In Theaters: It’s a pretty quiet week, which is just fine because the Knicks are rolling through the playoffs and in the immortal, puzzlingly non-Oscar winning words of Diane Warren, “I don’t want to miss a thing!” While I’m definitely going to make time to see Erupcja and staff pick In the Cut at Cinemapolis, Deep Water and The Sheep Detectives (both of which are at the Regal Ithaca Mall) can wait for a future Friday and Family Movie night respectively.
The Devil Wears Prada 2, which continues its run at both of those venues, is worth seeing at Cinemapolis or the Regal just to enjoy the line of dialogue referencing a fictitious summa cum laude from Cornell and a shoutout to famous real-life alum Ruth Bader Ginsburg with your fellow locals, but my favorite holdover is the Irish haunted house movie Hokum, which is at the same two theaters. Special events include the HUMP! Film Festival at Cinemapolis tonight and a free student film screening at Cornell’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts tonight and tomorrow, and repertory highlights include screenings of Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick at the Regal starting on Wednesday in honor of the former’s 40th anniversary.
Home Video Recommendation: I’m a firm believer in the idea that even a 10-minute short can be way too long and an epic with an intermission can feel all too brief–it’s all in how well they’re made! That said, once you get over the 240 minute mark, a movie is an undertaking no matter how you slice it. If you aren’t yourself a sports fan, the relative lack of compelling alternatives might make this the perfect time to tackle Wang Bing’s nine-hour-long magnum opus West of the Tracks. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd about a month ago:
The first two hours could stand alone as an almost conventional documentary about the shuttering of plants in a factory town, but that isn’t director Wang Bing’s project. He is, instead, using a 21st-century technology, his DV camera, to chronicle the death throes of the Industrial Age. And so it continues, and even more so than in his Youth trilogy, each subsequent part is essential for making meaning of the whole.
West‘s subject is the ripple effects of monumental events, their impact on regular people, not the events themselves. But they haunt each minute of the movie like hungry ghosts, and the unavoidable question their presence raises is What if? What if someone like Wang had been there every step of the 20th century filming hundreds, thousands, millions of hours of footage, becoming better than invisible–a confidant. Would the workers of Shenyang still have lead in their blood? What other atrocities might have been avoided?
Each movie which emerges from Gaza or Ukraine confirms that the answer is probably “not many,” but at least we’ll never again be able to offer “but we didn’t know!” as an excuse. And now we have the image of workers attacking the stalagmites of ice which rose up from the floor during the winter months their employer shut its doors because it couldn’t pay its heating bills and shoveling them out open windows on the first day of spring in part one “Rust.” And a house symbolically lit by gaslight after the authorities cut off its supply of electricity to coerce its inhabitants into moving out in “Remnants.” And shadows shimmering on the sand of a glass works-bound rail car like a desert mirage in “Rails.”
This is a hard watch, to be sure. Like other films-fleuve I’ve recently tackled while the rest of my family was out of town, what looked on paper like something I could have started in the morning and finished by dinner instead took all day and nearly half a pack of cigarettes, and this one left me literally shaking by the time I finally stumbled off to bed at 2am. But where my first experience with Wang was honestly just a bit of a letdown, this one was absolutely worth it.
Current Cornell faculty, staff, and students can stream this film via the Library’s subscription Academic Video Online: here’s a link to the catalog record for part one Rust. Others may have access to it via Kanopy, copies of Tiger Releases’ 2003 PAL DVD are still floating around, and there’s also a (presumably illegal) English-subtitled copy on YouTube.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 