Category Archives: Capsules

Capsules

CAPUSLE: RETURN TO REASON: FOUR FILMS BY MAN RAY (1923-1929/2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Man Ray

FEATURING: Alice Prin, Robert Desnos, Jacques Rigaut, Man Ray

PLOT: Four experimental films form Man Ray shown in rhythmic sequence, set to a partially-improvised score by ‘s band SQÜRL.

Still from "Les Mystères du Château du dé" (1929)

COMMENTS: Though May Ray considered himself a painter, he experimented with photography for decades. In the 1920s, as part of his explorations, he decided to try his hand at making motion pictures. Paradoxically, he cut strips of film into their individual frames, dusted them with salt and pepper, covered them with tacks and pins, exposed them to light according to his Rayograph process, then spliced the images back together. La retour à la raison/Return to Reason (1923) was his first result, two minutes of visual chaos in which random objects and detritus dance across the screen.

Ray had originally planned to screen Retour with a performance by George Antheil, but the enfant terrible of avant-garde music failed to appear. Antheil’s atonal sound remains associated with Ray’s films (Kino Lorber previously released Return to Reason with an Antheil score, as part of the collection “The Silent Avant Garde,” in 2022). This latest release by the Criterion Collection provides a moodier, atmospheric take on Ray’s imagery, through SQÜRL’s signature feedback-laden guitars, electronic tones, and resonant drums. The score’s dirge-like cadences slow things down, encouraging the viewer to notice each intricate detail in every frame while falling under their spell.

Jarmusch, familiar to readers of this site as the director of Dead Man, is also a guitarist, and has written scores for many of his films together with musician Carter Logan. The duo’s sound, at times reminiscent of late ’90s-era Sonic Youth, wraps the listener in a sonic net woven of reverb and ambient drones. Electronic blips and beeps rise out of the static, like distant signals from sonar equipment; deep resonant tones echo like the moan of foghorns. A sudden metallic tinkling, like a forgotten wind chime on the porch of an abandoned house caught by a stray breeze, heightens the uncanny atmosphere.

The disc presents the films in rhythmic, rather than chronological order. The first, L’Étoile de Mer/The Starfish (1928), inspired by Robert Desnos’ poem, has the most coherent plot of the four. A man falls in love with a beautiful woman who gifts him a starfish in a jar. Filmed as though through a pane of rain-streaked glass, or from behind an aquarium wall, the impressionistic visuals come into focus only at key moments. The intertitles feature lines of the poem, but unlike in many silent films where the title cards explain the action, here text and image juxtapose each other in surrealistic fashion; for example, the phrase “women’s teeth are such beautiful objects” precedes a shot of the female character (portrayed by the famous Kiki de Montparnasse), lifting her skirt to adjust her stocking garter.

Emak Bakia (1926) follows. With financing from stockbroker Arthur Wheeler, and featuring his wife driving her Mercedes around Biarritz, Ray created another, longer experimental film (22 min.) in Continue reading CAPUSLE: RETURN TO REASON: FOUR FILMS BY MAN RAY (1923-1929/2023) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: WORKING CLASS GOES TO HELL (2023)

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Radnicka klasa ide u pakao

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Working Class Goes to Hell is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Mladen Djordjevic

FEATURING: Tamara Krcunovic,  Leon Lucev, Szilvia Krizsán

PLOT: A group of former factory workers find solace in satanism.

Still from Working Class Goes to Hell (2023)

COMMENTS: When a movie opens with murals of socialist era workers on the crumbling walls of an abandoned building, you understand pretty well what it will be about: a society in disarray looking back to an idolized past while trying to find hope in desperate times.  And it is, as we follow a group of former factory workers trying to negotiate a better future for themselves and secure severance payment for an accident that happened years ago and took the lives of many of their loved ones.

Everything changes for the weirder when Mia, a man with some disturbing ideas of the apocalyptic kind, arrives in the group. At first, he persuades the group to conduct Satanic rituals to communicate with their dead loved ones. Then he offers more wish fulfillment.  Will they find what they are looking for, and what will be the price?

Serbian director Djordjevic is known mostly for his shocking 2009 The Life and Death of a Porno Gang, a provocative piece of cinema that went largely unnoticed because of the release of an even more disturbing Serbian movie in the same year, the infamous A Serbian Film. But whatever comes from this director needs to be examined as potentially weird, especially when supernatural events are mentioned.

What we have here, though, is a contemporary moral parable with hints of the supernatural and the apocalyptic. More grounded than a typical horror—only some bad omens like birds falling dead hint at the supernatural—this tale portrays moral decay and the worship of false idols in an ambiguous, non-didactic way. While the idols prove to be hollow in the end, a new unity emerges from the experience of common rituals, reigniting the passion of our characters to continue fighting for their rights. It is almost wholesome.

Balkan cinema is known for eccentric magical realist works, like the filmography of . Here the tone is less lighthearted, but a similar exaggeration of reality in a portrait of societal upheaval takes shape, climaxing with an urgent act of vigilantism. There are many nods to the history of the country too, from the Ottoman Empire to its recent socialist past, giving context and enriching the narrative.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…even if the director lets his tale go on for too long, with a messy narrative in need of trimming, he still delivers an appealingly whacko and unique work.”–Christopher Reed, Hammer to Nail (festival review)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Robert Zemeckis

FEATURING: , Nona Gaye, , Michael Jeter, Peter Scolari, Daryl Sabara

PLOT: A boy on the verge of abandoning his belief in Santa Claus is visited by a magical train that whisks him away to the North Pole, but the journey is filled with perilous diversions.

Still from "The Polar Express" (2024)

COMMENTS: There are two characteristics define Robert Zemeckis’ career: an eagerness to push the boundaries of visual effects technology, and an affection for frenetic, breakneck action. Sometimes the pendulum swings more in one direction than the other, but every now and then a Who Framed Roger Rabbit comes along to provide a healthy dose of both. So on the one hand, it is utterly unsurprising that Zemeckis would be captivated by the boundless potential of motion-capture CGI animation to deliver the kind of non-stop, eye-popping visuals that have always been impossible to realize in live action. On the other hand, it’s completely baffling that the property with which he would christen this new era would be the Caldecott award-winning children’s classic “The Polar Express.”

In fairness, it’s not a mystery that someone would come along to take a stab at turning this small book into a big motion picture. After all, Chris Van Allsburg draws cinematically. His page-wide illustrations capture action and emotion in an artistic splurge, summing up minutes of action and dialogue in single images, like oil pastel versions of Cindy Sherman photos. Building out from those lush Van Allsburg drawings probably felt instinctive, far more than other children’s book adaptations that expanded waaaaay beyond their source material, often to their detriment. There’s something very sweaty about the way absolutely nothing goes right for our Hero children, ladling on complications to make everything so much more EXCITING; but that’s not even the film’s greatest drawback. Rather, the problems arise when Zemeckis deploys his fantastic tech, which he has so often done in service of his story: shoehorning Forrest Gump into history, for example, or placing viewers in an impossible perch above Philippe Petit in The Walk. Here, though, the story is buried in spectacle, and repeated efforts to pad out the characters and give them more heft only make the spectacle push back harder. In The Polar Express, CGI beats Van Allsburg’s book into submission.

The movie wants to bedazzle you into a state of exhaustion. A raucous dance number in which flat-faced acrobats ricochet off the ceiling while singing the virtues of hot chocolate is aimed more at demonstrating the physics-defying capabilities of the technology than actually enchanting the children on the train. It’s immediately followed by the extended journey of a wayward train ticket, which takes a rollicking tour outside of the locomotive, floating through a pack of snarling wolves, flitting through a snowy forest, nearly becoming dinner for a flock of newly hatched eagles, before finally returning to the train compartment, all in an elaborate one-take that is Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: RABBIT TRAP (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Bryn Chainey

FEATURING: Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen, Jade Croot

PLOT: In the Welsh countryside, the lives of a musician and sound engineer are interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child imbued with supernatural awareness.

Still from Rabbit Trap (2025)

COMMENTS: They emerge from the Welsh countryside, bearing questions and a rabbit offering. They know the purpose of plants and the dangers they can keep at bay—or entice. They coming knocking with joy, and with fervor. They wonder at a strange man in his 30s, who apologizes a lot even while he may tackle an unsuspecting kid.

The film is set in the mid-1970s. The man is Darcy Davenport (Dev Patel), a sound engineer married to underground music sensation Daphne. For reasons omitted, they’re deeply out of the way of any neighbors, exploring each other, sonic phenomena, and melancholia. Darcy spends his days wandering about with his boom mic and recorder in hand; Daphne futzes around with microphones, synthesizers, and oscilloscopes, trying to craft something interesting. Enter small child. This child, the “they” mentioned above, is ambiguous in a number of ways. They’re boyish, girlish, a bit unearthly—indeed, no other pronoun would suit them, and perhaps no proper noun, either, as they never reveal their name. Events turn strange as the group—in varying ones, pairs, and trios—explore sounds, visions, faerie rings, and even more terrible dangers of the woodland.

The denouement suggests we may have witnessed a metaphor, but in the spirit of the film’s general turbidity, I will merely mention that it is there, and that I shan’t be scrutinizing events further. Chainey has achieved something impressive through his story, as has Jade Croot with their performance: summoning a deep well of mystery, uneasiness, and candid emotion. The hazards of Nature where it straddles the veil are frightening and glorious, and Rabbit Trap‘s dangers should be approached with an open mind—and open ears.

 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a vague but effectively unsettling slice of trip-folk horror about what happens when the world refuses to leave… Equal parts Ben Wheatley’s ‘In the Earth’ and Jerzy Skolomowski’s ‘The Shout,’ ‘Rabbit Trap’ is the sort of experience that could be better explained by certain mushrooms than even even the most detailed internet explainer. It’s definitely the sort of experience that’s best enjoyed by accepting those terms as soon as you can.”–David Ehrlich, IndieWire (contemporaneous)

Rabbit Trap [Blu-ray]

Rabbit Trap [Blu-ray]

  • Elijah Wood’s SpectreVision
  • Fairy Folklore
  • “Particularly Frightening and Very Haunting” – Slashfilm

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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE MYSTERIOUS GAZE OF THE FLAMINGO (2025)

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La misteriosa mirada del flamenco

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DIRECTED BY: Diego Céspedes

FEATURING: Tamara Cortes, Paula Dinamarca, Matías Catalán, Pedro Muñoz, Luis Dubó

PLOT: A family of drag queens raise an orphan girl in the shadow of a mining operation in Chile in 1982, but the miners blame them for a deadly plague they believe is spread by the gay men’s gaze.

Still from The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025)

COMMENTS: The setting of Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is more than somewhat absurd. A house of cross-dressing men (they call themselves “transvestites,” in the lingo of the period, not “trans” in the modern sense) stands alone at the base of the mountains, at the edge of the village where the miners live. The family within is tolerated by the macho community, although disparaged with slurs. The men avert their gaze, superstitiously believing that the deadly plague spreading through the village is passed through the transvestite’s gaze. The half-dozen occupants of the house raise Lidia, an orphan girl of about 11, with the glamorous Flamingo serving as the girl’s surrogate mother. Other than the prepubescent Lidia and, perhaps, the ambiguously gendered older matron of the clan, Mama Boa (played by trans actress Paula Dinamarca), there are no (cis-)women in the community; even the miner’s children are exclusively male. Perhaps for this reason, the transvestite’s home also serves as the community bordello, with the women putting on evening drag shows and beauty pageants. The more intrigued, or desperate, miners opportunistically sneak into the girls’ rooms to sate their carnal needs. This creates an eternal tension, with the miners tolerating, fearing, and sometimes desiring the transvestites, leading to the ever-present threat of violence—and the girls aren’t afraid to get into a scrap, when their seductive charms fail to get them what they need.

The straight world, therefore, is halfway accommodating, but always harbors a threat. It’s a dynamic that may be familiar to modern gays, although appearing here in exaggerated form. In this fairyland, the transvestites are free to be who they are; but that freedom comes with a price. They are eternal outsiders. True love is hard to find in this desert. Flamingo nurtures her maternal instincts through surrogate motherhood, and Lidia is fiercely loyal to the queer clan, but death—from violence, or disease—always threatens.

The Chilean mountains and desert valleys, reminiscent of the mythical American west, are captured beautifully through Angello Faccini’s excellent cinematography—although the unnecessary use of the 4:3 academy ratio sadly robs us of some of the classic grandeur we might hope for. The film is not quite magical realism per se—nothing actually impossible happens, outside of a dream sequence or two—but it’s of course heavily influenced by the movement. Flamingo is, instead, a slightly dreamlike dramatic fable set in a highly improbable world. It is, perhaps, the world as seen by Lidia, a pre-sexual being who loves the only family she knows, but is on the cusp of learning about the wages of the sinful world.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “Diego Céspedes’ gentle, funny, passionate, and occasionally absurdist debut drama packs an enormous emotional punch… [a key event] gradually nudges the film into surreal symbolic territory.”–Siddhant Adlakha, Variety (contemporaneous)