This Week Give the Laurels or Les Boos to:

• film analysis
• a great movie year
• a new Bechdel Test
• Internet investigators
• [Kirk voice] CANNES!

A seventy-minute standing ovation for scb0212, wallflower and nikmarov this week for their contributions. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

The new season brings the new issue of Senses of Cinema and a whole host of new articles from around the world, like this extraordinary breakdown from Jill Barkman of the visual and aural cues and the way they make a “third film” in The Zone of Interest:

While the visuals show the dependency and cracks between the two sides of the wall, the soundscape has the unique ability to confuse the worlds. As with the first few moments of the film, when birds chirping mixes in with the sounds of a screaming void, there is a lack of clear delineation between heaven and hell. This confusion is returned to later in the film. Hedwig and Rudolf have a newborn in the house. When the baby is on-screen it is clear the cries are coming from her. But in moments when the baby is off screen, cries are heard, but it’s hard to decipher which side of the wall they are coming from. Are they coming from ‘here’ or ‘there’? From the child who will live or the one who will likely die? These moments, where the noises cannot easily be assigned to belonging ‘here’ or ‘there’ suggests an equanimity between the people on both sides. Where these divisions get blurred and confused there is also a potent sense of arbitrariness of which side of the wall you are on. When the walls, both physical and ideological, are man made, they will always be subject to shift.

It’s Cannes! Two dispatches from the premiere festival. First at Insidehook, Mark Asch runs down the winners from the festival (but wonders if they got the big prize wrong):

Much has been made about the fact that Neon has “won” five Palme d’Ors in a row — that is, they’ve been the U.S. distributor for Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall and now Anora. This is obviously misleading: there are other territories, and no one cares who’s released the last five Palme d’Or winners in Italy, say, or India. Neon secured the U.S. rights for Parasite and Titane well before they came to Cannes, and deals for Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall were closed at the festival, but Anora is the first time Neon has had a significant hand in the development of a Palme winner, and that does feel genuinely important, as a sign of artistic vitality outside the major Hollywood studios during a period when our theatrical exhibition environment is so top-heavy and embattled.

Filmmaker Magazine hosted Vadim Rizov’s dispatches, where he covered many of the highlights that played the festival:

This year’s Best Director winner, Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour revises the bifurcated structure of 2012’s Tabu and its second-half pastiche of silent cinema. Both parts of Grand Tour mix documentary footage with studio-shot sequences, but the first half is heavier on the travelogue component than the staged mode; the latter half overwhelmingly surrenders to the former, a la imagining what Murnau would have done in the sound era mutated with the self-conscious stiffnesses, deliberate anachronisms and theatricalities of Manoel de Oliveira. While ambling to a definite resolution, the narrative—structured around the 1917 flight through Asia of British civil servant Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), seeking to escape his determined fiancé Molly (Crista Alfaiete)—pursues many non-essential byways, in a series of “glory to the director” gestures that, like 2015’s Arabian Nights, make a virtue of unresolved or truncated narratives just for the pleasure of storytelling. A few color passages aside, it’s shot in piercingly beautiful black-and-white 16mm which practically glows even in its final, digitally projected form. Basically, this is suspiciously engineered to appeal to people like me, a cinephile dog whistle of familiar, recondite pleasures. 

You know the FAR is always up for discussing totemic movie year 1999, and so is The Guardian‘s Simran Hans:

As the world hurtled towards the millennium, movie-making was animated by a naive, anything-is-possible optimism that feels genuinely alien today. And while in the 25 years since there has been increased visibility and opportunity for women and people of colour behind the camera, in other ways conditions have worsened. The stakes are higher, and the expectations are lower. A combination of less money, deteriorating labour conditions, degraded attention spans and risk-averse executives has meant that, even with today’s digital advancements, the landscape is considerably less hospitable to film-makers of all identities. What’s striking about 1999 in particular is its variety. Weird, fun, thought-provoking movies were being made, and they were being watched, too.

Patrick Whittle reports for the Associated Press that researchers are urging screenwriters to be conscious of a new kind of Bechdel Test for climate change awareness onscreen (Alison Bechdel approves):

Some results were surprising. Movies that at first glance appear to have little overlap with climate or the environment passed the test. “Marriage Story,” Noah Baumbach’s emotive 2019 drama about the collapse of a relationship, passed the test in part because Adam Driver’s character is described as “energy conscious,” Schneider-Mayerson said. The 2022 whodunnit “Glass Onion” and the 2019 folk horror movie “Midsommar” were others to pass the test. Some that were more explicitly about climate change, such as the 2021 satire “Don’t Look Up,” also passed. But “San Andreas,” a 2015 movie about a West Coast earthquake disaster, and “The Meg,” a 2018 action movie set in the ocean, did not.

Finally, Rachel Aroesti takes to The Guardian to explore how amateur Internet sleuths have influenced pop culture “true stories”:

Baby Reindeer, The Tortured Poets Department and the Drake v Kendrick exchange are all examples of art that centres on intimately personal, literally true information – and their value is almost entirely bound up in their proximity to reality. That’s not to say they have no artistic merit (in fact, Baby Reindeer is a masterpiece), but it is impossible to deny that they have acted primarily as starting blocks, preparing the public to race towards their actual entertainment: going online and finding out more.