Columns
At Home With… January Picks
Friends of Metrograph Grace Byron, Jacqueline Kramer, and Kelli Weston each share a film they love, streaming on demand on the Metrograph At Home platform.
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GRACE BYRON selects
SCUM Manifesto
SCUM Manifesto, dir. Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig, 1976
A favorite actress of Chantal Akerman, Luis Buñuel, and Marguerite Duras, Seyrig sloughs off the mantle of housewife in this tense adaptation of Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. Alongside Roussopoulos, Seyrig translates key passages taking care to keep all their unholy, blunt power alive. The bit-sized polemic, the undignified puny world of men: “a walking dildo” who suffers from “pussy envy.” The whole film takes place in front of a fuzzy TV set that Roussopoulos keeps fiddling with to hear news of anti-war activists. In a time fraught with political violence and few evangelists, the words of Solanas cut deep.
Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest. Her work has appeared in The Cut, Vogue, Bookforum, and The Baffler. Her debut novel Herculine is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in October.
JACQUELINE KRAMER selects
Faust
Faust, dir. Jan Švankmajer, 1994
A heightened fever dream from Czech director/animator Jan Švankmajer. Although his take on Goethe’s play is loose and sometimes messy, Jan’s childlike ingenuity pushes themes of hope and nihilism to new heights—always begging the viewer to continually seek entertainment and play in a world full of evil. Loaded with bizarre images of absurdist puppets and hellish stop motion animation, the film walks the line between dream and nightmare states of being.
Jacqueline Kramer is an editor and screenwriter based in Los Angeles and NYC. She enjoys horror and dark comedy and coffee.
KELLI WESTON selects
Ema
Ema, dir Pablo Larraín, 2019
A propulsive, daring, fiery vision from a filmmaker more often drawn to biographical portraiture; here Larraín surrenders to the umbral contours of fiction, an experimental foray into the complex structures of desire, disorder, intimacy, and, surprisingly, motherhood. The titular dancer, compelled at intervals to submit to the mobile synths of Nicolas Jaar’s electric score—in choreography that conjures the abiding force of community as much as liberation—comes home to herself in this reggaeton-laden reverie.
Kelli Weston is an editor at Metrograph Journal.
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