Launched last year by Wes Anderson’s producing partners at Indian Paintbrush, GALERIE has emerged as a well-curated film club publishing unique selections of films from artists with their personal annotations. With past lists from the likes of James Gray, Ed Lachman, Mike Mills, Karyn Kusama, Ethan Hawke, and more, today we’re pleased to exclusively share a sneak peek from the lists of two celebrated Chilean filmmakers, Pablo Larraín and Sebastián Lelio, which have recently landed on the site.
Both filmmakers are currently working on their latest projects: Larraín is helming the Angelina Jolie-led Maria Callas drama, while Lelio is handling the musical The Wave, inspired by Chile’s “feminist May” movement in 2018. While in post-production on the projects, they’ve shared their curated collections.
The Spencer and El Conde director features Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing on his list, and we’ve exclusively published his thoughts on both below.
The Act of Killing, dirs. Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and Anonymous, 2012
Impunity has been a subject of my own work in a number of movies, but usually the one who commits the crime denies it or tries to avoid the subject. And in this film, those who were responsible for the genocide are right there, looking at the camera, proud of what they did. So it’s on another scale. And I think Joshua did something very interesting, taking it to a place where it becomes almost a farce on some level. There’s absurdity in this historical narrative. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen a movie where mass killing is so somehow accepted, and that creates a very specific type of horror that’s very scary and creates discomfort and distress in the audience—in my case, in myself. So I thought it was a very interesting achievement and a very complicated and difficult movie to digest. Because of that, it becomes a cinematic political weapon. There are very few examples where cinema can actually say something so clear about a political process. This movie has that.
Cemetery of Splendor, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015
Unknown and indeterminate memories—those that chase our subconscious—can also be collective. That’s what I’ve learned from this movie. A vast pool of associations, intersections, existential mazes and time arcs that can be contradictory and mesmerizing at the same time. We all experience the same reality, but it’s our perception of it that makes it unexplainable. That’s exactly why you can’t really explain this movie unless you perfectly remember your first day in this world.
Something I respect and admire about this film is Apichatpong’s ability to make me feel that I was connecting and engaging with a form of collective memory, where my subconscious can be related to the subconsciouses of other people. The idea of that collective reality is something we can’t really explain. Apichatpong is one of the very few filmmakers whose sensibility, because of the way that he crafted the film—how he used the sound, space, framing, timing and obviously lighting—creates a sensation of how strange reality can be in a way that includes me. It made me feel less lonely because of that.
Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light, and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood round out the director’s collection of inspirations.
The director of A Fantastic Woman and The Wonder featured Buster Keaton’s classic Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Bong Joon Ho’s Mother among his collection. Check out his thoughts below.
Steamboat Bill, Jr., dir. Buster Keaton, 1928
For me, Buster Keaton is a filmmaker who will always belong to the future. He represents pure cinema, in the sense that his poetics are based on the capture, control and inhabitation of movement. His humor is rooted in the interaction between humans and movement, and Steamboat Bill, Jr. is a masterpiece of what Keaton knew how to do so well: the gag. The presence of that impassive face, barely surprised when confronted with a turbulent world full of dangers and traps, is one of the most famous combinations of expressive gestures in the history of cinema—Buster Keaton’s stoic face (almost like a Kuleshov effect) juxtaposed with his mismatches with the world, especially with the physical world.
There is a sequence that always steals my heart, the hurricane scene, which we humbly tried to honor in A Fantastic Woman (in the scene where Marina walks against the wind): Keaton faces a world ravaged by the wind, and everything in the shots is in motion—roofs, trees, cars. Everything moves as if dancing, as if it were made of air. His cinema at that moment is capable of touching that which is so precious and which might be pure art, grace and lightness. In that wind sequence, Keaton makes us smile and open our eyes in surprise and inhale through our mouths an enchanted Oh! To be able to elicit that from the viewer is, for me, the territory of great art.
Mother, dir. Bong Joon Ho, 2009
The cinema of Bong Joon Ho is grounded in a precision of gestures that are meticulously measured, so icy and so perfect that they become the trap into which the viewer joyously falls. I am fascinated by how he mixes humor and horror with total ease, making us feel as though these combinations are natural and normal. It seems effortless, but reaching this chilly poetry requires a level of mastery that Bong Joon Ho handles perfectly and, I believe, comes from a deep love for cinema and its mechanisms of expression and seduction. What I like about Mother is that it places a woman at the center, in an impossible, desperate situation, and continues to observe her from a distance that could be analytical and cold but is also merged with her. He achieves a strange mix of distance and closeness that I think is one of his hallmarks. As viewers we adore his characters, but the level of intoxication they generate is so precise that it allows us to love and engage with them while also analyzing them. Kim Hye-ja’s performance is moving as the mother figure at the heart of a thriller, a thriller that has a lot of Hitchcock, which is the same as saying a lot of true cinema. Another thing that fascinates me about Mother is the mix of tones—it is at the same time enveloping, hilarious and repugnant. It has a narrative intensity that never wanes, and being a masterpiece of suspense, it also gives us moments of visualization and narration in space-time that are exuberant, allowing us to feel that glory that can be cinema.
Lelio’s list also includes Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Sally Potter’s Orlando, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, and more––even including a film by Larraín.
To explore their full annotations, visit galerie.com.
The post Pablo Larraín: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Films Make “Me Feel Less Lonely” first appeared on The Film Stage.
