PERSONAL EFFECTS
To celebrate the Film Society’s 50th anniversary, we asked contributors from different parts of our industry to write about a film that played at one of the institution’s festivals or series over the years that reflects its daring and forward-thinking approach to cinema.
CHOUGA DAREZHAN OMIRBAEV, 2008 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
DAREZHAN OMIRBAEV’S FILMS WERE RECOMMENDED TO ME BY Philippe Garrel, and they were every bit as good as he told me they were: visually and emotionally precise, bracingly and often pitilessly sharp, unexpectedly funny, open to exaltation, and always surprising. They were also poetic in the very best sense of the word—as in all good poetry, every element of Darezhan’s films is exactingly calibrated. In contrast to the majority of filmmakers from the former Soviet republics, he is a determined miniaturist (the better to be left alone, I suppose). And where most Russian and Central Asian filmmakers of his era worked under the long shadows of Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksei German, Darezhan turned to Bresson for inspiration. Chouga, his fifth feature, is based on Anna Karenina. The alleged incongruity of a tightly compacted 91-minute modern-day adaptation of an 800-page classic of world literature seemed to throw a few critics when we invited the film to the 2008 NYFF, which took place in the old Ziegfeld. As a matter of fact, I took great pleasure in introducing Chouga by commending the packed audience for not believing everything they read in The New York Times, where it was not just panned but condemned. The reaction was a warm one. Darezhan has completed only one feature since Chouga. I hope he is able to get another film made soon.
—Kent Jones, NYFF Director
COSMOS ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI, 2016 FILM COMMENT SELECTS
ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI PASSED AWAY TWO DAYS BEFORE HE WAS scheduled to appear at the Film Society accompanying the U.S. premiere of part of a sidebar tribute to the Polish director. A faithful modernization of Witold Gombrowicz’s final is a single, coherent work constructed of mixed metaphors and non sequiturs—it’s a shame that too few directors could (or would even be willing to) sustain such a feat. The influence of Gombrowicz in much of Zulawski’s cinema is as fruitful as it is plain, but it’s that most deliriously combines the two artists’ profoundest and funniest ideas about creativity in our present day.
