At the Museum
Goings-on at Museum of the Moving Image
The Guests is a sort of cinematic equivalent of a literary explication de texte—an exercise in which a single, brief work is made to expand, undulate, deepen, and shift shape simply by virtue of being looked at unblinkingly and at length.
The best-known member of the cohort represented in New York is Kazik Radwanski, whose debut Tower (2012) showed at dozens of film festivals around the world and garnered critical praise commensurate with his level of formal accomplishment, which is high indeed.
“A singular being in a plural world” is how Jean Cocteau described the French director Jean Grémillon. His films are sensitive to the tensions between individuals and communities, between the cyclical patterns of daily life and the private obsessions or conflicts that break these rhythms.
An inventory of just about everything that the cinema could do in the year 1931, quite a lot of which still outlines its capabilities today.
Jia assembles oral histories from individuals shaped by the political upheavals of the last fifty years, opening a new window onto their history and ameliorating a vacuous modernity brought upon Shanghai by the frenzy of the new millennium.
If the critical community’s collective prejudice against the “message movie” becomes rigid dogma, then it will miss out on works such as those by pioneering Hong Kong filmmaker Patrick Lung Kong.