These Things Come In Twos: Favorites Of 2023 (Part 2)

This piece is the second of two listing the best films I’ve seen in 2023, grouped into pairs based on similar themes. The introduction and the top two films sharing the first slot comprise the first piece, to be found ahead of this one on this site. Slots 3-10 make up this second part.

# 3&4: 20 Days in Mariupol - Mstyslav Chernov, Ukraine / A Life on the Farm – Oscar Harding US/UK

Two starkly different documentaries that view death (both natural and human-induced) and the fragility of life with explicit clarity, each delivered firsthand by a one-man film crew – one a vital piece of expository journalism, another assessing an unearthed found footage subject.

There are two disastrous wars underway in 20 Days in Mariupol, a documentary shot on the fly by Ukrainian video journalist, Mstyslav Chernov. The first is the entirety of what we experience in the film itself, which is a vital account of the atrocities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine beginning in 2023. Chernov is one of two journalists who stayed in the city of Mariupol after the siege and though he and his Associated Press colleagues would eventually be awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, only his footage could be exported to media outlets because of the lack of reliable internet service in the region.

What survives is a shocking, harrowing and rage-inducing piece of journalistic exposure. The terror faced by Ukrainian citizens seems surreal but the images here of doctors, health officials and citizens attending to their wounded countrymen will stay with me forever. Chernov has simply used his phone camera to take a biopsy of the war crimes of Vladimir Putin and his thug army in real time. The fate of the people on screen looks precarious as they try to operate a hospital with limited power and supplies, looking absolutely worn down by stress and fatigue as they step over dead bodies covered up by sheets. We see that no structure in the city is safe from Russian bombing campaigns.

But another more ideologically set war seems to loom over the horizon and this one somehow feels more insidious: The lies and denials of the Russian state-controlled media’s propaganda machine in branding the crisis as manufactured and labeling Chernov’s footage fake. At one point, a badly injured pregnant woman is carried from a bombed out maternity hospital in a stretcher. Her pelvic bone had been crushed and her baby was lost. She’s confused and wracked by excruciating pain. The image gets circulated by media outlets all over the world, exposing the atrocities being committed in Ukraine. But the aggressor nation’s state-controlled newspapers and TV hosts allege that the hospital was turned into film set with extras and actors for the purpose of staging the tableau and that Chernov and his colleagues were “well-known propagandists.”

And so, this accusation of “Fake News,” made as always by the people most demonstrably guilty of producing or believing it themselves, adds another layer of damage to this already stomach-churning chapter of human history. At the bottom of this horror show is the idea that at least for the record, evidence of these events now exists to be seen and therefore, to be believed. A group of doctors respond to complaints made by some subjects directly to Chernov’s camera that the filmmaker is exploiting them by insisting that his camera’s presence will allow the world to see what’s happening to them. He’s encouraged to continue filming, because what he’s doing is noble. But what if even the reality of his findings is going to be up for debate? Are we now dealing with a superpower in the late stages of its Fascist ascendency that will deny the truth that’s staring people right in the face? It’s said that “Don’t Believe What You See With Your Own Eyes,” is the final order a Fascist Government needs to give to its citizens, which would indicate the answer to that question is “Yes.”

20 Days In Mariupol will be too intense for many viewers. There are close ups of gory injuries, dead children, people shrieking in terror at the sound of bombs overhead. It’s a rough ordeal to sit through. The sense of bleakness is unrelenting. A moment when a baby is successfully born is almost immediately drained of its potential for hope by the sound of a nearby bomb landing that cuts the lights. I could hear several people in the theater in which I saw it sobbing - quite understandably. But this film needed to be made and needs to be seen. This is literally happening right now. The culprits are calling it Fake News, that cowardly, ignorant false branding of the truth as lies that utilizes actual lies to place blame on the recipient for being duped. Graphic depictions here of violence carried out on helpless civilians – death becomes a fact of existence when people are struggling to survive. Facing it plainly like this feels like a proper way honor the victims. The mere existence of the film is an act of defiance.

Filmmaker Oscar Harding’s found footage documentary, A Life On The Farm, also looks at death and moments leading up to it naturally and starkly. Its view of death is as holistic as those of the subject of the film, farmer and amateur filmmaker Charles Carson. A retired professor of agricultural science living in a quiet farming community in England’s southwest region of Somerset, the eccentric widower is alone on his patch of land. He took to documenting himself with a camcorder on his Coombe End Farm, producing footage that feels halfway between education and home movie, with, shall we say, a touch of Ed Gein in there.

Harding’s unearthing and presentation of Carson’s footage here tells the story of a man who thought nothing of simply shooting the cycle of life on his farm, complete with death and birth, producing videotapes he would hand out to his neighbors. Carson’s footage, animated by his folksy demeanor and fake chuckling, demonstrates this unaffected, serene and decidedly democratic attitude towards explicitly depicting that cycle with his camera. He films cattle copulating and giving birth (holding the huge bovine placenta up to the camera for all to see) and places those scenes alongside what could be called a kind of memorial sendoff for those living things around him who’ve gone on to their maker. I’m trying to describe those images without giving away some of the film’s more shocking revelations, which must be seen to be believed.

As a narrator and documentarian, Carson appears not to discriminate his treatment of animals from that of human beings. It seems to have never crossed his mind that anyone viewing this footage would have their jaw practically hit floor in some spots as did mine and many of the people around me in the theater. There are moments in A Life on the Farm that are every bit as insane as anything you’ll see in 20 Days In Mariupol. The level of intimacy Carson appears to be comfortable with is stunning.

There’s a wonderful found/appropriated footage underground scene (a side obsession of mine) that brings these kinds of stories into public view. We hear from found footage maestros Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher of Found Footage Fest, who tour with a live presentation assembled from unearthed tapes they scour the country for, as well as the producers of Everything is Terrible, who tour with a similar show involving costumed performers mixed with similar clips and footage fashioned into a themed live performance. These curator/performers regard Carson as an inspirational, almost reverential figure, whose immense body of work, most of which ended up in a landfill, presents surprisingly lucid and touching insights into what life and death actually are.

The exploits of this quirky eccentric British hayseed, who then ventured into making inventive fiction films all by himself complete with storylines, humor, special effects and staged stunts (like falling off a riding lawnmower he personally modified), may just take the title for Greatest Found Footage material ever. A Life on the Farm is a leap forward for the endless potential of the Found Footage craze as a bizarrely down-home force for humanism, empathy and even enlightenment. It’s a subculture Harding describes as “more of a movement.” And why not, when the fruits of their persistence are this life-affirming? And death-affirming.

Neither Chernov or Carson are professional cinematographers. Neither man has any production team or crew. They are both using cinema simply as a means of documentation, both out of deep feelings of necessity. But the films composed from their footage constitute a noble use of the medium, one which provides a testament to a violent conflict for which a term like “war” fails to capture its catastrophic one-sided reality. The other is made by a loner who had no one to tell him he was crazy to film some of things he filmed, who wound up exploring the nature of existence in a way no sane man ever could. In both cases, the presence of a camera feels sacred, as does everything it films, even if its operators were simply capturing events for posterity. The existence of both films feels like a miracle, far beyond the usual narration-and-talking-heads approaches of most non-fiction fare, showing their subjects rather than simply talking about them, and in doing so, arriving at a much richer source of precious, basic truth.

# 5 & 6: Monster – Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan / Return to Seoul – Davy Chou, South Korea/France

Two brilliantly executed Asian features exploring questions of family and various forms of identity; national, provincial, professional, generational and sexual.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's stories of strained family dynamics are dramas that feel like mysteries. He’s a master at dramatizing a screenplay, knowing where to push, when to stop, when to dole out how much and what kind of information. His talent finds harmony with Yuji Sakimoto’s Cannes prize-winning script in presenting a film with shifting perspectives that doesn’t feel overstuffed or contrived. In Monster, he cuts from following one character to another in this story about the murky boundaries of responsibility between parents, teachers, school administrators and classmates. This way of telling a story has its pitfalls, when one can sense the calculation of a screenplay dutifully moving furniture around or preaching at us. We view three different perspectives, with overlapping timelines and it might have been Kore-eda’s way of letting scenes play out (like an embarrassingly choreographed, tone-deaf meeting between a school principal and an angry parent regarding her bullied and possibly abused son) that dissuaded me from regarding the structure of Monster as a gimmick, rather than a means of comprehensively graphing complex situations where everyone has their own truth

I’ve been at odds with this kind of crisscrossing, hyperlink movie plotting in the past, most notably in the features of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams). We jump around in a timeline, get information about the fates of certain characters before we see how they arrive at their moment of reckoning. So because we know more at a given moment than they do, what they’re doing is supposed to take on a level of poignancy. But it’s not a poignancy earned by taking us on a captivating journey with a character, building our empathy with them. It’s a kind of bargain-bin poignancy that can be achieved in an editing room by simply mixing up the order of scenes or cutting away to another perspective. But with Kore-eda’s film, I never got that sense of watching something didactic, of being placed in a rigged game, watching a production that was spinning plates.

Maybe it’s because the film itself is about empathy that the story structure doesn’t come off as a contrivance. We meet an erratically behaving boy named Minato (Soya Kurokawa) and his widowed single mother (Sakura Ando). Then we’re following his accused teacher (Eita Nagayama), and then Minato’s growing friendship with an effeminate boy named Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi). The film has empathy enough to give all these characters the time and space they deserve, detailing any number of situational factors that add up to a set of circumstances comprising “the situation.” Sakimoto’s script unfolds to show us how none of us ever has the whole story and even our slightest transgressions can have serious, far-reaching consequences.

I’m not sure all the mysteries of Monster are cleared up or even addressed (why did Minato seem to freeze in the act of picking something up off the floor when she ducked out to go the store?), but it scarcely matters with the warm treatment of these characters as more than game pieces. With numerous films now under his belt, Kore-eda seems to be a master at depicting the strain of non-traditional family dynamics and fraught communications between generations. As long he seems to understand children, young adults, middle aged people, the elderly and their context in Japanese society, still so formal in the way it frowns on individuality and assertion of identity, it should be very easy for him to continue to craft these kinds of stories with writing and a cast this good.

The family of Freddie Benoît is already fractured at the start of Return to Seoul. She’s a grown-up émigré from South Korea with French adoptive parents who gave herself a snappy French name to compliment the mischievous, spiky persona she cultivated for herself. We see her in social situations as an instigator who enjoys pushing other people’s buttons, carousing late at night and picking up and then ditching lovers and bedmates with aplomb. Smart, stylish, impulsive and swaggering, she has a natural gift for manipulating people to get what she wants. She defies the prejudiced traditional image of Asian women as submissive, doll-like introverts. On a trip to South Korea, she learns she can look up her now divorced biological parents through an adoption agency. Her plangent, overdrinking father (veteran character actor Oh Gwang-Rok) and his family live in a tight apartment space in an unappealing district and observe demure traditional customs. Freddie’s visible contempt for their stifling ordinariness gives her second thoughts about the visit. Her mother refuses to see her and can’t be tracked down. Her whole life has just been recast as a puzzle with major pieces missing.

She’s not the same when she returns to France. Her sense of herself has been shaken. The pathology of this crisis of identity affects her behavior and her relationship to the people around her. It’s as if just the awareness of her origin and her biological family have thrown the source of her identity and essentially the meaning of her existence into question. Freddie sees herself as unique and independent, but this may be based on qualities she inherited from her mother, whose decided absence feels like it could have been one of her own rebellious acts. Like it or not, Chou’s film explores the possibility that we can never get away from the fact that we’re our parents children, and that the “nurture” argument is only a fabrication of the very recent past. We are inherently self-absorbed and curious about our own inner workings, and so much of our behavior and character are forms of performance dictated by the circumstances of the situation.

It's one of those wonderful films where we’re wondering the entire time about what must be going on inside an emotionally blocked main character as they move through life. Chou trusts us with huge and sometimes jarring leaps forward in time, across the span of eight years, as it seems Freddie’s incorporation of her family’s history into her narrative has turned her into something else. Or has it? What is this knowledge worth to her? What is she worth to these two very different societies? Chou co-wrote the script for what is a very ambitious debut feature with an artist named Laure Badufle, whose own experience was the basis for the story. The performance by Park Ji-min as Freddie, moody and unpredictable, is one of my favorites of the year, my Best Actress pick in a perfect world. She’s a fascinating camera subject. Watching her grapple with her curiosity about herself – a deep confusion that can’t be put into words – as she coasts through her life (on her charm first and brains a close second) is never less than fascinating.

I suppose stories like these seem to hold more dramatic weight and fascination for viewers like me in Japanese and Korean films because their societies place so much emphasis on reticence. The culture of bowing one’s head, not speaking up and suppressing visible signs of shame or stress that are still very much ingrained in older generations appears to be thinning out with each successive younger generation. I often feel that places like the US (in which I live), despite claiming to have an accepting attitude towards individuality, display a somewhat more impoverished notion of identity relative to the Eastern countries. Western notions of identity seem limited to hidebound external classifiers like ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, gender and all those things that can be box-checked by advertisers and politicians in devising new strategies of exploitation for monetary or political gain.

The picture of identity in the features that come out of these Eastern countries is something more slippery and mutable, like complicated attachments to behaviors or forms of loyalty, built on the fragile ground of our surface demeanor, those faces we wear in a routine existence. Each person has their truth, one they’re alone with. This means that we don’t live in a world of heroes and villains, but erratic ciphers, strange and tragic, only as loyal as our options, as free as the relationships to our families and peers will allow.

#7 & 8: After Work – Erik Gandini, Sweden/Norway/Italy / Menus Plasirs – Les Troisgros - Frederick Wiseman, US/France

Two up-to-the-minute documentaries about the nature of work; one extensive and far-reaching, the other focused and contained.

Erik Gandini’s essay on jobs and the nature and purpose of work at this stage in human history covers so much ground in a short time, it may seem like not much is viewed in depth but After Work’s deep, satisfying exploration provides a great deal of material for discussion. Filmed all over the world, we meet people who love what they do, hate what they do, work too much or too little, are in danger of being replaced by machines, or are simply placeholders for other workers. The ethical and moral question of being technologized is explored in relation to what it actually means to have a work ethic. We’re told the concept of the work ethic goes back to puritan priests in the 17th century as a form of social control. Nearly four centuries later, it’s worth asking whether the concept of a disintegrated vocational landscape is a good thing.

We meet a group of young Italian “NEETs” (the EU term for “Not in Education, Employment or Training) in the 15–29-year-old range whose carefree lives are a daily party; drinking, carousing and beach selfies subsidized by their well-off parents. Sure, we might be able to lead richer, more thoughtful lives, have stronger relationships and more seriously ponder the meaning of our existence if we didn’t have to work. But is this unchallenging life of self-indulgence and leisure the alternative? We meet a topiary gardener in France who’d rather be nowhere else in the world than doing his job, and a meager bureaucrat in Korea who seems to be working in his sterile little station every possible waking minute of his life, to the detriment of his family. Yet in that same country, as part of a national mental health campaign, a countrywide policy was recently instated that mandates the powering down of office computers at a certain time of day so that employees can’t work anymore.

In the nation of Kuwait, where everyone is guaranteed a job and few jobs are available, twenty people are employed for the same job. Many people get dressed and sit day after day in sunless basement cubicles reading or watching movies on their laptops, while making a good salary for doing absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, American Amazon drivers looking to unionize relate the impossibility of making their daily quotas. Onboard technology monitors every second of their workday as they’re made to meet the impossible demands of a monstrous, anti-human conglomerate just counting off the days until it can replace them with AI. We meet a high-energy lecturer in the United States who tells us that Americans give up 500 million hours of vacation time each year and a surprisingly unempathetic data analyst for Gallup who notes that a majority percentage of the world’s workforce have completely disengaged from their jobs (like so many people I know), forced by the conditions of stupid, oppressive or boring work to detach mentally and emotionally from their task in order to maintain enough sanity to function. The prospect of AI technologizing us all out of a job hangs over everything.

After Work gets to the heart of the issues, asking the harder questions about what work means today, if it can retain the nobility modern societies attach to it in a world of so much redundancy and planned obsolescence. It explains a lot but doesn’t conclude for us. I feel like it should hit hardest for Americans, whose identities are still heavily bound up in their vocations and might be the most shaken at the idea that they’ve built those identities around nothing. The clock is ticking for the happily employed or the unhappily employed alike.

At 94, Frederick Wiseman could have been interviewed for After Work. His immense filmography is a sprawling document that has observed how institutions, communities and businesses function. Viewers familiar with Wiseman know his methodology by now - no interviews, no narration, no gimmickry. We watch people do what they do and make our own judgements. Though I’ve been convinced for a while now that Wiseman DOES tell a story in his choice of content – moving the camera or cutting inherently does this. There’s something in the way of a thesis from which he wants to extrapolate. His cleverness comes in making us think we’re arriving at these points ourselves.

Wiseman lives in France and must have dined at Pierre Troisgros’ hotel restaurant in Roanne, an establishment that has miraculously maintained its three-star Michelin rating since 1968. The aim of Nouvelle Cuisine legends like Troisgros was to make cuisine leaner, lighter and more colorful, accentuating the natural flavors of the best quality ingredients. Wiseman’s camera crew maneuver around the large open expanse of the kitchen, which comes across as a surprisingly tranquil place, headed by Troisgros’ son, Cesar. There’s no shouting, no clanking of pans or bickering servers. No intimidating Gordon Ramsay or Charlie Trotter types looming over pressured young chefs. A chef makes an error and he’s scolded but not demoralized. Cesar and the scolded chef calmly consult a large, ancient cooking manual together, as if correcting a mistake is part of a learning process the master is on with his staff. I was awed by sense of tact and patience in a streamlined operation, with quiet professionals knowing exactly what to do, conjuring vibrant dishes that look as if they should be framed and hung in an art museum. In a job where the staff members must get on each other’s shoulders to pick herbs, there is simply too much reverence for the process of harnessing and transmitting nature’s bounty to make room for fevered egos.

The four-hour running time gives us a chance to see how everything at Troisgros is conceived and handled. Cesar’s younger brother Leo owns and operates a smaller, more casual restaurant nearby, and we start at the farms where a livestock farmer explains to them (and us) his process of moving his grazing cattle through a series of cordoned off sections so that the grass they feed on can grow back. We follow the staff on a tour of a cheesemaker’s cellar, who explains how the mold on hundreds of extraordinary-looking cheeses for the meal’s cheese course should be washed off the outside of the rind in a certain way. Cesar consults the wine growers about what kind of vintages to expect this coming season. He and Leo visit the farmers markets in town and meet to go over the upcoming dishes, adding and subtracting elements in endless indecision. In an environment where perfection is the norm, Cesar must consider the total effect in presenting the dish, right down to how the colors will pop under the dining room lighting.

I’ve been fortunate enough to dine at a few Michelin starred restaurants in Europe, and I’ve tried a simplified version of the Salmon in Sorrel, the signature dish with sauce made from oseille. It’s the Troisgros family’s heritage. I believe that cuisine is one means of connecting human beings to the divinity of nature. So outside of my personal bias towards food-related subjects, I’ll say that I was struck by the steadfast commitment to excellence. The chefs and servers must all work as one entity, dedicating their lives to what they’re doing. With the low standards of the greediest economies where food is concerned, the passion of these French chefs is inspiring. They use only the blessings of nature to make their dishes, with everything coming from within the region. It may appear that only people with money falling out of their pockets can dine here, but the inspiration lingers after the meal is over, and we see, as Wiseman sees, that it is possible for humans with all our flaws to create something that is perfect.

# 9 & 10: Dream Scenario - Kristoffer Borgli, US/Skinamarink - Kyle Edward Ball, Canada

Two North American films brilliantly exploring the pathology of dreams and dreamers.

The jabs and revelations in Dream Scenario keep coming and coming in a dexterous film that keeps changing to incorporate all that it has to say about American self-absorption. There’s an evolution for Nicolas Cage’s feckless, stymied college professor who learns he's turning up in a lot of people's dreams. He goes from being a 21st century definition of a celebrity (famous for nothing) to a cult figure (robbed of his agency and humanity, reduced by fans to the status of a punchline or meme - a charge you could level at the cult of actor Nicholas Cage) to a living human trigger. In the digital age, reality TV and viral video culture have streamlined the process that sees individuals rise to prominence for meritless reasons, become objectified by corporations for profit or notoriety in order to cash in on the media buzz of the moment and then get thrown, with a deplorable level of apathy and spite, into the pop culture trash bin.

Dream Scenario builds brilliantly on its central concept to explore the insane lengths younger generations, aided by their craven technological and ideological impulses, will go to preserve their emotional well-being. The Cage character is a non-threatening, unspectacular man but because he becomes the phantom figure of people’s nightmares, he gets pre-emptively cancelled anywhere he tries to go. Borgli ingeniously uses the business with the dreams to set up a corrosive bit of social commentary. A reactionary public arbitrarily chooses people to hate and dehumanize. People form groups and bond with others over notions of shared trauma and victimhood. We used to share goals and hopes and now we share self-diagnosed anxieties and scapegoats and this becomes becomes our identity. We castigate people we don’t know based on what we THINK they represent to us, working backwards from how we WANT to feel about them, with oversensitive college students being the worst culprits. Then heartless, evil tech industries swoop in to exploit our fears and sell away more of our psychological freedom for the illusion of security. The sequence introducing the Charlie Kaufman-esque literalization of a metaphysical concept in the form of a consumer product that’s equally cheesy and evil is a masterstroke.

The American Psychological Association published a study this year that postulates that Americans are suffering from collective trauma caused by the confluence of crises. The COVID-19 pandemic, multiple nations fighting bitter wars, the normalization of racism and systemic injustice, the increasing cost of getting by, and climate-related disasters are all weighing on the collective consciousness of Americans. It’s what makes us vulnerable to authoritarian demagogues who promise security and order. The resulting cultural histrionics stem from the pathology of a collective nightmare. Could the power our damaged psyches and fragile emotional and mental worlds have over us ultimately be leading to a mass denial of reality? To where a mob can deny a person’s right to exist because of feelings about them that come from absolutely nowhere?

Dream Scenario is both empathetic and merciless, hinting at this trauma (here triggered arbitrarily), while tossing its barbs at the right targets. It brilliantly uses an actor for whom hip audiences turn out to see expressionist character transformations, now on the receiving end of all that aggression. There are such beautifully acted scenes of awkwardness and humiliation – like an attempted reenactment of one woman’s lurid dream about Cage that couldn’t be any less sexy – adding so much to a nervy film that suggests it may be time to get out of our headspace and stop seeing human interactions as a matter of Self vs Other. Dream Scenario is much needed rock in our shoes.

While Dream Scenario attempts to help us understand nightmares, director Kyle Edward Ball is more interested in transposing them. His popular YouTube channel features short films – impressive displays of atmosphere control made for pennies - that he crafts from nightmares recounted by viewers. This Canadian newcomer knows a lot about how nightmares feel and sound. His work recalls David Lynch minus any attempt at story or characterization. In a way, those things might work against him, diluting the potency of his atmosphere.

Skinamarink knows nothing outside its own internal nightmare. Nothing so much as a tracking shot from the point of view of a gasping person hitting the pillow to open Mullholland Drive to indicate it’s even a dream. But as with Dream Scenario, buried traumas and the pathology of physical and psychological wounds are a constant undercurrent. Dreams and nightmares seem to have their own logic, which this lucid work illustrates more explicitly than any film I can recall. It does away with literally everything that isn’t pure atmosphere and visceral effect. Giving the feature an early 70’s exploitation horror motif adds more of the potency of wonderfully unpredictable amateurism. It’s what can make analog DIY horror movies so memorable, despite inspiring so many dull studio imitations. A small budget like the crowdfunded $15,000 budget for Skinamarink fosters the filmmaker’s ingenuity as a matter of necessity. The ultra-grainy photography somehow makes peering down dark hallways and painted ceilings lit by the flickering glow of television MORE rather than less evocative. The coarse, grainy texture of the visuals lets us SEE the darkness more vividly than a pristine digital image would allow. Subtitles for snippets of dialogue too quiet to hear add to the feeling of eavesdropping on someone’s intimate home video recording that captured more than it should have.

Our imaginations are engaged by what we hear and imagine offscreen. Small children play unsupervised at night in the light of a television playing creepy old cartoons (like UB Iworks’ rickety Balloon Land from 1935, a not-irrelevant short involving an insulated community under attack from an outsider). Memories of severe abuse within a dysfunctional family are faintly implied without any visual depiction of violence. No proper story is handed to us. There is virtually nothing in the way of character, save for two children seemingly trapped in an extra-liminal space in which objects and fixtures shift and with the presence of a disembodied voice that claims it can “do anything.” The sound design here is masterful. We hear pain and bones breaking in the next room, voices beckoning to children to come and play. When people do turn up in the frame, they’re never complete – slashed by the edges of the frame or with blurred facial features. Ball uses the edges of the frame like a razor, suggesting the disorienting nature of bad dreams.

Trauma burrows deep into our sense of self, attaching itself to our DNA. We misremember events, people, and most importantly, spaces, which have their own voodoo. David Lynch says that an orderly room in the daytime is at a level of 1 where things like fire or spasming electricity take its visceral power, its “voodoo,” up to a 10. A television blaring away in total darkness in a dark house, lit by vague memories and haunted by the dark psychic energy of trauma in Skinamarink certainly feels like something high on the dial. Lynch’s transcription of nightmare fuel is evoked here but less so perhaps than Chantal Akerman’s feel for the ethereal atmosphere of spaces in her early work, not to mention similar influences by experimental film pioneers including Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow. It’s an easy film for contrarian bloggers and their narrow expectations to mock, It will frustrate the type of viewer who, in privileging comprehension over suggestion, reaches for their phone the moment it’s over for an explanation. But I found my patience and curiosity rewarded. My eyes were glued to the screen every second. You can’t watch Skinamarink passively, with your involuntary attention. Viewers expecting the film to just happen to them are in for a crushingly dull experience.

In examining both features together we might see the power a damaged psyche and its subconscious anxieties can hold over the conscious lives of both individuals and society at large. Movies themselves are like dreams, which filmmakers invite us to share. A movie follows the same logic as a dream. We leave a location on our way to the next one, walk through a door, and we’re right at the location we need to be as if from an editor’s cut. We’re the star of our narrative, which unfolds before us. A space is not quite whole. Event is a non-linear notion. We cast the people into the roles we need them to play, and nightmares set in when they don’t play those roles, or demand that we play ones we can’t play. Spatial and temporal continuity are incidental. Movies, like dreams, can be like the flooding of a subconscious that’s shouting at us, a lesson we can only grasp by feeling their raw, abstract power. Both features highlight the way we’re reminded when we dream that we all live in our own isolated reality, in most cases psychologically naked and deeply, deeply alone.

These Things Come In Twos: Favorites Of 2023 (Part 2)

Music o’ the Wind: Song of Granite

These Things Come In Twos: Favorites Of 2023 (Part 1)