Notebook, in partnership with the Locarno Critics Academy, presents a series of critical correspondences in which this year’s participants look back at the Swiss film festival. In this final installment, three critics explore how “tendenko,” a Japanese term that implies isolating to survive a tsunami, resonated across the program.
“We live in a state of apocalyptic fetishism,” a radio announcer proclaims in Ann Oren’s Objet A (2026), and the slate of films at Locarno this August did little to dissuade its spectators of this assessment. As has been everywhere observed in recent years, the constant sounding of the alarm has become the 21st century’s room tone, and film festivals are not situated on high enough ground to be safe from tsunami-like waves of crisis. Locarno, for its part, engaged with the apocalypse in a number of ways: Some films got up on soapboxes, others languished in despair, and a select few films and film-related events proffered solutions for living through this dire state of affairs.
Objet A (Ann Oren, 2026).
Manhunt (2026) premiered the same day the TIFF lineup was announced, sans Manhunt, and Canadian director Wayne Wapeemukwa introduced his film by praising the megaphone Locarno affords its artists: “Whereas Locarno programs boundary-pushing cinema, TIFF programs silence.” Taking inspiration from a murder spree perpetrated by two teenage boys in Northern British Columbia in 2019, Wapeemukwa’s second film lies somewhere between Taxi Driver (1976), Gummo (1997), and Elephant (2003). While its actors take a bracingly improvisational approach, Manhunt is unfortunately burdened with a well-rehearsed diagnosis for teen violence, pinning it on a melange of video games, incel ideology, and capitalist realism. The slippery slope from mediated to IRL cruelty weighs heavy on Manhunt’s mind. (“Like and subscribe,” one boy says before an execution.) But it is, in all, too credulous of the fire-and-brimstone promises of the online right, its provocations bearing the politics-of-concern of a teen internet-safety awareness. The film aims to offend—and I admit to being as obediently shocked and appalled as many of the elderly Swiss women I spoke to on my way out of the screening—and suffers from an eagerness to make its point in all-caps, with the ending taking place amid a literal forest fire. I’m not saying silence is a virtue, necessarily, but perhaps a little restraint would be nice.
When confronted with the end times, a polemical approach can be tempting. Entering the festival, my uninterrogated preconception of the Hollywood Blacklist (the subject of this year’s retrospective, curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht) was that a number of writers of well-intentioned and limply directed social-problem pictures had been barred from working in Los Angeles for a few years. To my relief, the program disproved this prejudice again and again. Force of Evil (1948), Ruthless (1948), and He Ran All the Way (1951) each conjured forceful, disparaging visions of modern American life, which demonstrated greed and ambition as structuring forces in American society. That said, a grandstanding approach held sway in some films: Character after character in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) decries the horrors of alcoholism; The Sound of Fury (1950) was burdened with an academic coda explaining the pitfalls of mob rule; even Chaplin’s otherwise laid-back A King in New York (1957) lends a pulpit to an annoying child asserting his right to read Marx without having to self-identify as a Communist.
As the water pulls back for the tsunami—be it the rise of McCarthyism, inceldom, or ecological disaster (in Objet A, the characters must learn to love a Björk-like character named “Gaia”)—there is an understandable desire to make one’s meaning crystal clear. Yet, after a title card somewhat gratingly announces a “post-postmodern persistence parable,” Nicolaas Schmidt’s September Afternoon (2026) is content merely to feel the storm winds, announcing nothing. Once a family has arrived at a beach for a picnic, Schmidt spends 30 hardly interrupted minutes observing the patriarch attempting to pin down a small beach tent against rising winds, while an instrumental take on Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face” loops endlessly on the soundtrack. Schmidt’s 70-minute vibe-piece felt more oriented to the gallery than the cinema, but at least its method was specific to the audiovisual format: observing rather than declaring the apocalypse. It goes unstated that we’re living through this, and that it’s often relatively boring; the work of “why” and “how” is left up to the viewer.
September Afternoon (Nicolaas Schmidt, 2026).
At a certain point, I started to hope the festival could move on from apocalyptic fetishism toward apocalyptic pragmatism. It was perhaps a damning comment on that morning’s cinematic offerings (the less-than-tempting press conference for Ketticè, in the international competition) that the room for the FIPRESCI-sponsored discussion panel “A World Without Film Critics” was packed to the gills, but here, at last, was a sincere inquiry into the possibility of life in this afterworld, if only for one part of the festival community. As was pointed out in the conversation, the "world" indicated by the attention-grabbing title—one without critics—might not look too different from the one we currently find ourselves in. In many ways, we are already in that reality. Panelists Diego Cepeda, Sona Karapoghosian, and Laura Staab, along with moderator Christopher Small, discussed in sober terms what precisely has been lost, and what might still be salvaged from the wreck. What emerged was a vision for a film-critical practice more comfortable (or at least less uncomfortable) at the margins. If tendenko tells us to leave the wave-wrecked beach, we film critics have not listened, have stayed with the wreckage of cinema. But perhaps we can—unlike the beachgoers in September Afternoon—shift our little tent to a more sheltered area.
In this light, Hong Sang-soo’s Nowhere to Lay My Eyes (2026) emerged as the film of the festival. Kim Min-hee stars as Sang-hee, an experimental filmmaker and port employee visiting her family on Jeju Island, attempting to make a case for her marginal art practice to her mother who only wants her to have financial stability. The film is inseparable from Hong’s other works, his quietly indefatigable mode of working. But where his other films tend toward the apolitical, this script acknowledges the dire state of the world, making a reference to the genocide in the Middle East (although he does not name it as such). Like his best work, Nowhere to Lay My Eyes talks its way around something unspoken, culminating in a stunning final laptop screening of Sang-hee’s flower films. What Hong’s characters can’t communicate in words, but what is communicated all the more powerfully by the film is the worthiness of persistence in an ever-shrinking niche. Let us forsake headline-grabbing pronouncements, embrace marginality, and attempt to weather this storm.
—Dylan Adamson
***
While tendenko was specific to the world of Ana Vaz’s Hanabi (2026), the term kept reverberating in my mind as I watched this year’s Locarno retrospective. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Hollywood filmmakers faced censorship for suspected ties to communism. Some kept working, but on smaller projects or under pseudonyms. Others were jailed or, under the threat of imprisonment, fled the United States. In line with tendenko, those fugitive filmmakers made a bid for survival, often resolving to be on their own. Meanwhile, various characters in their films were also isolated—but by remorse, greed, addiction.
In Cy Endfield’s The Sound of Fury (1950), loneliness emerges from feelings of guilt. Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) has moved with his family from Boston to California and is looking for a job. As his desperation escalates, he turns to a life of crime and becomes distant from his wife—unable to face her, unable to face himself. Endfield plunges us headlong into this feeling through his filmmaking choices. Howard is framed in close-ups, his face pained with contrition. As he withdraws into an abyss of his own making, Endfield amplifies his isolation. Irony gains momentum: Howard is tempted to play away from home, leaving his pregnant wife and child alone, but it is he, subsumed with regret, who is alone. If being an accomplice to a crime was a compromise he made to survive, then it also, paradoxically, chips away at his survival.
The Sound of Fury (Cy Enfield, 1950). © Courtesy of Park Circus-Paramount.
That tension recurs in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Ruthless (1948). The film’s protagonist, Horace Vendig (Zachary Scott), was abandoned by his father at birth and grew up blinded by ambition, eventually becoming a wealthy trader. He regards isolation as a refuge, using it as a coping mechanism and seeming to believe it is the only way he can live. Ulmer crowds the film with characters who are fond of Horace, but Horace sees them only as so many ladders for climbing up the social ranks. His self-isolation is a bleak version of tendenko: his selfishness, tantamount to drowning others in order to save himself. That this antihero is enterprising but, as the title has it, so ruthless, is his tragic flaw.
In Stuart Heisler’s Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947), alcoholism isolates Angie Evans (Susan Hayward). She is a singer who resorts to liquid comforts after her marriage falls apart and insecurity creeps in. As her husband becomes famous, Angie shuts herself in her house—the vastness of which underscores how much she shrinks in confinement. Days leak into nights through Heisler’s montage, mirroring Angie’s confusion as her husband turns increasingly hostile. It’s a cautionary tale that warns us against withdrawing from the world.
If tendenko can be translated as “each person for themselves,” then these films illuminate that tendency in human behavior—and do so in a way that might, by contrast, highlight an alternative possibility. One can survive on one’s own, it’s true. But to live, to really live, one needs community—or at least a hand to hold.
—Ishita Sengupta
***
We’d been warned by our editor not to fall too vaguely into the porousness of the word tendenko. Yet I tend to find porousness generative, and the more I looked into the term’s meaning, the more it seemed that consensus on how to interpret it was fraught, even in Japanese. Though it can be translated “to each on their own,” and refers typically to the safety measure of isolating in a tsunami so as to maximize chances of survival, that quick act of self-preservation is also understood to build confidence in other people (evacuation is possible), and an embrace of the term has been argued to reduce survivor’s guilt.
After I first heard tendenko in Hanabi, I was fascinated by that complexity, and wanted us to take the word out of its context to consider broader themes of isolation. In this year’s Locarno retrospective, there was a battle between individualism and socialism. In the international competition, loneliness was a consequence of modern alienation for some, while solitude was a coping mechanism for others.
The French proverb chacun pour sa pomme translates as “every man for himself” and transliterates as “every man for his apple.” It would have made a witty title for Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), in which a truck driver heads north from Fresno to San Francisco to sell a load of apples. The film depicts the lives of truckers not only as lonely, but as physically demanding to the point of being exhausting; the protagonist is constantly struggling to stay awake while on the road. As with most films in the festival’s Hollywood Blacklist retrospective, a socialist message is smuggled into this story: Workers are called upon to renounce personal profit, recognize the value of unions, and aspire to a collective freedom.
Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949).
But that vision of society doesn’t come easily. Almost every cast and crew member of Thieves’ Highway was born outside of the United States, and between the film’s production and its narrative, an accurate picture of America forms: Everyone is welcome, but only if they’re willing to compete against each other. “You can’t trust nobody these days,” one of the film’s characters says. At every opportunity, cheats backstab and sabotage each other in order to make a dime. This is tendenko as brutal personal interest amid the swallowing waves of capitalism. Why stick your neck out for another guy when there is an extra buck coming your way to help you survive?
A slick-looking angel of death in Denis Côté’s Nobody’s Violence (2026) had me lingering on the meaning of the Spanish word mira, “to look.” Côté’s frequent collaborator Larissa Corriveau stars as Mira, who performs assisted suicide with a mysterious powder. She is also a witness, someone who sees. Through wide, long-distance shots, her work is framed dispassionately; she looks death in the eye with each assisted suicide, but maintains her own emotional distance. Is she running away from something? Is she experiencing burnout? While the film allows Mira moments of tenderness—on the road with her dog, she seems almost happy—Côté offers no back story, tells us little of who she really is.
Nobody's Violence (Denis Côté, 2026).
Few languages have a translation for the English term “burnout,” yet it’s a word that is foreign to no one today. In Sarah Leonor’s D’ici là (2026), the protagonist has decided to become a recluse in the neighboring mountains of his French village. He’s completely at odds with society, exhausted by its bureaucracy. When his friend comes to find him, he tricks her into thinking he’ll come home, only to escape before dawn, deeper into the forest. Meanwhile, another character in the film is attempting to track down a wolf—an animal that perfectly exemplifies tendenko. When wolves disperse, becoming lone creatures, it’s usually in a bid for survival.
D’ici là ends with Weyes Blood’s song “Seven Words,” the lyrics of which express a desire for freedom from a romantic relationship: “In time we’ll both be free from this ball and chain.” The song arrives at a vanishing point here. What comes after a break-up’s waves? After survival: What next?
—Matilda Hague