Volume 28, Issue 8-9-10 / August–October 2024

Quirky Writing, Quirky Films

In this issue we focus on what I've perhaps too descriptively termed 'quirky writing and quirky films'. In some cases the writing is of a more personal nature or approaches its subject using an unorthodox critical style. R. Tiara Malone's approach to her evolving relationship with cinema from child to adult has more in common with poetry than criticism. Malone contemplates why she gravitates toward 'sisters' and cinematic women with a streak of violence. Anton M. Kolev discusses Quentin Dupieux's film Deerskin through a personal-political (mostly Marxist) lens that aims not to explain the film but "to engage in a rather sparse and largely idle conversation about a film [Deerskin] that deserved more. Tracy Ross also recalls screenings from a young age of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Christof's (Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol) The Truman Show and how the films of our youth change with each screening, evolving as we and the world around us does. Growing older with us, while hopefully staving off our sense of getting older. Michael Sooriyakumaran also begins from a personal space, recalling when he first saw the outlandish Tom Green in his late 1990s TV show, before exploring his curio madcap comic failure Freddie Got Fingered (2001). A career move which Sooriyakumaran describes as, quoting Jane Schoenbrun, being the equivalent of a "suicide-mission." Sooriyakumaran is still cheeky enough himself to invoke in reference to Green's attitude toward meat, the experimental filmmaker Carolee Schneemann and her most famous performance, "Meat Joy" (1964). Sarah Foulkes tackles a film that clearly fits the 'quirky' description, Frank Beauvais’ massive super cut of some 400 films that he downloaded and watched while living as a recluse for six months in an Alsatian town in 2016. Foulkes contemplates what this introspective film can teach us about cinephilia and whether such 'stolen' or cobbled together films can be thought of as a 'political' act. Totaro 'mimics' Roy Andersson's episodic film style in a schematic 'scene by scene' descriptive assessment of About Endlessness. Writer Ray Ellenwood offers us a double take on a 2024 Quebec film by André Forcier, Ababouiné (which surely has its quirky elements), that is in the midst of a successful festival tour across Canada and abroad. Ellenwood first puts the film into a broad historical and cultural context and then interviews Forcier and his partner-collaborator, Linda Pinet. The rest of the issue veers away from the decidedly quirky. Festivals make up the bulk of the remaining pieces, with coverage of four film festival (FNC, BIFF, HIFF, TIFF). Then Sheeba K examines the political ramification of subtitling in an English film (United 93) that features characters speaking in a language other than English (when does the film decide it is appropriate to subtitle dialogue, and when is it appropriate not to subtitle dialogue?).  (Donato Totaro, ed.)