A Couple of Recent Views (Patreon)

Grandma's House (Sophy Romvari, 2018)

I watched this, along with the somewhat more straightforward Nine Behind (2016), on the Criterion Channel, which has wisely decided to showcase the work of Romvari, a very unique maker of short films. They are not exactly experimental, nor are they essay films, and although they all engage with narrative elements, one couldn't really call them narrative shorts. Her work stems from her own personal history, particularly from painful aspects of her family life. Nine Behind is a dramatization of a long-delayed phone call between a young filmmaker and her Hungarian grandfather; their relationship was complicated by the estrangement of the grandfather from the filmmaker's parents. By comparison, Grandma's House is exceedingly terse and formalist. In conception, Romvari's film resembles certain key works of experimental cinema, perhaps most clearly the work of Gary Beydler. But it is also a compact document of memory's distance. Romvari simply returns to her grandmother's house after a long absence. She holds up photographs from the past, placing them in front of the camera as an overlay of the actual, present-day space. There is no commentary. Rather, the temporal dislocation speaks loudly of change and loss.

Pirated! (Nguyen Tan Hoang, 2000)

Another unexpected Criterion Channel selection, Pirated! is the film that first got Nguyen noticed on the Gay and/or Asian festival circuit. I should note, I went to grad school with Hoang, and he was briefly my TA. This is pretty clearly an artifact of its time, and not just because its blurry camcorder texture places it in a specific moment of video technology. It's a film that explores gay male desire from an Asian standpoint, a topic that was most comprehensively explored by Canadian artist Richard Fung. Pirated! is of a piece with other work of the era (e.g., Pratibha Parmar, Cheryl Dunye, John Greyson) that featured racial and sexual minorities articulating their desires by triangulating them through dominant film images. In the case of Pirated!, it's swashbuckling clips of Errol Flynn and, most notably, passages from Fassbinder's Querelle. It's clever, if a bit repetitive, but like I say, it was a thing and I guess you had to be there.