Valérie Massadian. Photo by Locarno Festival | Marco Abram.Six years ago, Valérie Massadian won the Opera Prima, the Locarno Festival’s first feature prize, for Nana, a great film that has since developed a small but deeply impassioned following. She returned to the festival this year with Milla and received another award, the Special Jury Prize in the Filmmakers of the Present competition. Simultaneously tender and brutal, in the film 17-year-old Milla (Séverine Jonckeere) runs away with Leo (Luc Chessel) before a series of incidents cause her to mature faster than nature had intended and make the uneasy transition from childhood to motherhood. We sat in a shady courtyard in Locarno to speak with Massadian about Milla and how it relates to, and expands upon, the project she undertook with Nana, as well as what it means to make films with and about young women. This transcription may give an indication of her demeanor,...
- 8/28/2017
- MUBI
I would like to accompany 2011's Nana with a printed text at the door of a public screening, a text written precisely before the word “contextualize” (b. 1934) existed as the verb form of “context” (b. 1840).It would be Jean Epstein, 1921—"Now the tragedy is anatomical. The décor of the fifth act is this corner of a cheek torn by a smile. Waiting for the moment when 1,000 meters of intrigue converge in a muscular denouement satisfies me more than the rest of the film. Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin."(…)"The film is nothing but a relay between the source of nervous energy and the auditorium which breathes its radiance…" (from “Magnification”)Or Antonin Artaud writing in 1927—"The human skin of things, the epidermis of...
- 2/6/2016
- by Andy Rector
- MUBI
Parents often grow used to hearing their children claim they hate them. The pain of the words becomes duller as it becomes clear that the phrase is nothing more than rebellious, interchangeable invective. What is truly heartrending is the knowledge that your child does not need you. Typically, parents learn this when young adults pack up their things and head off to college or to start their own homes. Valérie Massadian’s debut feature, Nana, inverts this model. The eponymous four year-old girl’s mother disappears from their rural home, but she doesn’t miss a beat. She continues to eat, play and even “reads” herself a bedtime story. The true pleasure of this film lies not merely in its unnerving premise, but in the confidence with which Massadian asserts her place in the history of European pictorial production. The film easily assumes the moniker “painterly,” not because of its predilection for vivid color,...
- 1/27/2013
- by Blair McClendon
- MUBI
2012, the year in cinema, will be starting early, even before the Sundance-Rotterdam-Berlin marathon. The Museum of the Moving Image is launching a new series, First Look, showcasing 13 features and seven shorts, all of which — with the exception of Mark Jackson's Without and two shorts by Artavazd Peleshian — are New York premieres. Curated by Dennis Lim, Rachael Rakes and David Schwartz, First Look opens on January 6 with Chantal Akerman on hand to present Almayer's Folly and closes on January 15 with Raya Martin's presentation of his Buenas Noches, España.
The lineup in full (more or less in order of presentation):
Chantal Akerman's Almayer's Folly, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's first novel. See Dan Sallitt's review, the Venice/Toronto roundup and Darren Hughes's interview with Akerman.
Philippe Garrel's That Summer (Un Eté brulant), which has just made Cahiers du Cinéma's top ten of 2011. See, too, Daniel...
The lineup in full (more or less in order of presentation):
Chantal Akerman's Almayer's Folly, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's first novel. See Dan Sallitt's review, the Venice/Toronto roundup and Darren Hughes's interview with Akerman.
Philippe Garrel's That Summer (Un Eté brulant), which has just made Cahiers du Cinéma's top ten of 2011. See, too, Daniel...
- 12/9/2011
- MUBI
You'd think that Team Cinema Scope, having just covered Toronto 2011 more extensively — surely! — than any other single publication has ever covered a film festival in the histories of films and festivals combined, would take a month or two off to recover. But no, here's Issue 48, solid as any other.
Of Thom Andersen's 30 "Random Notes on a Projection of The Clock by Christian Marclay," here's the first: "The Clock is certainly dumb: a 24-hour movie made entirely from other movies in which the depicted screen time corresponds precisely to the actual time of the screening with plenty of clock inserts and shots in which clocks appear, sometimes incidentally. I'm sure I'm not the first to ask, why didn't I think of that? But is The Clock dumb enough?" Marclay, at any rate, is smart enough to have made not one, not two, but six editions of the piece, the last...
Of Thom Andersen's 30 "Random Notes on a Projection of The Clock by Christian Marclay," here's the first: "The Clock is certainly dumb: a 24-hour movie made entirely from other movies in which the depicted screen time corresponds precisely to the actual time of the screening with plenty of clock inserts and shots in which clocks appear, sometimes incidentally. I'm sure I'm not the first to ask, why didn't I think of that? But is The Clock dumb enough?" Marclay, at any rate, is smart enough to have made not one, not two, but six editions of the piece, the last...
- 10/4/2011
- MUBI
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