At Home With… March
Friends of Metrograph Meriem Bennani, Nicolaia Rips, Jason Evans, and Katie Gee Salisbury each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
Alps, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011
I watched Alps as a piece of a puzzle to understand how Yorgos managed to make The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023) after so many ice cold movies. In Alps, a group of people work as substitutes for recently deceased loved ones. Grief is postponed, taking away any hope for the viewer to witness an ounce of emotion. The actors speak monotonously, and the cameras are locked. The emotion is bubbling somewhere under the tightness of things, but I can’t fully care for movies with no heart. When you cannot emotionally connect with the characters, the only relation you are left with is with the director. You start noticing every little detail, every little joke, every decision, and watching becomes about admiring their skills. Twelve years later, in Poor Things, the main character is a literal baby whose brain explodes in every scene as she discovers dancing, masturbating, sex, class disparity, and all the emotions that make life terrible or worth living. He’s now one of my favorite directors.
Meriem Bennani is a New York-based Moroccan artist. Juxtaposing the language of reality TV, documentaries, phone footage and animation, she explores the potential of storytelling while amplifying reality through a strategy of magical realism and humor.
Helmut Newton: The Bad and The Beautiful, dir. Gero von Boehm, 2020
Helmut Newton: erotic provocateur, Holocaust survivor, the father of modern photography, and a man ranking only slightly below Leonard Cohen on my list of sexy Jews. When my mom was modeling in the ’80s Helmut asked to take nudes of her. My mom, who grew up in a conservative Jewish family in the Midwest, was only allowed to model on the condition she didn’t do nudes or swimsuit photos. So, she said no. This is one of her biggest regrets in life. Watch Helmut Newton: The Bad and The Beautiful to understand why. Because of this decision, since I was a teen, my mom has always told me, “Nicolaia, if a photographer asks to take nude photos of you and you want to do it, I want you to feel that you can.” Unfortunately, no one’s asked me yet!
WATCH HELMUT NEWTON: THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL
Nicolaia Rips is the author of Trying to Float.
Keane, dir. Lodge Kerrigan, 2004
There’s a moment in Keane in which the broken and grief-stricken title character puts the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself” on the bar jukebox and sings along, in an attempt to drown out the noises in his head. It’s distressing to watch him frantically move his feet and shake about, trying to get closer to the music, as if he might actually escape his pain, but it also perfectly illustrates what Tommy Orange in his novel There There describes as the reason that we love Motown: “It asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.”
Jason Evans is a filmmaker and curator/founder of online art archive This Long Century.
Piccadilly, dir. E. A. Dupont, 1929
In the late 1920s, Anna May Wong got fed up with the situation in Hollywood—studios wouldn’t cast her in leading roles because she was Chinese—and up and left for Europe. Piccadilly was the first of her efforts made on British soil. Gilda Gray, queen of the shimmy, was billed as the star, but as critics later commented, “Whoever permitted Gilda Gray to take the role that she plays at Piccadilly showed very poor judgment, for Anna May Wong’s role entirely overshadows that of the Golden Girl of the box office. The little Chinese player troupes like a house afire.” There’s a reason I devote an entire chapter to this film in my book on Wong—it signaled her triumph abroad and made the producers back home wonder how they ever let her slip through their fingers.
Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of Not Your China Doll, a new biography of Anna May Wong set to release this month, with a Members Only event at Metrograph on March 14. She also writes the Substack Half-Caste Woman and shares posts at @annamaywongbook.
