It has now been seven years since Heinz Emigholz, until 2017 mainly known for his semi-silent architecture films, reintroduced language into his cinema with Streetscapes [Dialogue]. That film, structured as a series of conversations between an artist (John Erdman) and his psychoanalyst (Jonathan Perel), was inspired by Emigholz’s own depression-fueled sessions and thus served as a form of autobiography and auto-critique, building in discussions of the filmmaker’s career to date. Since then, Emigholz has collaborated with Erdman thrice more: first in The Last City (2020), which unfolds as a set of disparate conversations, and then in The Lobby (2020), where Erdman is credited as Old White Male, and which plays more like a misanthropic theatrical monologue. Like Streetscapes before it, The Suit, their latest collaboration, enfolds knowledge of those prior films into its diegesis — and Old White Male isn’t happy with the results.
For one thing, he contends that if anything, The Lobby was not misanthropic enough. For another, he is decidedly displeased with the label Old White Male, as if he could be reduced to an age and ethnicity. But then, he finds fault with virtually everything, at one point flatly remarking, “I no longer enjoy living.” (One of the few things he expresses admiration for is the suit he wore during the filming of The Lobby, hence the title of this film.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Old White Male lives alone in a bunker, where he is surrounded by books, contemplates suicide, and dreads what is to come. More surprisingly, he receives a video call from his future self.
Unlike The Lobby, then, The Suit is undeniably verbose, but not technically a monologue. As in all of this recent cycle of films, Emigholz breaks up the presentation of speech and dialogue across a variety of spaces — and this remains the fundamental interest of the film. The additional fillip here is the disorientation that results from this cross-temporal conversation. If Streetscapes, for all of its visual interest, conforms to the beats of a psychoanalysis session, The Suit goes a step further by depicting a conversation with oneself, thereby dramatizing the discontinuity involved in a passage from present to future. Apart from the structural interest of that move, however, The Suit comes across less as a standalone film than as the latest in an experimental cycle. Caught somewhere between the daisy-chained dialogues of The Last City and the oppressive but charged atmosphere of The Lobby, it is a transitional work that leaves tantalizingly open where exactly Emigholz is heading.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 2.
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