Certain Women

CERTAIN WOMEN   ***

Kelly Reichardt

2016

IDEA:  Three women in Montana - a lawyer with a volatile client, a family woman looking to build new property, and an independent ranch hand - experience adversities small and large.

BLURB:  The women of Certain Women are steady, determined, and courageous in ways they never have to call attention to. Kelly Reichardt, whose filmmaking is shorn of any shred of didacticism or bombast, gets this, and presents them plainly: never are they dramatically elevated to symbols of a particular gendered condition, but shown as humans negotiating the particulars of their socio-cultural environment. In this case, that’s an American West that Reichardt has remarkably demystified and empowered at once. Written and hegemonically upheld by Man, she doesn’t so much reimagine the landscape from a contemporary female perspective as demonstrate how its ideals are experienced and reworked through various female subjectivities. Law, property, and freedom, those sacrosanct male-scripted institutions, are undertaken by the women of Reichardt’s film, who operate within their patriarchal constraints while asserting their own agencies. Certain Women is not after a polemical call-to-arms but an inductive observation of social roles prescribed by gender and, in the superior final chapter of its triptych, by class, race, and sexuality. Reichardt offers neither a fantasy to redress systemic inequality nor a jeremiad; in the fashion befitting her unsentimental, understated style, she simply shows women living their lives, compelling us to realize that when it comes to the art of the West, that’s a quietly revolutionary thing indeed.

Cameraperson

CAMERAPERSON   ***1/2

Kirsten Johnson

2016

IDEA:  A film composed of unused footage cinematographer Kirsten Johnson shot for several documentaries. 

BLURB:  Without being precious or overly academic about it, Cameraperson demonstrates the transcendent body- and mind-expanding functions of the cinematographic camera apparatus. It’s right there in the title: for Johnson as it is for the spectator, the camera conflates with the individual, becoming an annex organ that has the capacity to enact and fulfill innate human needs. The humanist core that blossoms through the film’s measured formality attests to this central truth. Johnson gets us to reify how the apparatus gratifies our passion for perceiving; the ways in which it orients us in the world through mediation and identification; how it sparks our consciousnesses and consciences to make us agents of social awareness and change; most poignantly, through her deeply personal meditation on memory, deterioration, and death, its ability to overcome the constraints of time by memorializing that which is most transient. Indeed, Johnson formulates her film as a memoir, and yet we only ever see her once, briefly. In truth, there’s no need to see her at all: her footage becomes a gestalt, its content and precise formal choices enough to evince the character of the person who produced it, its collage emerging as a veritable archive of her memory and emanation of her very being. At all times asserting the presence of the camera and the influence of the person behind it, Cameraperson posits the apparatus not as a mechanical observer, but as a fundamentally human project, activated only in its interaction with the body and mind, and endowed with all the moral responsibility and fragility that inevitably entails.

The Birth of a Nation

THE BIRTH OF A NATION   ***

Nate Parker

2016

IDEA:  The story of Nat Turner, a preacher who led fellow slaves in an insurgency against their owners in 1831 Virginia.

BLURB:  Bristling with urgency and palpable moral outrage, The Birth of a Nation decocts American racial tensions in service of a cathartic cri de coeur for our uneasy times. More than a retelling of a historical event, the film is energized by the politics of the contemporary moment that inform its righteous anger. Nate Parker potently builds the cultural resonances into the picture, locating biblical and modern parallels in a story he fashions as both myth and future social promise. The portrayal of profoundly recusant slave Nat Turner could rightly be dinged for hagiography if not for the way he becomes filtered through his own homiletic teachings: while the Christ imagery is heavy-handed and often excessive, especially considering Parker has cast himself in the sanctified role, it is drawn from a place deeply connected to the guiding principles of his character and the culture he emboldens. Like the film’s title, it is also an emphatic reclamation of text that has and continues to be used to persecute and subjugate. Parker bluntly foregrounds this safeguard of religion to underscore its centrality and assert its primary purpose as one of enlightenment. He also calls upon other hallmarks of what would become the civil rights movement, giving particularly persuasive space to the rallying power of oration. The Birth of a Nation is not an especially refined film, and it shouldn’t have to be. Parker’s rough-edged, two-fisted approach bespeaks a visceral, untrammeled expression that in many ways disarms legitimate reservations about his film’s design. An emotional and political deflagration, it bursts forth as a splanchnic howl from the depths of an embattled African American psyche.