Film Thinking about Film

In a male-dominated world, all women are actresses: they represent a role to be moulded around the expectations and projections of others. With this idea in mind, Pedro Almodóvar wrote the story of Manuela (played by Cecilia Roth), a single mother who sees her son killed in a road accident on his seventeenth birthday. From this point on, she looks to fulfil the boy’s dream: to meet his father, whose existence she had always kept secret from him. And so Manuela embarks upon a journey through the ambiguity that characterises gender identity and all roles we represent in life. Todo sobre mi madre constitutes a remarkable homage to Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands and Romy Schneider, and to all suffering actresses, mothers and women.

A young actress (played by Natalie Portman) visits an older woman (Julianne Moore) to research and prepare her leading role in a film about the woman’s life and her controversial relationship with her husband (Charles Melton), with whom she started a relationship when he was a teenager. The presence of the actress rocks the woman’s family dynamics to offer a reflection on the different roles we play, day to day, and the motivations and emotions we conceal. The themes of this recently premiered work — one of the films of the year — engage in a whispered conversation with those of Todo sobre mi madre.

Sunset Boulevard connects two contrasting areas of Los Angeles: the centre and the sea. Along its near 24 miles are residential areas, iconic nightclubs, major commercial areas, cinemas and endless stately homes. The road was chosen by director Billy Wilder to situate the rise-and-fall story of two characters: the down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by William Holden), and a forgotten star of Hollywood’s silent cinema, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). In the film, the city and film industry become a factory of nightmares for the two characters, who embark upon a downward spiral towards destruction.

In Mulholland Drive, film-maker David Lynch creates an even more distorted mirror of Hollywood than its predecessor Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), choosing a more mysterious, darker and writhing road: Mulholland Drive, a street that seems to advance in circles, like the film itself. The story begins with an enigmatic woman, Rita (played by Laura Harring), who loses her memory after a car accident. Disorientated, she arrives at the apartment of Betty (Naomi Watts), a young, aspiring actress who is new to LA. The two women attempt to discover Rita’s identity, moving deep into this city of illusion and mystery, occupied by terrifying nightmares, film directors and hypnotic nightclubs, while the coordinates of time and space become ever more indecipherable.

Two young friends, Yasmine and Leila, visit an old film collector, Mr Farouk, who lives in a secret place surrounded by fragments of the history of Lebanese cinema: posters, photographs, projectors, theatre seats, scripts and films from the early twentieth century, among them documentaries, early fiction films, musical melodramas and war reports. As Mr Farouk shows them the history of struggle in their city, Beirut, through footage, the young girls start to delve deeper, with the three producing a kind of montage. This exercise makes the history of the city palpable, allowing them not only to understand its complex past but also to project into the future the desire for a possible city. 

The conserved remnants of the origins of Colombian cinema are few. In an exercise of recovering memory, film-makers Jerónimo Atehortúa and Luis Ospina assemble in this work fragments of films from Colombia’s silent cinema era to compose a three-act melodrama. Bit by bit, the film delves into absence: What is behind the melodrama of a poor boy who loves a girl who must marry a rich man? The film explores the history of the first half of the twentieth century in the country and the tensions between social classes in an exercise on the recovery of a near-lost filmic past.   

With its rich filmic language, this work portrays the life of a man shaped by film who is born amid a screening and who, in each stage of life, experiences the best and worst of his obsession with the medium, a fixation that leads him to become a director and put his loved ones in danger at the height of the Spanish Civil War. Film is put forward as a kind of ambivalent love affair, generating dilemmas and manipulation as it also creates memorable images. The work, the only professional feature film made by amateur film-maker Llorenç Llobet-Gràcia, is a dramatised version of his life and with a standing in the history of Spanish film owing to its recovery in the 1970s and subsequent restoration in 2012.

A cult film during the Transition to democracy period in Spain and Iván Zulueta’s magnum opus, Arrebato (Rapture) is about one film-maker who manages to cannibalise another, exploring cinema and an art that sucks blood, that devours. An art which, when turned into an obsession, is as addictive as a drug. Amid a creative block and relationship break-up, a film director receives a package with footage of an eccentric he knows. As he starts to see the images, they transform into both his main source of interest and difficulties given that the sender’s relationship to cinema is so macabre that it ends up impacting the protagonist, just as it affected Zulueta, who would not shoot another feature film after this work.

Crista, Carloto and João spend the summer together, partying, building a butterfly house, sunbathing and building and knocking down routines in a country house. Yet this is not any old summer — it is the first of the COVID-19 pandemic and important for all three to construct illuminating routines. The three protagonists are actually part of a film crew locked down to make a film, a team who, small yet diverse, are more accustomed to shooting bright and breezy films outdoors and, when faced with this out of-the-ordinary situation, must find a way of dealing with the challenge together, leading them towards numerous discussions about cinema.      

Eva, the protagonist of this story, has been a film editor and teacher for a long time. She has always worked with friends, one of whom, Juan, dies suddenly before both finish editing a new short film. The loss engulfs everything: the classes, the days of editing, the conversations. In the meantime, Eva and Rami, her assistant, work on editing a film on blindness, defined by one of the characters as a backdrop of emptiness. And, in point of fact, Eva suffers from a kind of emotional blindness: she is moving towards a loss of faith in film. Las cosas indefinidas (Undefined Things) seeks to modestly return this faith in film to its protagonist through her work — the images of her film inside the film — her personal objects, her conversations and her friends.  

In this thriller, set in New York’s Lower East Side, a vacant, dilapidated neighbourhood sent into decline by decades of neoliberal urban planning, Christine (played by Sandy McLeod), a woman with artistic ambitions, has money worries and is looking for a job. Her friend, played by artist Nan Goldin, tells her a downtown adult theatre needs a ticket-taker. Her place as the custodian of the theatre awakens in her certain obsessions which concur with the presence of a wealthy man (Richard M. Davidson) among the patrons, and a kind of mafia attraction Christine becomes fixated on, leading both to play a game of cat and mouse.

The Duque de Alba cinema is the only adult theatre left in Madrid. The year is 2013, a time when films can be watched online, in the privacy of the home. The cinema only has a few loyal patrons left, and only a few employees, whose loyalty is even greater. Together they are a small family who even share moments together leading up to Christmas. The cinema is a space of affect and conversations about the medium (and all types of films); however, its days are numbered: the ticket-taker is on the verge of retirement and the area is beginning to feel the dreaded effects of gentrification. The film records its final days, and the bonds and the nooks of the space in a slowly vanishing community.

This film tells the story of how actress and singer Jane Birkin was apprehensive about her imminent fortieth birthday when Agnès Varda, close to sixty herself, told her that it was a beautiful age. Thereafter, they began work on this film, reflecting on the footprint Birkin had left in the world (and vice versa). The film assembles memories, recreations and inventions on her works, travels, daughters, partners, parents and places (English and French), with everything mixed in this unconfigured (“auto”)biography which raises the question: What is a portrait? 

The Watermelon Woman is a romantic comedy, a fiction about a fictitious archive, among many other things. Cheryl (played by the film’s director, Cheryl Dunye) is a Black lesbian woman who wants to be a film-maker. She works with her friend and partner in a video rental store, with both also doing weddings and birthdays to gain experience, money and equipment in the hope that, at some point, it might kick-start their film-making. Interested in the presence of Black women in film history, Cheryl starts to watch films featuring Black actresses, particularly those from the 1930s and 1940s, and, consequently, discovers Fae Richards, the Watermelon Woman, an actress she had never heard about. As she interviews specialists, viewers and her relatives, Cheryl discovers that Richards was, like her, a lesbian, heightening her interest further. Her investigation subsequently becomes a film of archive adventures.   

In Bergman Island a film-making couple, suspiciously like the marriage of Mia Hansen-Løve and Olivier Assayas, a film-maker and huge admirer of Ingmar Bergman’s work, travel to the island of Fårö, in Sweden, to find inspiration and write their next feature film, living and working as the Swedish director did. With a lightness of touch and tenderness, Hansen-Løve films this homage to summer and the more pleasant and vitalist side of Bergman, as captured in Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika, 1953). The film maintains that creation and life are connected and that both have their sweet and agreeable moments.    

John L. Sullivan (played by Joel Albert McCrea), a successful film director who specialises in comedies, wants to take his career in a different direction and looks for inspiration to write his first drama. To gain an idea of the more impoverished side of the USA, still shaken by the Great Depression, he decides to dress accordingly and travel the country working precarious and temporary jobs. His exploits, however, are proof that the shift required is more mental than physical. At once a road movie and romantic comedy, Sullivan’s Travels is a film about the power of fiction and the self-portrait of a director who wants to champion comedy, even after the devastating Crash of ‘29.      

This session brings together two films centred on Buster Keaton, whose expression has been recorded in multiple forms across the history of the medium. In Sherlock Jr., a fresh-faced projectionist, played by Keaton, looks to cinema to learn about life, yet, ultimately, he overdoses on learning, to such a degree that he sees film in every corner of reality. In love with a girl with another suitor, he starts to imagine himself inside a detective film, his awkwardness triggering all number of risible accidents. Film, meanwhile, shot forty years later, is the first and only film by writer and playwright Samuel Beckett. The work focuses on the eye of the camera, perception, time and the body of the actor.

This film is a portrait of Hollywood as a relentless manufacturer of the show: an exercise in film within film, similar to a game of Russian dolls. A famous comedian dies in a plane crash, with his entourage — his team of writers, assistants, managers and administrators — concerned that they will be without work and a source of income. It is at this point that Stanley Belt enters the scene, played by Jerry Lewis, an unwittingly heavy-handed, chaotic and highly amusing character. It is obvious that Stanley is talentless, yet the machinery of showtime possesses all the tools to forcibly send him into homes around the world through television. As is common in Lewis’s other works, we find ourselves before a great comedy with agonising undertones.