Notebook is covering the Locarno Film Festival with a series of correspondence pieces written by the participants in the Critics Academy.
Illustrations by Lucy Jones.
What happens to the body at a film festival? Over the course of the Locarno Film Festival, we tried—as much as decency allows—to investigate this very broad question. These responses seek to tie together the films we’ve seen with our embodied experiences of Locarno, both inside and outside of the cinema, grappling with the limits of our attention, our exhaustion, and our desires.
Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957).
PIERRE JENDRYSIAK:
Far from the expected glamor, attending a film festival can sometimes feel like the trek through the desert pictured in Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957): a dreamy haze, almost a struggle. Under the heat of the Locarno sun, one wanders the streets, looking for a nice bartender to refill their water bottle, a little bit delirious from the sunburn itching their face. Of course, it’s not hard to imagine that a festival experience encompasses lack of sleep, hangovers, and general exhaustion. But strangely, the opposite sensation often arises: the body oddly, inexplicably, stays awake, sometimes very attentive, often very tense. And so we could also say that attending a film festival resembles the journey depicted in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome (1959): a rigorous walk in a straight line, eyes trained on the horizon (and with the body straight, almost upright), with just a few pauses to catch our breath; a trip organized around a very tight, almost monastic schedule. You just have to replace the decrepit cardboard western houses with beautiful movie theaters (and a few other uncomfortable ones that look like giant gymnasiums); the buckets of water with pints of expensive Swiss beer.
If Bitter Victory and Ride Lonesome—both of which screened in Locarno’s retrospective marking the centenary of Columbia Pictures—can be considered metaphors for attending a film festival, then Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), which was presented this year in an almost pristine 35mm print, can be seen as a deeply perverse metaphor for cinephilia as a whole: as long as we consider that watching a film puts one in a dreamlike state. In his Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud argues that dreaming does not actually “disturb” one’s sleep, but is, on the contrary, what makes sleeping possible; dreaming only “releases a stimulus” that gratifies an unfulfilled desire which, if left unaddressed, would disturb one’s sleep. But this desire is hidden from the dreamer, or “censored,” as Freud writes (outside of his analysis of dreaming, he calls this repression).
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953).
Lang’s film, like most of his American work, is cold, severe, arithmetical—but the strange thing about this coldness is the space it gives to the usual eroticism of American classical cinema. As much as possible, Lang strove to avoid eroticizing his close-ups: these shots are not about the sensuality of light, nor the closeness of a beautiful face—they are about communicating information, building a sense of space. Although there is a resistance to eroticism in The Big Heat, there is still an inescapable appeal to sensuality. Lang is very well aware of that, as he is aware of the smallest grain of dust in his films. And so he gives the perverse, cinephilic viewer what they want: just a few sensual close-ups of Gloria Grahame. But he also reminds us that this desire comes at a certain price—that it is often shameful, and that one is often terrified of what lies behind the censorship, the repression. A terrifying shame, a guilt, a penalty which unforgettably comes to Grahame’s character in the form of a scorching coffee pot.
At a film festival—and especially at Locarno, considering the heat, the humidity, the charming Swiss landscape—the strange state the body is put through might bring one closer to their own subconscious. During the festival, I sometimes found myself completely worn out, yet unable to get any sleep—both in and out of the screenings. At a different point in his Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud mentions how insomnia is sometimes caused by the fear that a repressed desire might come to the surface and be indulged. Maybe, as I got closer to what I might call my id, I could sense something that cinephiles like to hide from themselves—that this intellectualism, this writing, is often nothing more than a layer covering the motive behind film-watching, which is essentially libidinal. I managed to stay awake, attentive, during the third screening of a long day because watching a film (however austere it might be) has, in itself, a kind of seductive appeal, a way to grant access to some hidden desires. If film criticism, as all writing, is nothing but sublimation, then perhaps there is no film criticism without a little exhibitionism.
Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing, 2024).
CICI PENG:
I often feel like a sleepwalker at a film festival, like a conduit for these films to move through me. There’s a kind of whiplash that comes when jumping between the different states of attention a film demands—especially in the darkened cinema where you fade away into the shadows as the screen glows. Wang Bing’s Youth (Hard Times) (2024) completely transported me into the cramped workrooms of Anhui, where migrant workers have found precarious employment in fast-fashion production. Across the film’s 227-minute running time, there is rarely a slow moment—the action of labor is relentless, and Youth’s duration gestures toward the unending nature of this work and the continual exploitation of the employees who have to consistently barter for better pay and fairer treatment. Then, an hour or two later, I am watching Women’s Prison (1955), a Columbia Pictures restoration directed by Lewis Seiler, where I keenly anticipate the moment of climax: the prisoners band together for a takeover, holding their knives up, to the throat of Ida Lupino, playing the prison warden. Their pointed daggers become a metonym for direct action and a surprising anti-carceral symbol.
Yet, it’s impossible to think about a film festival without thinking of sleep too; oftentimes exhausted from long nights and the sweltering heat, I find myself nodding off in the cinema. But what if some kind of cinema demands another form of attention, or inattention? Falling asleep in the cinema is not a restful sleep; it’s one of many dreams and diversions. In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot writes of dreams as “a refusal to sleep within sleep.” I’m interested in a cinema that exists between dreaming and waking, and the attention they variously demand and refuse from a tired film critic.
Bogancloch (Ben Rivers, 2024).
Bogancloch (2024), Ben Rivers’s loose sequel to his film Two Years at Sea (2011), returns to Jake Williams, a man living in isolation in his caravan in a secluded forest in the Scottish Highlands. Two Years at Sea is marked by Jake’s silence and his isolation, while Bogancloch introduces the world Jake shares with others: singing with his friends, teaching astronomy in a school. Although we usually encounter Jake alone, in most scenes I can sense Rivers’s presence in the room. Rivers often places the camera within Jake’s tiny caravan, but at other points, he moves the camera outside to film Jake through the windows. As the rhythm alternates between interior and exterior, we become aware of Rivers’s changing position from an observer to a companion.
When I speak to Rivers the day after the premiere of the film, I mention one of my favorite moments: in a close-up, Jake sneezes, then quickly giggles—as if for Rivers. “In Two Years at Sea, I felt like I was trying to disappear,” Rivers says. “Like it's not two people in the forest, it's one person. But here, maybe it’s because we’ve spent so much time together, I’ve let myself enter the film in some ways.”
In one particularly affecting moment, Jake sings a bath-time rhyme in a makeshift tub outside his caravan. He’s framed in another tight close-up as he sings, and it feels like time has collapsed as I look at him: all at once, he is old and gray, yet also a child. The image cuts away to the forest, and when it returns to Jake, suddenly he is surrounded by verdant bushes, the seasons literally shifting from winter to spring within the space of a brief tune.
As I watch, I feel like he's singing to me. “I feel like he's really close to me when he sings that bath song,” Rivers adds. “When you look at him, he could be completely outside of time, even outside of life, some other realm that he's going to.”
Bogancloch (Ben Rivers, 2024).
Bogancloch moves languidly; in long takes, Rivers spends time with Jake as he makes tea, cooks, walks in the forest, naps. Despite that affection for the present tense, the way time progresses in the film is not so linear, as we drift into the realm of memories. Rivers frequently frames Jake’s face in close-up, gazing into the distance while listening to music from one of the cassette tapes he collected while working as a seaman—tapes in Arabic, in French. Rivers’s camera is both intimate and opaque, capturing Jake’s act of remembering and daydreaming without making literal the content of Jake’s memories. Rivers’s own realm of time enters the film through the way he hand-develops the film—an “imperfect” labor evinced by textured waves, specks of grain, and shadows across the image, a mark of Rivers’s touch on the material, a touch from the future.
I am taken to another realm of time by Bogancloch too—lulled into my own dreams while watching Jake reminisce or doze off. When I fall asleep in the cinema, I sometimes feel ashamed, like a bad critic whose concentration has failed them, but I recently came across a quotation from Apichatpong Weerasethekul in Jean Ma’s book At the Edges of Sleep: “When I watch a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, I always fall asleep. Years later, my films put audiences to sleep. I think, maybe, there’s a special power to these films that takes viewers to a different world, a different state of relaxation, where we can leave ourselves behind.” However, I don’t feel like I’ve left Jake behind in my dreams. Instead, I am in my own forest: the one from my childhood by the lake where my family and I would spend Sundays foraging for lake snails to cook together. To use Ma’s phrase, as a “deviant spectator,” my dreams emerge with their own syncopated stream of images, which mingle with Rivers’s film. When I think of the film now, I am left with a series of impressions and fragments rather than a clear sense of its chronological diegetic procession. I remember the film as my cinema, a collaboration between Rivers, Jake, and myself—a film composed of a triangular relationship between projected and unseen images.
When I tell Rivers enthusiastically about falling asleep in his film, he responds warmly: “Jake exists in this non-capitalist way where time moves differently. He can nap anytime, sing anytime, and you’re invited to watch and enrich these moments with your own thoughts and memories.” Oftentimes, we write that slow cinema demands another kind of attention, but maybe it offers a form of distraction which allows space for daydreaming with the images. Without a desire to lead us here, or there, or define narrative in a dominant authorial role, Bogancloch is permeable—the spectator is free to drift away, to wander, blurring the distinction between film and memory, between inside and outside, between cinema and dreams.
Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947).
JULIA SCRIVE-LOYER:
Eleven weeks ago, I broke up an eight-year-long relationship: I quit smoking. I decided to end it while we were still friends and I still had some love left for it. Around this time, I was selected for the Locarno Critics Academy. I worried the festival would be the perfect time to relapse. But now, here I am, sweaty and nicotine-free in Switzerland, even while I’m surrounded by smokers.
At a film festival, you don’t sleep much, you watch as many movies as your body allows, you talk and write about movies, you drink... At a film festival in Europe, you do all this while holding a cigarette in your hand. So not only did I come to the wrong place at the wrong time, but going to the movie theater—the only place where people can’t smoke—has unexpectedly proven to be far from a safe haven.
On day one, I thought everything was going to be okay. King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) and I met cute with a scene that featured my favorite post-smoking coping mechanism: chewing gum. As their characters ride on a double-decker bus, Eleanor Boardman chews seductively and makes pretty eyes at James Murray. “See!” I thought. “Chewing can be just as charming as smoking.” They even share a piece of gum a few minutes later as they ridicule a man on the sidewalk, dressed as a clown, who’s down on his luck…ain’t they got fun!
That is, about as much fun as I’m having on the sidelines of an extravagant, techno-infused opening-night party, which I leave early because of a panic attack. I feel observed by the VIP guests perched on the balconies like gargoyles, and by the models powering through the night on their stilettos. Smoking is key at these events—what other excuse could you have to be a wallflower without looking boring or antisocial? And what better way to strike up a conversation than asking for a light? If you stare at your phone you would miss the glittering dancers and catwalker influencers. I try to hang out with the smokers, but the music is too loud, the cigarettes are too close; I am finally able to volatilize without anyone noticing.
During Bogancloch, I am lulled to sleep by Jake Williams tenderly singing Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.” I wake up; he’s asleep as well. It’s beautiful, peaceful, not a cigarette in sight. But after one of the most gorgeous scenes in the movie—an afternoon tea during which the silhouettes of birds caress the window panes—the screen is slowly invaded by smoke. Something is burning. Did I just start a fire? Am I Carrie White? Jake opens all the windows, and the smoke finds its way out, its release. I feel at peace again with this cleansing of the home, akin to a cleansing of the body.
Woman of Truth (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1954).
Another home burns in the delightfully funny and recently restored Woman of Truth (Mulher de verdade, 1954), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. The film marks the director’s return to Brazil, and even though he was artistically rejected by his home country in his day, his work flawlessly strings together screwball comedy with social satire. This restoration excited me, but because of its release date, I was bracing myself to endure one cigarette-smoking scene after another. But it turns out that Amelia, the main character, doesn’t have time to smoke—she’s a nurse and has two husbands who don’t know about each other! I admire how she handles that stress simply by playing her guitar—another coping mechanism I note to myself. As soon as her nagging but hilarious aunt-in-law lights a cigarette, an Italian painter is there to yell at her, “NO SMOKING!” Thank you.
But a “No Smoking” sign is ignored in one of the workshops of Wang Bing’s stunning Youth (Hard Times). Preparing my body for the four-hour running time, I chew gum so as not to fall asleep. I soon realize it won’t be needed—I later discuss with Cici how the anxiety kept us alert. There is not a second of rest in this film, which instead relies on repetition to portray the never-ending struggles of these often teenage workers. The employees’ contentious negotiations for fair payment, the constant, percussive drone of the sewing machines, the endless-seeming trips up and down flights of stairs: all of this creates a symphony of the broken and beaten down. “All this talk about smoking,” says one of the workers in the film during one of their breaks, but despite how dangerous it is—smoking in a workshop surrounded by clothes might seem like a terrible idea—and despite how expensive a habit it is, smoking seems to be one of the only pleasures that fit into these crowded factories. Smoke is both invasive and transient; it’s small, it’s personal, it disappears. It’s a brief moment of escape, maybe even a brief moment of rebellion. But the most striking image of a smoker in this film—and probably in all the films I saw at the festival—was one of happiness: as a young man reaches the end of his journey home from the garment factories with his girlfriend, he is received by his father, cigarette dangling from his mouth, a tiny box of firecrackers erupting continually beside him, bathing him in a cloud of smoke which sometimes dissipates to show us the gray clouds and hilly landscape stretching out behind him.
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953).
“Noirs always put me in a smoking mood,” said Lucía Requejo, my friend from the Critics Academy, rolling a tempting cigarette after a screening of The Big Heat. I knew a noir would be filled with smoke, but it hit differently in this one. In the beginning, Detective Bannion and his wife’s love language is their sharing of everything, even cigarettes. It’s a beautiful way to introduce us to that relationship, and so unexpected for a noir—it’s so pure, so genuine. But then, his wife is suddenly killed, and when he sees cigarette burns on the body of yet another female victim, Bannion puts out his own cigarette. Smoke still pervades the rest of the film—it’s a noir after all; the texture is needed—but it makes everything more difficult to perceive; evil can hide so easily behind it. Toward the film’s end, Bannion musters up the courage to recount what his wife was like, what it was like to love her. The image of his face, a straightforward medium shot, is clear and crisp. There’s nothing to shield us from the pain in his voice as he stares into the distance, as if seeing a clear image of his beloved.
As I walk the streets of Locarno, another movie runs through my head. This is not only my first smokeless summer in eight years, but it is also the second one without my dad. I try to abstract myself and pretend I’m somewhere else, some other time. Not a time in which I still smoke, but one in which my father is alive to see me after I’ve quit, just as he himself quit when I was born so he could see me grow up. The street takes me back to the movie theater, where I think about all that is gone—turned into smoke, ashes to ashes—but their images remain. The roar of a leopard in the festival bumper wakes me up, along with these two words: “CINEMA FOREVER.”
More from the Locarno Critics Academy:
Just the Same but Brand New: A consideration of the filmmakers of the present through the moonglow of the retrospective.
Home, Interrupted: Our final choral dispatch reflects on notions of home: how it is created, recognized, lensed, and left behind.