Friends of Metrograph Sierra Pettengill, Lovia Gyarkye, and Natasha Newman-Thomas each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
Sierra Pettengill selects
Soft in the Head
Soft in the Head, dir. Nathan Silver, 2013
After the first time I saw Soft in the Head, I immediately ran to the front of the theater, introduced myself to Silver, and told him I was nauseated with anxiety all the way through its runtime. I thanked him: it felt like coming home. Soft in the Head is a film only someone steeped in many generations of this striving, vile, sublime, and mad metropolis could make. Silver’s wild cast-from Theodore Bouloukos to Carl Kranz, and of course his mother Cindy-joke, stammer, complain, and threaten violence in a stunning bouquet of New York accents that envelop this bridge-and-tunneler like a warm, neurotic blanket. A decade later, watching these zoomed-in, gloriously twisted personalities pulsing through the fourth-floor walk ups of an already gone early-2000s New York, I can’t help but think of Emile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart novels. Zola’s mission was to capture France under Napoleon III’s Second Empire with naturalism; his definition of “naturalism,” to my mind, comes close to something like “inherited pathology.” In Soft in the Head‘s ad hoc families, everyone is ceaselessly spinning their wheels, together but apart. Every moment holds the threat of being spit out, turned on, or taken in. Soft in the Head‘s title gives something of its tone away-idiomatically it means crazy, but its precise craziness is inherently tender. The movie’s hilarity and bleakness are inextricable, its vulnerability always laced with absurdity. It’s fiction, I guess, but Soft in the Head forever shifted my metric for contemporary observational documentaries somewhere into the stratosphere. You want life? This is as close as it’s gonna get.Sierra Pettengill is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and archivist.Her most recent film was Riotsville, USA (2022). Town Hall, her directorial debut (co-directed with Jamila Wignot) is now streaming on Metrograph At Home.
Lovia Gyarkye selects
On Call (La Permanence)
On Call (La permanence), dir. Alice Diop, 2016
They come to the hospital seeking relief from their problems: back pain, eye infections, panic attacks, nightmares of countries they might never see again. In La permanence, filmmaker Alice Diop observes the goings-on at a refugee clinic in France to find the details of a crisis almost always spoken about in abstraction. Set in the claustrophobic office of a clinician, the film reveals the chronically underfunded medical and social services system upon which mostly Black and brown immigrants rely, for healthcare, housing, and other basic needs. Comparisons to Frederick Wiseman and Claire Simon would be apt, but Diop’s doc is, above all, the testimony of a filmmaker honing her signature sensitivity and haunting, subversive gaze.
Lovia Gyarkye is a critic at The Hollywood Reporter.
Natasha Newman-Thomas selects
Suburbia
Suburbia, dir. Penelope Spheeris, 1983
A dear friend of mine and a renowned cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, used to host screenings of his favorite films in his art studio in Koreatown. The first one of these I had the pleasure of attending was to see Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia. Chris and I had both lived in versions of punk houses in our younger years, as had many others in attendance, and as the film progressed, all of us crammed into the tiny studio regressed into our chaotic youths, mimicking the raucous behavior on the screen-it was a perfect introduction to the Spheerisphere. Suburbia brings insight to a misunderstood subculture and was Spheeris’ first foray into feature length narrative work; a natural follow up to her legendary documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, which encapsulates the LA punk scene of the late 1970s. If you haven’t seen this film or it’s been a minute, call up some friends with whom you used to dumpster dive and prepare a freegan feast-it’s gonna be a wild ride!
Natasha Newman-Thomas is an award winning costume designer working in film, television, music, stage, advertising and experimental artworks.