At Home With…November Picks
Friends of Metrograph Matt Wolf, Daniel Schmidt, Nick Pinkerton, Vikram Murthi, and Caroline Golum each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami, dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2018
The first time I saw Bloodlight and Bami, I was totally obsessed—not only because I’m a fan of Grace Jones, but because of Sophie Fiennes’s kaleidoscopic treatment of her electrifying subject. Shot over 12 years, traversing countless hotel rooms, bodies of water, and stages, Bloodlight and Bami gives the sense of time passing, but at once Grace Jones’s everyday life feels timeless. Fiennes’s best-known works are her collaborations with the theorist Slavoj Žižek, which are highly stylized and constructed essay films. In Bloodlight and Bami, she’s gone rogue, filming Jones mostly with a prosumer-grade digital video camera on a tripod. This visceral, diary-like material combines with lusciously captured stage performances. The result is a narcotic tapestry of the everyday and the extraterrestrial. Nowadays music biopics are mostly overproduced, and even if access is granted for an unvarnished depiction of a pop star’s true life, the filmmaking often feels stage-managed, and the star too aware of the social media tropes of oversharing. In Bloodlight and Bami, Jones seems to be genuinely, or perhaps blissfully, unaware of these conventions of celebrity. The film wisely forgoes secondary interviews or archival footage to create context. Instead, you’re immersed in a hypnotic experience, pleasurably drawn into the rites and rituals of a full-fledged icon.
WATCH GRACE JONES: BLOODLIGHT & BAMI
Matt Wolf is a documentary filmmaker in New York. His features include Wild Combination (2008), Teenage (2013), Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019)—which is currently streaming on Metrograph At Home—and most recently Spaceship Earth (2020).
Body and Soul, dir. Oscar Micheaux, 1925
There are more interesting and more complicated Micheaux films—but this one has much to recommend, including an extremely messy rain storm (though it emphasizes just how flat the rest of the film’s staging is). It’s truly perverse to watch Paul Robeson in such a static, not to mention silent film, but it lends the throwaway title a certain gravity. His presence is portentous, too handsome—one can’t tear their eyes away from his onscreen debut, which necessitated not one but two roles, playing twins, the ex-con cum reverend Isaiah and his brother Sylvester. Robeson’s twins never share the frame—likely a technological limitation, but one that adds to the sense of dread, and animates some low-key doppelganger vibes for which I am bon public. Other limitations abound, and the director’s cut of the film was ultimately lost—but this heavily edited-down version is another luminous example of Micheaux’s cinema as he struggles with and against censors, race, faith, and the medium itself. Nearly the entire film is framed as a bad dream belonging to that of Mercedes Gilbert’s devout parishioner. (Is this formulation, at least at feature length, another debut?) In the stillest moments of this horrifying moral tale, Robeson’s false preacher flickers with an eerie resemblance to another night-terror vision of lore: The Hat Man. This legend has recently been exhumed by post-creepypasta culture, and it’s striking to me how much online esoterica is indebted to early cinema and the first filmed nightmares—the marriage of new mediums to supernatural malevolence—often visualized as fragile, silent and degraded. Body and Soul, Machine and Ghost, etc. I wonder when we’ll have the A.I.-generated voice of Robeson emanating from his preacher’s mouth, threatening damnation.
Daniel Schmidt is an artist and filmmaker based in NYC. His works include three feature-length films: Diamantino (2018), which is currently streaming on Metrograph At Home, as well as Palaces of Pity (2011), and The Unity of All Things (2013).
Losing Ground, dir. Kathleen Collins, 1982
I’d never heard Kathleen Collins’s name before I saw Losing Ground playing as part of the series “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968–1986” at Lincoln Center in 2015, in a new restoration by Milestone Films. I don’t think very many people had, even hardened cinephiles; the movie didn’t get a theatrical release when it was completed in 1982, and it was the only feature film Collins made before her death six years later. Among other things, it’s about a couple of Black bourgeoise bohemians in the process of de-coupling: a tight-laced philosophy professor, played by Seret Scott, and her husband, a dandyish bon vivant painter played by Bill Gunn. There’s no dearth of films about the existential struggles of intellectuals with Manhattan addresses; there are very few as incisive in their depiction of the agonies that come from trying to reconcile intellect and intuition as Losing Ground is, and practically none so full of surprises—a film that initially appears to be a “realistic” drama about a woman living too much in her own head that later transforms into a musical about the Frankie and Johnny myth? That restoration of Losing Ground gave Collins a new cachet; Ecco published a collection of her acute short fiction, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, the year after the film re-appeared. I wish she’d gotten to make another feature. I that wish Gunn, another very great filmmaker, had gotten to make more movies. It’s small comfort to know that there will always be great forgotten filmmakers, like Collins, to rediscover, but it’s a bummer that things almost always go down this way, and the real, idiosyncratic talents have to subsist on meagre approbation when they’re alive, while glad-handing mediocrities go to sleep every night on a cushy bed of plaudits. It’s nice to pretend that a Kathleen Collins born 40 years later would’ve seen more opportunities put in front of her, but let’s not kid ourselves: artists always get the shit end of the stick.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Decadent Editions), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk).
The Aviator's Wife, dir. Éric Rohmer, 1981
Messages of the heart swirl around Éric Rohmer’s The Aviator’s Wife—some are sent and received, others delivered but unaccepted, but all are mixed and mixed-up. It’s almost too literal that the heartsick François (Philippe Marlaud) works nights at a post office, sorting through various communiques. But his job can’t prepare him for navigating the web of partial information involving his occasional girlfriend Anne (Marie Rivière) and her ex-lover Christian (Mathieu Carrière). As François stalks Christian and a mysterious blond through the park, sparks fly and minor truths are revealed in classic Rohmerian fashion. His subjects suffer from a persistent inability to be present, as Rohmer interrogates the tragedy behind the proverb “It’s impossible to think of nothing.” Admirably, their over-speculation doesn’t impede them from pursuing new romance, even if they’re risking further alienation. Only Lucie (Anne-Laure Meury), the perceptive teenager who assists François on his stakeout, seems to live in the moment with curious abandon. One wonders if or when the scales will fall from her eyes.
Vikram Murthi is a Brooklyn-based freelance critic and writer. He’s a contributing writer to The Nation, editor at Downtime Magazine, and has written for publications like Filmmaker Magazine, Reverse Shot, and The A.V. Club among others. He’s still very much for hire.
A Star Is Born, dir. William Wellman, 1937
Well before Judy, Babs, and Gaga, there was Janet Gaynor: the titular farmgirl-turned-Hollywood-hopeful in William Wellman’s 1937 A Star is Born. Compared to George Cukor’s doomed 1954 Judy Garland vehicle, or the bumptious music business–set storylines offered by the 1976 and 2018 remakes, Gaynor’s performance is shockingly subdued, almost catatonic. Yet her nascent turn as Esther Blodgett, all soft-eyed naivete and infinite capacity for forgiveness, laid the foundation for these diva-heavy remakes. The simplistic plot of Star is a testament, no doubt, to the timeless love story at its rock-hard center. It’s a familiar tale that never loses its sting: small-town girl moves to Hollywood, meets cute with a fading matinee idol, and miraculously falls ass-backward into A-list status. Her stock rises as the prospects of her drunken helpmate begin to wane, all but guaranteeing a tragic outcome the minute she surpasses him in the box office reports. In times of crisis, Hollywood dusts off the ol’ source material and applies a fresh coat of paint. Details may change across the four adaptations—clothes, mostly, alongside directorial styles and soundtracks—but Esther’s stalwart purity endures. From her sympathetic reluctance to embrace surveillance stardom to her hayseed sincerity and, above all, her faithful devotion to a total scrub, each Esther owes a debt of gratitude to the O.G. (Original Gaynor).
Caroline Golum is a filmmaker, programmer, and writer. You can follow her on Twitter @carolineavenue if you like that sort of thing.
