I hope you will read my interview with filmmaker Shaunak Sen for one of the best films of 2022, "All That Breathes": https://www.allarts.org/2022/12/shaunak-sen-documentary-all-that-breathes/ It recounts the story of two brothers who rescue Black Kites, the raptors endemic to their hometown in Delhi, India.
This blog for librarians and publishers interviewed me this fall about my career as a film critic and feature writer. Here is the link: https://blog.exacteditions.com/meet-the-contributor-maria-garcia-cineaste/
My interview with documentary filmmakers Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes for The Janes appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of Cineaste. The documentary recounts the story of the eponymous radical feminist group that provided free abortions before the passage of Roe v. Wade. Below is a brief excerpt from the feature:
Cineaste: All of the Janes and your other subjects appear in informal settings, even the
police officer who arrested the Janes, and Mike, the abortionist. You filmed a lot of the Janes
at home, and screening the film I felt like I was sitting in on a living room conversation.
Would you comment on your stylistic choices?
Pildes: For this documentary, that setting felt right because these women are testifying to
what the country looked like the last time women did not have a right to choose. These
are very intimate conversations and they are personal. They’re funny and warm, and
almost take a page from this “grassroots-ness” of the abortion counseling itself. The Janes
shared each other’s cars and each other’s homes for “The Front” or for “The Place,” the
locations where they met their clients and where the abortions were performed. It just felt
appropriate for these stories. That is the film Tia and I wanted to make. We did not use
experts in this documentary. We were doing first-person perspective. We knew that was
the “lightning in the bottle” of this particular story, the Janes being able to tell this tale
free of male experts and statistics. That is all implicit. We were doing this encapsulated,
historical story and it does not take much to connect the dots with what is happening
today. We wanted the feeling that we were having a conversation; we felt that was the
incredible power of their testimony.
Lessin: Emma uses the term “conversation.” Of course, we came prepared with questions,
but hopefully it is more like a conversation than an interview. The film takes its twists and
turns and there are surprises along the way. I have never used Errol Morris’s Interrotron
machine. I prefer that personal connection that was made harder because of COVID. Half
of the interviews were completed before COVID, but there were at least nine or ten that
we did after the vaccines, although still during the pandemic. We could not be as close to
the subjects as we would have wanted.
Cineaste: I was reminded of a moment during the interview with Mike, the abortionist,
when, referring to his skill, you said, “And you were good at it.” He replied, “Yes, I was.” It
was conversational and intimate, and it gave him a chance to brag about the small part he
played. I suddenly understood his history and his personality.
Lessin: He was a complicated character. Mike was not apologizing. He felt good about
what he had done. Both Emma and I feel some affection for him even though were also
other feelings because he’s a tricky guy. He did good, but of course not for the reasons
that the Janes were doing it. We could have made a whole film about Mike. We had to be
judicious and efficient because the film was not about Mike, yet he was a very interesting
and colorful character.
A still from Tony Kaye's "Lake of Fire" As will happen in the digital universe, "In the News" (to the right of this column), disappeared recently, during a Google "upgrade" of the site. It is back to document the pivotal role that the cinema, particularly human rights filmmaking, plays in the recording of history. (This section generally contains a list of films I have reviewed in the past, or feature-length interviews I conducted with filmmakers.) Sadly, this section is also a testament to how little social justice issues have improved in the U.S. This month, it addresses the fact that women are fighting yet again for a right granted to them by law, and by the human rights recognized in every democratic constitution.
Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire is one of the most disturbing films ever made on the subject of anti-abortion extremism. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's 12th and Delaware, set in Port Fierce, Florida, documents the then burgeoning war against women that has come to define the state; in a brief interview with Grady, the filmmaker discusses the infiltration of far right religious groups into neighborhoods that host abortion clinics. Maisie Crow’s Jackson is an excellent portrait of the last abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi, a documentary that foresaw that state's present-day restrictions, among the most aggressive in the U.S.
A still from Camilla Neilsson’s President. The talented filmmaker's previous documentary is Democrats (2014), about the drafting of Zimbabwe's constitution.
I began writing my third book last year, but my progress has been slow. Winter brought a personal loss, although today it is easier to push those memories aside. Few things heal as well as spring's blue skies and birdsong.
I reviewed a terrific documentary, Camilla Neilsson’s President, in the current issue of Cineaste, a print-only publication. It is a topical look at the course of elections in formerly colonized countries, in this case in Zimbabwe.
Please go to the new link (under "Italia," on left side of this column) for my review of The Hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino's autobiographical film that streamed on Netflix.
Best Quest Films of 2021
A still of Nelly and Marion, portrayed by Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz, from Céline Sciamma's Petite Maman.
My criteria for choosing these movies is derived from my latest book Cinematic Quests for Identity: The Hero’s Encounter with the Beast (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). An essential component of my theory about cinematic quests is that heroes do not have a “coming of age” or a “middle-age crisis”—these patriarchal ideas are derived from Western literary tradition and so reflect the experience of men. Cinematic heroes embark on quests many times in their lives in a courageous desire to live a conscious and meaningful existence. They do so at great peril because the quest requires a return to childhood wounds or profound losses; always there is the Beast of individuation, the equivocal figure in the life of the hero that can lead her to madness or to individuation.
This year, there are five outstanding films, four of which are appropriate for adults and children, and some, like Slalom and Little Girl, that are quite topical. All feature a female quest for identity, and with the exception of Little Girl, a documentary, are directed, or written and directed, by women. The order for these entries is random, and does not reflect any effort at ranking.
Petite Maman (subtitled, appropriate for young audiences and adults)
One of the most striking qualities of cinematic quests for identity is the suspension of time. All heroes, even very young protagonists, are compelled, through a current crisis, to revisit a profound loss or an unhealed wound. It is for the purpose of healing that the hero embarks on the path to individuation. For children, as for nine year-old Nelly in Petite Maman, the quest is sometimes an origin story. Céline Sciamma’s sublime film opens shortly after the death of Nelly’s grandmother. Nelly's mother Marion is distraught and rather distant; because of Nelly’s hyper-awareness of her mother’s moods, it appears at the start of the film that the role of mother and daughter are reversed.
In the manner of fairy tales, Sciamma makes that manifest. In probing her mother’s grief, and her own loss, Nelly returns to Marion’s past that hints at a difficult mother-daughter relationship. This of course leads, as all fairy tales do, to a jaunt into the woods, in this case to the forest of Marion's childhood. There Nelly finds a kindred spirit. Like Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête, and akin to the work of Miyazaki Hayao, who Sciamma credits as an inspiration, Petite Maman is a terrific movie for the girl in all of us, with outstanding performances by twin sisters Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz.
Land
Rather improbably, she immediately sells the equally expensive SUV that got her there. The screenplay never recovers from that blunder that suggests Edee is hellbent on suicide, a narrative dead-end. The source of Edee’s wish for isolation is also withheld far too long, and while viewers will guess that she has suffered a profound loss, it is actually an outsized ego that led her to winter in that cabin, sans electricity and running water. Arrogance is rarely an attribute of female heroes in cinematic quests, but Wright’s performance makes it believable. The Beast of Edee’s individuation, the character that propels the hero to destruction or redemption, is Miguel (Demián Bichir), a fellow hermit. He confronts Edee with her penchant for self-absorption that has long kept her from appreciating the beauty that surrounds her.
Slalom (appropriate for adolescents and adults)
The image above is a still from one of my favorite films at this year's festival, Michelangelo Frammartino's il Buco or The Hole (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2021/films/il-buco/). It is ostensibly about the exploration of underground caves. One of my friends and a fellow critic once said that watching the Italian filmmaker's work, one could walk away from the screen, hard boil an egg, and go back to it, knowing you have not missed anything. Maybe Frammartino's work is slow but it is also exacting and subtle. He is a master at composition, too. This one is about the upper world where time moves on, people die and cows calf, and the underworld that has not changed since the beginning of time. The film is scheduled for theatrical release in 2022.
Read my interview with the director of "Respect," the new biopic about the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin: https://awardswatch.com/interview-respect-director-liesl-tommy-on-aretha-celebrating-black-women-and-her-hitchcock-moment/
Chances are you have not seen one of the best films of 2018. It was not released until May of this year. The film, Dead Pigs, is written and directed by an Asian woman, Cathy Yan.
After pitching a review of a female-directed film earlier this year, to two different venues, and being told by both editors that the movie was not widely distributed, and that they would be skipping coverage, I felt angry. The writer-director, a woman from an underrepresented group, made a very popular art house film just five years ago. Her next movie did not do well, but she had not written the script. If she were a male director, these venues would have reviewed her film based on her initial success.
I decided to begin a website that would feature one long-form review a month of a film made by a female writer-director. My next review, which will publish this weekend, is about Dead Pigs. Last month's review was of Haifaa Al Mansour's A Perfect Candidate.
I hope you will visit the website soon: https://www.awomanspicture.com/
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| A still shown in Tulsa Burning, Stanley Nelson's new documentary, of the Greenwood section of Tulsa. |
In Tulsa Burning, Nelson depicts the present search for the bodies of Black men and women killed during that Oklahoma massacre in 1921, who were buried in mass graves, and the circumstances that led to the white mob violence that leveled the Greenwood section of Tulsa. Dubbed "Black Wall Street," it was one of many all-Black communities that were founded when African-Americans migrated north during Reconstruction.
With a brilliant score by Branford Marsalis, scores of archival photographs, and interviews with the family members of those murdered at Greenwood, and other family members of Blacks who survived, Nelson provides a comprehensive picture of the massacre, its cover-up in the white press (the Black press reported it), and the lingering effects of the seizure of Black land after the massacre. The latter has led to a demand for reparations in Tulsa, as it has across the United States, in Black communities and among Native Americans.
"Video Interviews" (to the upper left of this column) provides links to Part I of my past on-camera interview with Stanley Nelson, and my print interview with Marco Williams, a Black filmmaker who executive produced Tulsa Burning.
I have just updated a few non-working links, added to "The Craft of Filmmaking" and to "Recent Features." I hope readers will appreciate my new Biden-era "Save Us From the Centrists" list.
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| A still from Miss Juneteenth of mom and daughter, Turquoise and Kai. |
Several of the films are proof of that lifelong search for meaning, and chronicle the childhood wounds that so often form the heroic character; these often inform the classic tales of the hero’s journey, in literature and at the movies. We are reminded this year that survival itself is an heroic task: in the wake of 300,000 souls in the U.S. and millions worldwide who have perished in the pandemic, is an ocean of sorrow and longing. Three filmmakers on the list this year, veterans Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne and relative newcomer Chloe Zhao are returnees; their work is consistently focused on the quest undertaken by largely uncelebrated heroes, disenfranchised by poverty, ageism or racism, or cultures marked by institutionalized violence.
(Please note that the movies are listed in alphabetical order by title. I try to resist ranking beyond the compilation of this list. Excessive ranking is counter to the aim of film criticism, the purpose of which is to further an appreciation of the art form through a consideration of all movies.)
House of Hummingbird, Kim Bora (Subtitled)
This accomplished debut feature set in South Korea centers on Eun-hee, a young woman who confronts class discrimination, an abusive family and other more ordinary teenage woes. Then she suffers the sudden loss of the only person who understands her predicament. The film is not only a beautifully rendered quest film, it is a reminder of the terrifying fragility of youthful individuation. Excellent performances anchor what some may feel is a slow-moving story. Ozu fans will love it. (Scroll down for a longer review on Facebook.)
Miss Juneteenth, Channing Godfrey Peoples (Appropriate for young audiences)
The Beast of individuation, the equivocal figure in every hero’s journey, is sometimes a relative or guardian, and in the young, female quest, it is often a loving but overbearing mother. In this unusual film, both mother and daughter are grappling with their identity. Turquoise, the youthful mother, was almost a beauty queen and the recipient of a college scholarship, but now she ekes out a living as a waitress, worried about paying for Kai’s education. Under the delightful female gaze of this African-American writer-director, what emerges is a cinematic quest story in which a girl, on the verge of adulthood, sends her mom on a path to individuation. “Miss Juneteenth” is significant for other reasons, not the least of which is that the characters are Black—and that Turquoise’s nostalgia for her storied girlhood is so often portrayed as the sole province of white women.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Liza Hittman (Appropriate for teens; family viewing to discuss matters of abortion, rape, male aggression)
This film is ostensibly the story of a 17 year-old girl unable to get a legal abortion in her own state, and the journey she and her friend embark upon to get her to New York City—but Autumn’s tale is centuries’ old. Instead of a single Beast of individuation, Hittman substitutes a hostile environment rife with male aggression, turning Autumn’s rape and her subsequent individuation into an archetypal female quest. The silent acknowledgment that Skylar and Autumn share of the necessity to endure is devastating, and further proof, as if women needed any, of the neverending story of our loss of innocence. Hittman even touches upon the delicate matter of how mothers are sometimes complicit in crimes committed against their daughters.
Nomadland, Chloe Zhao
Like Zhao’s first two films, this one is a conflation of documentary and narrative film, the title and the characters derived from Jessica Bruder’s eponymous book. The underlying political and social commentary in this movie informs all of the young filmmaker’s work, but here there is a certain severity that undermines the narrative. It is somewhat overcome by Zhao’s celebration of an uncommonly old female hero who leaves nothing behind when she embarks on her last adventure. Fern’s late-in-life search for meaning has been a long time in coming; all heroes harbor one terrible childhood wound that is revisited over the years so that they may continue to live consciously. Fern has always lived by her own rules, and now only one path allows her to maintain that independence. The individuation is bittersweet, but then so is senescence.
Young Ahmed, Dardenne Brothers (Appropriate for teens; subtitled)
These Belgian filmmakers have been writing and directing quest films for over 20 years; among their most memorable are “la Promesse” (1996) and “Rosetta” (1999) that feature young, working class heroes. “Young Ahmed” follows that tradition, portraying a 13 year-old boy who comes under the influence of an extremist imam. Ahmed goes on to taunt his family with his sudden misogyny and his strict adherence to the imam’s beliefs. When he must pass certain barbarous rights of passage, it becomes apparent that Ahmed is on the path to self-destruction. Male quests for identity are marked by violent transformation because under patriarchy men and boys, unlike women and girls, must prove themselves physically, in playground battles and fields of battle. This film, anchored by a terrific performance, is a potent warning to adults about how easily children are influenced, and often harmed, because their passions are as great as their potential for self-sacrifice.
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| A still of Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian (1976). |
I have removed all the links to my work for Biography.com because that website removed all my reviews and features (and those of others) when they stopped film coverage altogether. I will soon be restoring some with links to PDFs on Google Drive.
Best news (besides the fact that the Democrats will boycott the committee vote on Amy Coney Barrett) is that my Rotten Tomatoes Approved Critic profile is restored along with more than a decade of links to my reviews: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/critic/maria-garcia/movies
I occasionally write about recently released classics on Blu-ray, mostly for Cineaste, for instance my recent review of John Ford's The Last Hurrah (1958). I always enjoy revisiting Ford, one of America's great directors, and researching stories about the production, especially when I feel that the movie is under-appreciated as this movie undoubtedly is—who can resist a cast that stars Spencer Tracy, and includes such Ford regulars as Basil Rathbone, Jane Darwell, Donald Crisp and John Carradine?
With the Fellini and Morricone columns, my writing was focused on the work, the cinematic legacy, a comfortable circumstance for a film critic. With the 100th anniversary of Federico Fellini's birth this year, there was no way to avoid writing about him. His portrayal of women has always made his films problematic for me, and in revisiting his work in the course of my research, I found my opinion had not changed. Much of his oeuvre is dated, but the performances of his wife, closest collaborator and star, Giulietta Masina, are vibrant and worthy of more critical consideration than they have been afforded. Their collaboration gave me the "hook" for my piece. (It appears here: https://www.niaf.org/niaf_magazine/ambassador-magazine-vol-31-no-4-current-issue/)
With the Ennio Morricone column, which will appear in the upcoming Fall issue of Ambassador, the research was daunting, in part because of the length of the composer's career in film. I had the advantage of being able to read some newspaper articles in Italian, and that gave me anecdotes that did not appear in the American press, but it was necessary for me to conduct more database research than usual. While I consider myself well-informed on the subject of film music, I am not a musician. And, to write about the maestro, who was also a classical composer, I had to explain the reason his music was considered so innovative, without the benefit of a web-based platform. (Ambassador appears online but as a PDF.) In other words, I could not provide readers with musical or video clips.
I found myself rewriting the introductory paragraphs for two weeks before realizing that I needed some of the vocabulary of a music critic. Of course, I did more research, and that yielded an intriguing quote from Morricone in an interview published 25 years ago, in which he said that he began each of his compositions with "a brick from Bach." As a passionate early music "fan," I listen to Bach often, and started speculating about the nature of the maestro's "brick" in Bugsy (1991) and Cinema Paradiso (1994), two of my favorite Morricone scores.
I was not exactly "off and running" after that—Red Smith was not exaggerating when he said that writing is an endeavor in which you "open a vein and bleed"—but I had the structure for my 1300-word article. In retrospect, I found a way to comment on the life of two iconic figures with some biographical research, although in the end mainly through their work. One of the benefits of being a film critic is that the research, in addition to reading interviews and reviews (and sometimes the more painful task of rereading your own published pieces), entails screening the work of talented filmmakers like Giuseppe Tornatore and Barry Levinson.