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CINEASTE, VOL. L, NO. 2, SPRING 2025 . lio ig ’s Verm lpero De Maura lps in Athe in lfresco a ing in in D ARTICLES Sins of the Father: Politics and Patriarchs in the Cinema of Leos Carax by Darragh O’Donoghue Both Good and Bad Fathers figure throughout the short filmography of French filmmaker Leos Carax, movies shown to be largely autobiographical in nature. 10 Everything or Nothing: The Cuban Revolution’s Censorship of Cinema by Matthew David Roe Miguel Coyula Aquino’s new documentary Chronicles of the Absurd testifies to the endless problems faced by Cuba’s filmmakers, dating from the Revolution’s earliest days, laboring under the smoke and mirrors of the government’s ideological dictates. 19 Masahiro Shinoda: At the Vanguard of the New and the Old by Adam Bingham With films like Demon Pond, which are not easily characterized, the director’s contributions to Japanese cinema have received less recognition but a reassessment is underway. 30 The Great Might-Have-Been of the French New Wave by Mitchell Abidor Anarchic, occasionally brilliant…and forgotten. However undisciplined the talent and uneven the results, Jacques Rozier, the last of his generation, deserves reconsideration. 37 INTERVIEWS All We Imagine as Light: An Interview with Payal Kapadia by Graham Fuller Directing her first fiction feature film encouraged the filmmaker to innovate for her story about three nurses within an expansive vision of Mumbai transpiring largely after dark. 4 Histories of French Cinema’s Moving Body: An Interview with Denis Lavant by Arta Barzanji It’s Not Me returns the performer to his collaboration with Leos Carax and their mutual creation, Monsieur Merde, the monstrous character introduced in Tokyo! 16 Meeting with Pol Pot: An Interview with Rithy Panh by Clarence Tsui Turning to fiction filmmaking, the documentarian imagines Meeting with Pol Pot, based on the true story of Western journalists seduced by the genocidal dictator’s propaganda. 26 La Cocina and the American Dream: An Interview with Alonso Ruizpalacios by Paul Risker No reservations required as the filmmaker takes us inside a busy Times Square restaurant, staffed largely by undocumented immigrants dealing with work and personal anxieties. 34 Mapping a Cinematic Grand Tour through Asia: An Interview with Miguel Gomes by Shahnaz Mahmud The director of Grand Tour, which combines period piece and Rom-Com elements, and who filmed throughout Asia, decided that his film would not use narrative conventions. 42 NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE AT WWW.CINEASTE.COM Article: Around The Clock: On an Overnight at MoMA by Will DiGravio. Film Review: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain reviewed by Graham Fuller. Book Review: Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre reviewed by Mitchell Abidor and Chris Marker: Early Film Writings reviewed by Nadine Boljkovac. Cover: Zoe Saldaña in Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez. FILM REVIEWS Emilia Pérez Reviewed by Karen Backstein ....................45 Vermiglio Reviewed by Matthew Evangelista.............47 Witches Reviewed by Megan Feeney ........................49 Eureka Reviewed by Robert Koehler .......................51 Babygirl Reviewed by Mary F. Corey .......................53 Separated Reviewed by Charles Musser ......................55 HOME VIDEO REVIEWS Pandora’s Box Reviewed by Thomas Doherty ...................58 Scarface Reviewed by David Sterritt .........................60 Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger Reviewed by Jonathan Murray ..................62 The Long Good Friday Reviewed by Michael Sandlin.....................64 Enough Rope Reviewed by Matthew Hays ......................66 Paper Moon Reviewed by Christopher Bray ..................67 Staff Recommendations: Burn, Witch, Burn, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, The Eichmann Trial, The Hop-Pickers, and The Valley of the Bees Reviewed by Cineaste Editors ....................69 BOOK REVIEWS Hard to Watch: How to Fall in Love with Difficult Movies Reviewed by Catherine Russell ..................70 Elmer Bernstein, Film Composer: An Authorized Biography Reviewed by Robert Cashill .......................71 Still Film Crazy (After All These Years): Collected Interviews Reviewed by Phillip Lopate ........................73 George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director Reviewed by David Sterritt .....................74 From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary Reviewed by Karen Backstein ....................75 Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair Reviewed by Kurt Brokaw ..........................76 Book Brief Reviews ..............................78 DEPARTMENTS Editorial ..............................................1 Letters ........................................................3 Contributors ............................................57 Short Takes: Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, A Photographic Memory, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Sugarcane, Zurawski v Texas........80 2 CINEASTE, Spring 2025
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LETTERS A Cover to Cover Reader The magazine era seems to be over. As we sort through a flurry of push notifications, screechy headlines, and relentless clickbait that daily violates our minds (even as it incessantly vibrates inside our pockets), it takes some effort and devotion to read a great magazine the way it’s supposed to be read: that is, from cover to cover. Cineaste is the last magazine I continue to read in this fashion. Whenever a new print issue arrives in my Warsaw mailbox, I prime myself for being delighted, inspired, and educated by a group of writers I have come to deeply admire over the past twenty years or so (I first laid my hands on an issue of Cineaste circa 2005). It usually takes me several weeks to carve out the necessary pockets of free time to read all new Cineaste pieces, but as I finish my ritual and mark an issue as “done,” I feel deep gratitude for all the scholarship, knowledge, and care that goes into the diverse and wideranging coverage the magazine provides regularly (and with a deceptively effortless editorial touch). There is one writer, however, whom I would like to single out for praise; one whose new articles are always the first I read whenever I crack open a new issue of the magazine. That author is Darragh O’Donoghue, whose incredibly wide-ranging, beautiful critical prose is often jaw-droppingly insightful, masterfully researched, and compulsively readable. It never ceases to amaze me how fresh Darragh (whom I am lucky to meet up with annually on his visits to the Gdynia Film Festival in my home country) is in the perspectives he takes on and in the conclusions he draws. To name but a few of his stellar pieces: his essay on Chantal Akerman (Fall 2024), in which he considers her filmography through Hitchockian influence. (The parallel Darragh draws between Akerman and the work of Stephen Dwoskin is just as illuminating.) The art of subtle parallel-drawing is also on display in Darragh’s review of Fallen Leaves (Summer 2024), in which he beautifully juxtaposes the aesthetic of Aki Kaurismäki with that of Yasujirō Ozu. In the same issue, he offers a fresh perspective on that most cryptic of filmmakers—the late Jean-Luc Godard, in his Bluray review of Godard Cinema. Earlier on, in the Winter 2023 issue, he authored an expansive essay on the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini that all but restructured my entire understanding of the tragic Italian poet-filmmaker. These are merely a few examples of many (I am not even mentioning the pioneering scholarship and archival research on the work of Stephen Dwoskin, in which Darragh quite simply excels). This letter is a means of saying: thank you. Thank you, Darragh—but also thank you, Cineaste, for introducing me to the work of one of the best film writers working today. As I finish making my way through the latest issue of the magazine, I cannot wait for the next one to hit my mailbox and delight me anew. Michał Oleszczyk Warsaw, Poland Coverage of Jewish Issues A note of appreciation for two illuminating interviews in your Fall 2024 issue on two of the strongest films to open last year: Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border and Cedric Kahn’s less noticed but no less powerful return to the murder trial of the French ultra-leftist Pierre Goldman, The Goldman Case. Speaking as a Jew, I submit that in a year that has been painful for all Jews no matter their political beliefs, both movies were highly relevant in contextualizing the massacre of European Jews during World War II. Holland’s interview makes explicit what is implicit in her movie: “What struck me immediately—when I first saw images of what was happening on the Polish-Belarusian border and talked to the people who were living there—was Holocaust imagery and the parallels.” Kahn’s interview underscores his sense of Goldman as a product of the Holocaust and an existential Jew (neither observant nor Zionist). As I’ve written elsewhere, The Goldman Case is not only a terrific movie—as formally rigorous as Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) in presenting an unyielding, self-possessed, imprisoned defendant—but unusually explicit in dramatizing the internal divisions that existed and continue to exist among Jews. AntiZionism (like anti-Communism) is not necessarily antisemitism; what’s antisemitic is the position that all Jews are necessarily Zionists (or Communists). In publishing interviews such as these, Cineaste continues to live up to its announced mission as a journal devoted to “the art and politics of the cinema.” J. Hoberman New York, NY I Second His Evaluation I’m writing to concur with the comments about Cineaste made by Peter Cowie in your Winter 2024 issue. I, too, am impressed with the constancy of your publication in defending film form and language. To me, the editorial line of Cineaste has always been the defense and illustration of cinema as a language specifically along the lines underlined by Peter, to which I adhere. With these thoughts in mind, I am reminded of the exchange between Fritz Lang and Jack Palance in Contempt. In the scene, that follows the screening of rushes of the film being shot within Godard’s film, Palance, script in hand, tells Lang, “That’s not what’s in that script!” To which Lang retorts, “Naturally, because in the script it’s written, and on the screen it’s pictures. Motion Pictures, it’s called!” Film productions have exploded over the last twenty or so years! And it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish one work from another. Too many movies are based, produced, and marketed as “subjects.” They are sometimes the work of gifted craftsmen and women but formally more and more resemble one another, if only for their subject. The narrative is predominant and film language is submitted to “storytelling and script continuity.” I think it was Wim Wenders who a few years ago said, in a deliberately provocative manner, that Cinema was dead! As he explained, “most of the new methods of filming have less to do with language than with tools. The medium is looking more and more like a ‘cacophony of images.’” Many other filmmakers and critics have taken up this idea and it does seem to me that too many films are being mass produced almost in a “assembly line” way. So much so that it has become almost impossible to compile filmographies yielding an authorial signature or a formal line traceable from one film to another—something that was possible for most film directors of the Sixties to the late Eighties. Indeed, these days I notice that trailers rarely mention the name of the director. I sometimes get the impression that films have become “self-generated.” Consequently, most of the national cinemas, as we knew them in the Sixties through the Eighties, are less and less promoted as such, as illustrated by our own Quebec and/or Canadian cinemas. Considering the number of pictures being produced over the last years in Canada, very few directors the likes of Denis Côté, Matthew Rankin, Guy Maddin, Sophie Deraspe, Léa Pool, Anne Émond , André Forcier, or Atom Egoyan stand out today. For these reasons and more, Cineaste is important to me as a rampart of film language, both in its evolution and practices. André Pâquet Montréal, Quebec Letters to the Editors Readers’ letters of comment should be emailed to cineaste@cineaste.com. Please try to keep your letters to 500 or fewer words. Authors of letters chosen for publication will receive a free one-year subscription or an extension of their current subscription. CINEASTE, Spring 2025 3

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CINEASTE, VOL. L, NO. 2, SPRING 2025

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ARTICLES Sins of the Father: Politics and Patriarchs in the Cinema of Leos Carax by Darragh O’Donoghue Both Good and Bad Fathers figure throughout the short filmography of French filmmaker Leos Carax, movies shown to be largely autobiographical in nature. 10 Everything or Nothing: The Cuban Revolution’s Censorship of Cinema by Matthew David Roe Miguel Coyula Aquino’s new documentary Chronicles of the Absurd testifies to the endless problems faced by Cuba’s filmmakers, dating from the Revolution’s earliest days, laboring under the smoke and mirrors of the government’s ideological dictates. 19 Masahiro Shinoda: At the Vanguard of the New and the Old by Adam Bingham With films like Demon Pond, which are not easily characterized, the director’s contributions to Japanese cinema have received less recognition but a reassessment is underway. 30 The Great Might-Have-Been of the French New Wave by Mitchell Abidor Anarchic, occasionally brilliant…and forgotten. However undisciplined the talent and uneven the results, Jacques Rozier, the last of his generation, deserves reconsideration. 37 INTERVIEWS All We Imagine as Light: An Interview with Payal Kapadia by Graham Fuller Directing her first fiction feature film encouraged the filmmaker to innovate for her story about three nurses within an expansive vision of Mumbai transpiring largely after dark. 4 Histories of French Cinema’s Moving Body: An Interview with Denis Lavant by Arta Barzanji It’s Not Me returns the performer to his collaboration with Leos Carax and their mutual creation, Monsieur Merde, the monstrous character introduced in Tokyo! 16 Meeting with Pol Pot: An Interview with Rithy Panh by Clarence Tsui Turning to fiction filmmaking, the documentarian imagines Meeting with Pol Pot, based on the true story of Western journalists seduced by the genocidal dictator’s propaganda. 26 La Cocina and the American Dream: An Interview with Alonso Ruizpalacios by Paul Risker No reservations required as the filmmaker takes us inside a busy Times Square restaurant, staffed largely by undocumented immigrants dealing with work and personal anxieties. 34 Mapping a Cinematic Grand Tour through Asia: An Interview with Miguel Gomes by Shahnaz Mahmud The director of Grand Tour, which combines period piece and Rom-Com elements, and who filmed throughout Asia, decided that his film would not use narrative conventions. 42 NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE AT WWW.CINEASTE.COM Article: Around The Clock: On an Overnight at MoMA by Will DiGravio. Film Review: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain reviewed by Graham Fuller. Book Review: Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre reviewed by Mitchell Abidor and Chris Marker: Early Film Writings reviewed by Nadine Boljkovac. Cover: Zoe Saldaña in Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez.

FILM REVIEWS Emilia Pérez Reviewed by Karen Backstein ....................45 Vermiglio Reviewed by Matthew Evangelista.............47 Witches Reviewed by Megan Feeney ........................49 Eureka Reviewed by Robert Koehler .......................51 Babygirl Reviewed by Mary F. Corey .......................53 Separated Reviewed by Charles Musser ......................55

HOME VIDEO REVIEWS Pandora’s Box Reviewed by Thomas Doherty ...................58 Scarface Reviewed by David Sterritt .........................60 Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger Reviewed by Jonathan Murray ..................62 The Long Good Friday Reviewed by Michael Sandlin.....................64 Enough Rope Reviewed by Matthew Hays ......................66 Paper Moon Reviewed by Christopher Bray ..................67 Staff Recommendations: Burn, Witch, Burn, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, The Eichmann Trial, The Hop-Pickers, and The Valley of the Bees Reviewed by Cineaste Editors ....................69

BOOK REVIEWS Hard to Watch: How to Fall in Love with Difficult Movies Reviewed by Catherine Russell ..................70 Elmer Bernstein, Film Composer: An Authorized Biography Reviewed by Robert Cashill .......................71 Still Film Crazy (After All These Years): Collected Interviews Reviewed by Phillip Lopate ........................73 George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director Reviewed by David Sterritt .....................74 From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary Reviewed by Karen Backstein ....................75 Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair Reviewed by Kurt Brokaw ..........................76 Book Brief Reviews ..............................78

DEPARTMENTS Editorial ..............................................1 Letters ........................................................3 Contributors ............................................57 Short Takes: Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, A Photographic Memory, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Sugarcane, Zurawski v Texas........80

2 CINEASTE, Spring 2025

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