Link Round Up: Quotable Lions

Firstly, a little self-indulgence. Anyone following my Twitter rants knows the amount I am obsessed with Jazmin Lopez's Leones, which I wrote about during New Directors/New Films and discussed on The Cinephiliacs. While the film still does not have distribution, they did cut a trailer for international publicity, and felt kind enough to include one of my heartfelt phrases. Watch the trailer here; I'll keep everyone up to date on if/when it returns to the States.

Also a cause for celebration is the other Argentinean marvel of the year, Viola from Matías Piñeiro. I liked the film when I also saw it at ND/NF, but have grown quite amorous with it since then as well as Piñeiro's other three films, which I wrote about at The Film Stage. I'll later be posting something about his previous film, Rosalinda, but read my primer on approaching his work here.

My Criterion pieces for The Film Stage also continues this week with a look at Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu. I use the opportunity to talk melodrama and bodies, with a little film theory as well, but mostly to talk about why you don't need a close-up to make great emotional movie. It also links to my favorite discovery of the week: Kent Jones's phenomenal piece "Do Movies Think?"

Finally, The Muriels have returned! This summer, we are counting down some of our favorite films from before 1962, and I was assigned to write about a little film called Vertigo.

On Letterboxd, my final posts on Allan Dwan and  If...

Fearless: Jazmín López's Leones

Jazmín López's Leones is playing as part of the New Directors/New Films festival, on Monday, March 25th and Wednesday, March 27th. You can buy tickets here. Go.

“A long tracking shot is always a statement of liberation.”

-Robert Kolker

“The greatest novelty of the recent cinema is the appearance of worthy treatments of religious subject matters.”

-Andre Bazin

            Cinema began stationary. Sandow flexed his muscles for the camera. The train rushed into the station. Melies and his crew moved into the frame to perform their action. The camera recorded, but it was a dispassionate observer. The camera was not yet the camera.

            Once the camera moved, it also began a new life. It became expression embodied. It became a life force with its own gestures and language. This is not to discount the beauty of the stationary camera—Ozu made this his life blood. But a moving camera creates its own narrative, beyond the characters and beyond the text perhaps. It becomes a sensuous, breathing validation of art.

            Leones is a film that validates the history of tracking shots while also pushing it into a new future. Leones is only about cinema in the way every film can be claimed to be about the cinematic process. Its director, Argentina’s Jazmín López, utilizes the purpose of the tracking shot in so many unique, forceful, and honestly humbling new forms. But the film is also a journey of the spirit—a film that doesn’t just imply cinema can depict a spiritual journey, but can itself be a spiritual journey. This is a film that takes the camera and morphs it into Virgil, Dante’s guide through the beyond. Have I mentioned yet that Leones is an outright masterpiece and perhaps one of the great works of world cinema of our contemporary moment? Allow the hyperbole.