There is a funeral home across the street from Anthology Film Archives. I had never noticed it until I stepped out of a tribute screening for the late Vincent Grenier, who passed away last year. November always invokes death. There’s just something about the month. It has to do with the fallen leaves and its proximity to the year’s end; in my culture, the month is inaugurated with the Day of the Dead. But the feeling of death that pervades this November is different. It is totalizing. It has to do with the election and the accumulation of lives lost here and elsewhere. Both presidential candidates could not care less about stopping the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but the fact that we got the one whose previous administration emboldened Israel to continue subsuming Palestinian territory in the West Bank when it declared their settlements did not violate international law is tragic, to say the least. The neglect our new president will treat environmental concerns with frightens me as someone in their twenties who has grown up incapable of imagining a future for this planet; his stance on immigrants infuriates me as a Mexican-American; the Democratic Party’s continued disregard of working class citizens and problems is shameful; the list goes on and on… The cinema-screen, with its alternative realities and images of the past, extends generous consolation during such times of distress. But it can also offer too much comfort—a hiding place for image-obsessed individuals with an acute intolerance for the real world. It is images of dead moments brought back to which we treat ourselves when we watch films; such a concentration of death can be overwhelming, but it is the reminder that these images come back that should stick with audiences when they leave the cinema. If our future is lost, it must be recovered.
I spent most of my evenings at the Museum of Modern Art this month attending the screenings that comprised the excellent program “The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema.” The series was occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, which saw dictator António de Oliveira Salazar dethroned by a left wing coup and marked the end of four decades of fascist rule in Portugal and its African territories. On the film-front, the country saw a flourish in independent filmmaking—from agitprop documentaries to formally complex works that combine fiction and non-fiction filmmaking to ingenious results. Films like What Shall I Do with This Sword? (1975), a myth-minded political tract, and Trás-os-Montes (1976), a beautiful country fable, set the stage for a new kind of cinema to be made in Portugal. The tradition extends itself in the contemporary work of filmmakers such as Pedro Costa, Miguel Gomes, and Catarina Vasconcelos—just to name a few. It’s not only that these works were responding to a cultural paradigm shift, one that did not last very long, but that they embody this shift—formally, visually, philosophically. Most of the films in the series—at least the most memorable ones—are protean in design, searching for questions, asking how to relate to the world again and again.
“Portuguese cinema is not afraid to offer films with no definite answers,” said Francisco Valente, the Curatorial Assistant at MoMA who organized this series, when we spoke over the phone earlier this month. They can be considered films to exit the cinema—whether on a mental trip or more literally, by stepping outside and taking the film with you and out into the world. It saddens me to write that I witnessed several walk-outs during showings of Torre Bela (1976), O Bobo (1987), and Recollections of the Yellow House (1989, pictured at top)—coincidentally, my favorite films from the series. I want to believe these spectators were motivated by these films to step outside, help a friend, protest, grab a drink and think, or something along those lines. I doubt that was the case, but I do not care for the weakness of an audience member who cannot stand a warm work of vérité, an inventive relationship-drama-cum-conspiracy-thriller, or a good laugh. Either way, the endings of each of these films, like many other films in this program, encourage departure—through terse provocations (The Green Years), alarming news (Torre Bela), extraordinary images (Recollections of the Yellow House), or other means. These are not films that burrow into their final credits and shut themselves, but films that open themselves up and out into the world, much like the carnation blooms.
Metaphors aside, films end. “Cinema is a utopia—dreams always end and films always end,” said Valente. Nonetheless, he also told me that the only way for him to curate a series “is to think about how films are relevant now—to think about frustrations, dreams, goals, utopias.” Films make interventions upon those who see them, so those films that stick with you when you leave the theater affect others; hopefully, they help people and places develop in new directions. Per Valente, “the best films will contribute to debates now as they do twenty years in the future; in that, I can still find truth in the cinema.”
And so, the film that never ends has the potential to be eternally relevant. I’m writing about Guy Debord’s In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1981), which was presented at e-flux as part of “If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies: Revisiting Situationist Film.” Before the screening, the writer and thinker Ethan Spigland shared a few words about what could be gained from revisiting situationist films today. “The hope is that this series will not only propose a space to revisit these ideas historically, but imagine how they can be applied moving forward,” he said. Debord’s film, which taunts the audience by arguing that cinema “serves no purpose but to while away an hour of boredom with a reflection of that same boredom,” is a melancholic film, full of longing for a “Paris [that] no longer exists.” Its palindromic title and instruction “to be recommended again” upon completion safeguards its utopia—the beautiful Paris of détournement and bacchanalia. But, it also amplifies its sorrows; in turn, inspiring exit—from the theater and toward a new Paris. The films in this program, situated today, should encourage people to rework their world—to chop it up and piece it back together, to make our own maps and set our own rules because the existing ones are not only absurd, but destructive.
Although I mentioned the moving tribute to Vincent Grenier at the top of this piece, I only did so in passing. Our wonderful contributor David Schwartz has already commented on the genius of his work, but it would be ill of me to not redouble on his statements. Grenier’s films, of astounding simplicity and skill, are unlike anyone else’s. In the films that were shown as part of the tribute, it was revealed to me that light was his subject. The film program, which started with Interieur Interior (1975) and ended with Burning Bush (2010), represented an adventure in light—its brilliance, variability, and presence. His oeuvre is radiant and his loss casts an enormous shadow on the world of film. Ricardo Nicolayevsky, who passed away last summer, was also honored with a tributary screening at Anthology Film Archives this month. His films, mostly snapshots of himself and his friends, are a joy to watch. They blend the magic of Jean Cocteau with the provocations of New York’s punk scene in the ‘80s—a strange and mesmerizing fusion that needs to be seen to be believed. His loss is also immeasurable. Of particular note, the minute-and-a-half Scratches on My Brain (1982), a total screen scramble.
As a repertory filmgoer, you are always bumping up against the dead. Whether it’s a filmmaker from the past or a forgotten film, there is a constant intimacy with loss present in the act of filmgoing. The fact that cinema harbors other worlds, bygone and yet-to-come, always highlights the limits of our own, either distancing or whisking viewers away. But these images, of other worlds and possibilities, must be recognized for their importance, their ability to remind audiences that new worlds are within reach. There are avenues into other lives on-screen. This is the utopia of “The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema” at MoMA. This is the fact that people care to see and change the reality shown in No Other Land, which had a successful one-week run at Film at Lincoln Center. These are the wonders of Vincent Grenier and Ricardo Nicolayevsky at Anthology Film Archives. Films are tools of recovery, meant for viewers to forget themselves and remember the world around them. Although it seems we’ve reached a cultural and political endpoint, there’s always an exit for a new beginning. I write this because true politics remained in the films I saw this month, even though reasonable politics were dissolving in real-life. The political is on the screen, perhaps, to be taken elsewhere.
Feedback Loop is a column by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer reflecting on each month of repertory filmgoing in New York City.
