Kudos to Dennis Lim for his lucid overview, in Sunday’s Times, of the spate of recent films from around the world “that could be said to blur or thwart or simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction,” such as the forthcoming film by the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, “Our Beloved Month of August” (which is indeed terrific and about which I’ll say more as its release, on September 3rd, approaches), and the films of Abbas Kiarostami and Jia Zhangke. The question, however, is why. It’s there, and not just in the inherently documentary nature of the movie camera, that the genre brings to light the paradoxes of contemporary art. For instance, he writes: In the 1940s, D. W. Griffith, lamenting the airlessness of studio-bound films, declared, “What’s missing from movies nowadays is the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” It was an urge to confront reality that inspired Italy’s postwar neo-realists and the cinéma-vérité pioneers of the 1960s.
The Front Row: Life Works : The New Yorker
Posted 1 year ago
