My expectations might’ve been too high by having my first NYFF as press feature back-to-back screenings of two of the best films I think I’ll see this decade (Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds), but I had an overall disappointing run with the lineup this year. Only a handful of films from the Main Slate really moved me—Angela Schanelec’s My Wife Cries, Hong Sang-soo’s Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, and Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva (which plays in Baltimore this Friday as a part of New/Next)—and while I enjoyed the romp of Arthur Harari’s The Unknown and think Mariano Llinás’s Life of Jorge Luis Borges will be one of my favorite films of the year, I was let down by just as many, namely the new works by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Lee Chang-dong.
Granted, I missed some films I can say with near-certainty I’ll like (although I thought that about Possible Love, and look how that turned out), like Mike Leigh’s supposed-final film Tender Loving Care, Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom (a sequel/reworking of his first film, La libertad), and Sandra Wollner’s Everytime (which is also playing New/Next and, funnily enough, during the same time slot as La Gradiva). Some of this was inconveniences with how the Press & Industry schedule shook out, some was me being strategic around what I thought I would be able to catch relatively soon in Baltimore. Overall, though, the quality of the new releases at NYFF this year was strangely subpar compared to my last two forays. But the Revivals this year are nothing short of extraordinary.
While I had a little disappointment there too (with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Gone to Earth, a film which has been something mythic to me for a long time), quitting the Walter Reade Theater with its lineup of new festival releases and cutting across the 65th to sit for a day with restorations was rejuvenating.
My day started seeing Fred Camper’s Suicide Note, a collection of diarist Super 8mm footage that Camper compiled from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Going from day after day of very talk-y festival fare and sitting for 110 minutes in complete silence as someone’s observations from decades ago flash in front of you was like putting my brain into factory reset.
This was followed by a selection from the Pelechian Project, a restoration effort by Coproduction Office of the works of Armenian documentarian Artavazd Pelechian, the inventor of his own film form he called “distance montage” and one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live. This program was made up of his early works, starting with Mountain Patrol (looking at men who clear railways of debris) and exuberantly moving to his VGIK thesis film Land of the People, which was so enthusiastic towards life and human achievement that it moved me to tears in its 11-minute runtime.
After rewatching Pelechian’s masterpiece We and his terrifying and transcendent look at sheep herders (featuring long sequences of men sliding down mountainside and alpine rivers with rivers with lambs in their arms) The Seasons, there was enough time to grab another coffee before sitting back down to a movie I knew absolutely nothing about.
John Abraham’s Report to Mother immediately became one of the highlights of the festival. This 1982 film is set in Kerala, following a man who sees a commotion on the road one day around a suicide victim and thinks he half-remembers the unidentified man’s face. One by one, he recruits friends, at first to figure out who the deceased is, and then they start gathering more acquaintances as they walk to find the man’s mother and report his suicide. As the film progresses, characters recall moments of the man’s life and the milieu of the time—the music scene, the radical politics—and reveal a portrait of a man stuck in a bleak world and unable to make meaning of it in the way that his more artistic and militant friends are. Watching Report to Mother, I felt like I’d discovered arthouse cinema, filled with an overwhelming excitement for all the corners of the world with their own classics that still remain unknown to me and are waiting to be found.