Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic
1. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
2. Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito)
3. Tiong Bahru Social Club (Tan Bee Thiam)
4. Martin und Hans (Mark Rappaport)
5. John Farrow Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows
(Claude Gonzalez & Frans Vanderburg)
6. While We Were Here (Sunčica Fradelić)
7. Letters from the Ends of the World (a dozen of the first
graduates of Béla Tarr’s FilmFactory)
8. Uncut Gems (Josh & Benny Saftie)
9. Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood)
An incomplete list of nine titles for an incomplete, pandemic year that cries out for updates and afterthoughts. That may help to explain why many items here are at least partially films/videos about films/videos (and at least one item, Letters…, is about the pandemic). Having to compile a so-called ‘2021’ list in October compels me to add Uncut Gems, seen too late in 2020 to make it onto last year’s list. Read more
My column in the Winter 2021 issue of CinemaScope. — J.R.
Teaching an online course on Agnès Varda at the School of the Art Institute this fall for 39 students has put me in regular touch with Criterion’s superb 15-Blu-ray box set, The Complete Films of Agnès Varda, every week. The packaging reminds me in some ways of the handsome 78 rpm albums I used to cherish as objects and totems in the mid- to late 1940s, when I was still a toddler, although Criterion’s version of this sort of assembly, held in a box, manages to be neater and more compact. There’s also a richly illustrated and annotated 200-page book inside the box, with essays by Amy Taubin, Ginette Vincendeau, So Mayer, Alexandra Hidalgo, and Rebecca Bengal, and excellent “program notes” on all the films by Michael Koresky. In short, plenty to keep a coronavirus shut-in busy, even without a course to teach.
The course has gradually brought home to me the complexly ambiguous lesson that Varda wasn’t really or exactly an auteur, at least not in the boys’-club meaning of that term as it’s most commonly used. But not being an auteur gave her a kind of freedom and a form of elasticity denied to most auteurs. Read more
