers, carried by seasoned actors who aren’t necessarily stars. The Grey Fox is a beautiful sleeper, the story of a few months in the life of a Western highwayman named Bill Miner—played by the marvelous Richard Farnsworth—who ends a 33-year stint in San Quentin in 1901 and is “released into the 20th century,” as the title cards put it. The Power of the Dog (2021) owes obvious debts to its spare composition and serene pacing. I can’t help but imagine that when David Lynch cast Farnsworth as the anti-hero in The Straight Story (1999), Lynch told him: “Listen, just play Bill Miner again, superannuated beyond measure, driving a lawn tractor across the Midwest for one last hurrah.”
Randy Kennedy is a writer, editor and curator. His first novel, Presidio, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2018. For 25 years, he was a staff writer for The New York Times. He is now editor-in-chief of the art magazine Ursula, published by the gallery Hauser & Wirth.
Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang, 1927
Once you see Metropolis, do you even need to see another silent expressionist German sci-fi film? I came to Lang’s classic via The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), my favorite Coen brothers film (a sentiment that usually leads to some verbal table-flipping). The former clearly inspired the latter. Visually, Metropolis is just the most arrestingly cool brutalist carnival. Plus, reading a question like “Who lubricates the machine joints with their own blood?” (as an intertitle) is surely better than hearing it.
Sloane Crosley is the author, most recently, of the novel Cult Classic. Her next nonfiction book, Grief Is for People, is out in February.
The Task, dir. Leigh Ledare, 2017
A film that smashes open the fractal machinations of social interaction with a playful dance of clinical observation and compassionate humor. Does it matter what the group is talking about, or just how, from where, they’re talking about it? Where are you sitting, after all? How are you feeling sitting there? As one participant says, “Is the power in the chair, though?” I leave this film feeling grateful for the miracle that any of us get along at all.
WATCH THE TASK
(The Task streams on Metrograph At Home through July 16)
Theo Anthony is a filmmaker and bowler based in upstate New York. His first feature, Rat Film, screens at Metrograph starting Friday, July 7.
