Last Few Viewings of 2021 (part two) (Patreon)

Labyrinth of Cinema (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 2019)

A film so ambitious in scope that it becomes almost aggressive, Labyrinth of Cinema is truly one of a kind -- mind-bending, frustrating, educational, and ultimately glorious. It's the final film completed by Ôbayashi, a Japanes auteur still best known for a single film (1977's House) but whose oeuvre has been rediscovered in recent years, proving to be a fount of passionate, surreal ideas, radical politics, and genre-warping originality, a latter-day peer of Seijun Suzuki and a precursor to Takashi Miike. This final cinematic testament runs a full three hours, combines live-action performance with green screen and digital compositing, and organizes its plot around Japanese military history, from the end of the Shogunate to the dropping of the atomic bomb.

There is an ostensible frame story. On the last night of operation for a cinema in Onomichi, the management has decided to screen an all-night marathon of Japanese war movies. Following a supernatural occurrence, three young men from the audience -- a cinephile, a film history student, and a monk who wants to be a yakuza -- are sucked into the screen and forced to contend with the militarism and imperial authority. As Ôbayashi makes clear, these events are inseparable from their cinematic representation. More than a few commenters have compared Labyrinth of Cinema to late Godard, particularly Histoire(s) du cinèma, and this makes sense. Ôbayashi is obviously interested in the history that film has made, and his own possible culpability in that visual regime. But by placing pseudo-protagonists into the mix of fleeting times and places, Labyrinth foregrounds the role of the spectator, and the power of the projected image. Where Godard's interventions are somewhat private and idiosyncratic, Ôbayashi insists that cinema is a shared experience and a form of public memory. Recommended, but not for the feint of heart.

Terra Femme (Courtney Stephens, 2021)

Recently we've been seeing a lot of essay films, and too many of them are little more than illustrated lectures or rudimentary analyses of media material whose meaning would be fairly obvious to the halfway attentive viewer. Even if this were not the case, that the bar for this genre has been set rather low, Courtney Stephens' excellent Terra Femme would stand out as a signal achievement. The result of Stephens' research into the history of amateur travel films made by women, Terra Femme does not present foregone conclusions or demonstrate an already road-tested thesis. Instead, it invites us to think about the material along with Stephens, as she identifies certain patterns and limitations in the films but also acknowledges that some of her ideas are still being formed.

Amateur film clubs were popular in the 1940s and 50s, and the various films produced by these enthusiasts have increasingly become objects of film-historical study. After all, they reveal the ways that dominant film grammar came to be understood, applied, or flouted by individuals who most often constituted the audience for cinema, not its official makers. In Terra Femme, Stephens examines films by a number of women whose facility and obsession with low-gauge film and travel ran counter to the still-dominant assumptions about the male gaze as a ground-level agent of colonialism. Some films fully exoticize the other, while others reveal a less acquisitive tendency. The most impressive aspect of Terra Femme is the fact that Stephens respects and preserves the variety of the work she's discovered, restraining the academic urge to codify or totalize. Instead, she deftly demonstrates these these amateur productions are, as Levi-Strauss once said, "good to think with."