The Brooklyn Rail

Editor’s Note:

The first iteration of the “Greatest Films You’ll Never See,” a selection of excerpts on films lost or widely unknown for various reasons, proved how much we have to learn about cinema and cinema history. Our goal was to raise awareness about the material and the ephemeral nature of cinema, thus bringing attention to the ongoing need for film preservation, including restoration and sustainable archiving. Contributors to the Rail’s film section responded to our call with films they had seen via chance screenings or had heard about from friends, filmmakers, and educators. The excavation procured a diverse range of films yearning to be known and a group of writers eager to share. Our second list built upon this effort, carving out an opportunity to read about films rarely seen, hard to find, completely forgotten, and never made. Now, we have continued our call for a third time. If you build it they will come. They sure did. Have you heard of these? Seen any of them? You should, and we hope one day you can. Whether lacking accessible exhibition and distribution, getting dismissed by the artist or shelved by the production company, cast aside for abstract flickering, or just falling through the cracks of recognition, the films mentioned below are integral to the ongoing conception of culture and industry within cinema history. We must keep this practice of care for film preservation going.

As we’ve stated before, many outlets want to tell you about the best movies; sometimes the worst. We at the Brooklyn Rail want to give you the worst FOMO of your lives and tell you what you won’t see, can’t see, or may never get more than one chance in your life to see (streaming subscriptions be damned). With advice from our contributors, we present you Volume III of the “Greatest Films You’ll Never See.”

—Edward Charles Mendez and Laura Jane Valenza, Film section editors

 

Sound in the Mist (1956, dir. Hiroshi Shimizu)

By Hannah Bonner

Hiroshi Shimizu’s elegant, understated melodrama Sound in the Mist (1956) is a gorgeous love letter to the mist-streaked landscape of the Japanese Alps and to unconsummated desire. One fall night, a botany professor’s (Ken Uehara) assistant (Michiyo Kogure) unexpectedly leaves him, despite their mutual vocation and love. The rest of Shimizu’s film chronicles the same day every autumn equinox when the professor returns to the mountain cabin they once shared. The film features Shimizu’s famous, graceful tracking shots that glide across the provincial wilderness like moonlight. I saw Sound in the Mist at the 2024 Hiroshi Shimizu retrospective at the Japan Society in New York where—with the support of the National Film Archive of Japan, Alexander Fee at Japan Society, and programmer Edo Choi at the Museum of Modern Image—English subtitles were created for the first time. I’m hopeful that the retrospective brings renewed attention to one of the twentieth century’s most poetic and humanist filmmakers.

 

Coalfields (1984, dir. Bill Brand)

by Nicholas Reich

Structuralist films are typically about themselves. But not Bill Brand’s Coalfields (1984). Not exactly. This experimental documentary ostensibly follows the story of Fred Carter, a retired coal miner in West Virginia. Carter was running for president of the United Mine Workers Association on a platform for black lung advocacy. That is, before the federal government intervened with a smear campaign to undermine the union’s acting power. Kimiko Hahn reads a poem about Carter over fleeting images of his life in the coal works, rhetorically emphasizing the gendered and racialized grammars of his predicament. Yet we struggle to find him. Because after a few minutes, Brand starts intercutting these otherwise stable images with sequences best described as aggressively frenetic. He splices the frame with hand-cut mattes rephotographed and collaged using an optical printer. And the fielded result flickers like white noise for a majority of the remaining forty-minute run time. Incredibly visually frustrating, we’re left with the feeling that it’s our responsibility to piece together from these hateful lights some gestalt figure that almost certainly isn’t there. In this way, I think this film has something important to say about extractive violence, how the modern spectacle sustains itself on a social gospel of homogeny, a planet-eating illusion fossil-fueled by mass coercion. You can check out all of Brand’s structuralist work on his website, as well as his career in film preservation. Watch with Advil.

 

Bitch (1965, Andy Warhol)

By Edward Frumkin

In the opening of Andy Warhol’s Bitch (1965), filmmaker Marie Menken asks her spouse, poet Willard Maas, when Andy will shoot them for his movie. This concern homes in on the meta-humorous irony of the artists’ quixotic storytelling as they host a dinner with poet Gerard Malanga, playwright Ron Tavel, Maas’s partner John Hawkins, and Warhol regular Edie Sedgwick. Playwright Edward Albee attended one of these gatherings, and rumor has it that he penned Menken’s and Maas’s mannerisms into the protagonists of his magnum opus, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Upon learning of this, Warhol made a static shot, two-reel film (Warhol’s eighth such film) of “the last of the great Bohemians.” Bitch isn’t necessarily a parody of Albee’s play, rather a reflection of how art influences others and how its setup obscures theater and cinema. Unfortunately, Warhol was downhearted with Bitch (which also has jarring sound quality due to Warhol not separating audio from the film print) and shelved it. It would take nearly sixty years for Bitch to see the light of day when The Museum of Modern Art intriguingly paired Warhol’s film with a 35 mm, pristine restoration of Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) to celebrate Philip Gefter’s book Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in January 2024. Bitch is not meant for the public and its unveiling gives Warhol devotees an attempt to comprehend an artist who pulled his works from circulation in 1970 and verify his various fabrications.

 

Ôrí (1989, dir. Raquel Gerber)

By Zenzelé Soa-Clarke

“Ôrí,” meaning “head” in Yoruba, refers to initiation into a new stage of life. The experience of watching Raquel Gerber’s documentary by the same title is an initiation in itself, guided by the voice of her collaborator—scholar and activist Beatriz Nascimento—who shares her own experience of rejecting Eurocentric societal standards in favor of Black consciousness. The coupling of Nascimento’s poetic reflections on the Brazilian Black Movement in the seventies and eighties, and rich imagery of Black Brazilian life—lively spiritual ceremonies, the dancefloors at the club and on the streets during Carnaval, the vibrancy of braid and afro barbershops, the lush wilderness and the foamy Atlantic across which their ancestors came—privilege education and feeling above Western standards of documentary structure. In referencing the Atlantic slave trade and the quilombos of old—autonomous militant communities of African descendants who escaped enslavement—Nascimento identifies the legacy of ‘quilomboismo’ in later pushes for Afro-Brazilian liberation. There is no scandalous tale of why Ôrí is not widely known, even among enthusiasts of African diasporic cinema. It has not had many public screenings in the US and is mostly available to stream in Brazil. This film was created with the Black Brazilian viewer, on the precipice of a new stage of life, in mind. Still, I suspect anyone lucky enough to see it would be similarly and irreversibly affected.

 

Coyote vs. Acme (date unknown, dir. Dave Green)

By Edward Charles Mendez

A live action/animated Looney Tunes vehicle recalling the ambitious and lauded efforts of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) had been shot, edited, and readied for a theatrical release before the studio effectively said, “That’s all, folks!” In 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery decided to shelve the recently completed Coyote vs. Acme. The shelving came after the previous cancellation of films developed and near completion for streaming the year before: Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt. After pivoting to a same day theatrical/streaming distribution model during the early throes of the pandemic, Warner Bros. Discovery decided to move away from their serendipitous model to focus on theatrical releases. The shift was followed by the run of projects—far into post-production—getting canceled to become tax write-offs for the company. Coyote vs. Acme would have been (and still could be) an animated/live-action hybrid comedy framed as a courtroom drama starring Wile E. Coyote suing Acme over their faulty products that continue to backfire in his efforts to catch the Road Runner. A completed film with strong responses and supporting performances by Will Forte and John Cena, its shelving became the center of a public outcry by cinephiles across social media. In response to the #SaveCoyoteVsAcme backlash, Warner Bros. tried to walk back their dismissal of the film, selling itself as open to shopping the film to other studios rather than deleting it from its archives. Although the offers reportedly came in, Warner Bros. didn’t budge. Covered thoroughly by Drew Taylor, the Coyote vs. Acme peril revealed the studio’s (anti-art) business intentions: they were disinterested in anything but an unmerited profit or tax write-off. During talks, executives were skipping screenings of the film, yet seemed skeptical of its possible success in a theatrical or streaming market. They also kept the filmmakers in the dark about any resolve. As of now, there is no word on if the film will receive any kind of release, or if it has, definitively, been eviscerated.

 

Pink Narcissus (1971, dir. James Bidgood)

By Jess Saldaña

This 1971 experimental art film drips with lush saturation and shimmers with an 8 mm analog quality. The general arc of the abstracted story follows the fantasies of a gay male sex worker. Stunningly vibrant, it deals with young queer sexuality and images of the self as a worker. The title Pink Narcissus serves as a softening of the Greek figure, which reflects back a queer narcissism that comes into play as a means of self-sustaining. Rendered pre-AIDS pandemic, this film is largely overlooked because of the time it was made and its genre; it is told from the perspective of a gay prostitute. The lines between dreaming and waking life are blurred, as the theatrical sets unfold in the rose-colored twilight. In the surreal erotic poem, the main character repeats gestures that bleed over into different contexts, from fucking the land, to a bathroom sex scene, to him laying alone in bed spinning a globe. The film doesn’t hold back and has a raw, introspective quality to it. Originally released anonymously, it was erroneously credited to Andy Warhol, but was later revealed to be the work of James Bidgood, who removed his name after a producer dispute. It wears namelessness like a relic of a sexual freedom that could only exist in the 1960s–70s homo-underground, before illness and bereavement shaped the community forever.

 

Black Box (2013, dir. Stephen Cone)

By Frank Falisi

“Acting” means living truthfully under false conditions. In the work of Stephen Cone, the falseness of these conditions isn’t predicated so much on the fact that they’re invented, but that their very inventing means they’re not inevitable. In a trilogy of features—The Wise Kids (2011), Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015), and Princess Cyd (2017)—Cone charts the ways desire is policed by such invented forces, whether backwards dogmas, archaic gender expectations, or the totalizing grief of making a life in America. Cone’s cinema is one of uncommon humanity—these forces are never allowed more authority than the one we possess as desiring bodies. A kiss could change your life. So could lying on your back under the sun or whorling your body to music. What a balm then, to remember that Cone has made something like a secret fourth film that’s simply (criminally) fallen between the cracks of distribution. A critical injunction to acting as an act of vulnerable uncovery, Black Box (2013) chronicles a theater MFA student as she navigates the eggshell egos and crinoline emotions of directing young people while contending with her text’s wincing, fragile writer. Thornier than his other films, and possessed by an eerie veil of irreality, Cone finds in the black box—and in collaborators Josephine Decker and Austin Pendleton—ways to speculate about desire that hew closer to weird horror, even as they liberate the way we move. Rather than disproving the momentum pleasure accrues in his films about young, queer, and female characters, Black Box grace-notes it; art isn’t easy, but given more to see, new remedies to falseness emerge in each other.