One of the great pleasures of attending a film festival is engaging with the multitude of responses to the films being exhibited, whether they be instantaneous responses overheard whilst filing into the foyer after a screening, or snatched chats with fellow cinephiles over a drink should one’s schedules allow enough time for this. As the leader of the Cinema Rediscovered 2022 Film Critics Workshop I had the additional privilege of prolonging this period of discourse with this year’s cohort, seeing them develop their ideas about the programme into a collection of video essays.
During the course of the workshop, the group heard from guest speakers Catherine Grant, Jessica McGoff and Charlie Shackleton, each with their own differing approaches to tackling the same problem: how do we go about using film as a medium to comment on films themselves? The eclecticism of the results is in part a reflection on this, as well as on the diversity and wide scope of the festival’s programme.
- Film historian, programmer and video editor Jonathan Bygraves
Jo Reid’s An Elegy to Intertitles examines the aesthetic and narrative functions of intertitles in F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), and on how the film represents a swan-song for the silent era which was in the process of passing.
Lara Callaghan’s All the President’s Men responds to the festival’s Pre-Code season by linking the coming of the Hays Code with historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s notion of the Imperial Presidency, a linking of cultural censoriousness and political authoritarianism which carries a vital resonance with our present times.
Part of the festival experience itself was the inspiration for Chay Collins’s Queen of Time: A hot take overheard after the screening of Queen of Diamonds (1991) is used as a launching point to examine the thematic and formal parallels between the work of director Nina Menkes and Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s own chef d'œuvre Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).
A thematic aspect of the festival’s programme which resonated strongly with the group was the way cinema can be used to challenge the dominant cultural paradigms of the medium. Amaya Bañuelos Marco’s Speaking Nearby focuses on two documentaries which screened at the festival: Trinh T. Minh‑ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959). Elegantly locating visual parallels between the two films, the essay also locates a deeper resonance between them in their uses of formal strategies to liberate themselves from the mediated gaze associated with the documentary traditions they ostensibly reside within.
Releasing the cinematic image from its traditional hegemons is also the subject of Joy Hunter’s A Picture Paints a Thousand Lies, which looks at how Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982) serves as a correction to the racial biases of the Hollywood myth-making machine.
In Esther Okorocha’s Pat’s Political Awakening, Menelik Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981) is reconfigured through the lens of a quotation from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, foregrounding the polemicism within the film’s narrative.
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Meanwhile, Jennifer Doveton’s Social Mobility and Black Performativity On Screen expansively positions both of the above films alongside Wendell B. Harris’s Chameleon Street (1989) within a framework of Afro-Pessimism, paralleling the destructiveness of their protagonists’ strivings for socialized bourgeois conformity.
Each of us comes to a piece of art with a different set of eyes, a different history of life experiences behind us, and we each can gravitate towards different aspects of the same shared viewing experience. The jazz world of Paris Blues (1961) is an anchor point for Daniel Turner’s Blue in Green, an intricate interweaving of disparate media which poignantly explores his own journey of cinematic and musical discovery, and how it has been shaped by those closest to him. Video essays, as with other more traditional forms of criticism, lie in a space between the subjective and the objective, at once interrogating works and revealing a part of ourselves, our passions, our ways of seeing the world. Just as these pieces reflect the diversity of the festival’s programme, so too do they reflect the diversity of the individuals who made them.