Read On is a regular feature in which The Dissolve’s staff recommends recent film pieces. Because there’s always someone writing something notable about the movies somewhere on the Internet.
Movie Mezzanine’s Mallory Andrews looks at Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood as it fits in with the rest of her work:
“Images of containment and limitation recur throughout Sciamma’s work. When Laure/Mickäel first observes the neighborhood boys from afar, she peers at them through a chain-link fence: she relates to their maleness, but is held back from fully being able to join them. The blocky apartment complex where Laure/Mickäel’s family lives is a maze of sharp right angles and concrete barriers that evoke a sense of restraint. The apartment projects of Girlhood also make use of this claustrophobic mise-en-scène, with Vic seeking the freedom to “do as she pleases” in spaces that threaten to absorb her completely.”
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody on how critics have failed female filmmakers:
“[The New York Times’ Manohla] Dargis’s complaint about the state of the industry seems misplaced. Today’s leading independent visionaries are tomorrow’s acknowledged auteurs; rather than merely waving at independent filmmakers en route to the shining studio cities, it would be worth calling attention to artists of today who have made superb films and ought to be bumping up to the next level of financing and recognition. I’m thinking of such filmmakers as Amy Seimetz, Eliza Hittman, Josephine Decker, Miranda July, and Sophia Takal, and this is just for starters. Genuine independence—of mind—is the one quality that matters.”
IndieWire’s Sam Adams responds to Wired’s Jordan Crucchiolia’s piece on why journalists are the “worst people at Sundance”:
“I don't know Jordan Crucchiola, and based on her nebulous account, it's hard to tell what steps if any she took to get to know her fellow journalists. But I don't know how you can spend a day, let alone three or more, at a film festival and not hear a critic raving about something they've seen. The praise for Dope.The Witch, Me and Earl and the Teenage Girl, Z for Zachariah and The Diary of Teenage Girl, to name only a handful of breakout hits from this year's Sundance, may not have been uniform, but throw a rock in the Yarrow Hotel bar and you'd hit a critic who loved it. (Per Barton Fink, throw it hard.) Critics can be cynical and short-tempered — the long, often frustrated wait to get into movies in Sundance's crammed first few days occasioned plenty of inflamed outbursts — but they love what they do, even if not always the conditions under which they have to do it. I don't know of any figures to this effect, but I'd wager that a substantial percentage of Sundance's accredited press, maybe even a majority, struggle to turn a profit on covering the festival, no matter how hard they try to keep their expenses down. I shared a two-room apartment with three other critics, all veteran writers; last year, I shared a bed.”
The LA Times’ Mark Olson details a heated Sundance Q&A with the white-supremacist star of the doc Welcome To Leith:
“It was at this point, less than five minutes into the Q&A, that things began to turn. One person in the audience asked Mr. Cobb if he had ever fallen in love. This led to a slightly rambling, minute-long answer from Cobb in which he said he was thankful that where he is currently living doesn’t have a Girl Scout troop, ‘so I don’t have to contend with that feminine aspect of human reality, which is emotional and not logical.’ ‘I’m offended by all of this,’ shouted a woman from the audience. ‘This guy is a dangerous white supremacist and I think giving him a platform and trying to make a spectacle out of this is appalling.’ Currimbhoy attempted to calm the situation by saying, ‘We’re just trying to have a discussion, ma’am. We’re just trying to have an even debate here, that’s all.’ ”
Plus, the rest of today’s biz-ness: