This Week, You Will Mythologize Your:
- interview prowess
- wild life story
- hometown
- favorite action film
- love for Hootie!
Legendary help from scb0212, Miller and Jake Gittes this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Errol Morris has a contentious interview with David Marchese at The New York Times as his documentary on John le Carré sets to debut:
[Morris:] What is the purpose of an interview, anyway? A lot of people think it’s this gotcha idea: You’re required to come up with a difficult question that pins the butterfly to the board, and the interview is judged on how adversarial it might be, how difficult the questions might be. That’s not part of the deal. An interview should be investigative, in essence. I don’t know how many people know this about me, but I made two films when I was in my 20s and early 30s, and the two films are probably the best films I’ve ever made. They were weird, and they were good, and they were original, so much so that I could not get anybody to make another film. There weren’t a lot of producers out there who were willing to hand over money so I could continue to work as a filmmaker, and I became a private detective. So do I understand what it means to play games with people? I think we all do.
Morris’s mentor, Werner Herzog, publishes his memoir titled in glorious Herzog fashion Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Dom Sinacola gives a thorough review at Paste Magazine:
It eventually doesn’t matter whether any of this is made up, how much is a faltering memory, how little his stories have evolved to compensate for false accounts, and for time, and for the sake of writing a compelling book accessible to people who may know nothing about Herzog outside of Grizzly Man and the “You must never listen to this” scene. The power Herzog unearths, the essence of the thing he captures on film or in prose, is sometimes a revelation regardless. He can do this because he has been everywhere. He’s unafraid of dying, of enduring pain, of the unfathomable. In last year’s The Fire Within, he confesses a kinship with volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, understands intimately their need to step closer and closer to the edge, to stare into the pyroclastic flow. The images Herzog brings us in his films—and the experiences he brings us in this memoir—can only come from a life lived fully. Fearlessly.
At BFI, Michael Koresky eulogizes Terence Davies:
It might seem counterintuitive, but, yes, Davies’ films were musicals, a genre that exists in the space between the public and the private self. These were often deeply interior works, which moved to the external rhythms of songs and melodies that were profoundly meaningful to him. Never was this more apparent than in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), which forewent traditional linear narrative for a series of anecdotal memory shards triggered by popular songs he remembered being shared by family members when he was a child, and The Long Day Closes (1992), which drifted along on the recollections of music and movies to form a twilit portrait of his own adolescence that felt like a direct transmission from its maker’s mind. These films are melancholy, occasionally harrowing, and are also indescribably beautiful, two of the greatest works in all of cinema, with no tonal or aesthetic equal. Arguably, he doesn’t even have imitators; no one would dare.
The Fanimatrix: Run Program,, a New Zealand fan film, is now the oldest active torrent! The Guardian‘s Eva Corlett has the story:
Over nine nights, the amateur film-makers and wannabe stunt actors shot the film, The Fanimatrix: Run Program, on a handy-cam, recording sound on a karaoke microphone attached to a broomstick and lighting their scenes with a couple of lamps borrowed from the local film school. […] The NZ$900 project – $500 of which was spent on the main character’s leather jacket – was then uploaded to the still-young BitTorrent filesharing website, where it suddenly, and unexpectedly took off. Within months, the film had been downloaded millions of times.
For Interview Magazine, Richard Linklater talks to Gregg Araki about filmmaking, nostalgia, and the benefit/curse of Netflix:
LINKLATER: It’s so weird. I feel so torn. On one hand, this was a dream when you’re sitting there in the eighties trying to find a movie. There’s the Criterion Channel now. You can just watch it. If there’s one thing different now, it’s just obviously the availability is everywhere, but if someone had told you, you wouldn’t be spending your time in a record store the way you used to, or a bookstore. And I think technology goes toward people’s wants like, “Hey, that song you just heard, just push a button and you can listen to the song 12 seconds later instead of going and looking for it in a used record store.”
Adam Nayman muses on Daris Rucker and the aging 90s rock fan for Still Alive:
Somehow in 2023, Rucker and his bandmates don’t seem especially pathetic, or opportunistic, or even past their prime: more like they’ve aged gracefully into the corniness that is their musical birthright. I think I’d even consider attending Hootiefest 2024 (dates and place TBD) to observe Rucker’s amiable defiance of the burn-out/fade away dialectic, and maybe to hear his killer cover of Stone Temple Pilots’ dusty, lonely, “Interstate Love Song” in person. Or maybe even Pearl Jam. Imagine it: an entire resort of washed dads in cargo shorts, lowering their voices, raising their arms to the sky, and affirming en masse that they are, in fact, still alive. Let them cry.
And at The New Republic, Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov offer an analysis of the dynamics behind the Nobel Prize in literature, most recently awarded to Jon Fosse:
Fosse has a growing fan base, and despite having written a septology, he isn’t a difficult writer—though he will undoubtedly be characterized as such in the coming days. He is certainly a writer’s writer, however—specifically, the kind of writer’s writer who makes appearances in other writers’ books, as when he shows up in the fifth volume of fellow Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård’s monumental My Struggle: No, Not the German One. In that book, Fosse tears apart one of Knausgård’s poems, telling him that only one phrase—“widescreen sky”—has any value. This is why Fosse is a Nobel laureate and Knausgård is currently manning the merch table on Wilco’s European tour.