In its now almost thirteen year history, 2024 has proven the most difficult year for photogénie. Hence the reason why this issue contains not only the essays of the Young Critics Workshop of 2024, but also those of the preceding year. Though times may be challenging—not just for photogénie, but for film criticism in general—once again, the texts coming out of these two editions of the workshop prove that the practice is alive and sometimes kicking, taking aim at complacency and negligence, sometimes caring, bestowing loving attention on an art form that might be at the same time in its infancy and its old age. Who’s to say if we’re at the beginning or at the end.
Struck by how the final scenes of several films at Film Fest Gent 2023 upended what preceded them, Sam Warren Miell reflects on three different ways current cinema can position itself in relation to the narrative-realist tradition that remains its dominant mode to this day. In Astrakan and May December, as well as in Cerrar los ojos, “a volte face in the closing minutes turns the film around on itself, suggesting both the conviction that something in storytelling must go beyond the telling of stories, and the sense that this conviction is best expressed through a very specific formal choice.”
José Emilio Gonzalez interrogates how Todd Haynes’ May December explores what acting can and cannot communicate of the life of another. Can acting bridge the gap between truth and fiction? Is that even its goal or function? Gonzalez analyzes how Haynes’ mise-en-scène and his work with editor Affonso Gonçalves expand these questions, creating new images of his protagonists “with every irruption, every change in closeness and change of perspective”.
Through a close analysis of Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring), Vedant Srinivas thoroughly considers the depiction of labor and everydayness in cinema, truth and reality versus “the manufactured nature of the filmic experience”, the overabundance of images and the necessity of a turn towards an observational mode of filmmaking: “Indeed, what seems of paramount importance in times such as ours is precisely to wade through this deluge of images—to cut through the relativist clutter—and continually reaffirm those images that have a modicum of existential referentiality.”
Ana Đošev examines The Devil’s Bath as “one of the newest additions to the canon of cinematic interpretation of religion”. She delves deep into the juxtaposition of Christian and pagan imagery and asks the film questions surrounding the ideas of female martyrization and its myriad possibilities of exploitation. How to show historical violence being inflicted on women without perpetuating it as such visually? “The violence of The Devil’s Bath is both ‘barbaric’ and noble, liberating and restraining at the same time.”
“Home movies seem to be having a moment, their place in the zeitgeist growing bigger”, writes Emily Jisoo Bowles. Using Emilija Gasic’s 78 Days as a starting point, she ponders questions of authenticity and artifice, memory and re-enactment. What happens when one forges a document in order to claim or gain its authority as a witness when dealing with tragedies of unthinkable human loss? In contrast Faraz Fesharaki’s What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? comprises thousands of hours of Zoom-footage with his parents into a intuitively edited, sharp 80 minutes. “By abandoning the realistic recreation approach, Fesharaki can then experiment with new ways of connecting with his parents.” A new way forward might be exactly what is necessary for the home movie.
Marina Zigneli’s essay ‘Vermiglio and the Lives of (M)others’ takes a closer look at how Maura Delpero’s sophomore film visually embraces its female characters in their struggles. In Zigneli’s words, those struggles “both foreign and unexpectedly familiar, reflect how the roles of mother, daughter, and sister intertwine and reveal much about the complexities of the female experience across the different stages of life.” Through an insightful analysis of Mikhail Krichman’s cinematography, the essay conceptualises a plurality of womanhood Vermiglio attends to, tenderly.
Theo Du‘s essay ‘“Everything Again Very Slowly”: On A Traveler’s Needs‘ asks prescient questions about the essence and the limits of translation, prompted by the peculiar method Isabelle Huppert’s character uses to teach French in Hong Sang-soo’s film. Between reading, misreading, and the potential palimpsestic trap of translation and cinema’s referential nature, Du also reflects on his own spectatorial relationship with Hong Sang-soo films and surrendering to the pleasure found in repetitions.
In ‘Save us Hong Sang-soo, you’re our only hope!’ Matheus Felix muses on the beauty of cinema by way of Hong’s latest. “Where lies the beauty of a movie?” he asks and looks for the answer not in a single image but in that which underlies these images and forges them into a singular whole. “We dream of a movie that would show us, at every step of the operation, how it was made, so that its real secret would be even more impenetrable.” A Traveler’s Needs therefore feels like a culmination point in the career of a master who quite prolifically has taken off a piece of clothing with every movie he has made up until now. As such cinema stands naked before us, more gloriously alive than ever.