Pepe

Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air travel, these photographs of Paris taken by balloonist Nadar gave the world the perspective of birds and God for the first time. There are very few times in history that the world’s people could be said to be given an entirely different viewpoint on the world, but wonder and elation would soon become the humdrum of efficiency as farmers and landowners used this new technology to monitor crops and enforce borders. And, of course, no story of wondrous moments would be complete without military intelligence taking God’s powers for Old Testament-style punishment and surveillance. To this day, farmers proudly keep large photographic prints of their land in their offices, and civilians can enjoy the fruits of military labors with the satellite photography of Google Earth. The wonder is still there, but so is the feeling that this angle belongs to the birds and the military voyeurs.

Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias’ Pepe, a film about the hippos of Colombia, is indebted to this history of aerial photography and the uneasy feelings that come with it. The first time the hippos are glanced from above place them in the context of the rivers, tributaries, and desert stretches of Namibia, a country with few hippos outside the few that stick around for safaris full of tourists who damn better see a hippo while they’re in Africa, even if they picked the wrong side of the continent. The topography of these shots acts as impressionist brushstrokes that simultaneously hide and highlight the slippery-smooth, black-pink ovals that dip and swim and disappear one moment and emerge the next. The latter half of the movie follows the hippos to Colombia; the shots from above here take a darker tone as the work to find the hippos in these shots mimics the reconnaissance work that happened in this territory decades early. After all, this is the land of Pablo Escobar, whose purchase of African hippos in the 1970s led to a small population of the affectionately named “cocaine hippos” that still live along the Magdalena River. One of these hippos is Pepe, and he can talk.

Or, at least, he’s figuring out language, speaking bits of four languages from the regions he wanders. His ethereal voiceover intermittently interrupts a loose narrative — one of hippos wandering the safari land for the pleasure of a burgeoning tourism industry, of being shipped illegally to Colombia and insultingly classified as pigs to get past the police, of being enclosed in a makeshift zoo on Escobar’s estate, of the whispering of Pepe’s presence in the town of Puerto Triunfo, and of his eventual legendary status in the media and his capture and demise — with attempts to understand the Two-Legged that seem to hold his fate. Oscillating grunts turn into vowels, which Pepe transposes into emotions and questions for the Two-Legged, such as “what kind of river doesn’t have a middle?” during his Atlantic voyage or a small meditation that the “beautiful sleep” of death also awaits the soldiers that have killed him. The words are punctured and punctuated by the staccato grunts of the hippo itself, providing a rhythm that matches the streams as well as a fatalistic reminder that the Two-Legged cannot quite connect with Pepe’s pleas.

Just like his previous Cocote, De los Santos Arias mixes aspect ratios, color gradings, and film and digital photography to enhance Pepe’s dreamlike qualities. The black-and-white dunes of Namibia give way to grainy but colorful POV shots on the river; widescreen digital arrives near the end almost as a jump scare. The soft electronic soundtrack and Pepe’s poetic voiceover hint that this will not be a literal retelling of the cocaine hippos. Little moments with the Two-Legged afford the film some structure, such as distasteful disregard of African folklore from the safari guide or Magdalena Riverman Candelario’s (Jorge Puntillón García) flashlight-led adventure to prove the gigantic animal’s existence. But, though the film’s visual formats don’t always coalesce into great moments or meaningful observations, Pepe demands that we, like the river-horse of its title, merely follow along with its currents.

The most obvious comparisons to Pepe are the recent EO or its predecessor, Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar — two movies about the human condition told from the perspective of the non-humans who are perhaps better poised to understand it. Unlike those films’ donkeys, however, hippos are hardly barnyard animals or pets. They’re seen as actively hostile, something that might eat a child for instance, and are not wanted by the Colombians that now have to deal with the leftovers of Escobar’s eccentricities from Hacienda Nápoles. To be the homeless and nationless like the donkeys was to be a mere observer of all the world’s peoples and stories; the hippo is a much more apt metaphor for today’s displaced that aren’t trusted or wanted in their host nations but also can’t be further displaced or culled. When that final aerial shot centers Pepe’s body, surrounded by stoic soldiers, the whole history of military photography folds into it. — ANDREW DIGNAN

Presence

The notion of “camera-consciousness” in the cinema is not, on the face of it, a terribly plausible idea. Apart from point-of-view shots, or extended experiments with the same, how can one reasonably impute sentience, let alone sapience, to the movements of the camera? Properly understood, though, the idea is — or anyway should be — of central importance. For it expresses not the doubtful notion that the camera must be treated as a sentient character, but rather the assumption, fundamental to so many a film, that the actions and events being presented are independent of the camera’s description. Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) offers a famous example of this when the camera, after tracking a serial killer and potential victim as they walk up the stairs of an apartment building, declines to follow them inside and instead reverses direction, descending backwards down the stairs, coming out onto the street, and then rising up the building’s façade to the opaque window of the apartment seen from outside. While our perspective remains restricted to the exterior, the murder takes place inside. Camera-consciousness, then, is the camera’s capacity to express an awareness limited not by the physical movements it can follow or make, but by the mental connections that it can enter into. No camera-consciousness, no Hitchcockian suspense.

Presence, Steven Soderbergh’s latest experiment in filmmaking economy, offers a playful twist on what we might accordingly call the Frenzy principle. To this end, the film imposes a clear constraint: every sequence (with the exception of the last) will be a continuous shot confined entirely to the interior of an old mansion. In the film’s opening minutes, the camera glides around the empty house, floating weightlessly through the staircases and rooms, later observing as a realtor (Julia Fox) attempts to sell the place to an Asian American family of four. Through snatches of conversation, picked up by the selective peregrinations of the camera, we learn that neither the kids nor the parents are quite all right. Teen daughter Chloe (Calliana Liana) has been dealing with the recent and sudden death of her best friend, which has taken its toll on the entire family and is the main reason for the current move. But it’s clear that the tensions between her father (Chris Sullivan), mother (Lucy Liu), and brother (Eddy Maday) have their roots further back. In any case, Chloe is the only one who senses a supernatural presence in the house. She identifies this presence as the ghost of her best friend, but for us, the audience, the invisible presence seems to be nothing less than the camera itself. 

Together with screenwriter David Koepp, Soderbergh conceived and developed Presence as a movie that unfolds from the point of view of the ghost, placing it in the tradition of such films as Lady of the Lake (1947), Dossier 51 (1978), and Enter the Void (2009). And to be sure, such a description stands to reason: the ghost’s existence is often conveyed in the manner of a conventional point-of-view shot, as when it rearranges Chloe’s books while she is in the shower, methodically stacking them on her desk. Nevertheless, if this characterization of the film does not quite capture its unique frisson, it’s because there remains a lingering question about extent to which the camera can truly be identified with the ghost, as opposed to, say, the generic causality of the story itself. 

Ever since Hitchcock made it impossible to make a movie without considering audience expectation, filmmakers have confronted something like the genre equivalent of the Euthyphro dilemma: Is the camera present because things are bound to happen, or are things bound to happen because the camera is present? Claude Chabrol, for instance, demonstrates his awareness of this conundrum in his tendency to move the camera for purely dramatic effect, exploiting the way movement through space can create a sense of narrative expectation. In Presence, Soderbergh offers his own “solution” to this post-Hitchcockian situation by potentially identifying camera and ghost. Thus, when Chloe’s would-be boyfriend attempts to drug her by spiking a glass of orange juice, and the camera moves toward it, “causing” it to fall onto the floor, the event is equally attributable to both the ghost (i.e., it’s protecting Chloe) and the simple necessity of genre convention (i.e., the exigencies of story structure dictate that the drugging cannot occur yet). It’s this uncanny convergence of — and tension between — the camera-conscious direction and the ghostly entity that makes Presence more than just an extended point-of-view experiment with an invisible being.

The narrative beats to which this formal-conceptual conceit is wedded admittedly leave something to be desired. It’s not in itself a problem that Presence does not offer nuanced characterizations or plausible plot turns: one doesn’t go to Frenzy or Shadow of a Doubt (1943) for those things, either. More of an issue, ultimately, is that the film does not maintain a baseline naturalism of staging and performance that its conceit requires. All the same, Presence is an invigorating experiment — both a revealing foray into camera-conscious direction and an amusingly literal play on the ghost in the machine. . — LAWRENCE GARCIA

Cloud

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary bodies of work from a veteran filmmaker, one as dedicated to remixing his own work in late auteur style as he is retaining the fresh experimental bent of a much younger director. Martin Scorsese and Hong Sang-soo may be the only other filmmakers who have also been able to accomplish a similar feat this far into their careers. While Kurosawa’s medium-length film Chime, which made the rounds earlier this year, took its cues from his turn-of-the-century masterpieces Cure and Pulse, distilling them both into a pure expression of unnameable yet deeply resonant dread, Cloud seems like a spiritual sequel to his 2016 film Creepy, an exploration of the everyday evil next door that begins as one kind of suspense thriller before moving into the territory of a violent genre film… — SEAN GILMAN   [Read the full previously published review.]

Dead Talents Society

While Taiwanese arthouse films have been regulars on the international festival circuit since the breakthroughs of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and the rest of the New Taiwan Cinema in the 1980s, the island’s popular cinema has always struggled to differentiate itself in the West from the more familiar cinemas of Hong Kong and Mainland China. But in recent years, the tide seems to be shifting. The Taiwan Film Archive has done tremendous work restoring and re-releasing film classics going back to the 1960s, everything from the wuxia and kung fu films of King Hu and Joseph Kuo to the New Cinema classics. And as the productivity of Hong Kong’s cinema has steeply declined in the decade since the Umbrella Movement (though great films are still being made in the former colony), Taiwan’s pop cinema has been on the rise. John Hsu’s Detention, a 2019 horror film based on a video game and set during Taiwan’s White Terror of the early 1960s, was a hit across the sinophone world (though it was not allowed to be released on the Mainland). His latest, Dead Talents Society, is an existential comedy about scary movies and celebrity, a kind of Scream meets Monsters, Inc. meets All About Eve, deeply steeped in the aesthetics of 21st-century East Asian horror.

A brief prologue sets up the world: Sandrine Pinna (Legend of the Demon Cat, See You Tomorrow) plays the ghost world’s most popular star, Cathy. She haunts the creepy Room 414 at a hotel, where she pops out of a closet and does a backwards crab walk until her victim runs away screaming. These kinds of hauntings are essential for the ghost world’s economy, which gets a boon when ceremonies are performed to clean the haunting sites: the more famous the scare, the bigger and more lavish the ceremony. Cathy though is soon upstaged by her young protege, a mean girl who takes hauntings in a new direction (the Internet!) and relegates Cathy to has-been status. 

Then we join the story of a young ghost, The Rookie, played by Gingle Wang (star of Detention). She has no particular talents and is going to disappear from existence in 30 days unless she can obtain a special Haunting License. Cathy’s manager Makoto takes her in, and a ragtag team of misfits work to teach her the haunting ropes. It all leads to a haunt-off between the new girl and the mean girl to scare a trio of YouTube skeptics. Success means goodies for all the ghost world, as well as a bit of self-esteem for our loser heroes. Failure means a death worse than death.

Dead Talents Society is a breeze. Mostly light and goofy, it moves at a furious pace through its ingenious world — well, until its post-credits scene, which is the funniest one of those that most viewers will have witnessed in a long time. It lacks the acrobatic genius or set piece construction of something like the Mr. Vampire series, but has something of the same attitude. Its references are to J-Horror-era classics like The Ring, which may be a little outdated (Hideo Nakata’s film came out more than 25 years ago!), but classics are classics for a reason. And its central metaphor — that being remembered on social media has become a replacement for being remembered by your friends and family — is a powerful one. 

The Rookie’s trouble begins when an item special to her is accidentally thrown away by her surviving family. This is what triggers the countdown to her disintegration. The only solution for a ghost whose memory has been lost by the living is to try to live on as a meme. But that kind of celebrity is fleeting and limited: the pursuit of it causes all kinds of problems for the striving ghosts, and even if they do succeed in achieving it, it’s only a matter of time before a trendy new ghost comes along and usurps their place. Real human connection — being remembered and having a tangible impact on the lives of the living — is much more permanent, more real. Hsu is smart enough not to strain the metaphor, but it’s more than a little disturbing, scary even, how much his ghost world resembles our own increasingly haunted social media. — SEAN GILMAN

The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s new film can only be described as experimental. It doesn’t just explore the legacy of Martinican writer Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, an intellectual whose ideas and achievements have largely been eclipsed by those of her husband, post-colonial poet and theorist Aimé Césaire. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is also a meta-filmic commentary on the process of reconstructing history’s incomplete record. Hunt-Ehrlich frequently breaks the frame, showing us the process by which she and her actors are constructing 1930s Martinique with limited cinematic means. (The film was actually shot in Florida.) We are also kept guessing as to whether the performers onscreen are representing Suzanne and Aimé, or themselves as actors within Hunt-Ehrlich’s project… — MICHAEL SICINSKI    [Read the full previously published review.]

Dead Mail

Shot on grainy 16mm and scored by loopy, synth approximations of classical instruments, Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s Dead Mail sets up a dialectical battle between the analog and the digital, the past and the present, the solitary and the communal, and even Black and white. The latter gets a bracing introduction in the film’s cold open, in which a Black man, bound at the hands and feet, chains dragging underneath him, bloodied and drenched in sweat, crawls through the front door of a house to a mailbox at the edge of the road. Just as he manages to slip the letter in his hands into the box, a White man comes behind him and strikes him across the back of the head. 

The letter inevitably finds its way to the Glen Haven post office, where workers Ann and Bess (Micki Jackson and Susan Priver, respectively) wonder whether its huge red stains and “Help me” scrawled on the front is just some prank. Like they do with other unidentified mail, they give it to Jasper (Thomas Boykin), the solitary, almost mystical “dead mail” investigator in charge of tracking down unknown senders. Jasper is another of the film’s lonely men, with a methodical approach to his work and a subdued demeanor. His lifestyle — which includes residing in a downtown men’s community, something between a shelter and hostel — his aversion to new technology (such as the office copy machine), and a love of model-making make him the perfect foil to the technology-obsessed man he sets out to find.

Trent (John Fleck), the man who struck the bound man, also chases down the letter and, through some careful inquiry, discovers who is in charge of tracking down the sources of dead letters. The inevitable meeting between the vengeful Trent and unsuspecting Jasper has its own shocking conclusion, which is best left unspoiled. But their meeting allows for the film’s narrative structure to take some liberties. A flashback to an unspecified point in time sees Trent entering a synthesizer engineers marketplace, where he meets Josh (Sterling Macer Jr.), an idealist with dreams of making the world’s most accurate synthesizer. Trent takes a shine to Josh’s enthusiasm and offers to help him out. 

The care with which DeBoer and McConaghy shape Josh and Trent’s dynamic is admirable. It plays out like a patron and his benefactor, at times endearing and sweet, at others paternalistic, and sometimes verging on sexual. Trent bears an intense interest in Josh’s technical prowess that borders on the obsessive, crucial given a past relationship to another man who also bore specific expertise to which he aspired. In particular, the directors’ portrait of Trent, whose tendencies to obsess and overthink (and his eventual violence) make him an easy target for scorn, is never apathetic. Trent admits to feeling unseen and underappreciated, which makes Josh’s potential move to Japan to work for a synthesizer manufacturing company a tough pill to swallow; after all, he tells Josh at the lowest point in their crumbling relationship, it was another talented young man long ago who left him alone with his inadequacies. That Trent struggles with feeling unseen and underappreciated is ironic, given the people against whom his character is set in the story, namely women and people of color. The critique is hard to miss, but thankfully it doesn’t bludgeon the viewer. 

Any more detail would spoil the story, which in turns delivers an expectedly thrilling, and unexpectedly moving, ode to public servants whose work often goes unheralded, a fact which DeBoer and McConaghy make explicit in the story. For a film whose greatest strength is in exploiting the possibilities when opposites collide, it makes sense that the film’s expected, but not unsatisfying, end comes when its two storylines finally converge. Safe to say, where justice technically fails in Dead Mail, humanity doesn’t. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite possibly the director’s pièce de résistance in an oeuvre long conversant with everyday Iranian life and critical of the Islamist regime under which it unfolds, brims with the germs of many ideas and sows them far and wide over a sprawling runtime. There is a sacredness, too, attached to its proceedings: a film incensed by the scales of injustice and insistent on invoking morality against morality’s own weaponization, Rasoulof’s indictment of his country’s theocratic regime comes hot off the heels of a renewed prison sentence from which he narrowly escaped, along with footage from a production clandestinely made and then smuggled across the border… — MORRIS YANG    [Read the full previously published review.]

Sketch

Almost as if it were made in response to John Krasinski’s IF, a saccharine fantasy about a motherless young girl who through magical contortions was able to interact with not only her own imaginary friend, but dozens of other cutesy creations (all voiced by the filmmaker’s celebrity friends) in what amounted to group therapy, Seth Worley’s Sketch counters with a pointed hyopothetical: what if that same kid had a really fucked up imagination instead? While still couched in the language of child psychology and that seemingly inescapable genre film trope of overcoming trauma, Sketch understands that even with well-intentioned adults trying to reassure them that their feelings are perfectly normal, the things that children think up on their own can be straight nightmare fuel; particularly as they’re not bound to any sort of logic and are often a means of working through unprocessed, deeply confusing emotions. However, what might have been waved off as “unnerving but something they’ll grow out of” when confined to the pages of a notebook takes on an entirely new meaning when it’s not only tangible, but is chasing you down the road.

Tween Amber (Bianca Belle) and her slightly older brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) live with their father Taylor, played by the ever-reliable Tony Hale, with the three of them still dealing with (or not, as the case may be) the recent passing of the family’s matriarch. While Jack and Amber argue at the dinner table whether they’re considered orphans (Google helpfully explains they are, in fact, “maternal orphans”) Amber channels her anxiety and sorrow into her sketchbook — cheerfully adorned with a kitten on the front cover — where her drawings take on upsetting overtones, especially the ones that depict her bratty classmate Bowman (Kalon Cox) being stabbed through the stomach with a very sharp object and bleeding out. Every page is some ghoulish creation of Amber’s own design that feels lifted straight from the unconscious while also possessing a certain kind of deranged logic (e.g., arachnid-like creatures whose thoraxes are a giant eyeball called “eye-ders”) that dad tries to reassure her is perfectly normal while also being visibly creeped out. Meanwhile Jack, while wandering around in the woods behind the house, discovers a magical pond with glowing blue waters that has the ability to fix broken objects (the film spends exactly no time dwelling on the “hows and whys” of this plot device, so this review will do likewise). If it can make his smashed cell phone good as new and fix a cherished serving plate, what might it do to mom’s ashes, which dad has kept hidden away in a closet? But before Jack ever gets the chance to find out, Amber stumbles upon him at the water’s edge and, after some pushing and shoving, her notebook falls into the drink instead.

Soon, both the house — which the family has been unsuccessfully trying to offload with the help of Liz (D’Arcy Carden), Taylor’s sardonic sister and real estate agent — and town are overrun by sentient crayon and marker creations who, despite the googly eyes and colored-outside-the-lines shape, represent a very real threat to life and limb. The creatures are janky-looking by design, but Worley, a VFX artist and industrial video producer by trade, is smart about how he implements them, lending them real weight if not actual dimension, while leaning into the literalism of a child; how does one kill something drawn from chalk? The same way one gets a chalk drawing off the driveway, of course. Joe Dante’s Gremlins feels like a big influence, but the overarching tone here is less anarchic, live-action cartoon or creature feature and more screwball comedy. Worley’s screenplay is heavy on dialogue callbacks, plant-and-payoff plot devices, and humor that’s intrinsically connected to the film’s editing and shot composition (such niceties used to fall under baseline proficiency in mainstream comedies, while now their mere presence feels like an oasis in the desert). A school bus attack sequence (by a giant, glitter-belching blue biped named “Dave”), while suitably harrowing in its own right, also showcases a semantics debate over whether an iPod is in fact a phone, two inspired needle drops — one of which gets an appreciated callback in the film’s end credits — and a clever gag where a cowardly child escapes through an emergency hatch in the roof that’s conveyed entirely through offscreen sound effects and out of focus action in the background of the frame. It’s not revelatory stuff, but Sketch has the fundamentals down cold.

It helps that the cast, specifically the child actors, is exceptional. The film’s action splits apart Taylor and Liz and Amber and Jack (along with perpetual thorn in the side, Bowman) into parallel adventures, with much of the film’s action driven by the kids. The young actors are precocious (in the way sitcom performers often are) without being obnoxious; bouncing off one another with their bickering and pre-adolescent skepticism, taking to the film’s PG-rated barbs and volleying insults like fish to water. Meanwhile, old pros like Hale and Carden keep the film’s fantastical premise grounded in the emotionally credible, with Taylor and Liz (themselves a pair of siblings well-versed at needling one another) meeting each new creature with the right mix of horror and deadpan resignation. It’s all building toward an emotional epiphany about confronting sadness in all of its messy manifestations being a healthier response to grief than denying its existence altogether, which is fairly customary for this sort of thing (one imagines Hale perhaps felt a touch of déjà vu here, having lent his voice to Inside Out 2 earlier this year), but it’s movingly addressed all the same. The derivative nature of Sketch, which feels very mid-’80s Amblin-adjacent, limits the film’s ambitions somewhat, but there’s an audience waiting to discover and appreciate a film like this. It’s comforting in its familiarity, but in its particulars and execution, it’s better than it arguably needed to be. — ANDREW DIGNAN

All We Imagine as Light

“This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night Mumbai city in the lyrical opening montage of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Clément Pinteaux’s jump-cut editing and Ranabir Das’ mobile camerawork enhance this feeling of poetic chaos: we’re always on the move, stumbling into overcrowded streets when not uncomfortably sat inside overcrowded trains and buses, our eyes, like the kinoeye, constantly looking for someone else who’s also grinding it out in the sticky heat of the night. And then, all of a sudden, the film slows down. The most transparently apparent reason for this is to introduce us to one of its central protagonists. But, stylistically, it’s also a cue to slow down: Kapadia, through her patient and soulful film, wants to restore some of the time people feel the city has taken away from them… — DHRUV GOYAL    [Read the full previously published review.]

Being John Smith

In his new film Being John Smith, premiering alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s for-real-this-time last two films in TIFF’s Wavelengths program, filmmaker John Smith starts with a simple idea, the exceptional commonness of his name, and layers on contradiction after contradiction, accomplishing both deep vulnerability and unusual universality. He begins with a personal history, structured around the childhood nicknames that augmented his indistinct given name. As his height lags behind his peers, “Big John Smith” gives way to the confidence-corroding “Piddly John Smith” before settling at the more amenable “Pid.” At a certain point, an interruption introduces the motif of juxtaposition, as his expression of the concern that a film constructed from “voice-over accompanied by illustrative images” will be too conventional annihilates itself, appearing as a text caption over a black screen. Smith continues with a sort of dialogue between voice and text, advancing a number of themes through similar contradictions.

Most salient are those around the film’s own existence. Smith raises numerous concerns around the activity of creating art as horrors around the world escalate and around the value of art functioning as a personal archive when it seems the world is ending; “cockroaches can’t read,” one caption quips. Though a number of filmworkers in Toronto delivered statements calling for a ceasefire and an end to Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, some more specifically calling on the festival to drop the Royal Bank of Canada as a sponsor, Smith is the only one this critic saw embed such a statement in his film. Perhaps this gesture is no more likely to effect change, but by including his call for a ceasefire in the film, Smith ensures the message will travel anywhere the film does and insists upon, at the very least, a tacit acknowledgement from any institution choosing to program it. There’s some risk in permanently tying himself to a position — though it be clear a righteous one — that has brought substantial pushback from various artistic and academic institutions.

Though Smith’s unease with the world he lives in is potent, in Being John Smith it exists necessarily alongside personal and artistic unease. Throughout the film Smith incorporates several of his more famous works, most memorably allowing the black tower from his film of the same name to pop up intermittently to continue its haunting. Smith’s deadpan narration has been an integral part of a number of his films, and in one of this project’s most bracing moments, he expresses discomfort at recording his voice for the first time since undergoing treatment for cancer, finding it diminished by the physical trauma. Though Smith flirts with immodesty, owning up to the significance of his artistic career in a manner only somewhat tongue-inicheek, he stops short of making explicit the ultimate contradiction of the film: that despite, and in fact because of, feeling the diminishment of his voice, the strain of continued invention, the futility of his project, Being John Smith stands before the audience as a brilliant accomplishment. Instead, Smith ends with a moment he filmed at an open air concert he was invited to last year by a famous friend, explicitly uniting the common with the ecstatic. — JESSE CATHERINE WEBBER