2023 New York Film Festival: War + Art

War-torn lands were at the core of films.

Green Border depicts boundary land, specifically the BiaÅ‚owieża Forest between Belarus and Poland, part of the European Union (EU).  Made by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, her government under right-wing President Andrzej Duda, is furious with her for blowing the whistle on how both countries use migrants like pawns, tossing them back and forth over the 2-mile wide 116-mile long, 18’ high barbed-wire dividing line, manned by many soldiers.  They’ve called it “anti-Polish” and compare it to Nazi propaganda films.  A ploy of  Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko to lure migrants from Africa and the Middle East (Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Congo) to the EU with misleading propaganda of their welcome, it is retaliation for anti-Belarus sanctions.   The film tells the story of a Syrian family of immigrants (trying to meet family in Sweden who have paid for their passage) as well as border guards who are also seen as pawns who bow to anti-immigrant sentiments, and a newly engaged Polish activist who witnesses the removal of a wounded woman she finds who is nonetheless deported — again.  Meanwhile, when the Ukraine war broke out, the border crossing was wide open.  

Zone of Interest, based on the Martin Amis book, depicts the family life of Auschwitz/Buchenwald camp commandant Rudolph Höss who lived in a palatial two-story house with a Bauhaus-like glass entryway next door to the camp — crematorium, dormitories, smokestacks.  You would hardly know there was a war going on with the life they lead in comfort, except for the occasional delivery of women’s clothing including fur coats for the females to choose from, the human teeth that children play with, or the smoke seen over the wall and occasional cries, gunfire, and barking heard. Truly the “banality of evil.”   It is the Höss’s dream house complete with garden, greenhouse and square swimming pool, one that Rudolph and Hedwig have strived for.  Hess also oversees the building of a new, expanded “ring crematorium” to “burn, cool, unload, reload” many more bodies or “yields.”  He attends meetings in palatial Nazi buildings in Berlin with elaborate floors and staircases, seen to great advantage from above.  

Occupied City is Steve McQueen’s reflection on his adopted city, Amsterdam, under Nazi occupation during WWII, and shows in over four hours, resistance and cooperation organized by buildings, squares, parks, streets, noting their addresses and current status (often “demolished” or converted), often with current day life on screen, hitting home the “ordinariness” that took place.  A fair amount was shot during COVID lockdown, hence a different kind of eeriness.

Artists we have lost came back on film.

Pier Paolo Pasolini — Agnes Varda 1967 is Varda’s filmng of the impossibly handsome Pasolini in 16mm color film walking through Times Square when they were in town for the 1966 Fourth NYFF, Pasolini screening The Hawks and the Sparrows.   Like a time capsule, the footage and audio recording were found in a box in 2021.  These two European directors respond to NYC: Varda asks what strikes Pasolini about New York? “Poverty,” he replies.  She then asks what’s the difference between reality and fiction in film, and he says, there is none.  Meanwhile, we see passersby along 42nd Street.  
Ryuichi Sakamoto — Opus shows the Japanese pianist and composer performing his compositions in a studio shortly before he died.  The filmmaker is his son, and they knew his days were running out from cancer.  In this elegiac final concert film, he plays from his soundtracks for the films The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, as well music from the pioneering electronic group Yellow Magic Orchestra and experimental works with Alva Noto all in stark black & white.  

A series of films had architectural settings that set the tone for their storylines: The Taste of Things, a film about a chef and a cook (Juliette Binoche) in a palatial French chateau with a vast kitchen and gardens;  perhaps its documentary equivalent is Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Menus-Pleasures, The Troisgros), Frederick Wiseman’s four hour film on a family’s three Michelin-starred restaurant in the Loire valley in central France (one glassed-in dining area is built around an oak tree); May December, the festival’s opening night film about an actress portraying a woman who had an affair with a student (Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore) who she then marries is set in a lake house in Savannah, Georgia; Anatomy of a Fall, about a fatal accident where a husband dies from a fall from an upper story of a chalet in Grenoble in the French Alps, where his wife is accused of murder; Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s film on composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, which is shot partly in the actual Bernstein country house in Fairfield, CT and the real Serge Koussevitzky house at Tanglewood in Lenox, MA; Foe, where the protagonist couple live in a weatherbeaten, wooden Midwestern family farmhouse, archaic and unusual for this futuristic time of 2065 when most of the Earth is depleted.  The husband works in a soulless chicken factory, while the wife works in a diner; Strange Way of Life, Pedro Almodovar’s short Western that takes place in the sheriff’s (Ethan Hawke) comfortable 19th century house in the town of Bitter Creek with solid wooden furnishings and period artwork, or the cabin outside of town where his former lover (Pedro Pascal) looks for his son; La Práctica (The Practice), about a couple who teach yoga in Chile, who when the couple split, the wife remakes their apartment into a studio, while the husband goes to a retreat outside of Santiago; we get to know Bucharest in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World  where the protagonist, a film production assistant, drives around the city for her job; A Prince by Pierre Creton, “one of the world’s great cineaste-peasants” who is both an outsider artist and an agricultural worker, about a young man in Normandy, France who becomes a gardener who says “you have to understand that the road leads us home, yet far away from any abode”; The Boy and the Heron, a Japanese animated film by Hayao Miyazaki about a boy who discovers an abandoned, sealed tower near the country estate he has moved to with his father after his mother has died that was built by his granduncle, a great architect, which becomes a magical alternative world for the boy; About Dry Grasses follows a teacher who has been exiled to a remote Anatolian village rather than his preferred Istanbul, where he is stuck in boring snowbound buildings both at school and at home; and The Sweet East, where Lilian gets separated from her high school class in Washington, DC and sees both the familiar city landmarks and a more unexpected side to the metropolis (including the Pizzagate parlor which supposedly had pedophiles in the basement) before moving to suburban New Jersey and then New York City.   

Films Mentioned:
Green Border, directed by Agnieszka Holland
Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer
Occupied City directed by Steve McQueen
Pier Paolo Pasolini — Agnes Varda 1967, directed by Agnes Varda
Ryuichi Sakamoto — Opus, directed by Neo Sora
The Taste of Things, directed by Trân Anh Hùng
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, directed by Radu Jude
A Prince, directed by PIerre Creton
The Boy and the Heron, directed by Hayao Miyazaki
About Dry Grasses, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
The Sweet East, directed by Sean Price Williams