At Home With…March Picks
Friends of Metrograph Annie Hamilton, Courtney Stephens, Fox Maxy, and Suneil Sanzgiri each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
Tommaso, dir. Abel Ferrara, 2019
In early January I was not doing well. I texted friends for recommendations but all of them required too much attention from me; I was unable to watch anything. So I asked an equally depressed friend for a movie rec, thinking the prompt Eat Pray Love meets “sewer rat” might help. It did. He gave me Tommaso. Willem Dafoe gives a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him performance as Tommaso AKA Abel Ferrara in this semi-autobiographical film, and it is fascinating (and oddly comforting) to watch. Seeing Tommaso go about everyday life in Rome—putting on the charm at the espresso bar, learning to speak Italian with a private tutor, attending AA meetings down small alleyways, cooking pasta for his daughter and wife (played by Mr. Ferrara’s real-life European wife and little daughter)—it’s all really fun… until it isn’t. Ha. Honestly, hell, I found this movie to be a real pick-me-up. It’s shot so intimately and told so gently amidst Tommaso battling pretty violent feelings of invalidity, jealousy, and estrangement—I felt it a real reason to keep going that depressed week in January. Hardship can be coupled with such steam and mystery, sometimes we need to record it.
Annie Hamilton is a writer and performer from NYC.
Kristina Talking Pictures, dir. Yvonne Rainer, 1976
A language experiment, a feminist complaint, a study in personae, Kristina Talking Pictures is, on the face of it, a film about a Hungarian lion tamer who moves to New York to be a choreographer. Its actual choreography lay in its wide-ranging audit of filmic speech. Words and bodies are placed in configurations that can both build out characters or drive a fiction, but also slip into the seams of the drama, un-syncing from moving mouths and setting the camera free to glide over rattan mats in search of sequined lingerie: “How nicely you put your words that cut my throat,” a voice intones. “Oh, let’s forget about it and go to the movies.”
WATCH KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES
Courtney Stephens is a director of non-fiction and experimental films, including Terra Femme and The American Sector.
High Heel Nights, dir. Beth B, 1994
Opening with a show, it’s elegant, it’s gorgeous, it’s full of truth. The distinctions made in this film are revolutionary. For me, it feels precious to get to be an audience to this certain time in New York. There’s a power carried throughout High Heel Nights that speaks to who you are, and about building your own worlds within worlds.
WATCH HIGH HEEL NIGHTS FROM MARCH 10
Fox Maxy is a Payómkawish & Iipay filmmaker. Her work has screened at Sundance, MoMA and Rotterdam. Fox’s upcoming film is about mental health and portals.
Nationtime, dir. William Greaves, 1972
There’s a moment about halfway through Nationtime—a film documenting the 1972 National Black Political Convention—where the great poet and playwright Amiri Baraka gives a bright smile while at the podium. He has been tasked with supervising, coordinating, and moderating some 3,000 delegates gathered in Gary, Indiana, to determine (or attempt to determine) the creation of a unified Black political vision ahead of that year’s Democratic and Republican national conventions. As the film continues, the burden of Baraka’s task becomes increasingly more visible—but for that brief moment, Baraka’s smile seems to encapsulate the beauty and radical energy of the three-day caucus, where affinities and solidarities amongst vastly different Black political ideologies were glimpsed. While viewers may be more familiar with Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), what runs through both films is a palpable drive to question and challenge notions of “success” and “failure.” Greaves’s film urges us to think of the movement towards freedom as not a singular event, but as an ongoing experiment.
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist and filmmaker. His films include At Home But Not At Home (2019), Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020) and Golden Jubilee (2021). He will have his first institutional solo show at the Brooklyn Museum in Fall 2023.
