To pair with this week’s collection of our favourite interviews of 2017, the editors here at 4:3 also looked back at the reviews and features that we have ran this year and have selected 20 of the best. From a Michael Jackson tribute to an in depth essay on video essay form, it’s certainly an eclectic bunch of pieces but taken as a whole, these are indicative of what we aim to publish year in, year out.
Text vs. Context: Understanding the Video Essay Landscape by Jessica McGoff
“With platforms now monetizing, and more and more video essays geared towards social media platforms, it is now vital to consider how industrial factors will impact video essays themselves. Criticism and analysis of video essays needs now to go beyond positioning essayists as auteurs and presupposing institutional context. Doing so will demonstrate a grasp on the shifting landscape, allow for nuance between and through the lines of academia and scholarship and fully understand the uniqueness of the form in terms of creative and collaborative factors.”
David Lynch: The Art Life by Keva York
“A kind of claustrophobia attends the scenes depicting Lynch’s creative process: his world seems circumscribed by the boundaries of his studio. And yet, the studio is also the point of departure for his excursions into the past, memory becoming a mode of transportation.”
Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc by Ivan Čerečina
“Jeannette is exceptionally restless as a work about the major French historical figure, perhaps more than anything due to Dumont’s even more restless confrontation with the historical drama as a form of filmmaking. He continually expresses a certain ambivalence for the easy mythologising of Joan of Arc that has dotted film history, an attitude that comes through in his brazen fracturing and reassembling of her story into a spiky mix of almost Straubian period film and rag-tag, genre-hopping musical. The resulting work is as strange and very often perplexing as that description might make it sound, but through it all emerges an oddly nuanced reflection on the figure of Joan and on re-approaching distant and well-worn myths.”
The Love Witch by Phoebe Chen
“There are immediately discernible conceits that are tempting to pack into dichotomies—the puritanical streak in traditional Americana vs. the “empowerment” of female sexuality; stoic masculinity vs. female hysteria—but Biller avoids streamlining her ideas, eschewing an easily digestible argument for a strange and nuanced deconstruction of contemporary feminism and all its conflicting precepts.”
Hell All Up in Hollywood: Michael Jackson’s Ghosts at 20 by Luke Goodsell
“[Michael] Jackson and longtime choreographer Travis Payne stage some of his most expressive dancing, an angry, electric carnival that fuses jittery bone-man shapes with the classic precision funk of the performer’s craft. There’s a ferocious urgency to the routine, the way the rag-and-dust dancers, in their demon-face masks, holler and stomp and levitate in formation behind Jackson, like ancient kings and queens returning to inherit their playground from suburbia’s tasteless interlopers. As Jackson commands his horde to terrorise the white bureaucrat, the film achieves its great moment of comical racial usurpation: the possessed Mayor is compelled to perform the Maestro’s dance — a white racist’s worst fears — as he pops and locks awkwardly to the rhythmic crunch of “Ghosts”.”
Lost Girls: A Jean Rollin Roundtable by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, with Samm Deighan, Alison Nastasi and Kat Ellinger
“Rollin—alongside Jess Franco—has always felt to me to be a director who has resisted feminist critical models like “the male gaze”: these are unapologetically sexual films that focus on the female body, sure, but there’s something about their almost aggressively dreamlike subjectivity that feels so inherently aligned with the feminine to me.”
Good Time by Conor Bateman
“[Daniel] Lopatin’s music fires up just as it would in a video game, triggered by and responding directly to the actions of a character on screen. It underscores the structure of Good Time too, a film of discrete sequences that plays out like a visually arresting episode of COPS, with a series of unusual crimes and police reports all connected by one man perpetually on the lam.”
On Body and Soul by Matilda Surtees
“While in the slaughterhouse the romanticism of the cinematography and Enyedi’s direction perfectly offsets the brutality of the work and the starkness of the setting, many of the domestic scenes that frame the inner lives of the two leads are too obvious in their depiction of urban alienation and veer towards sentimentality. Their bond is most interesting, most compelling, when it isn’t underwritten by sex or structured by a romantic teleology: when they are two coworkers, strangers, who find themselves suddenly and unexpectedly bonded by a shared emotional experience.”
Ama-San by Blythe Worthy
“Varejão’s moody, living tableaus seem almost expressionistic, capturing informal portraits of the ama and their families through gesture. In one of the first sequences, ama Masumi rides a scooter to work in close up, returning our gaze. Later, when her eyes fall shut as she sings with her son, it’s as if there is no distance at all — we’re instead nestled against them, the quotidian transformed into the sublime. Varejão locates the richness in this simplicity, offering such tenders moments as living treasures like those the ama find in the ocean depths.”
Kong: Skull Island by Luke Goodsell
“A squadron of helicopters is strafing the Vietnamese jungle, recklessly dropping depth charges to the sound of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” while grunts banter and a Nixon bobblehead leeringly presides over frenzied war-movie cutting. The composition is pulp poetry, writ large in the B-movie palette of apocalypse magic hour.”
The Island and the Cave by Phoebe Chen and Conor Bateman
“A vivid tactility links the different media – extreme grain from the expired film flits across shots of cave interiors, distorting already ambiguous shadows into fields of colourful static. The 4K footage substitutes film physicality with the haptic immediacy of intensely detailed, high-resolution images. These sequences play out like a secret life of rocks, camera drifting across the textural minutiae etched onto these formations by unwitnessed forces.”
Napalm by Jaymes Durante
“Lanzmann has always searched beyond intellectual accounts of memory and history. In Napalm, the testimony he gives is, of course, deeply personal. It’s also messily intertwined with politics, an empirical account of what living in a freedomless land, partially created by and through the West’s own ignorance, looks like, and how that oppression forbids the most basic and righteous of human connections. It would be corny and insincere to write that Napalm is about a love that transcends national borders — Napalm is deeply realistic about the pain and impossibility of human experience in a hawkish world in which gunless wars are the unremitting norm.”
Moonlight by Sarinah Masukor
“Moonlight refrains from putting forward analytic arguments about race, opportunity and the cycle of drug users and dealers, focusing instead on how its characters hold themselves in their skins. We’re not asked to think about Chiron, but instead, through the tactile qualities of the image, become him.”
Sexy Durga by Nicholas Godfrey
“Sexy Durga arrives in Sydney hot on the heels of the thematically similar Hounds of Love, and the comparison is an illustrative one: where that film performs moral contortions, attempting to pathologise its subject matter through endless backstory, the more formally adventurous Durga remains deliberately inscrutable.”
Short Films at Queensland Film Festival 2017 by Jessica Ellicott, Conor Bateman and Luke Goodsell
“Each frame is coated in a feverish parade of sequins, feathers and flesh, giving literal form to the figurative creatures of the Lisbon night — mermaids, birds and lions take shape before the lens.”
Lion by Virat Nehru
“Lion has a lot in common with Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, an Oscar-winning act of white audience placating which parroted the same tiresome negative stereotypes about India: that it’s a chaotic, cruel and dirty place, and the majority of the people are poor, but all that is of little significance because the people have ‘big’ hearts.”
Maliglutit by Jaymes Durante
“You can spot the frost bite on the actors better than you can the horizon, where white ice meets the blinding glare of the sky, and the fact that cinematographer Jonathan Frantz’s camera is reticent to move is understandable — at -48°C, it barely can.”
The War Show by Isabelle Galet-Lalande
“Zytoon’s documentary provides a compelling analysis of the Camera as Director in a war zone. “The camera was an event in itself,” she says, shaping the behaviours and speech of those around her. Rows of men queue up to display their wounds, and young children boast to the camera of their ambition to die martyrs. Thinking of the camera outside its capacities as disseminator of information, the film makes a surprising intervention into the current discussion surrounding wartime photography––without giving away too much, the mere presence of a camera is enough to push even the most upright rebel groups into elaborate, money-grabbing stunts that mimic the propaganda tactics of Assad.”
Daguerrotype by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
“Daguerrotype is until its final moments a deeply poetic Gothic allegory of cinema’s own conceptual and literal play of light and dark, reality and illusion. If it has a pronounced weakness, it is one shared with many other Kurosawa films: the unsatisfying indifference of their endings.”
Manchester by the Sea by Conor Bateman
“When that moment comes, just like the awful accident in Lonergan’s 2011 film Margaret, it’s sudden but not random. Individual negligence and tragic happenstance collide; the uniquely grotesque accident becomes a spectator sport. Those onlookers, the nexus of people and place, are the catalyst for Lee’s exile. He can’t even get a beer in Quincy, 44 miles away, without someone whispering his name.”
You can read all of our end of year coverage here.