As usual, the list below is a reflection of my taste, interests, and viewing habits during 2020. For obvious reasons I have not attended any film festivals in person, but the online viewing events organized all over the globe were, for me at least, one of the few positive things to come out of this annus horribilis.
Synopsys in italics, followed by my quick take and the trailer:
Expedition Content (Veronika Kusumaryati, Ernst Karel)
In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organized the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (current day West Papua). Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations, and consisting of several of the wealthiest members of American society wielding 16mm film cameras, still photographic cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a microphone, the expedition settled for five months in the Baliem Valley, among the Hubula (also known as Dani) people. It resulted in Gardner’s highly influential film Dead Birds, two books of photographs, Peter Matthiessen’s book Under the Mountain Wall, and two ethnographic monographs. Michael Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller (Standard Oil) family, was tasked with taking pictures and recording sound in and around the Hubula world. Expedition Content is an augmented sound work composed from the archive’s 37 hours of tape which document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The piece reflects on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to multimodal anthropology, in the lives of the Hubula and of Michael, and in the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua.
Visual representation and the obsession with it has become, in our society, a black hole absorbing and distorting everything around it. Expedition Content, by offering us for most of its duration a black screen —the are only some written words, and a couple of minutes of images towards the end—allows the sound to take prominence. The freshness of the encounter and discovery, different languages, different sounds, different time, is here preserved and conveyed with an almost haptic quality. It is a work where the experience for the “viewer” is thus channeled through sounds and voices, however I firmly believe it is primarily a film to be watched, possibly on a big screen, in that it establishes its discourse within the frame of the power of (here absent) images.
Expedition Content is also a theoretical piece that goes deeply into colonialism and how the anthropology endeavor, at least a certain way of doing anthropology, is deeply embedded in it. The last 20 minutes of the movie (I’m not revealing more because I don’t want to spoil it) are in this regard an incredible exposure of the stance of the anthropologist as a colonial subject.
By far the best work I saw this year, fiction or non-fiction, it definitely deserves a stand alone and more in-depth piece (I’m working on it, hopefully it will be ready early next year).
The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe (1897-1902)
A compilation film of newly-restored rare images from the first years of filmmaking. Immerse yourself in enchanting images of Venice, Berlin, Amsterdam and London from 120 years ago. Let yourself be carried away in the mesmerizing events and celebrities of the time, and feel the enthusiasm of early cinema that overcame the challenge of capturing life-like movement.
One of the highlights of the Le Giornate del Cinema Muto/Pordenone Silent Film Festival, which this year moved its edition online. An incredible and touching dive into the anodyne beauty of everyday life, captured 120 years ago.
Concrete Forms of Resistance (Nick Jordan)
Filmed in Beirut and Tripoli, Lebanon, Concrete Forms of Resistance is a documentary centred upon Tripoli’s abandoned ‘Permanent International Fair’, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the mid-1960s. The film presents themes of progress and crisis, labour and capital, material and memory, contrasting the utopian vision of the original plans with the stark realities of sectarian divisions, regional conflicts and rising economic inequalities.
A short documentary I watched back in February, although it feels like ages ago, Jordan’s film is an enthralling journey through the recent history of the Middle East seen through the lens of Oscar Niemeyer’s works.
Dick Johnson is Dead (Kirsten Johnson)
As her father nears the end of his life, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson stages his death in inventive and comical ways to help them both face the inevitable.
Stylistically I was expecting something different, so it didn’t have the impact I thought it would, yet the way Kirsten Johnson is able to blend grief and laughs was touching, healing and in the end refreshing.
Edo Avant-Garde (Linda Hoaglund)
Edo Avant-Garde reveals the pivotal role Japanese artists of the Edo era (1603 – 1868) played in setting the stage for the “modern art” movement in the West. During the Edo era, while a pacified Japan isolated itself from the world, audacious Japanese artists innovated stylization, abstraction, minimalism, surrealism, geometric composition and the illusion of 3-D. Their elegant originality is most striking in images of the natural world depicted on folding screens and scrolls by Sotatsu, Korin, Okyo, Rosetsu, Shohaku and many others who left their art unsigned.
While thematically is in another universe, stylistically the movie is very similar to Hoaglund’s ANPO: Art X War (2010). Coproduced by NHK, Edo Avant-Garde was shot using a special Sony 4k camera, and the sound and music used are also superb. For me it was the perfect viewing experience during the partial “lockdown” we had here in Japan in Spring. Soothing.
Me and the Cult Leader (Sakahara Atsushi)
Me and the Cult Leader — A Japanese Documentary on the 1995 Tokyo Sarin Gas Attack perpetrated by doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, following victim Atsushi Sakahara’s travels with current cult executive Hiroshi Araki.
Don’t be misguided by the trailer below, the film is a slow meditation on the banality of evil, and an exploration of a fascinating and problematic relationship.
Archiving Time (Lu Chi-yuan)
In Taiwan, there is a group of people participating in this race against time. They are hidden inside the film archive of New Taipei City’s “Singapore Industrial Park”, where the 17,000-plus film reels and over a million film artifacts have become their spiritual nourishment. Day after day, they shuttle back and forth inside, carrying their doubts, their learnings, and their faith. What they are doing is awakening these long-neglected film reels, then piecing together the no-longer-existent social atmospheres and lives of distant pasts recorded on them. And spending time in this archive has become everyday life for these film archivists and restorers.
If you are a lover of movies and interested in how preservation and archiving are changing and shaping what the history of cinema, in this particular case, Taiwan cinema, will be in the near future, this is the documentary for you.
Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds (Werner Herzog, Clive Oppenheimer)
Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds takes viewers on an extraordinary journey to discover how shooting stars, meteorites and deep impacts have focused the human imagination on other realms and worlds, and on our past and our future.
While Family Romance was a complete letdown, a disaster both stylistically and content-wise, I quite enjoyed this documentary released on Apple TV a couple of months ago. “Enjoyed” is the correct word because this is, make no mistakes about it, 100% Herzog, for better or worse, and at the end of the day a documentary fully drenched in the public persona he has become in the last 10 years or so. That being said, the themes tackled and the time framing of the events narrated and shown on screen really resonated with me.
Ghosts: Long Way Home (Tiago Siopa)
After a spell cast by Grandma Faraway, the oldest son of a small family encounters the ghost of his late Grandma Maria still living in her old house, and they chat as they used to.
Moving between documentary and fiction, the film explores the memories of a family and those of an area, in a slow-paced style reminiscing of Pedro Costa’s cinema. Beautifully photographed, this hybrid experiment works also a visual poem and an ode to rural Portugal and its ancestral and magical/pagan beliefs. The dreamlike quality that is infused throughout the whole film really works well, but at the same time I think that some scenes could have been left out, especially those in the second half of the movie when the magical realism and the ghost story aspects are pushed too much on the surface and become too on the nose, so to speak.
Lil’Back: Real Swan (Luis Walkecan)
Dancer Lil’ Buck grew up jookin and bucking on the streets of Memphis. After a breathtaking video of him dancing to Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” accompanied by cellist Yo-Yo Ma went viral, everything changed.
A documentary about a topic I was not familiar at all, and yet, or because of this, it was a nice surprise, a discovery of a world.
Asian Docs 