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The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)

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What could be more thrillingly romantic than young, destitute artists falling in love while starving and drinking themselves to death on the streets of Paris? Try those young lovers beating up cops and lifting businessmen’s wallets together against a backdrop of fireworks & gunfire. Leos Carax’s 1991 stunner The Lovers on the Bridge depicts the kind of ferocious, burn-it-all-down love affair that scares everyone outside the mutually destructive pair at the center, whose romantic gestures include acts of betrayal, theft, murder, and institutionalization. It approaches Parisian homelessness with the same unsentimental, semi-documentary eye as Varda’s Vagabond, and yet it largely plays as a love letter to impulsive, erratic behavior instead of a dire warning against it. It’s a love story rotting in illness, addiction, and retributive violence, which greatly helps undercut the schmaltz when it frames the Eiffel Tower through the rotating spokes of a Ferris wheel. Countless movies gesture towards the all-consuming, obsessive passion of young love without ever fully capturing it; The Lovers on the Bridge is the real deal.

The English translation of the original French title is a deliberate simplification. The French title Les Amants du Pont-Neuf makes reference to a specific bridge, the oldest bridge in Paris (despite the name “Pont Neuf” paradoxically translating to “New Bridge”). It’s a historic site that has been cited as the location where the first human figure was ever captured in a photograph, an early daguerreotype experiment by the eponymous Louis Daguerre. It was also temporarily closed to the public for restoration from 1989 to 1991, when the film was set & produced. Juliette Binoche & Denis Lavant play young homeless artists who squat on that closed historic bridge, unsure how much they can trust one another despite their obvious mutual obsession. Our two lovers first encounter each other while their partner is unconscious. Binoche finds Lavant’s unresponsive, blackout drunk body in the street and sketches his corpse-like visage from memory. Once recovered, Lavant later finds Binoche sleeping in his personal alcove on the bridge, discovering the charcoal sketches of his own undead face and studying her with the same intense fascination in return. Once both awake, they start guzzling gallons of trash wine together and committing escalating crimes in the streets on either side of the Pont Neuf, coinciding with the citywide bicentennial celebration of The French Revolution. A painter and a street-performing firebreather, respectively, the homeless couple become unlikely, reckless avatars for the city’s long history of art, sex, violence, and sensual romance, breathing new life into Parisian clichés that have otherwise become as stale as an old baguette.

Like all great romances, The Lovers on the Bridge is propelled by tragedy. The film opens with Lavant’s unresponsive body being scraped off the pavement where he’s been run over in traffic. He’s washed & patched up by a city-run homeless shelter and then re-released back on the streets, where he immediately falls back into the self-destructive cycle that got him banged up in the first place — guzzling alcohol as intentional self-harm. Meanwhile, Binoche’s struggling artist is suffering a more medically diagnosable malady. Her eyesight is failing her due to a rare form of ocular degeneration that will soon leave her blind and unable to continue working. She’s relatively new to street life, while her drunkard firebreather lover appears to know how to thieve, grift, and glean with the best of ’em. After a short crime spree ties up some loose ends in Binoche’s former life as a semi-wealthy suburbanite, the pair quickly bond by getting wasted on cooking wine and laughing maniacally. Part of what makes their volatile dynamic so romantic is that either or both lovers could die at any moment, and they’re both selfish enough to die by the other’s hand in a desperate crime of passion. It almost plays a prank on the audience that the movie eventually ends on a moment of quiet sweetness, with Carax restaging the bus ride epilogue from The Graduate as an epiphanic embrace of the central romance instead of a reality-check rejection of it.

Contemporary movie nerds familiar with Leos Carax from the more recent, extravagant productions Holy Motors & Annette would know to expect an ecstatic, expressionistic visual style here that breaks away from the movie’s semi-documentary opening. Once Binoche & Lavant lock onto each other’s romantically nihilistic wavelength, the visual language soars — sometimes literally, mixing images of swarming birds and helicopters in a single, seemingly impossible shot. Their lives are small, tethered to a single stone bridge, but nothing about their depiction is simple. The painter cannot simply take her daily birth control pill; her lover must feed it to her via open-mouthed kiss. It’s not enough for the doomed pair to peer into the social lives of more fortunate & fashionable Parisians from the streets outside; the windows into nightclub are lowered to the pavement, so all that’s visible is the wealthy’s dancing feet & flashing lights. When laughing like children while high on bargain-bin wine, Carax uses a shift-tilt lens and oversized set decoration to physically shrink his performers in the frame. This expressionistic visual approach reaches its fever pitch during a grand bicentennial fireworks display, which is used as a backdrop for a Sinners-style musical sequence that mixes orchestral chamber music, Iggy Pop, Public Enemy, and Bal-musette accordion waltzes into one delirious post-modern cacophony. Improbably, it lands as one of the most romantic sequences of cinematic spectacle I can recall instead going full cornball. It’s also immediately followed by the lovers bonking a beat cop on the head and hijacking his boat for a joy ride, somehow escalating the visual spectacle even further through a brief detour into vaudevillian slapstick.

The Lovers on the Bridge was recently restored in a new 4k scan by Janus Films, and it’s currently bouncing around American arthouses. I recently caught it at The Broad’s weekly Gap Tooth Cinema rep series in New Orleans, weeks after Boomer reported it was playing alongside Carax’s Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang at the Austin Film Society one state over. That loose thematic trilogy surprisingly makes up half of Carax’s total catalog of features, which means he’s not an especially intimidating auteur to catch up with in terms of prolificacy. There’s more out there than just Holy Motors, but not much more. The Lovers on the Bridge is as good of a place to start as any, since it’s so utterly romantic, so utterly violent, and so utterly, utterly French.

-Brandon Ledet

Naked Ambition (2025)

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One of cinema’s greatest virtues is how it functions as a populist access point to art. Not only is the medium itself a collaboration between artists of many talents—photographers, writers, actors, costumers, sculptors, set designers, musicians, make-up artists, etc.—but its documentary branch can also document and distribute fine-art images to the widest audience possible, making fine art objects readily accessible to virtually everyone. While it could be prohibitively expensive to travel the world seeing the great works in person or to collect high-end art books that present them in the best 2D renderings available, it doesn’t cost all that much to watch a movie. With enough patience & a library card, you can even access most documentaries about fine artists for free. There’s obviously something lost in not seeing a large-scale oil painting in person or hearing a world-class musician perform from across the room, but fine-art photography is especially apt for the documentary treatment, since montages of still photographs largely function the same way as catching a photographer’s career-retrospective slideshow in a physical art gallery. Thanks to the movies, I’ve seen hundreds of photographs from the likes of Nan Goldin, Lauren Greenfield, Ernest Cole, and George Dureau that would have cost exorbitant sums of money & time to track down in other venues. Formally, documentaries about photographers don’t need to try very hard to be worthwhile. A feature-length slideshow narrated by talking heads who know the artist personally is already well worth any art-enthusiast’s time, especially if you don’t live the kind of life that allows you to travel to Paris, London, and New York City between shifts at your soul-crushing 9 to 5.

It might seem a little flippant to praise a documentary for providing wide public access to vintage nudie pics as if they were the cultural equal to Guernica or the Mona Lisa, but vintage cheesecake photographer Bunny Yeager has well earned that art-realm prestige. The new documentary Naked Ambition argues that Yeager should be recognized for her artistic & political merit as a skilled portraitist, pushing back against her superficial reputation as the pornographer who made Bettie Page the world’s most famous pin-up model. However, that work has already been done by fine art curators in recent years, who have staged retrospectives of Yeager’s work in legitimizing gallery spaces instead of the nudie mags where her photos were more traditionally exhibited. Even if Bunny Yeager were “just” a pornographer, her contributions to the visual lexicon of American pop art would still be worthy of a career-retrospective gallery show or documentary. Her iconic collaborations with Page and her aesthetic-defining contributions to Playboy‘s early, semi-literary days helped define an entire genre of vintage American smut that has been gradually disseminated & recontextualized enough that her artistic influence is now immeasurable. She also has a great print-the-legend story as “the world’s prettiest photographer,” having started as a pin-up model herself before learning how to operate a camera. As profiled here, Bunny Yeager was just as highly fashionable as she was highly ambitious. Her career as a public spectacle affords the movie more than enough vintage talk show clips, nudie cutie excerpts, and celebrity name-dropping anecdotes to fill its 73-minute runtime, but the real treasure is the access it gives the public to high-quality scans of her photographs. Like Bunny herself, they consistently look fantastic and convey a timeless cool.

If there’s any value to Naked Ambition outside of its function as a Bunny Yeager slideshow, it’s in its peripheral portrait of Miami, Florida sleaze from the 1950s through the 1970s. Alongside young feminist talking heads who link Yeager’s work to modern phenomena like burlesque revues, Insta selfies, and OnlyFans modeling, the doc also drags out a few surviving old-timers from Yeager’s heyday to attest to the grease & sleaze of vintage Miami living. The late, erratic news anchor Larry King is a surprise MVP in that respect, telling wild stories about how easy it was to get laid in his radio broadcast days that have no direct relevance to Yeager’s work except to establish the mise-en-scène in which it was created. There are also brief glimpses into the private lives of Sammy Davis, Jr. and the surprisingly gravel-voiced Bettie Page that happen to appear in anecdotes, but for the most part Yeager’s social life appeared to be more domestic than glamorous. As much as Yeager’s skill & fashionability elevated her work to fine-art quality, it was still produced as commercial material meant to financially provide for her family. Her surviving daughters are in an ongoing dispute about whether to treat the work she’s left behind as archive-worthy art or disposable smut, but they at least appear to agree that they were raised in a loving home with emotionally present parents. If you read between the lines during their opposing interviews, there is some juicy drama to be found here in how Bunny Yeager is being remembered by the people who loved her most, but that domestic conflict isn’t really any of Naked Ambition‘s business. The movie cares most about the work itself, which is presented in constant art-gallery slideshow. Assuming the public display of nude breasts can no longer shock a modern audience, there is nothing especially surprising or daring about that cinematic presentation, but there is something greatly virtuous about its ease of access.

-Brandon Ledet

George Dureau: New Orleans Artist (2023)

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I have been aware of George Dureau’s legacy as a local artist for as long as I have been aware of local art, but until now I’ve only ever seen a toned-down, smoothed-out presentation of his actual work. Dureau was an edgy, confrontational presence in the early decades of his notoriety, but by the time I was old enough to explore local art galleries on my own in the 2000s, he had become a respectable cultural ambassador for the city, delivering commissioned works of public art for institutions like NOMA & Gallier Hall. The only time I’ve ever seen his image outside of self-portraits and still photographs is in a made-for-PBS documentary about the process of constructing Mardi Gras parade-floats, titled From the Ground Up. Introduced to him as a venerated public artist, I assumed his personal work was as safe & kitschy as George Rodrigue’s, but Dureau was much more provocative than that. He had just already gone through the John Waters trajectory of outsider-art iconoclast turned Respected Filth Elder before I was around to see the transformation. Thankfully, the new documentary George Dureau: New Orleans Artist is here to correct the record.

George Dureau: New Orleans Artist is a documentary portrait of a classic French Quarter eccentric, crudely stitched together from the stories & works he left behind.  The movie itself is ragged in its construction, seemingly assembled from whatever scraps of interviews with Dureau could be found on YouTube and molding camcorder tapes, with little attention paid to their mismatched sound quality. Despite enjoying an active social & professional life in the city for over eight decades, only eight interviewees are included in this hagiographic portrait, which either feels lazy or cowardly (depending on how divisive other participants might have found his personality or art). The filmmaking team of Sergio Andres Lobo-Navia & Jarret Lofstead are inconsistent in the final edit on when to illustrate those interviewees’ anecdotes with location-specific images captured around the city and when to just repeat triple-exposure shots of oak tree canopies filmed from below as a place-holder background image for the audience to zone out to. Still, no matter the moment-to-moment quibbles I had with the presentation, I left overall grateful for them giving this subject a feature-length treatment in the first place.

As a slideshow of art stills, New Orleans Artist is thrilling. Dureau thought of himself primarily as a painter and was frustrated by the curational attention paid to his photographs instead. Both mediums are presented with equal weight & importance here, drawing a throughline between the macho, muscular models he scouted to photograph in his home studio and the classical figure paintings that resulted from those studies. A homosexual lush with a warm but caustic demeanor, Dureau is portrayed as his own worst professional enemy, self-sabotaging his way through The Art World as he blew easy opportunities in order to maintain a vague personal integrity that only he fully understood. This self-driven conflict is mostly explained in his relationship with infamous NYC photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whom both the film and Dureau himself argue photocopied all of his best visual ideas in less interesting, crueler works that made a lot more money in a market that thrives on cruelty. Dureau’s own work could cynically be seen as exploitative towards his nonprofessional models, whom he often sought for their differences in race & physical disfigurement. Mapplethorpe is presented at length as both an example of Dureau’s self-sabotaging professional combativeness and as an example of how this same work could be truly exploitative in the wrong hands.

A better movie might have focused entirely on Dureau’s warmly bitchy clashes with Mapplethorpe and the mutual influences of their work as contemporaries. There’s a specificity & purpose to that subject that’s missing in the film’s broader recollections of Dureau’s life in the city, which often devolve into “Ain’t dere no more” nostalgia and understandable-but-rote mourning over the devastation of AIDS & Hurricane Katrina (both of which Dureau survived relatively intact). By the time local art gallery owner Arthur Rogers explains that the French Quarter of the 1970s was different from today because it was full of “true eccentrics” then, I was nauseated by the obliviousness to the city’s ongoing art-scene counterculture; speaking of it purely in the past tense is embarrassing, not validating. Dureau’s work is powerful enough to speak for itself, though, and it loudly speaks over any good-old-days distractions from the film’s few interviewees. His work feels especially alive when compared with Mapplethorpe’s, seeming much cooler & kinder than his more famous frenemy’s (which was blurred at local screenings, presumably due to copyright issues). No one would have hated a side-by-side Dureau/Mapplethorpe documentary more than George Dureau himself, though, so it’s probably for the best that the only feature-length documentary of his work to date is about his relationship with New Orleans instead, something he did have genuine affection for.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #216: Sick – The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)

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Welcome to Episode #216 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Nail Club‘s Sara Nicole Storm to discuss the 1997 outsider-artist documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.

00:00 Nail Club
12:56 Sick (1997)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Altered Docs

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My happy place is the Altered Innocence logo card.  When I close my eyes, I’m often transported to that James Bidgoodian terrarium, which is just as often tacked to the front of the best films on the modern media landscape.  Not everything the high-style, queer distributor releases can be as transcendent as all-star titles like The Wild Boys, Knife+Heart, Arrebato, and Equation to an Unknown, though.  Like all small-operation film labels, they’re also in the business of releasing minor, low-budget festival acquisitions that would otherwise drift into the great distribution abyss.  And if you’ve ever been to a film festival, you know that distro model is going to include a lot of documentaries – a medium that’s cheap to produce but difficult to market.  I’ve run across a couple Altered Innocence documentaries before on both ends of that distribution path: I caught their couture culture documentary House of Cardin at New Orleans French Film Fest before it was certain to land proper distro, and I sought out the personal coming-out essay film Madame because it already had the Altered Innocence stamp of approval.  I love Altered Innocence most for its proud, consistent platforming of arthouse weirdos Yann Gonzalez & Bertrand Mandico, but I also respect that their stated mission to release “LGBTQ & Coming-of-Age films with an artistic edge” extends to smaller, no-name directors whose work would otherwise screen once at venues like Outfest, then fade into oblivion.  In that spirit, I’d like to highlight two recent queer-culture documentaries distributed by Altered Innocence that might not have as flashy of a premise as phantasmagorical fiction titles like After Blue: Dirty Paradise (a sci-fi acid Western in which a lesbian orgy planet cowers in fear of a demonic assassin named Kate Bush) but still deserve wide attention & distribution anyway.

The more innocuous title of this pair is 2019’s Queer Japan, a densely packed, low-budget documentary about contemporary queer culture in—you guessed it—Japan.  I’m calling it innocuous because it’s relatively soft in its political advocacy, over-explaining basic concepts that are common to most queer subcultures regardless of region.  It argues that drag is art, bisexuality is real, and lesbian spaces are too often trans-exclusionary, all while scrolling through a never-ending glossary of basic terms in onscreen text & Instagram graphics.  It’s somewhat illuminating as an update to the semi-fictional, half-century-old street interviews in Funeral Parade of Roses but, overall, the film’s queer politics are largely understated & unspecific.  Thankfully, its region-specific details are much more prominent in the “artistic edge” Altered Innocence seeks to platform.  At its best, Queer Japan is an extensive catalog of beautiful queer visual artists, ranging from avant garde drag performers to gay manga illustrators to high-fashion latex & puppy play fetishists.  It also doubles as a tourist roadmap to popular queer nightclubs & pride events in its titular country, which I suppose might be of use to travelers using the doc as a quick crash-course primer.  There’s a wide enough range of vibrant pop art footage that it’s instantly clear why director Graham Kobeins decided they had enough raw material to justify a feature length documentary here; it must’ve been daunting to edit.  If anything, though, that overabundance of subject material is almost too wide of a scope for one documentary.   I would have been a lot more enthusiastic about it as a whole if it dropped its onscreen dictionary of political terms and instead focused entirely on profiling queer Japanese artists in particular, since that’s where its heart appeared to be.

By contrast, the 2017 punk scene documentary Queer Core: How to Punk a Revolution did pull off the trick of tackling both queer art & queer politics without overextending itself.  A talking-heads nostalgia trip into the queer zine culture of punk’s hardcore & riot grrrl eras, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the film in terms of form, but its revolutionary content more than makes up for it.  It has plenty furious things to say about assimilation politics that continue to resonate beyond its vintage punk scene infighting & self-mythology, loudly decrying assimilation a “death trap”.  It also has a stylistic upper hand over Queer Japan in its archival footage’s vintage zine aesthetics, cobbling together a loose art scene between such disparate artists as Bruce LaBruce, Vaginal Davis, Team Dresch, Tribe 8, and Bikini Kill (citing earlier provocateurs like Quentin Crisp, John Waters, and William S. Burroughs as their queer elders).  Somehow, though, its political advocacy comes across as much sharper & more specific than its corollary in Queer Japan.  It throws punches at supposed counterculture movements like hippies & punks for continuing the retrograde sexual politics of their Right Wing enemies, pointing out “punk”‘s origins as an explicitly queer term and pushing back against the macho hardcore scene & AIDS paranoia of the Reagan Era.  As soon as Queer Core opens with a cumshot title card, its goal to make straight-boy punks uncomfortable is loud & clear, and all of its hagiographic interviews of queercore, homocore, and riot grrrl artists are filtered through that viscus lens.  Director Yony Leyser’s only real misstep is an early narration track that’s quickly dropped to instead let the subjects speak for themselves, since they’re all loudly, politically opinionated enough to carry the movie on their own.  The art cataloged in Queer Japan is on par with the art cataloged in Queer Core, but only one movie makes great use of the political meaning behind its creation.

You don’t have to be a physical media collector to access these titles.  Queer Japan is currently streaming for free (with a library membership) on Kanopy, and Queer Core is streaming for free (with ad breaks) on Tubi.  As strongly as I preferred Queer Core out of the two, they’re both worth your time if you have any interest in their respective subjects.  I’d even extend that to say that I’ve yet to see an Altered Innocence release that isn’t worth your time.  They’re the best distributor of “LGBTQ & Coming-of-Age films with an artistic edge” that I can name, give or take a Strand Releasing.

-Brandon Ledet

The NYC Art Gallery Concert Film

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I recently found myself falling down a hyperspecific rabbit hole watching live performances of bands that meant a lot to me in high school. It started with the David Byrne concert film American Utopia, which I caught up with on HBO as part of the late-in-the-year hunt for potential Best of the Year list-toppers. Even more so than the landmark Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, American Utopia is a unique specimen within the concert film genre. Unlike most rock concert docs, it doesn’t aim to energize or throttle the audience in any discernible way. It’s an upbeat but gentle work, staged with regimented, clinical precision within the rigid confines of a Broadway theatrical setting. Spike Lee directs the film with a controlled, observant formalism that only appears in flashes in his messier, more idiosyncratic works. As a movie, American Utopia is more like stumbling across a performance art piece in an NYC art gallery than attending a rock show or even a typical Broadway musical. It’s not the only concert film of that exact ilk, though, and I soon found myself seeking out more heady art gallery concert docs on its wavelength to keep the arty party going.

I was lucky enough to catch the traveling American Utopia show live at the 2018 Jazz Fest, but it was a lot more of a traditional rock performance than what’s captured in the movie version. Watching Byrne perform for the first time live in the afternoon sunshine, I found myself crying while dancing in a rare moment of ecstatic happiness – maybe the second time I’ve ever experienced such euphoria at a concert. That Jazz Fest set was an abbreviated version of the show, one that cut out a few songs and, more importantly, abbreviated the spoken monologues that act as the show’s thematic throughline. In the movie (and, presumably, most live performances of the act), Byrne’s parade of solo & Talking Heads hits are bookended by short lectures that examine the function & the soul of American culture from a distanced outsider perspective; it’s a kind of spiritual sequel to Byrne’s small-town America portrait True Stories in that way. It’s an honest but optimistic temperature check of where America is today, both acknowledging the horrors of racially-motivated police brutality that have long been a stain on this country’s honor and pointing to our current moment of change as a possibly transformative turning point towards a better future. Meanwhile, everything onstage is rigidly uniformed & regimented like a dystopian sci-fi film, with the traditional rock performers’ instruments & colorful costuming stripped away to mimic the minimalism of modern performance art.

American Utopia has earned plenty accolades as one of the best cinematic experiences of the year, but it’s not the only NYC Art Gallery Concert Film that was recently highlighted as a Cultural Event. In an effort to stay visible as a cultural institution despite ongoing COVID-lockdowns, the Brooklyn concert venue St. Ann’s Warehouse has been periodically broadcasting past shows on YouTube, free-to-the-public. A recent one that caught my eye (thanks to write-ups on sites like the New York Times) was a 2007 concert film version of Lou Reed’s Berlin. The follow-up to Reed’s cult solo record Transformer, Berlin was a critical & financial flop in 1973, a failure that broke the rock ‘n roller’s heart to the point where he refused to play songs from the album live. The 2007 performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse is a decades-in-the-making event, then, finding Reed performing the proggy concept album in its entirety with a sprawling backup band that included contributions from Sharon Jones, Antony, and a full children’s choir. It also translated Berlin into the world of Visual Art, layering in dramatic visualizations of the album’s loose “narrative” (as projections on the stage and interjections on the screen) as if they were fuzzy memories bubbling up to the surface of the songs. The film’s director, fine art painter Julian Schnabel, does his best to turn the concert film experience into an instillation piece, achieving an art gallery aesthetic in a much uglier, more somber way than Byrne’s work. Weirdly enough, both movies also happen to share a cinematographer in Ellen Kuras.

After watching Berlin & American Utopia in short succession, I caught myself wondering what the ultimate NYC Art Gallery Concert Film would be. The answer was immediately obvious, although I had not yet seen the film myself because of its limited availability. Laurie Anderson’s 1986 concert film Home of the Brave is a 90min distillation of her two-night concert piece United States I-IV. Having now only seen a fuzzy rip of the film that’s lurking on YouTube (as it unforgivably has never made the format leap from VHS & laserdisc to DVD), I’m fairly confident in calling it The Greatest Concert Film of All Time. I know that title has been communally bestowed upon Stop Making Sense, but Anderson’s piece certainly belongs in that conversation, if not only for highlighting how her work pioneered a lot of the more Conceptual Art elements that goes into Byrne’s stage shows. Anderson also observes the soul & structure of America in a series of abstracted, outsider-POV lectures the way Byrne does in American Utopia, but those monologues are interwoven into her avant-garde new wave songs to the point where there’s no boundary between them. Projectors, voice modulators, newly invented instruments, and guest appearances from William S. Burroughs of all people are prominently featured in her show as if they were the hallmarks of a rock ‘n roll music video instead of weirdo outsider-artist eccentricities. While American Utopia & Berlin evoke the mood & setting of an art gallery, Home of the Brave is an art gallery, and it’s a shame that it’s the only film of the three that you can’t currently access in Blu-ray quality.

Although she’s less of a household name elsewhere, Laurie Anderson was very much an equal & a contemporary alongside David Byrne & Lou Reed in NYC art snob circles (and Reed’s spouse in the final years of his life, a pain explored in the experimental essay film Heart of a Dog). Stop Making Sense might have preceded the concert film version of her United States I-IV act by a few years, but she was already pushing its more out-there ideas (especially its use of projectors) to their furthest extremes in her own stage work at that same time. If anything, American Utopia finds David Byrne leaning even further into the Laurie Anersonisms of his own work, to the point where it feels like it’s turning Home of the Brave‘s idiosyncrasies into a concert film subgenre all of its own. The only other concert doc I can name that approaches these films’ shared NYC art gallery aesthetic is Bjork’s Biophilia project, which is great company to be in. They might not be the most raucous or chaotic specimens of rock ‘n roll hedonism, but they collectively strive to elevate the concert film to new artistic highs; and Anderson clearly stands as the mastermind of the medium.

-Brandon Ledet

Mr Klein (1976)

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It sometimes feels as if the canon of Cinematic Classics has already been set in stone, as if there’s no major discoveries left to be found that haven’t already been exulted by cultural institutions like The Criterion Collection or The Sight & Sound Top 100 list. That’s why restorations of forgotten, discarded gems like Mr. Klein are so vital to modern cinephilia, keeping the hope alive for decades-delayed discoveries. Directed by HUAC-backlisted American ex-pat Joseph Losey in the grim, grimy days of the 1970s, Mr. Klein has been shoddily distributed in the decades since, to the point where it’s been effectively backlisted itself. Maybe some of its initial critical reluctance in France was due to its American filmmaker going exceptionally hard on targeting French authorities for cooperating with Nazis while under German occupation (still a fresh wound at the time of its initial release). Maybe the film was simply just considered not particularly great, just another vanity project for its tabloid-friendly leading man Alain Delon in the titular role; maybe its exceptional qualities only became apparent with time & distance away from Delon’s peak star wattage. Whatever the case, it’s a great work that deserves great respect, the exact kind of discarded gem that self-serious film nerds cream their jeans over when it’s rescued for the digital restoration treatment. Rialto Films isn’t only keeping Mr. Klein alive with this restoration; they’re also keeping alive the thrill of the hunt.

Delon stars as an unscrupulous art dealer who makes a fortune off the Holocaust’s slow intrusion into German-occupied France. As doomed Jewish citizens seek the road money necessary to escape Nazi rule, Mr. Klein lowballs them on the worth of their precious art collections, profiting off their terror. This unseemly business is disrupted when Klein is mistaken by French authorities to be Jewish himself, as he shares a name with a much less wealthy French citizen who’s on the path to be exported to a German concentration camp. Arrogantly convinced that his wealth & public stature will protect him, Klein decides to address this mix-up through official, administrative channels instead of fleeing France himself. His delusions that he can remain uninvolved in the plight of French Jews makes him more involved than ever. As he falls down a Kafkaesque bureaucracy rabbit hole in an attempt to clear his name, he effectively become both a Nazi and a Jew himself: hunting down the “real” Robert Klein to bring them to “justice” and being treated like a lousy criminal by the Nazi-complying French authorities because of an arbitrary criterion beyond his control. It’s clear from the start where the story is headed, as the movie largely functions as a Twilight Zone-style morality tale, but the point is less in the surprise of the plot than it is in the ugly depths of Klein’s authoritarian, self-serving character. This is a damn angry film about the evils of Political Apathy, and a damn great one.

Where Mr. Klein might frustrate some plot-obsessed viewers is in its predictability, it more than makes up for it in eerie mood. Its Kafkaesque bureaucracy nightmare and fits of uncanny horror almost suggest that Klein’s plight will tip into supernatural fantasy at any moment, as if he has a genuine doppelgänger roaming the streets of Paris in wait of a violent showdown. Mostly, though, the film operates like a grimy 1970s throwback to the heyday of noir. Klein’s late-night investigations of shadowy figures, dangerous dames, and widespread political corruption recall a wide range of classic noir tropes, right down the trench coat & fedora of his costuming. By the very first scene, he already tips the archetype of the noir anti-hero into full-fledged villainy, as he’s introduced fleecing a devastated Jewish man while dressed in an obnoxious silk bathrobe in his luxurious apartment. His villainy only worsens as he pursues the “real” Robert Klein instead of fleeing France himself, something he’s easily equipped to do. What’s his ideal success story here? That he clears his own name by condemning a Jewish man to death in a concentration camp? Klein is convinced the French authorities will clear his name through proper channels in time, yet he only becomes guiltier in the eyes of the audience and in the eyes of the Nazis the more he fights his designation as a Jewish citizen. Like all great Twilight Zone plots, it’s the story of a morally defunct man getting his cosmically just deserts, with plenty of uncanny chills along the way. It just happens to be dressed up more like a spooky noir film than an outright horror.

I hope that this restoration of Mr. Klein rescues it from its relative obscurity to present it as one of the era’s great works. If nothing else, there are isolated images from the film that continue to haunt me the way all Great Cinema does: a Nazi phrenology exam, a mansion left empty by pilfered artwork, the world’s most horrific drag brunch, etc. Whether that critical reappraisal is imminent or not, just the chance to see it projected on the big screen with a totally unprepared audience at this year’s New Orleans French Film Festival was enough of a wonder to justify Rialto Films’s restoration of this forgotten gem. Our modern-day audience was thrilled, chilled, and traumatized by the experience, which is just as validating as a proper entry in the Great Cinema canon.

-Brandon Ledet

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

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Contemporary art galleries are some of my favorite places in the world. The shiny white floors and tall white walls sparsely decorated with bizarre, thought-provoking pieces make me feel like I’m trapped in a glorious nightmare. Dan Gilroy explores this mix of art and horror in his most recent Netflix film, Velvet Buzzsaw. It’s mysterious, stylish, and oh so very gory.

I have yet to see Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, but I’m well aware Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance in the film was well received. I haven’t seen many Gyllenhaal  films, so I never really had an opinion about him. I always thought he was just okay, far from being a noteworthy actor. His performance in Velvet Buzzsaw has completely changed the way I feel about him. I never thought I would say this, but I’m officially a Jake Gyllenhaal fan! His character in the film, Morf Vandewalt, is a pretentious art critic who is extremely influential in the art world. How Gyllenhaal was able to make me fall in love with such an unlikeable character is beyond me.

In the beginning of the film, Morf leaves his boyfriend and develops a sexual relationship with his colleague, Josephina (Zawe Ashton). There aren’t nearly as many bisexual characters in cinema as there should be, so this was just another reason for me to appreciate Morf. Josephina works under Rhonda (Rene Russo), a well-known, tough-as-nails art dealer who was once a member of a punk band named Velvet Buzzsaw (the origin of the film’s title). Josephina is sweet and probably the most down-to-Earth out of the bunch, but that all starts to change when she uncovers the massive personal art collection of her deceased mysterious elderly neighbor. Josephina claims the paintings, and after she brings them to the attention of her fellow art associates, the paintings take the art world by storm. When anyone looks at the paintings, they look like they saw Jesus Christ in the flesh. It’s obvious there’s something magical about these paintings, but once those who come in contact with them begin to die in mysterious ways, the paintings go from being magical to pure evil.

Velvet Buzzsaw effortlessly balances being a satire of the highbrow art world while also being a blood-soaked slasher. The star-studded cast (including fabulous appearances by my all-time favorite actress, Toni Collette) work their magic by giving fabulous performances without allowing the film to lose its funky underground vibes. This is one of the best horror films to come out so far this year,  so 2019 is definitely off to a good start.

-Britnee Lombas

Yellow is Forbidden (2019)

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I’ve been making an attempt in the last few years to learn more about fashion as an artform – something I have a lot of ground to catch up on after decades of being a snotty brat who didn’t appreciate its full value. Unlike other niche artforms I’ve recently taken a better-late-than-never interest in – pro wrestling, drag, comic books, etc. – fashion doesn’t have an easy crash course introduction to its history or artistry. You can pick up practically any comic book issue, tune into any wrasslin’ bout, or drop by any dive bar drag show and get a basic feel for the merits of their respective media. To fully get fashion, by contrast, there’s centuries of factual history, evolution in craft, cultural context, and seasonal fads to catch up on to even approach a basic appreciation of what you’re looking at. I’ve found a couple decent quick-fix workarounds to this daunting gap in my art history education: The podcast Dressed: The History of Fashion is an excellent resource, although an auditory account of a visual medium. Reality competition shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, Project Runway, and America’s Next Top Model drop fashion history context in small morsels while showing off the basic building blocks of workroom craft (when not distracted with the typical beats of reality TV drama). Documentaries, then, would seem like the perfect middle ground between the fashion history podcast & the reality completion show – offering an explicitly visual format that can discuss historical context and fully display the artistry of the medium. That’s why it’s so frustrating that so many fashion documentaries fail their subjects by only profiling personalities & historical movements – literally losing sight of the artform being discussed, zapping it of its visual majesty.

Although its own subject is extremely niche, Yellow is Forbidden is a cut above the average fashion documentary in this way. A feature-length profile of Chinese couture designer Guo Pei, the film largely traffics in the well-established grooves of the fashion doc as a medium. Its fascination with Guo Pei’s larger-than-life ambition & peculiar persona, and its tangential interest in the history of Chinese fashion & the current state of Chinese textile production, are well in tune with the concerns of the typical fashion documentary. It even works those contextual details into a clear narrative structure, following Guo Pei as she prepares for a career-high runway collection meant to earn her recognition among the Parisian haute couture elite. Where Yellow is Forbidden overachieves within its own medium, however, is in the cinematic eye of its director (and fine art journalist) Pietra Brettkelly. Within just a few minutes of the film I was crying at the beauty & extravagance of Guo Pei’s work. That’s not something that can be achieved with a photograph or a podcast recap or even television news coverage of a runway show. Guo Pei’s extravagant, hand-beaded art gowns speak loudly for themselves as grand, inspired works of genius design, ambitious collaborations that take years to stitch into place. I’m sure seeing them in person, whether in motion on the runway or propped up on art museum display, could easily trigger an emotional response in an observer. That’s not an easy experience to reproduce in the document of a show, however, and I’ve seen few fashion films even attempt to do so as actively as Yellow is Forbidden. Brettkelly shoots Guo Pei’s designs with the careful, eerie beauty of an arthouse nature documentary, matching the avant-garde designs on display with its own heightened cinematic language. It’s an impulse I wish were more prevalent in the fashion doc as a medium.

Guo Pei is most widely recognized for having designed a bright yellow dress modeled by Rihanna at the Met Gala in 2015. The story of how she & that gown got to that world stage and how much of a struggle it has been to be recognized by the infamously snobbish Parisian couture elite in the years since is perfectly suited for the documentary feature treatment. Themes of class disparity, political tyranny, racial & gendered glass ceilings, and the abuses of auteurist ambition arise naturally in Guo Pei’s quest to impress The Haute Couture Commission with her climactic runway show. Brettkelly could have very easily rested on the virtues of telling that story in plain documentarian language. Instead, Guo Pei’s intensely dyed fabrics, wedding gowns made of pearls, and glow-in-the-dark contraptions are treated as part of a larger, ethereal cinematic language that includes goldfish fins waving in slow-motion, kaleidoscopes turning in impossible configurations, and the cold digital exterior views of cityscapes being harshly interrupted by intensely colorful art shows of the museums they contain. Composer Tom Third matches this eerie beauty with an appropriately atmospheric, delicately sinister score. Brettkelly excels at the fashion documentary by keeping in mind that she’s not only documenting history; she’s also cataloging fine art – an achievement in craft & a sensory experience that’s difficult, but necessary to recreate in your documentation to do couture creations justice. The ambition of Guo Pei’s work and the importance of her outsider status in the fashion industry are enough to trigger an emotional response on their own merits, but what makes Yellow is Forbidden a great film is the way it attempts to match that significance in its own mood & artistry. It feels less like an academic document of a culturally significant artist than it does like a swooning, dizzying trip to a fine art museum where the designer’s work is on magnificent display.

If you’re as ignorant to the history & cultural context of the fashion industry as I am, I’m not sure that Yellow is Forbidden will do much to fill in those gaps of personal knowledge. There’s some insight here into textile production & the political limitations of the industry’s gatekeepers. Yet, this story of one artist’s struggle for recognition & legitimacy within that paradigm is a little too specific to be all that illuminating in a big picture sense. Guo Pei’s work in particular is very much worthy of study for anyone with an interest in fashion as an artform, though, no matter how well versed you are in the subject. Yellow is Forbidden does justice to her artistry by at least attempting to match her ambition in its own craft, no matter the impossibility of that task. That’s an ethos that the fashion documentary template in general could benefit from repeating, as too many middling docs chase down the medium’s history at the expense of its visual art.

-Brandon Ledet

As Is (2017)

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Imagine being told the best band you’ve never heard before just played a mind-blowing concert nearby, but it’s okay that you missed it because there was an all-access documentary produced around the event. The documentary shows you all of the practice, fine-tuning and songwriting leading up to the day of that mind-blowing, life-changing, world-stopping concert, and then documents none of the performance itself, just the reactions of the people who were there in the audience. Would that leave you frustrated or satisfied? The recent small scale documentary As Is details the behind-the-scenes production of a one-time-only multimedia performance staged by visual artist Nick “Not That Nick Cave” Cave in Shreveport, Louisiana in 2015. The film documents all of the artist’s intent, production logistics, and cultural context in the weeks leading up to this performance, then stops short of documenting any of the real thing once it’s executed. It’s like watching the behind the scenes footage of a concert you weren’t invited to for a band you’ve never heard of before. It’s very frustrating.

Glimpses at Nick Cave’s visual creations is certainly the draw for this unassuming art doc. Cave is most well-known for his “sound suits,” costumes that essentially look like a Yo Gabba Gabba! character made out of brightly colored cheerleader pompoms. The construction of these costumes is very reminiscent of the similar traditional garb worn at Cajun Mardi Gras celebrations (Courir de Mardi Gras); the beaded blankets meant to accompany them in the one-time performance are similar to the beading of Mardi Gras Indian costumes. This Louisiana cultural context is entirely ignored by Cave, an “international artist” who acts as if he were creating these works in a void. Incorporating over 600 collaborators from the Shreveport area as beaders, dancers, musicians, and lyricists, he certainly interacts with the local community. He just treats that interaction like an act of charity instead of a cultural exchange by making a huge to do about how his show has elevated local visual art with high falutin’ NYC production values. He speaks of the cultural & religious undertones in As Is in such vague terms that by the time a gospel choir arrives to sing about how “He changed my life and now I’m free” it’s understandable to assume they’re praising Nick Cave, not God. Lip service is paid to healing the trauma of Katrina, homelessness, mental illness, and so on among the local people of Shreveport, but as the film goes on the whole show starts to feel like a complex ego boost for Cave himself and nobody else.

So, was As Is a once-in-a-lifetime art event that forever transformed Shreveport and sealed Nick Cave’s legacy as a charitable, soul-healing deity? It’s tough to tell, because this film does not invite the audience to see the performance for themselves. The gospel, zydeco, light shows, sound suits, and (appallingly muted) Big Freedia performances suggest that it could have either been a total mess or a work of genius. Without being given enough evidence to verify either way, it’s difficult not to turn on Nick Cave as he boasts at length about the transformative nature of his art and all of the good deeds he’s done bringing real culture to Shreveport (again, without acknowledging the immediate similarities between his work & long-established Louisiana culture). As Is might be a much more rewarding doc for anyone who actually witnessed its subject in person, but for everyone on the outside looking in, it’s a frustratingly incomplete work about the supposedly transformative accomplishments of a very vain man. At least the beading and sound suits are verifiably cool-looking; there isn’t much else to latch onto.

-Brandon Ledet