At Home With… October Picks
Friends of Metrograph Doreen St. Félix, Andrew Kuo, and Whitney Mallett each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
The Hottest August, dir. Brett Story 2019
The Hottest August is alive, meaning, receptive to ageing. It had been a mirror of the nascent Trump season, when it debuted; now, the documentary enters the archive space. Story, who began her career as a geographer, and cinematographer Derek Howard made themselves pliant and peripatetic, able to catch ephemeral scenes at Coney Island, Dead Horse Bay, the Upper West Side. The film captured not only a particular time period—the summer of 2017, the summer of the eclipse—but the concept of the present itself. How we are prejudiced toward the contemporary, forgetful of the past, and nostalgic, amazingly, for the future. This is the question we hear Story ask of her subjects, who are New Yorkers living in the five boroughs: “How do you feel about the future?” It is a question sparked by climate anxiety, brought to our consciousness by the eerie voice-of-some-god narration of Clare Coulter, and given visual language in shots of the marshes, the homes made unstable by Hurricane Sandy. The people take that wistful question and dominate it, use its vagueness to get hard and real about money, politics, and love. When I say that the film is alive, I mean the vantage point of you, the future viewer, with your accreted wisdom of the past six years, “completes” the film each time you watch it. You have lived more catastrophe, which is to say, more life than the subjects. And you will continue to. The then-present that Story found is gone; the future will always exist.
Doreen St. Félix is a writer at The New Yorker. She has been awarded the National Magazine Award for Criticism. She's at work on a book.
The Grief of Others, dir. Patrick Wang, 2015
“The grief of others” is an aspirational thought. It’s a projection, right? Wang’s film is based on the novel by Leah Hager Cohen in which a couple’s baby dies and they’re left with pieces of recognizable days. It confirms that the idea of wandering can be the foundation of a story. The characters fade in and out of scenes of making pancakes, appreciating the artwork of a dead father, being bullied at school and receiving life-altering news in a doctor’s office. There’s a palpable “Asian-ness” to the depiction of this fragmented white family. They know how they feel, but don’t have the right words. There’s a long shot of a regular looking kitchen. Everything is familiar.
Andrew Kuo is an artist and writer working in New York City. He’s a contributing editor at T Magazine, co-host of the Cookies Hoops podcast, and co-author of The Joy of Basketball.
Towards Mathilde, dir. Claire Denis, 2005
Claire Denis always makes loneliness dignified. This dance film is like if Derrida wrote Center Stage (2000). Its subject, French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, comes across as consumed by the pursuit of expression, fully aware that traversing the void between bodies—between our beings—will always be fleeting, frustrated, futile, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. She also dances to PJ Harvey.
Whitney Mallett is the founding editor of The Whitney Review of New Writing and the co-editor of Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey.
