At Home With… May Picks
Friends of Metrograph Marlowe Granados, Rayne Fisher-Quann, and Chelsea Spengemann each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
Losing Ground, dir. Kathleen Collins, 1982
I often feel split into two—the intellectual and emotional or rather, the cerebral and the artist. Truly living requires a negotiation of logic and feeling where each is delicately considered. I first watched Losing Ground in the kitchen of my grandparents’ house, on a television you could still record movies on. I was in my early twenties, and even then, obsessed with knowing how other women lived—and beyond that—how they created art. Losing Ground follows a beautiful woman who would rather read an academic paper on ecstasy than live it. All it takes is one sultry summer to finally let herself give in.Â
Marlowe Granados is a writer and filmmaker based in Toronto. She is the author of Happy Hour.
It Felt Like Love, dir. Eliza Hittman, 2013Â
In It Felt Like Love, Hittman’s camera moves with a distinctly pubescent gaze: it wavers, it falters, it lingers on hands and stomachs and asses and lips before veering away, hungry and hesitant at the same time like Lila, the teenage girl it follows. It gives us a somatic glimpse into what it’s like to look at the things that Lila looks at, and these things—the things she wants, and the knowledge of what she might do to get them—are the driving force of this dizzying adolescent character study. A gorgeous film that feels like looking into a mirror and hearing a ghost story at the same time.
Rayne Fisher-Quann is an essayist based in Brooklyn. She writes the Substack blog Internet Princess.Â
chelsea spengemann selects
A Night of Knowing Nothing
A Night of Knowing Nothing, dir. Payal Kapadia, 2021
If you’re as moved and completely thrilled as I am about the campus strikes happening across the country in support of a free Palestine, you should watch A Night of Knowing Nothing. The film conveys how essential creative and intellectual community is to a humane future. Documenting the years 2015-2020 at the Film and TV Institute of India, Kapadia’s first feature is a formal and conceptual guide to the importance of knowing what and how to hold from the past, and what to release. A range of types of footage filmed at nighttime in black and white, with voices reading undelivered letters and verbalizing dreams, combined with beautiful, ambient sounds of protest, reminds viewers to take to the streets but also to dance; to speak out but also be vulnerable. Love is resistance; resistance is love.
WATCH A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING
Chelsea Spengemann is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Soft Network, an emerging arts nonprofit for under-resourced, socially engaged artist estates. In 2019 she co-founded AFELL, an active listserv for 300 international legacy workers. She has been the director of the Stan VanDerBeek Archive since 2013.
