This week’s “Screen” page features an interview with Fort Worth filmmaker Cameron Bruce Nelson, who had three terrific short works debut this year: In Kind, a meditation on unemployment, identity, and escape; New Animal, about a small but profound moment of transition in one young couple’s relationship; and the video for Cleburne band Fungi Girls’ new song “Velvet Days.”
Off the top of his head, Nelson listed three of his favorite filmmakers. We’re going to go all auteur on your ass with video clips related to each. Here’s a 2008 q&a with director Kelly Reichardt and actress Michelle Williams, discussing Reichardt’s bleak, haunting study of downward mobility Wendy and Lucy and its cinematic influences.
This is an interview with Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, Close-Up, the script for The White Balloon), whose 41 year career has often focused on reserved, realistic portraits of life in rural Iran. {“I don’t like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice,” Kiarostami says. “I don’t like to belittle him”).
Finally, Nelson digs modernist master Michelangelo Antonioni – in particular, the director’s 1964 Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert), in which Monica Vitti and Richard Harris have a torrid affair against the backdrop of a massive smoke-spewing power plant. This amusing trailer for the 2010 Criterion Collection rerelease reminds us why 1960s Middle America thought those European “art film” directors were just peddling high-class smut, thank you very much.
I’d be interested to know what he thinks of Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff” (which I mentioned on this blog) or Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” (which I reviewed earlier this year).