Nolan Kelly
Nolan Kelly is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY.
This oldest form of mass media, a printed book, forms a kind of failsafe, preserving Marker’s grand foray into futuristic technology. Alone, either experience would be incomplete to the English reader. Together, with a laptop on one’s desk and the printed tome in one’s lap, they form a complete experience of the artwork.
One senses the breakthrough Lisa Yuskavage was having at this moment, when the childish indulgence of “Tit Heaven” birthed a whole subject. From here on, the work becomes immediately more ambitious.
Looking at late-career films by Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Jia Zhangke, Paul Schrader, and David Cronenberg reveals something about postproduction and the process of becoming history while still alive and working.
![C'est Pas Moi [It’s Not Me], dir. Leos Carax. Courtesy Janus Films.](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstudio.brooklynrail.org%2Fassets%2Ff62a3a29-889a-4b32-b1c3-2e9615e9ca6f.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
In her New York debut at David Peter Francis, the artist R. Jamin has created a dynamic show around this idea, with all the comforts that accompany a medieval sense of proportion. For Temperance, the windows of David Pagliarulo’s two-room gallery on East Broadway have been blacked out, as if turning away from the all-too-modern world outside.
Making one debut feature is hard enough, but Zhang has successfully enriched and deepened his themes—of performance, surveillance, sincerity, and exchange—by presenting these two parts in ambiguous relation to one another, with a playing order determined by the flip of a coin.
A documentary of primarily interviews, Rojek begins innocuously enough. Its subjects, who are never introduced by name, take turns in front of the camera, their faces framed tightly and head-on. Staring out as if to make eye contact with us, the men speak in Arabic and English about their hobbies, childhoods, interests, and beliefs
Wenders’s film, which stars Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama, a professional toilet cleaner in Tokyo’s downtown Shibuya district, offers a tender glimpse of a working class life—one we might otherwise never dwell on or dismiss as mere misery.
O’Brien is a poet and critic with an interest in mass culture before the information age; published by Terra Nova Press as an experimental novel, his Arabian Nights can be read as a marriage between criticism and poetry. It consists of short passages—organized under categories like “Loose Ankles” and “Laughing Sinners”—that follow the frenetic logic of the Jazz Age just before the Depression, as expressed by the movies that bottled that excitement and sold it back to the crowd.
There are several types of “festival films” that help make Cannes what it is. In its Official Selection, the programming walks a fine line between politically sensitive (read: calculatedly scandalous) pictures and an all-out devotion to art for art’s sake. Kelly explores new films including May December, Firebrand, Homecoming, and more.
Talk of ethno-nationalism pervades all corners of Mungiu’s film, though no one can seem to decide who exactly is Romanian enough for it.
It can feel risky, as a director, to put a well-thought-out scenario at the mercy of New York streets, but, as indies like Daniel Antebi’s God’s Time (2022) go to show, the loss of control also breeds high rewards, capturing spectacles inherent to the city itself.
The artist’s ability to develop an intuitive alternative to typical photography, one that naturally corresponds to themes she has previously explored in performance and object arrangement, is the great triumph of Hamilton’s present career.
Bones and All manages to balance the chaste intimacy of a typical YA novel with an appetite for the shock and gore of a body horror flick. But it is Guadagnino’s vision of 1980s Americana that arises as particularly potent for a film making a statement about the relationship between queer desire and social exclusion.
Semans’s Resurrection (2022) is a genre flick that grapples with the power of trauma as a tool of manipulation and a destroyer of credibility.
Adapted from a relatively obscure semi-autobiographical novel by the French author Annie Ernaux, Happening (2021) is director Audrey Diwan’s second feature. Happening is a deeply affecting encounter with illegal abortion—specifically Ernaux’s, which took place when she was twenty-three, in 1960s France.
A toxic pink smog appearing simultaneously across the whole world is liable to kill a person in under ten seconds. That Gerbase’s film was entirely written and produced before the pandemic began is the basis of what makes it so powerful.
The strange curse of privilege is the proper subject of The Interim.
Unlike so many other exhibition monographs—which are often treated as something between a program guide and show souvenir—Motor City Underground presents detailed reproductions of Sinclair’s photographs, often blown up to full-page, alongside a wide variety of testimony. The range of dates and sources across which these statements are culled suggests years of research combing through a decade’s worth of underground missives—the type of ephemera that does not often make it into digital archives.
This sense of bewilderment, of a past that is both accessible and impossible to decipher, is the real subject of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale. Its ostensible subject is her own genealogy, going back through four generations of Russian Jews, which is presented to the reader like a cadaver on a table—all parts intricately connected and covered in film, both sticky and slippery to the touch. Stepanova is less interested in holding these parts up to the light than she is in recording her horror at the death of her history, its inability to speak for itself, and the plethora of morbidities which could inform its cause of death.
This anthology assembles the poetic compositions of the poet and performer scarcely known in this country, but influential in Russia since the days of the Soviet Union. Monastyrski’s poems call for action, and by their very nature draw attention to the activity of reading.
I am fertile ground is a piece imbued with the themes of Antoni’s work—the body as an artistic tool, both for making and meaning-making, which corresponds to the art objects that will inevitably outlast it. Her work as a product hinges upon her physical form in the time she makes it, a period sometimes as specific and short as the instant of a photograph.
