News #003: profaning a classic of Georgian literature
Parajanov and cultural ownership, queer liberation and fragmentation as key to changing cinema histories...
Hello and welcome to Rep Cinema International. This news report focuses on significant events, job opportunities and other assorted links & ephemera related to repertory cinema around the world. This is a reflection of what I gather together looking around social media, cinema websites, through conversations and so on. I’m very happy to get any tips—especially job listings—you can find out how to get in touch at the bottom of this newsletter.
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This week’s repertory cinema highlights
The Legend of Suram Fortress at Projections, Tyneside Cinema (Newcastle, UK)
The history, context and interpretation of Sergei Parajanov and his films cannot be reduced in any coherent way in such a small space. Instead, I’ll point to the essential work done by James. M Steffen in The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (2013) in trying to capture the intricacies of studying a figure who was an ethnic Armenian, born in Georgia, making films in the Russian-dominated constellation of the USSR and its republics Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia. That is all to say that I’ve heard Ukrainians, Georgians and Armenians all claim Parajanov as their own for varying reasons. And they’re all correct. Which is fascinating.
Thus, this screening of Parajanov’s The Legend of Suram Fortress (1985, USSR/Georgian SSR) caught my eye, as it was selected by Georgian artist Sophio Medoidze, whose solo exhibition is currently at LUX in London. The screening introduces Parajanov as a Georgian artist, which is complicated given his history and context, but also very much true.
Steffen writes about a project abandoned in 1987, The Passion of Shushanik, in which Parajanov hoped to adapt the earliest surviving work of Georgian literature. As could be expected, his interpretation of the narrative and imagery took many liberties. Steffen writes:“…no one anticipated the vehement response [the screenplay] provoked in some Georgian intellectuals, who accused him of ‘profaning’ a classic of Georgian literature. Beyond the very legitimate question of profanation, this response arose to no small degree from the fact that Parajanov, an ethnic Armenian, was adapting one of the key works of Georgian literature, and one that happened to have an Armenian heroine at that. In other words, one of the subtexts underlying the controversy was the question of cultural ownership.”
I’m pointing this out as less of a criticism and more as a fascinating example in which cultural contexts and contemporary situations can color the ways films—or even ideas for films—are interpreted. The screening takes place as part of Projections, Tyneside Cinema’s robust program working with artists through commissions, screenings, touring programs and other projects.
“Now We Think as We Fuck”: Queer Liberation to Activism at MoMA (New York)
Titled after a quote from Marlon Riggs’ 1989 essay film Tongues Untied—“Now we think as we fuck. This nut might kill. This kiss could turn to stone.”—MoMA’s wide-ranging series is split between films unfamiliar and those that are hopefully now considered canonical. The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996, US), Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967, US), Tongues Untied and films by Kenneth Anger, Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich and Andy Warhol are complemented by less-familiar films of AIDS activism, an explicit video on safer sex and the feature length documentary triumph Word is Out: Some Stories of Our Lives (Mariposa Film Group, 1977, US).
Programmer Carson Parish (also MoMA’s Theater Manager) has found a meaningful and resonant context through which to place Marlon Riggs’ work in conversation with other filmmakers working before and after. And though this was also done to different ends in series at the BAMPFA in Berkeley, BAM in Brooklyn and The Cinematheque in Vancouver, it shows that Riggs’ versatile filmmaking can be celebrated not just on its own terms but through its different connections and resonances across topics, disciplines and authors.
Writing in 4 Columns, Erika Balsom finds that “revisiting these films and videos while Mayor Pete is on the campaign trail, when homonormativity is a formidable cultural force and the demand for ‘positive’ images still feels inescapable, I found it striking how many of them, from the very earliest through the plague years, challenge the attitudes and exclusions of respectability politics in ways that remain meaningful today.”
Another significant aspect of the series is that it marks the world premieres of new 4K restorations of three films by Fred Halsted, “gay porn film’s first auteur”: The Sex Garage (1972), L.A. Plays Itself (1972) and Sextool (1975, all US). In an interview for Screen Slate, Karl McCool speaks with filmmaker and writer William E. Jones—whose book Halsted Plays Himself was published in 2011—focusing especially on Halsted’s history through screening at MoMA in the 1970s and his films being brought into their collection.
Devika Girish on fragmented histories
In a resonant quote from about 6:00 into the Film Comment Podcast’s January 17 episode (The Decade Project #4, or, What Just Happened?), Devika Girish speaks on fragmentation as key to understanding the cinema of the 2010s. It’s perhaps a useful way to understand our developing notions of global cinema histories as well.
“Maybe it is hard to define a 2010s film because of—what you said—fragmentation. Partly it’s also a matter of retrospect. It’s difficult right now to say what is a 2010s film and I’m sure in 1979 it was similar.
But also, people do characterize this time as one of fragmentation. I think that holds true to a great extent. You can think about the way the media landscape is being split into various corporate monopolies, the way there’s this unending glut of movies and television that makes it hard to get a sense of the core of it all, or what it all means.
The flip side is that movies travel much more easily across the globe now, and there’s a way of accessing things and experiences that are far from yours, much moreso than in previous decades. Some of the fragmentation is also an increased, everyday awareness of the fact that there’s a multiplicity of experiences out there, a multiplicity of histories and bodies of filmmaking, national cinemas, that sort of thing.
So one of the difficult things in trying to figure out what a 2010s film is, is being confronted every day with the fact that the answer to that question looks different to different people. Not just because of differences in taste but also because of differences in where you are, how you’re accessing cinema and what circumstances shape the way you think about movies.
It feels like the decade is characterized by this ungraspable paradox, and the movies that seem most like they will be remembered as movies of this decade seem like they try to grasp at that. Zama (Lucretia Martel, 2017), Synonyms (Nadav Lapid, 2019, France/Israel/Germany) or Western (Valeska Grisebach, 2017, Germany/Bulgaria/Austria) try to get at that kind of hybridity of everyday existence and those untranslatable gaps between peoples’ experiences.
How not to write retrospective marketing copy
Locarno Film Festival took a few knocks—and rightly so—for their press release and social media postings about the upcoming and certainly welcome Kinuyo Tanaka retrospective. The words were not only… a bit strange… but also were somewhat problematic in several senses.
The reactions below were in addition to others I saw posted privately. Objections brought to the festival’s attention were acknowledged, and surely will serve to improve the quality of their future text on the series.
Job listings
Send repertory cinema-related job listings to me at RepCinemaInternational@gmail.com. They’re one of the more popular parts of these newsletters but hard for me to research!
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Los Angeles): Collections Curator (Academy Museum), full time
Curator Exhibitions (Academy Museum), full time
Curatorial Intern (Academy Museum), part time
Edinburgh International Film Festival: Publications Editor, part time
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative (New York): Administrative Assistant, part time
Maryland Film Festival (Baltimore): Artistic Director
Events Manager
Festival Manager
Projectionist
Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, US): Director and Curator of Moving Image, full time
Watershed (Bristol, UK): AV Technician/Projectionist, full time
Endnotes
Featured images in this newsletter are The Legend of Suram Fortress (Sergei Parajanov, 1985, USSR) and L.A. Plays Itself (Fred Halsted, 1972, US), which—yes—inspired the title of Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003).
Off-topic: I filed a short article for IFFR Daily on the winners of Rotterdam’s Tiger Short Award last Sunday at the festival. You can read it here and I’ve got two more reports from IFFR coming down the line.
If I’ve learned anything thus far in the three weeks I’ve been working on this newsletter, it’s that the schedule of things might shift. Thus, this email is being sent out late on Friday and I also encourage you to stay tuned for my next interview with Sahraa Karimi of the Afghan Film Organization which is certainly coming soon!
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