New Directors New Films Festival Showcases Cutting Edge Work

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 14 March 2013 03:52

Written by Jack Angstreich

This year's New Directors New Films Festival (March 20 - 31, 2013), co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center (70 Lincoln Square #4, New York, NY) and the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY), opens with Blue Caprice, the assured feature debut of Alexandre Moors, a thoughtful reconstruction of the relationship between John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the joint perpetrators of the notorious Beltway sniper attacks in 2002.

Moors adopts a free-associational, impressionistic style that successfully eschews any explanation for the crimes, but he nonetheless assembles a highly insightful portrait of the killers, creating a plausible account of how it all came to pass, especially by means of significant, occasionally moving, details. Although Blue Caprice is a very promising film, it doesn't evidence the intense formal rigor — and, consequently, doesn't demand the same quality of attention — that the most enduring cinema does. However, the directors is aided in telling his story by some expert performances, notably those by Isaiah Washington (as Muhammad), Joey Lauren Adams, and, perhaps above all, Tim Blake Nelson.

Shane Carruth's brilliant Primer from 2004 was a puzzle film where one of the foremost pleasures was not fully understanding what was happening onscreen and taking enjoyment in trying to reconstruct a coherent narrative out of the fragments that one encountered. His next film has been long anticipated — an eight-year interval — and it, Upstream Color, also induces a state of generalized bewilderment — although, after one viewing, by the end I remained more at sea than I did after the first time that I saw Primer, but I hope that subsequent screenings will be more satisfying. I won't even attempt to summarize this bizarre film, a science-fiction romance involving induced amnesia, theft, parasitic worms, and anomie.

Upstream Color has a more fluid visual style than Primer does, more dream-like in its use of camera-movement and more collage-like in its editing —indeed it has something of the character of an assemblage. Despite the transition to a digital format, it is also a more handsome film than its predecessor and Carruth, who acts as his own cinematographer, appears to understand the limitations of digital very well, successfully adopting a cool, muted palette that does much to establish the work's peculiar mood. The polymathic director also contributed a memorable, evocative, synthesizer score and sensitively plays the male lead; his female protagonist is realized in an extraordinary performance by Amy Seimetz.

For more info, go to: newdirectors.org

New Directors New Films
March 20 - 31, 2013

Film Society of Lincoln Center
70 Lincoln Square, #4
New York, NY

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY

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