I meant to write about the recent Ed Bowes retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, but got sidetracked by a last-minute work trip and family affairs. The latter has brought me back to San Diego, where independent film culture has been virtually extinguished, or forced to go Underground. The Landmark Theater where I once saw Leviathan, Timbuktu, and Two Days, One Night as a neophyte cinephile back in 2014 has been razed to make more parking space for a new Nordstrom Rack. And, what once used to be Westfield UTC’s Arclight – La Jolla, which wasn’t necessarily a haven for independent cinema but still awarded me the opportunity to catch a print of Rushmore (1998) as part of some Saturday matinee, has, like most defunct theaters in this city, been bought up by AMC. Its cushioned seats have all been replaced with black leather recliners. This is where I saw A Complete Unknown (2024).
Before watching James Mangold’s Walk-the-Line-hairball, I visited family friends who complained to me about the sad state of new releases. Their salve presented itself in the form of direct-to-streaming releases. For the parents: Netflix K-Dramas. For the children: Prime Video’s Secret Level. The latter is an animated anthology series in which Tim Miller and Dave Wilson, creators of Netflix’s LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS, put their own televisual spin on pre-existing video-game IP. Amazon Studios calls it their “love letter to gaming.” The series depicts Pac-Man as an emaciated yellow man who fights monsters. Miller and Wilson’s art relies on adding backstories where none were ever required and coating everything with blood—the puerile end-goal of gritty consumer culture, trading Schumacher’s Batman for Nolan’s Dark Knight and then for the so-gritty-it’s-camp novelty of Matt Reeves’s The Batman. Pac-Man for preppers now has more appeal than Pac-Man for gamers.
After some more episodes of Secret Level, we got back to talking about the future of cinema. The family’s youngest son was excited about Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare. (San Diego is a military city.) The middle-child made some remarks about AI and how it could assist him develop small horror stories he’d always wanted to make into movies. On cue, the father of the household presented me with a TikTok video that showed how a teenager had recreated a scene from Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) using AI. Hollywood won. Not only have general audiences become childish connoisseurs of CGI passed off as serious art, they’ve become brain-dead, hungry for algorithmic variations on children’s franchises or, better-yet, violent puerilities, especially if they are endorsed by the U.S. military, as in San Diego’s very own Top Gun: Maverick (2022) or the soon-to-come Warfare.
Leaving New York always brings into sharp relief the depressing state of contemporary cinema. And, it is for that reason, that I will not just write about Bowes’s films—many of which you can watch on his website—but provide an account of the year in New York repertory cinema that’s not driven by numbers, but memory.
January
There was a beautiful presentation of Fluxus films at Japan Society in which the filmmaker Jeffrey Perkins recalled how he met Yoko Ono because he was trying to buy LSD while doing his military service in Japan. They showed the hits, as collected in The Film-Maker’s Cooperative’s Fluxus - Fluxfilm Anthology DVD, but the hits were enough. These short films, which exhibit more daring and formal acuity than most films released nowadays, are more-or-less gag films. But, the gags are good—relics of another time. They make me wonder two things: where are New York’s weirdo filmmakers today and when did short films—pardon me, alms-expectant proof-of-concepts—get so serious?
February
This was the month of Film at Lincoln Center’s “Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s,” which actually began in late January with a poorly-attended screening of Sidney Sokhona’s incredible Nationalité immigré (1976). But, it was Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s seven-and-a-half hour Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977) that made a splash in The New York Times. The spotlight was warranted, but it puts into perspective what attracts present-day cinephiles: monuments of yore that can be cataloged as achievements in endurance, especially if exhibited on film. Denser films in the program were not as well attended: Numéro Deux (1975) and From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979)—but, of course, these were DCPs. Suddenly, everyone has become an expeditioner, searching for treasure in the same celluloid cemetery as everyone else, holding their conquests higher than their peers in an empty game of metrics—rarest finds and most films viewed.
March
Raúl Ruiz and A24. Anthology Film Archives and BAM Film screened The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) and The Wandering of the Soap Opera (2017), respectively. Both showings were part of programs tied to intellectual publications: Afterimage and Triple Canopy, respectively. This is not a new trend, but it appears to have exponentiated this year. It seems as though every week the release of a new film book or literary journal invites a cinematic celebration. I’m not complaining—and the two programs I’ve cited here, “Afterimage: Counter Cinema, Radical Cinema” and “Triple Canopy: Standard Deviations,” represent the best in this line of programming—but as the book releases pile up, these screenings begin to feel like calendar padding.
March is when I saw Love Lies Bleeding (2024) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024). The latter ended up coming out in theaters a bit later, but it struck me that two queer films by the same distributor came out around the same time. This phenomenon repeated itself with the dual release of A Different Man (2024) and The Substance (2024), and the half-ironic, half-PR-y positioning of It Ends With Us (2024) and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024), Glicked, and Babyratu. Everyone has been trying to replicate the success of Barbenheimer with little financial success; nonetheless, PR-success has manifested itself and with it more than a few bucks. Every packaged release creates a conversation. The dual release of A Different Man and The Substance prompted The New Yorker’s Critics-at-Large to probe the state of body horror and Babyratu gave rise to a Vulture think-piece on “the art of the stealth Christmas movie.” The call-and-response game between PR-teams and critics is not new, but it’s never been so brazen.
In Queens, the Museum of the Moving Image hosted the latest edition of “First Look,” an annual festival dedicated to new releases that have not played in New York. I participated in the festival’s critics workshop for the second year in a row, so my words are weighted with some bias. But, it still baffles me that the adventurous programming on display here has not started many conversations; in fact, many of the films from “First Look” remain without U.S. distributors. My favorite film from the festival remains Knit’s Island (2024), an immersive machinima documentary about people who spend more time playing DayZ than going outside. Filmed over 963 hours in the video-game, Knit’s Island outruns its odd premise and reaches into poignant and personal territory, setting into motion a new model of documentary filmmaking. The film remains unavailable in U.S. theaters or on streaming services—if only it was released alongside Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024).
April
New Directors / New Films also hosts an excellent slate of undistributed films in New York for two weeks. Then, most of these films vanish back into no-man’s-land. At least the festival is co-hosted by MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, so certain visibility is guaranteed. For reasons beyond my knowledge, The Quad hosted the 24th edition of the Havana Film Festival. Part of this festival included a two-day retrospective dedicated to Nicolás Guillén Landrián, an Afro-Cuban short filmmaker who merits as much recognition as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. His films run the gamut from poetic agitprop (Ociel from Toa and Arabian Coffee, from 1965 and ‘68 respectively) to sensitive portraits of everyday life (In an Old Neighborhood and Un Festival, just to name a few). Although his oeuvre is not as prolific as Harun Farocki’s, films such as Para Construir Una Casa (1972) share similarities with works like Hammer and Saw (1973) and An Image (1983)—all films that show labor.
Perhaps part of the reason the Landrián retrospective only brought in a handful of viewers—apart from the fact that both screenings began at 1 p.m. on week-days—is because the films in the second-block did not have English subtitles. This was not a problem for me and the ticket-taker warned me in advance, but it resulted in a great deal of confusion. The ICAIC spokesman did not know whether to give his introduction in Spanish or English, and after he decided to deliver it in Spanish, it became clear that the festival’s translator did not speak Spanish. This led another woman to step into the role of impromptu interpreter—in front of the screen stood a befuddled old man, a disappointed young woman, and an exasperated middle-aged woman with a microphone that was tossed around like a hot potato. When the films were finally shown, the masking was all wrong. When I went to tell the projectionist, the booth was empty. Such is the care afforded to repertory Latin American cinema in New York.
May
For most cinephiles in New York, May was the month of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler. For me, it was the month of Bulle Ogier. For everyone, it was the month of protests on campus. A week into the month, Inney Prakash kicked off the fourth edition of Prismatic Ground—an annual festival dedicated to experimental cinema. His daring as a programmer remains unrivalled and the festival demanded a true engagement with the ongoing horrors in Gaza. The artist known as arc, whose continued outspokenness about the genocide reminds me that saneness survives in the arts, delivered an incredible expanded cinema performance at Light Industry—a real highlight and true contemporary complement to the Dorsky-Hiler show in midtown.
June
BRAT took over The Roxy. As ridiculous as the artist-hosts-film-program format can be, I found New York’s renditions of it this year to be quite refreshing. Around the same time as the BRAT takeover, Annie Baker hosted a film series at Lincoln Center in anticipation of her terrific feature debut, Janet Planet (2024), hitting theaters. The series, titled “Angels and Puppets,” hosted a remarkable constellation of features and shorts—including 35mm prints of The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939), To Be or Not to Be (1942), Children of Paradise (1945), Vanya on 42nd Street (1949), Summer Stock (1950), The Band Wagon (1953), The Magic Flute (1975), Opening Night (1975), All That Jazz (1979), My Dinner with Andre (1981), Fanny and Alexander (1982), and a unique glimpse at the Bread and Puppet Theater’s annual Domestic Resurrection Circus in the form of a short documentary. If I have to watch the music video for Charli XCX’s “360” to enjoy a 35mm print of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies in the future… Well, things could be worse, just go to AMC and sit through 30 minutes of garbage instead.
July
The flip-side to April arrived in late July with Film at Lincoln Center’s “Spectacle Every Day: Mexican Popular Cinema.” This presentation of classic and outré Mexican cinema from the 1940s to the 1960s represented a wonderful intervention upon the dearth of Latin American film programming in New York. Of course, it had to be presented in Locarno first—and thus, with a European stamp of approval, boomerang back to plaudits in America.
August
I spent the bulk of August in Locarno, Switzerland, participating in the Critics Academy. I wrote about the films I saw there for Screen Slate, among other publications. I am not prone to ire, but more than a few people accused me of ranting in my assessment of the festival’s short films. It’s up to the reader to decide whether I was truculent or not, but it is my hope that they trust I am honest—it is not my ambition to form part of a placid critical establishment.
Back in New York, I caught some real wonders: Glen or Glenda (1953) on 35mm, Éric Rohmer’s Full Moon in Paris at The Paris, Agnes Martin’s only film Gabriel (1976) at the Rockaway Film Festival, and a restored version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) at Anthology Film Archives. I caught all of these films the same week and they represent some of the most ping-pong-ing I’ve done all year—a fitting finale for another year of exceptional summer programming in New York.
September
Although September marks the start of the New York Film Festival, it doesn’t really get going until October. This year’s festival hosted some real gems, some of which, surprisingly, remain undistributed: Afternoons of Solitude, bluish, The Damned, No Other Land, Pepe, and Union—to name a few. The buzzier titles in the festival—Anora, Nickel Boys, The Room Next Door—were just as good. The quality of new releases is good, it’s just a matter of whether they make it out of the festival circuit or not.
Elsewhere in Manhattan, I caught an Andy Warhol triple bill: Batman Dracula, Batman Dracula – “Batman on Beach with Nymph,” and Batman Dracula – “Jack Gerard Smoking”—all from 1964. Greg Pierce, Director of Film and Video at The Andy Warhol Museum, explained that Batman Dracula was never meant to be released; hence, the mishmash quality of the film, which includes several scenes that are out of focus. Notwithstanding, Batman Dracula is a remarkable feature—a fun and inventive peek behind the uber-manicured Warholian factory.
Uptown, at L’Alliance New York, film programmer Jake Perlin kicked off a new era for the cultural center with a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s newly-restored In Praise of Love (2001). In his brief introduction to the film, he promised more cookies would be available to moviegoers in the lobby of L’Alliance New York before each screening. I have returned to L’Alliance New York several times this Fall and Perlin’s promise remains unbroken; on top of that, you can compliment your cookies with some extraordinary films.
October
It’s not often I go to the e-flux screening room, but every time I do I regret not being a frequent attendee. I caught Gürcan Keltek’s Meteors (2017) there this October. The film starts off as a documentary about exotic deer being hunted by rich people in rural Turkey, then turns into a film about the Kurdish conflict in southeastern Anatolia, and then transforms into a dazzling spectacle of light through its capture of a sudden and spectacular meteor shower. It’s a perfect little film, of singular shapeshifting quality.
Over at Light Industry, I watched A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner’s Community Action Center (2010). This is another perfect little film, but of the pornographic sort. In it, Burns and Steiner play out and subvert pornographic clichés with their friends. This screening, which was presented in collaboration with MIX NYC, was extremely well-attended, making for a fun night at the movies. With these two screenings, I can reaffirm that microcinemas remain the source of New York’s most adventurous and memorable film programming.
November
I wrote about politics on-screen in my most recent edition of “Feedback Loop,” although I neglected to mention the Harun Farocki film series that took place at e-flux and the Goethe Institut. I attended a free event at the latter that began with a lecture at 2:30 PM and ended around 7 PM or so following the presentation of nine short films. The lecture was rich and the films were outstanding, but no one should ever program so many Farocki films in such quick succession, especially if guests are expected to sit on stiff plastic chairs. As a general rule: short film programs should never include more than four films.
December
Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and Screen Slate all agreed that May December was the best film of 2023. The year before that, Crimes of the Future was awarded the same honor by both Film Comment and Screen Slate. And, one year before that, Memoria was recognized as the best film of the year by Reverse Shot and Film Comment.
Each film publication, one of which I partly edit, has its own editorial stance and although it would be presumptuous of me to claim excellence for the writing featured in Screen Slate, I will note that Reverse Shot and Film Comment feature some of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking film criticism in the english-speaking world. The reason I have grouped these publications together is because they are all based in New York and, as of late, have championed the same films in their end-of-year coverage.
This year—and let it be noted that Reverse Shot has not published their Best Of… list because they always intelligently wait until the year is over before tallying up critics’ picks—I sense a change. Here at Screen Slate, A Different Man has been named the best film of the year and over at Film Comment, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light has taken home that honor. My hunch is that another film will be recognized as Reverse Shot’s favorite this year and that the unanimity of last year will not repeat itself for a while; in short, that New York film culture will get a little bit more diverse and surprising. At least, this is my hope.
In the meantime, if you are a sucker for schizophrenia, go check out the Critikat’s “Top 10 de l’année 2024” or Light Camera Jackson’s “Top 25 Films of 2024.”
Feedback Loop is a column by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer reflecting on each month of repertory filmgoing in New York City.
