Alan Gomis “Rewind & Play”
Elisabeth Subrin “Maria Schneider, 1983”
Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi “Personality Crisis: One Night Only”
Laura Citarella “Trenque Lauquen”
The first two films I saw at 2022’s New York Film Festival, screened together, bring a subjective and interventionist eye to archival interview/performance material. Alain Gomis’s “Rewind & Play,” the best of the pair and something I think will be considered a milestone of the form, is the French-Senegalese filmmaker’s edit of raw in-studio footage of Thelonious Monk trying to get through an interview and short piano set on French TV in 1969.
The interviewer, a fortyish white egghead who’s conversant in jazz, notes at several points that he spent a little time in Manhattan in 1954 and got to know Monk at an ebb in the latter’s career. But as filmmaker Gomis noted later in a Q&A, that small link between them didn’t necessarily translate to 1969 Monk being treated with respect. We see Monk struggling to answer thoughtless questions (“When I met you, why was your baby grand piano in your kitchen?” “That was the only room where it would fit,” as if a Black musician in midcentury NYC had a fucking music parlor with Liberace candelabras all around).
We see Monk growing increasingly agitated as the shoot drags on, marred by technical issues, retakes for very precious reasons, the hot lights making him sweat, and the rare unguarded answer (about being screwed out of money) the production decides to scrap for being too negative. This show has someone extremely valuable to modern music, and they’re treating him like content — extracting and exploiting and dismissing. He seems stunned by it all, barely verbal through the whole thing, but he is so expressive in his playing, with the emotional resonance so robust and reference points so vast, he is communicating entire worlds.
In this sense he’s like David Lynch, and like a lot of possibly neurodivergent creative types, where he’s more than capable of using his words but language is kinda his second language — the art is the fluency, the mother tongue, the place where all light is shed. Gomis opts to communicate his directorial point of view through editing choices rather than narration, letting history and context do the heavy lifting.
Anyway, this was major, and it was made even better when his son, the esteemed T.S. Monk, came out at the end and provided lovely insight into his upbringing and his dad’s legacy.
The opening film on the bill, Elisabeth Subrin’s “Maria Schneider, 1983,” took its source material from the same French archive where Gomis found the Monk footage. Subrin’s dramatized short is about the troubled actress Maria Schneider (not the contemporary American jazz composer Maria Schneider, although that would fit thematically). Subrin came across a brief interview where Schneider, whose star had faded but also changed quality by necessity, was trying to promote a recent project.
Three actresses of different races and ages play Schneider as the reluctant interviewee, and the dialogue changes slightly with every iteration. The repetition suggests the onslaught of boring, invasive media attention that wore Schneider down, that along with her sexual assault on the set of “Last Tango in Paris” drove her into self-destructive patterns and suicidal ideation.
Where Subrin’s movie really succeeds is in questioning the trauma-porn industrial complex at a juncture in history where this sort of thing is purely meant for titillation and “trauma” is decades away from entering the typical living room conversation in earnest. The interview is obviously a throwaway segment-filler, CONTENT once again, and these can be the most revealing as zeitgeist because they mean so little to the production, because you just get the juicy quote and move on. And as the celebrity, the momentary focus of this grind, you have to decide what it means to assert a boundary to protect yourself.
These movies gave me loads to think about. Also, Thelonious Monk used to live in San Juan Hill, the lost neighborhood where the big bulldozery midcentury urban renewal civic project Lincoln Center stands now. There’s a graphic of Monk amid a bigger visual statement about San Juan Hill on one of the LC buildings across 65th from Walter Reade Theatre, and a new piece composed for the Philharmonic by Etienne Charles.
“Personality Crisis: One Night Only” (coming to Showtime in 2023), about punk/pop star/actor/legend of downtown eclecticism David Johansen, is part concert documentary and part standard interview/archival stuff. Martin Scorsese and his co-director David Tedeschi, along with cinematographer Ellen Kuras, shot the live footage at New York’s Café Carlyle in January 2020, as everyone knew the pandemic was on its way down the pike but city nightlife was still hot hot hot.
Introducing this at NYFF, Scorsese spoke about how “cinema is devalued, demeaned, belittled from all sides, not necessarily the business side but certainly the art,” adding: “Since the ’80s, there’s been a focus on numbers. It’s kind of repulsive.” Perhaps these looks back, via “Personality Crisis” and his other recent docs like “Pretend It’s a City” (one of his two Fran Lebowitz projects) are a wish for a time machine to taxi us from the outoupos to the eutopos (though everybody knows this is still nowhere), from the IP economy to the messy little character studies pulled together on limited budgets. His documentaries posit that minor works and more conversational filmmaking approaches do count as cinema, if more casual affairs than his dramatic features.
David Johansen and the New York Dolls are no doubt mythic creatures. There is a fair amount of mythbusting in “Personality Crisis,” but it’s never Scorsese’s point: it’s just presenting Johansen as a whole person and not an enigma, no more a bullshit artist than anyone else in the game. The “Buster Poindexter” we see performing at the Carlyle, keeping the moniker of the figure who brushed elbows with the monoculture in 1987 for a lounge-lizard soca cover, is in this setting just “Johansen cleaning up nice with a minimal band in a cabaret setting.” He never tries to evoke the Spuds McKenzie party animal vibe associated with that guise. Elsewhere, he comes clean about his acquaintance with beatnik polymath Harry Smith, namesake of Johansen’s celebrated project the Harry Smiths: they didn’t know each other that well, and the guy was kind of a basket case by the time their paths crossed at the Chelsea Hotel.
Scorsese does seem especially excited about Johansen’s early-’70s stint with Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, unsurprising since Johansen found his counterculture feet in the same Village where Marty had come up as an NYU student and emergent filmmaker.
I like the shifts in focus, how the new and archival interviews feel very present and direct rather than navel-gazing. And showing Johansen’s hosting duties on SiriusXM’s Mansion of Fun program allows us to see him at his most fanciful and grandiloquent and omnivorous. Sometimes the rococo parts of Johansen’s persona lead Scorsese down a primrose path into documentary cliché: opera motifs remind us repeatedly of the influence Johansen’s father, a one-time singer of light opera and classical, had on David’s musical upbringing as a sprog on Staten Island. It’s a little Brian De Palma gilding the rotten lily of “Bonfire of the Vanities.”
And every doc about an elderstatesrocker hits a beat in the script where there’s a reunion tour and/or comeback album(s), and Scorsese hits both those as well with the New York Dolls, rather perfunctorily. I never really enjoy these bits in documentaries, because unless the unit has had a significant creative second wind (as with sketch comedy’s Kids in the Hall), there’s nothing to say. This should be a footnote and not a section.
Something I enjoy about Scorsese is how as director he challenges the viewpoints that other creative forces on his films actually bring to them. He did it with “Taxi Driver,” where Paul Schrader’s screenplay scans to me as a heroic, sympathetic portrayal of Travis Bickle, and Scorsese’s shaping of the material seems to say “well no, this behavior is really toxic and shitty.”
I think Scorsese sees the untapped filmmaker in this rock star, this guy who sees the dramatic potential in everything and is always on the hunt for expressions of that drama. As Johansen de-mythifies aspects of himself throughout the film, Scorsese almost hesitates to let him get away with it, shooting the Carlyle scenes with a warm nostalgic glow, at-home interviews centered around scrapbooks. Scorsese knows damn well nostalgia is a trap, but so is cinema: would you run if someone yelled “fire” in a crowded theater or would you be inclined to stick around and watch the embers flicker in shadow on the bright wall?
Laura Citarella was a producer on Mariano Llinás’s 2018 sly metafictional beast “La Flor,” a cult sensation at that year’s NYFF. With her own two-part feature, “Trenque Lauquen,” she returns to the festival with her own work, and I keep hitting a wall with every way I can venture to describe it. Narrative Trojan horses changing the viewer’s idea of what it’s about, when what it’s about is something Other.
Laura Paredes (one of the four stars of “La Flor”) plays a botanist and sometime radio guest host on a research trip in a far-flung suburb of Buenos Aires. She goes missing, as girls in movies often do. Gradually, through a mazy series of speculations and clandestine love letters and Cronenbergian witch-lesbians, she transubstantiates: a vagabond like Sandrine Bonnaire in Varda’s 1985 film, a feral road dog, the earth itself.
You might read it as a feminist re-envisioning of “missing girl” tropes, where men and well-meaning women of the status quo who have invented various narratives regarding her disappearance ultimately have no clue about her inner life, her motives. You might read it as an antithesis to body horror, an allegory for transgender euphoria or even just for any reason, the kinetic momentum in the light years it takes to suit up into who you are. Incredibly energizing.
