Film on Film

Buster Keaton reached the peak of his popularity in the mid-1920s with a run of brilliant, comedically elegant shorts and features. Among these, Sherlock, Jr. and The Cameraman stand out as meditations on what it means to make, exhibit, and watch movies. Sherlock Jr. finds Buster as a film projectionist and would-be detective who dreams his way onto the movie screen. In The Cameraman, Keaton’s first film under a new contract with MGM, he plays a young photographer who bluffs his way into a job as a newsreel cameraman…for MGM. Both showcase Keaton’s unique combination of meticulous sight gags and adroit physical comedy. These silent films will be presented with live accompaniment by acclaimed musicians Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton.

In Preston Sturges’s 1941 comedy, film director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is unhappy with a career making popular but lightweight entertainments like Hey, Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Pants of 1939. Determined to make a more serious topical film called O Brother, Where Art Thou? about the plight of the common person during the Depression, Sullivan poses as an impoverished migrant and travels the country in search of authenticity. Along the way, he befriends a young actress (Veronica Lake in one of her first major roles), has a series of misadventures, and experiences firsthand the social value of cinema—including the real value of those lightweight comedies that have been the basis of his career thus far.

A number of Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s were also film theorists who wrote about the power, the potential, and the risks of the cinematic image. If directors like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin put their theory into practice largely by dramatizing their nation’s recent revolutionary history, Man with a Movie Camera finds director Dziga Vertov more invested in creating an image of a social and technological future in which cinema was intertwined with the very fabric of urban life. The film constructs a “city symphony” that combines footage shot in multiple cities including Kiev, Odessa, and Moscow. It is also, charmingly, a family production. Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman portrays the titular man with the movie camera; Kaufman also served as the film’s cinematographer. Editor Yelizaveta Svilova, who was married to Vertov, appears in a memorably self-reflexive sequence in which she is seen editing the very film we are watching.

A white limousine creeps through Paris in the near future. Inside is a mobile dressing room in which actor Monsieur Oscar prepares for his next assignment, doing his own makeup and costuming and rehearsing his lines. Throughout the day, Oscar will take on numerous roles both outlandish and mundane, meeting other actors and performing for cameras so small that they are “almost invisible.” A haunting meditation on the alienation of performers in an era of technological mediation, Holy Motors is a surreal, horrifying, and whimsical ode to both the promise and the peril of cinema.

Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical bildungsroman follows teenager Sammy Fabelman as he develops an interest in films and filmmaking and begins to see the world around him in cinematic terms. Starting from a traumatic viewing of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 spectacle The Greatest Show on Earth, Sammy seeks to contain his fears by making films that reproduce and reinterpret them on the screen. As he grows older and encounters challenges like family conflicts at home and antisemitic bullying at school, Sammy increasingly regards his world, and intervenes in it, through filmmaking. The Fabelmans features a rare writing credit for Spielberg, who penned the script with frequent collaborator Tony Kushner.

In DePalma’s thriller riff on the Michelangelo Antonioni arthouse sensation Blow-Up (1966), John Travolta plays a sound technician working on low-budget horror films. After inadvertently recording audio of a car accident in which a governor dies, he becomes convinced that he has captured evidence of an assassination. As he spirals into obsession, sound recording and editing become ways to maintain his tenuous grasp on the distinction between artifice and reality. Featuring Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, and Dennis Franz in memorable supporting roles, Blow Out speaks to the political paranoia of its time and to the evolving status of audiovisual recording in the wake of the Zapruder film and the Watergate scandal.

On a rainy night, viewers gather in a vast, decaying Taipei movie palace for a screening of Dragon Gate Inn (King Hu, 1967). As that film plays, the patrons and employees of the theater have a series of largely wordless encounters, both in and out of the auditorium. Among the crowd are Miao Tien and Shih Chun, both of whom also appear in Dragon Gate Inn, and there are few illustrations of the emotional resonance of cinema as evocative as the image of their faces in the theater illuminated by the light of their younger selves onscreen. Director Tsai, a minimalist master of the Taiwanese New Wave, constructs a precise, delicate, and humorous portrait of the complex presence of movies in the lives of their viewers, and of the often-overlooked importance of exhibition spaces to the cinematic experience.

In the mid-1990s, two teenagers (Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine) bond over late-night TV show The Pink Opaque. As a series of unpredictable events unfolds, their relationship to the show, and to reality itself, comes into question. A haunting, haunted meditation on fandom, identity, and the power of screens, I Saw the TV Glow will keep replaying in your mind long after its conclusion. From the opening frame, director Jane Shoenbrun’s visual and sonic sensibilities lend the film a feeling that is somehow both dreamlike and rooted in the material realities, the exaltations, and the traumas of media and embodied existence.

Sometimes thought of as a British equivalent to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom shares a release year and some thematic elements with Hitchcock’s film, but it creates an atmosphere all its own. Starting from its opening in which a murder is depicted in the first person as seen through the viewfinder of a camera, Peeping Tom was highly controversial at the time of its release and it nearly derailed the career of its director, previously best known for films including Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). With time, it has come to be viewed as a classic of British Cinema, and as a landmark of film on film.

Cheryl (Cheryl Dunye, who also wrote, directed, and edited) is a video store employee who undertakes a documentary project investigating the identity of a Black actress, credited only as “The Watermelon Woman,” from a 1930s movie called Plantation Memories. Through her research and a series of interviews, Cheryl’s project, along with The Watermelon Woman itself, becomes an exploration of Black lesbian identity and the exclusionary practices of the film industry and of film historiography. The Watermelon Woman is a landmark of independent cinema and a 2021 inductee to the National Film Registry.

One of the great cinematic humanists, Jafar Panahi is the director of some of the best-known Iranian films of the 1990s and 2000s. Since an arrest in 2010, however, he has been prohibited from making films in his home country. Panahi’s immediate response was This is Not a Film (2011), the first in a series of innovative meta-films made in defiance of the ban. In No Bears, Panahi, playing a fictionalized version of himself, moves to a small town so that he can remotely direct a film across the border in Turkey. There, he faces technological, social, and political contingencies as the lines between fiction and document become blurred—though in Panahi’s cinema these lines are rarely clear to begin with.

After a mysterious event that leads to the death of their father, siblings OJ and Emerald (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) carry on the family business of wrangling horses for Hollywood films—work subjected to both the erasure of Black labor in the film industry and the marginalization of Black farmers and ranchers. Meanwhile, something is wrong in the skies above Haywood Ranch, and a series of inexplicable phenomena will lead OJ and Emerald to harness a variety of cinematic technologies in their encounter with the unknown. After horror films Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), director Jordan Peele branches out into the Western and Science Fiction genres while maintaining his unmistakable directorial voice.