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.
In our second missive from the Locarno Critics Academy, Leonard Krähmer, Lucía Requejo, and Katarina Docalovich put the filmmakers of the present in conversation with retrospective selections—particularly the films presented in “The Lady with the Torch,” the festival’s 2024 Retrospective surveying the history of Columbia Pictures, curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928).
Dear Kat and Lucía,
Prioritizing the retrospective at a major festival like Locarno—which claims to be a haven for exciting new voices, where the Cineasti del Presente are put in the spotlight, and where cinema is questioned about its futures and dead ends—could be misconstrued as a relapse into nostalgia. There may be some truth to this, but short-circuiting the new and the old can cause a productive tension, perhaps even dissolving such a tendentious binary. Not beating the nostalgia allegations, on the first day of the festival (while still struggling with sleep deprivation and—mi dispiace—The Big Heat), we watched King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) with a live score courtesy of the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana. As soon as the final round of applause erupted, probably directed toward the film and the musicians in equal measure, I realized that I had genuinely forgotten the orchestra was performing by about ten minutes in. Instead of pitying my inability to “enjoy properly,” I wondered if my attention deficit was closer to the intended audience reception, then and now. Despite the anachronism of the performance—and the strangeness of seeing it at Palexpo, a multi-purpose hall which, for most of the year, hosts events as diverse as the International Feline Exhibition and the Congress of the Swiss Rheumatology Society—the experience was as seamlessly absorbing as it would have been one hundred years ago.
Apart from the nocturnal solemnity of closing most days with a 35mm retrospective screening at the GranRex, the history of cinema could also materialize in more discursive forms; case in point: a talk from Radu Jude. When taking part in a panel called “Cinema’s Futures,” his citation-heavy habit of conveying his cultural knowledge was on display: he not only quoted the Lumières and Jean Rouch, but also a broader swathe of public intellectuals, such as Franco Moretti, Umberto Eco, Gustave Flaubert, and Stanisław Jerzy Lec—sometimes for no apparent reason. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I was more compelled by his description of how, after editing his films, his vision of the so-called “real world” would become magically altered, and he’d see mise-en-scène everywhere. To a certain extent, I can relate to this heightening of the senses in relation to moviegoing, but more often than not, I experience the exact opposite: a perceptive flattening that is only suspended once I return to the cinema.
Bogancloch (Ben Rivers, 2024).
Listening to Jake Williams joyfully singing Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” in Ben Rivers’s Bogancloch (2024) gave me—in a regrettably alienated perversion of the stimulus response model—more pleasure than gazing at the certainly bluer skies that frame the Lepontine Alps. Bogancloch, however, can hardly be reduced to a hermetically sealed celebration of solitary life in the wilderness; in fact, the individual is dependent on a communal structure—be it society, a choir, or even the universe. Echoing an earlier scene that shows Williams educating children about the planetary system, the ending elegantly bridges the gap between cosmic order and the individual through an ascending drone shot, gently measuring the space between terrestrial existence and eternity. This immediately made me think of The Crowd, where a similar formal gesture is used to charge the iconic final image with more than just an air of relativity. Reunited and reconciled, John and Mary Sims, the couple at the core of the film, are having a blast at a vaudeville show. The camera tenderly pulls back and pans across the packed theater, thus revealing numerous, virtually identical couples seated around them, ascribing them a both comforting and disenchanting role in the universe: you’re not alone, but you’re also laughably insignificant. It’s possible to trace this back to the consolidation of “modern” society and entertainment culture in the 1920s, Siegfried Kracauer’s essay collections on “The Mass Ornament” and “The Salaried Masses,” or even dream it up as a preliminary stage of totalitarianism. As tempting as such academic speculations may be, the film’s affective pull lies in its more tangible qualities.
In an earlier scene, John Sims is shown working in the office just after a truck tragically struck and killed one of his children. He fails to focus on his work, stuck reliving the traumatic scene he had witnessed in his head. Vidor takes this as literally as possible, depicting the intrusive thoughts and their delirious effects on John’s mental state by superimposing images of the arriving truck and spinning numbers directly onto his forehead. In contemporary cinema, superimpositions are often relegated to experimental cinema and considered tacky or camp if featured in conventional narrative films—perhaps this also contributed to the mixed reception of The Sparrow in the Chimney (Der Spatz im Kamin, 2024), Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s new pressure cooker of a family drama, which marks a daring departure from the rather austere style of their first two features, superimpositions included. However, depictions of trauma are more topical than ever; they are—and I’m criminally generalizing here—usually told in a straightforward manner, without formal invention, only seeking to serve what Parul Sehgal called the trauma plot: “Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?).” The films shown in the retrospective might even feel more forward-looking, assuming they would be more inclined to the marriage plot.
The Sparrow in the Chimney (Ramon Zürcher, 2024).
The Zürchers’ work had always been preoccupied with wounds, but in their new one, these piercing hints at trauma (which is Greek for “wound”) lack any subtlety, providing a backstory to their chronically fucked-up characters. Another competition selection, Drowning Dry (2024) by Lithuanian director Laurynas Bareiša, fits this theme, but aims for a different angle, or rather angles. The depleted time of a summer family gathering is used to construct a narrative full of ellipses, repetitions, and slight variations (and as I write, Hong hasn’t even arrived in Locarno yet), that keep circling an event that may or may not be traumatic. Emulating the distorted notion of time associated with trauma on a structural level, Drowning Dry engages the viewer by imposing a mode of intellectual distance that, strangely enough, had an immersive effect on me. At least, until Bareiša crosses the threshold at which his game of stimulating confusion betrays itself as a callous calculation, primarily designed to underscore his own abilities to pull the strings. I would rather have stayed on the threshold.
Best,
Leo
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953).
Dear Kat and Leo,
It’s obvious to say that forgetting the past can limit the possibilities of the present, but there’s something about that particular past portrayed in classical cinema that crushes our contemporary notions of representation. I was always drawn to the golden age of cinema for its understanding of realism as an element you can play with. We sometimes fall into the idea that we see old films to experience the world as it was, when we’re really watching visions of worlds that could never exist; projections of how the world must or mustn't be; or playful, dreamy, fictional worlds, just because. Westerns and noirs take place in a fanciful time frame with a fruitful irreverence for the present.
Contemporary cinema is usually very far gone from this conception of fiction. But something happened at the retrospective screening of Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) that made me think about the kind of relationship that contemporary audiences have with both the new and the old. When the opening credits rolled, the sight of the words "Directed by Fritz Lang" prompted a warm round of applause, cheers, and even some “bravos” in the theater. What were we cheering for, if Lang wasn’t around to hear us? There was one similar moment at the beginning of Youth (Hard Times) (2024), when Wang Bing’s name appeared onscreen, but he was only given a timid, if enthusiastic, couple of claps. While the fanfare for Lang was the sound of a genuine plurality coming together, born of pure excitement, the claps for Wang were timid, somewhat performative or aspirational. By clapping for Lang, we’re clapping not for the name in the opening credits but for the film itself: we’re rejoicing in the very possibility of watching this film so long after it was made, and in the vitality of the connection that we still feel with classical cinema. In a way, we are cheering for history.
Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955).
I’m sure that Picnic (1955), directed by Joshua Logan, was the first Technicolor film that I watched as its makers dreamt it would be seen, in a theater that hosted it as it deserved, on a screen large enough to suit it perfectly. Technicolor films are a great example of the golden age’s disregard for realism. Those invented colors were never visible in the real world, only in a portrayal of the world, encapsulated in the light forever preserved on celluloid. At a picnic celebration held in a tiny town in Kansas, the film’s central couple, Hal (a maybe-too-old-for-the-part William Holden) and Madge (Kim Novak, for whom it feels like Technicolor was invented), take each other out dancing on a dock, and they’re only illuminated by some string lights and the moon. But the colors somehow conjure a privacy of their own, while the big screen is filled mostly with their faces in profile, framed by the tiny lights. The black that surrounds them as they dance is almost blue—an abstracted effect of the river water in the haze of the night—and the dimly colored lights of the pier frame them and slowly twinkle in their hair. The slow, deliberate pace of their dance is that of those who desire each other without wanting to accept it, whose hearts unite them without reason. At that moment, we understand that there is no way to narrate this space between them without this color palette, and nothing else matters. The whites of Kim Novak’s eyes have never been whiter, and their skin shines with the sweat of the encounter. Our newly made couple dances on the colors, while responding with their feet to the rhythm of the lights, as if music was just an afterthought. While they keep silent, the colors do the talking.
Bionico's Bachata (Yoel Morales, 2024).
The colors also do the talking in Bionico’s Bachata (2024), from Dominican director Yoel Morales, which screened in the festival’s Open Doors section. The film takes us on a thunderous and vibrant journey alongside the electric and heartwarming Bionico (Manuel Raposo), whose driving force—his passionate love for his fiancée, La Flaca (Ana Minier), a girl who makes him twist his hair and giggle when talking to her on the phone—comes up against his addiction to crack. Along with Calvita (El Napo), his friend and drug partner, he navigates the nooks and crannies of the wild neighborhood of Capotillo, a chaotic working-class Latin American neighborhood. Meanwhile, he tries to find a job, a house, and a wedding ring to marry La Flaca as he waits for her to be discharged from a rehabilitation center. Styled like a mockumentary, the camera never stops moving, trying to keep up with Bionico and his wild state of life and mind; the film crew asks him questions from behind the lens, wondering how his plan to remake himself as a traditional family man is going.
Ongoing conversations surrounding exploitation in cinema might explain why the camera clings to Bionico, probably searching for the bloody, miserable, “truthful” images we Latin Americans are used to seeing in stories set in this milieu. But trying to reach the heart of the neighborhood through a naturalistic image won’t do the trick. Instead, humor will take the lead, fashioning Bionico’s journey on his own terms: colorful, pop, melodramatic. The handheld camera keeps adjusting to new framings, responding to the wider context of Bionico’s life, often literally happening in the background behind him: while the film crew tries to interview Bionico, who waxes poetic about the depth of his love for La Flaca, Calvita decides to use the bed at the back of the room to have sex. The film crew suggests they stop and continue another day, but Bionico tells them not to stop filming. So, the crew is obliged to tighten the frame to better fit his face, but we can still hear the offscreen sound. But Biónico’s Bachata doesn’t rely entirely on humor, an element that can risk trivializing or overtaking the whole movie. Just like these moments of humor, Bionico’s moments of pain and tension are also depicted, and stylized, with respect, and the film reaches the truth through singular storytelling.
Coincidentally, colors are foregrounded in a dance scene very reminiscent of Picnic, where Bionico watches his love, La Flaca, dance on a terrace under small lights that also cast light on the characters. The song chosen here is a cover version of Bad Bunny's “Me porto bonito,” re-recorded as a ballad by Narco Antonio Ruiz. By using a cover of such a popular song, it feels like this version exists only for the movie, only for the two, creating a time frame, a universe of their own. It somehow sounds familiar, or resonates with the real world, but it lets them create their own story according to their own rules.
Hoping this piece finds its way to you both, wherever you are in the world,
Lucía
Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner, 1958).
Dear Leo and Lucía,
In a cultural climate that is suspicious of moral ambiguity (at least in the United States), I’m always drawn to pull on threads of immorality, so I was thrilled that many films at Locarno were not so optimistic about human connection; instead, they find intrigue in the dark, dirty, and profane.
As Leo brought up The Crowd to discuss trauma through its superimpositions, I would like to use the same film as a jumping-off point to investigate what connects contemporary artists to filmmakers from the past. Audiences keep returning to King Vidor’s silent drama of the individual spirit because while we want to believe in Johnny Sims’s capacity for good, we are also compelled by his addiction to making the “wrong” choice, even as we are repulsed by it. Johnny is allergic to employment; instead of running an errand for his wife, he goes out drinking. Frankly, Johnny is a lazy drunk, without much to offer anyone except a ukulele tune here and there, but we root for him anyway, or at least I do. While my head knows that Mary should leave Johnny in the dust of the upcoming Great Depression, my heart longs to see a family stitched back together again. This is not because I possess any inherent goodness, but thanks to the heartrending manipulations of Vidor’s meticulous plotting, I identify with this lazy son of a gun.
Claude, the existentialist at the center of the retrospective selection Murder by Contract (1958), directed by Irving Lerner, is a much better worker than Johnny Sims. Punctual and efficient, he is well-known in his field for always getting the job done. His coworkers call him “Superman.” Claude is even responsible enough to put his energy toward saving up for a house, a concept that never crossed Johnny’s mind. The catch is that Claude is not an office worker like Johnny: he’s a contract killer. An important inspiration for Martin Scorsese in his creation of Travis Bickle—one scene depicting Claude doing pull-ups, push-ups, and lifting weights is copied almost shot-for-shot in Taxi Driver (1976)—Claude sees his murder-for-hire practice as purely transactional. Instead of keeping a journal of thoughts and feelings like a Paul Schrader protagonist, Claude keeps a ledger notebook filled with only numbers to track the money he’s earned. Claude sums up his ruthlessly capitalist philosophy in one line: “The only type of killing that’s safe is when a stranger kills a stranger…Now why would a stranger kill a stranger? Because somebody’s willing to pay. It’s business. Same as any other business.”
While Claude insists that his moral code is rigid, it proves more flexible than he might imply. Claude, ever the professional, refuses to carry a gun “because guns are illegal”—never mind the legality of murder itself—until he screws up and has no choice but to acquire a firearm. “Look at this place,” he says. “Weapons for sale. A warehouse full of murder. And me, because I’ve got a business contract to kill one person, they label me a goon, a murderer.” Much like Travis Bickle, Claude believes he can pick and choose his way through morality, which is a timeless read of the American way.
Foul Evil Deeds (Richard Hunter, 2024).
Murder by Contract remains resonant today for its lean film noir style: Perry Botkin’s sparing guitar score, Lucien Ballard’s minimalist photography, and Lerner’s dryly funny direction work together to lure the viewer into identifying with Claude, even as we know rationally that we should be disgusted by his cavalier approach to his occupation. Richard Hunter’s Cineasti del Presente pick Foul Evil Deeds (2024) also uses its scarce style to explore messy moral issues, though there is little tangible dramatic conflict to be found. Hunter, a British filmmaker who grew up making VHS skateboarding videos, weaves together a darkly comedic collection of DV-shot, unconnected short stories. One story follows an elderly couple who accidentally kill their neighbor’s cat while trying to rid their house of mice. Another story follows a group of teenagers’ casual sadism in their social interactions, ending in a cruel prank gone awry. Without one protagonist to follow, or any character names at all, Hunter has painted a warts-and-all portrait of “the crowd” in a hyper-modern, bare-bones European arthouse style, reminiscent of Michael Haneke in its economical approach and its highly bleak perception of everyday people. In lieu of one character to identify with, Hunter pierces his restrained aesthetic with shocking blink-or-you’ll-miss-it moments of true strangeness, and often cruelty.
Like Murder by Contract, Foul Evil Deeds uses mainly static shots with minimal camera movement to exacerbate the sense of banality felt throughout, and both films feature an intentional lack of on screen violence to disarm the viewer. Where Murder by Contract used a guitar score to cement its cool style, Foul Evil Deeds entirely forgoes a score to ratchet up this sense of unease and moral ambiguity. The most significant camera movement in Foul Evil Deeds is a long pan used to reveal a wealthy father’s hidden bloodthirst, when we’d previously been lulled into trusting him through repetitive, mundane scenes of his daily home life. The viewer is left with a jarring sense of doubt about whether or not to love thy neighbor, because you never know who is going to chop you into little pieces. In the same way that Lerner captured the nervous essence of late 1950s America, Hunter puts the paranoid isolation of contemporary British suburban life on display with his tapestry of suspicious characters.
These films by Vidor, Lerner, and Hunter all beg the question: in a world of total indifference, how much personal responsibility for societal decay do we, as individuals, have to shoulder? Vidor may not have explored “evil” as Lerner and Hunter did, but The Crowd sought to confront the audience with the paradoxical pain and beauty of existing as a drop in the vast, uncaring ocean of humanity; he also reminds them that the weight of their actions is carried by those closest to them. With Murder by Contract, Lerner shined a light on the hypocrisy of the capitalist American ideal of the “individual” and its negative impact on society through the extreme example of a contract killer. With Foul Evil Deeds, Hunter focuses not on the individual like Vidor and Lerner, but on the larger social rot that festers when literally everyone in one neighborhood abandons their sense of duty to the community, imparted through the disquieting tone plaguing each of his stories.
To avoid ending on a total down note, while I was drawn to darkness in my cinema-going at Locarno, the opposite is true for my own social experiences at the festival. I could not have left feeling more rejuvenated and affirmed as a writer or human being after spending time with all of you.
With love from Locarno,
Kat
More from the Locarno Critics Academy:
Cinema Embodied: What happens to the body at a film festival? A journey into the subconscious, sleeping, and smoking.
Home, Interrupted: Our final choral dispatch reflects on notions of home: how it is created, recognized, lensed, and left behind.