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      Overlooked No More: Chick Strand, Pioneering Experimental Filmmaker

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      Often turning her lens on women, she emerged as one of independent cinema’s fiercest proponents on the West Coast.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In Chick Strand’s 1979 film “Soft Fiction,” five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories, including one who describes being molested by her grandfather. As she talks, images of her performing household activities like cooking breakfast appear in splintered frames and enigmatic shapes.“It is a film about women who win,” Strand explained in a 1998 interview with the conceptual artist Kate Haug for the journal Wide Angle. “It is not about women who were victims or who had survived.”“They carry on,” she added, and by doing so they become “more potent, more powerful, more of themselves.”In “Femme Experimentale,” a research paper based on her interviews with several pioneering female filmmakers, Haug wrote that Strand’s “experimental techniques” in that 55-minute film disrupted “the visual codes of documentary film” with its “poetic transitions between narrators.”“Soft Fiction,” which is regularly screened in university film programs, retrospectives and museums around the world, was one of dozens of movies made by Strand, an experimental filmmaker who often trained her lens on women. Among the others were “Anselmo and the Women” and “Fake Fruit Factory,” both from 1986.Strand was a late bloomer by the standards of her day: She didn’t make her first film until she was 34. But she would go on to have momentous impact on the West Coast’s experimental film movement.A still from Strand’s film “Fake Fruit Factory” (1986), about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.Canyon Cinema Foundation“She rejects the classification of ‘feminist artist,’” the film scholar Gene Youngblood told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1999, when some of Strand’s films were being shown at the College of Santa Fe. “And yet she has produced some of the most memorable portraits of female characters in the history of cinema.”Though she never achieved the same level of fame as contemporaries like Barbara Hammer and Shirley Clarke, scholars say her work was just as groundbreaking.Chick Strand was born Mildred Totman on Dec. 3, 1931, in Berkeley, Calif., to Russel and Eleanor Totman. Her father was a bank teller, her mother a homemaker. (Chick was a nickname given to her by her father).She first developed an interest in film while studying anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. By then she had already dabbled in photography.In the 1960s, inspired by the growing free speech movement, Strand began hosting makeshift screenings in her backyard with her first husband, Paul Anderson Strand, an artist, and the experimental film impresario Bruce Baillie. These “happenings,” as they called them, were intended to showcase highly personal, often esoteric audiovisual experiments among friends. As word spread, they quickly became carnivalesque productions, with Strand, Baillie and other regulars dressing in costumes and performing live while the films were shown to an increasingly large group of strangers.A still from Strand’s “Soft Fiction” (1979), in which five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories.Canyon Cinema FoundationIn 1961, she founded The Canyon Cinemanews, a journal for local filmmakers that Stanford University called “the main organ of the independent filmmaking community” when it purchased the journal’s archives in 2010. The journal offered what it described as “a cornucopia of announcements, letters, classifieds, how-to information, call-outs and more” for local filmmakers who lacked access to Hollywood.In 1966, the same year she began studying ethnography at the University of California, Los Angeles (and the same year her son, Eric, was born), Strand presented a three-minute short, “Angel Blue Sweet Wings,” at the New York Film Festival. The film captured the luminous, psychedelically colored landscape of Strand’s second home, in Mexico, through a roaming, almost dancing camera, with the faces of her friends collaged seamlessly over fuzzy bodies, plants and mountains. It was described as “an experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions” by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.In 1967, Strand helped start the Canyon Cinema collective with Baillie and the filmmakers Lawrence C. Jordan, Robert Nelson, Lenny Lipton and Ben Van Meter. The organization — part pop-up cinematheque, part artists’ cooperative — distributed experimental films by now-famous directors like Hammer, Clarke and Peggy Ahwesh. Canyon Cinema later became a full-time nonprofit, with many of its members’ works incorporated into the National Film Registry.By then Strand and her second husband, Neon Park, the artist known for his imaginative album covers, were splitting their time between California and Mexico. In Mexico, she began to explore assemblage and ethnography more formally in her art, resulting in several works now considered landmarks of West Coast cinema, including “Fake Fruit Factory,” about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.“I’d be tripping over the rocks and speaking this terrible Spanish,” Strand told L.A. Weekly in 2006. “But I was so incredibly interested, and people really responded.”Strand with her second husband, the artist Neon Park. They split their time between homes in California and Mexico.Canyon Cinema FoundationStrand then delved into what would become perhaps her best-known work: a 20-year trilogy of ethnographic films on the life of Anselmo Aguascalientes, a poor Mexican Indian tuba player. The first of these, “Anselmo” (1967), about his music, “represents an early example of Chick Strand’s abiding interest in documenting people, objects, animals and events through a heightened and poetic subjectivity, while at the same time using assemblage techniques that allow her to incorporate disparate, sometimes jarring elements,” Maria Pramaggiore, a professor of media studies at Maynooth University in Ireland, wrote in an essay, “Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography,” published in the book “Women’s Experimental Cinema” (2007).The techniques used in “Anselmo” — and later in “Cosas de Mi Vida” (1976), about Anselmo’s life, and “Anselmo and the Women,” about his wife and mistress — would, Pramaggiore noted, become hallmarks of Strand’s documentary practice.Another key work, “Kristallnacht” (1979), was more technical, using the whites and blacks of 16-millimeter film negatives to craft a luminous existential tribute to Anne Frank. In that film, reflections play across shots of women swimming in a pool of water, sparking glimmers in the chiaroscuro darkness of each inverted image.Throughout her filmmaking career, Strand taught at the film arts program at Occidental College in Los Angeles, ultimately becoming the program’s director. She retired in 1996 but continued to produce groundbreaking experiments in film in her twilight years. As she told L.A. Weekly a decade into retirement: “I’m very satisfied creating works of art. I can’t seem to keep my mind from doing this, from painting or planning new films. It’s just what I love to do.”Strand died of cancer on July 11, 2009, at 77. But she lived long enough to see 350 of her personal items permanently entered into the Motion Picture Academy’s Film Archive in 2007. More

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      Taylor Swift Eras Tour Concert Film Coming to Movie Theaters

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      A theatrical version of the billion-dollar tour — a cultural juggernaut that just ended its North American leg — opens Oct. 13.Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the billion-dollar juggernaut that has dominated the cultural calendar this year, may be on a break before picking up internationally, but its momentum will only rest so long: The show is coming to movie theaters this fall.“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” concert film will be released in the United States, Canada and Mexico on Oct. 13, Swift announced on social media Thursday, with U.S. AMC Theaters promising at least four showtimes per day from Thursday to Sunday upon opening.“The Eras Tour has been the most meaningful, electric experience of my life so far and I’m overjoyed to tell you that it’ll be coming to the big screen soon,” Swift said. “Eras attire, friendship bracelets, singing and dancing encouraged.”Anticipating the white-hot demand that has followed the tour since its announcement, crashing ticketing systems around the world, AMC promised in a news release that it had “bolstered its ticket server capacity to handle traffic at more than 5 times the current record for the most ever tickets sold in an hour.” (The company added, however, that it was “also aware that no ticketing system in history seems to have been able to accommodate the soaring demand from Taylor Swift fans when tickets are first placed on sale.”)Tickets are on sale now. Prices start at $19.89 for adults and $13.13 for children, substantially less than what fans paid for the tour itself — especially on the robust secondary market — as the concert industry adjusts to sometimes prohibitively high costs for its biggest events.Swift, 33, wrapped this year’s North American dates with four shows in Mexico last week. Her downtime, though, will be brief. In addition to the movie version of the concert, the singer will release “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the fourth of rerecorded original albums, two weeks later, on Oct. 27. By November, the Eras Tour will pick up in Argentina before traveling around the world in 2024, with dates — including nine additional U.S. shows — continuing into November 2024.“1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the new edition of her 2014 pop blockbuster, marks Swift’s seventh release in barely three years, a period of artistic productivity that has fueled pent-up, post-pandemic demand for the singer’s live show. Jon Caramanica, a critic for The New York Times, said in a review of the first concert in March that the Eras Tour put on display “how many pivots Swift has undertaken in her career, and how the accompanying risks can have wildly different consequences.”The trade publication Pollstar has estimated that the singer sold about $14 million in tickets for each show so far. By the end of next year, the 146 stadium dates could reach $1.4 billion or more in sales. More

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      Review: In the ‘Ernest & Celestine’ Sequel, a Prodigal Cub Returns

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      The delightful odd couple of the Oscar-nominated French film head to the mountains in ‘A Trip to Gibberitia.’ Every frame brims with painterly detail.One of the many enduring pleasures of “Ernest & Celestine,” the 2014 French film about the unlikely bond between a bear and a mouse, is its rhapsodic bridging of music and imagery. The tale (based on books by Gabrielle Vincent) is rendered with gossamer line drawings so wedded to their accompanying score that the images sometimes ripple, swell and curl in tandem with the musical notes.“Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia” is the gem of a sequel to that Oscar-nominated film, centering the story this time around on music as the sine qua non of community. The plucky, petite mouse Celestine (voiced by Pauline Brunner) and the surly troubadour Ernest (Lambert Wilson) trek to Ernest’s hometown, Gibberitia, a majestic but autocratic city in the mountains where music is no longer legal. Not even birds are exempt; tuneful warblers are shooed and hosed down by the police.While the earlier film tilted toward Celestine, “A Trip to Gibberitia,” directed by Julien Chheng and Jean-Christophe Roger, hangs on Ernest, a prodigal cub who soon learns that his father, a state judge, instated the ban out of spite.The brisk, lively plot has shades of a French Revolutionary spirit — a band of insurgent musicians call their underground movement “the resistance” — but the film’s real magic lies in the illustrations. Backdrops brim with painterly detail, and tiny changes in characters’ faces convey worlds of feeling. In a film whose moral emphasizes the necessity of artistic freedom, there is a deceptive simplicity to this aesthetic style that makes it all the more special.Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to GibberitiaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fremont’ Review: Rapid Transit

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      This dry, understated film follows a young Afghan refugee looking for connection in her new home, the San Francisco Bay Area.“Fremont” takes its title from the Bay Area city of the same name. Often called Little Kabul, it’s home to one of the largest enclaves of Afghans in the United States, with many immigrants gravitating toward it for a sense of community. That’s what Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is searching for: Community. Connection. Love. These are difficult pursuits for anyone in these atomized times, but especially for Donya, a young refugee and former translator for the American military.Being in Fremont, living among other Afghans, isn’t a huge comfort for Donya. Perhaps because her memories of home aren’t cozy — in fact, they fill her with dread and guilt. The details of what she left behind aren’t the focus here. It’s enough to know that they keep her awake at night; that she prefers the lightly numbing, Zenlike routine of her unglamorous job at a fortune-cookie factory in San Francisco.The British Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali captures Donya’s existential plight with the dry, contemplative mood of a film by Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismaki, both masters of deadpan dramedies infused with melancholia. Shooting in milky black-and-white, Jalali situates Donya in a world of outcasts and loners — people disaffected and worn out yet also capable of compassion and change. Salim (Siddique Ahmed), a fellow insomniac who lives in Donya’s apartment complex, gives her his slot with a psychiatrist, Dr. Anthony (Gregg Turkington), who sees him pro bono.An appointment isn’t like a movie ticket that you can just hand over to a friend, Dr. Anthony explains, fussing over protocol. Donya persuades him to take her on anyway, beginning a series of droll (if not exactly helpful) consultations. After Donya is promoted to fortune writer at the factory, her boss’s vengeful wife (Jennifer McKay) discovers that Donya has written her phone number on the paper in one cookie. She calls for Donya’s firing. Her husband (Eddie Tang) sees it differently: If anything, Donya’s attempt to reach out to another lost soul makes her precisely the kind of person who should be inventing dreamy maxims.Jalali and his co-writer, Carolina Cavalli, point to the ways in which bureaucratic rigidity and cutthroat capitalism can cripple us. They stop short of reducing the film to a story about social injustices while deftly steering clear of an overly cutesy tone and messaging about our shared humanity, or whatever. Expressionistic interludes — shadows mingling on a stairwell wall, a globe spinning at a blurred speed — capture the uncanny nature of social interactions among the displaced and disoriented.Jalali complements this wistful mood with a jazzy score from Mahmood Schricker, which, driven by sitar and low-pitched horn, seems to cut through the dead air of Donya’s impassive encounters. If the humor in these moments doesn’t always click, it’s because there’s only so much awkward-giggle mileage in Jalali’s drawn-out takes of two people talking face-to-face.A first-time actor who fled Afghanistan in 2021, Wali Zada emits a natural warmth and poignancy as she delivers intentionally vacant line readings. This flattens some of the wryer scenes but makes Donya’s measured expressions of longing and hopefulness sing. She’s what makes the final act — which features a solitary mechanic played by Jeremy Allen White (of “The Bear”) — so moving and romantic. Jalali maintains a mysterious ambiguity, but Wali Zada conveys what matters: Donya has found somewhere she wants to be.FremontNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Choose Love’ Review: Pick Your Own Cliché

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      This interactive Netflix rom-com lets viewers make choices on behalf of the main character, changing the story. But each path is banal.Netflix’s latest interactive movie, “Choose Love,” is an attempt to apply a dating simulator experience to a standard-issue rom-com. Its choose-your-own-adventure interface — like the one in the 2019 “Black Mirror” movie “Bandersnatch,” another Netflix production — allows viewers to make decisions for Cami Conway (Laura Marano), a young woman who suddenly finds herself having to choose between three suitors. The choices that viewers select with the click of a button (Should Cami kiss this man or dodge his advances? Should she wear this dress or that one?) will ultimately inform which guy she ends up with.Except, there’s not as much choice left to the viewer as meets the eye. The movie’s opening scene is a tarot reading where you get to help Cami decide whether she wants “good news” or “bad news” first. But either way, it’s the same set of cards. After a pleasant but banal double-date night with her long-term boyfriend, Paul (Scott Michael Foster), she runs into an erstwhile high school heartthrob, Jack (Jordi Webber), while dropping her niece off at school, learning that he’s now a professional photographer with humanitarian priorities. He takes pictures of children for charity.She meets her third suitor, a famous pop musician named Rex Galier (Avan Jogia), when he rents out space at the recording studio where she works as a sound engineer. Rex asks for her advice on a new track he’s producing, and — whether or not you pick “lie and say it’s good” or “brutal honesty” — he takes a liking to her expertise and asks her to record with him. Cami’s longtime dream of a singing career is reawakened, and she finds herself faced with three potential life paths: play it safe, reconnect with the one who got away or chase stardom with a famous beau.The interactive features in “Choose Love” more or less boil down to two or three pivotal scenes that determine which man Cami will spend her life with — and of course, as the credits roll, Netflix encourages you to go back and click a different button for an alternative ending. If only the film were compelling enough to warrant that.While “Bandersnatch” and Netflix’s other attempts at interactive storytelling, like the “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” special “Kimmy vs. The Reverend,” were not without their flaws, their unpredictability — whether through dystopian thrills or comedic timing — kept the gimmick somewhat afloat. But the main selling point of “Choose Love,” directed by Stuart McDonald, seems to be that viewers get to pick which stale rom-com trope they see play out onscreen. Predictability aside, “Choose Love” resembles less of a comforting rom-com than it does the forgone conclusion to streaming’s algorithm-powered media: a series of disconnected, shallow interactions, each leading to a different predetermined cliché.Choose LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Mountain’ Review: Stone-Faced in Nature’s Splendors

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      In this drama directed by and starring Thomas Salvador, an urbanite plunges into treacherous conditions.Thomas Salvador’s “The Mountain” is a lightweight parable about a man who abandons modernity to connect with the earth. On impulse, a Parisian robotics engineer named Pierre (Salvador, who also wrote the script with Naïla Guiguet), extends a work trip to scale France’s snow-capped Mont Blanc. “I can’t resist,” he says, and for a while the film plays like a silent comedy about a transcendence junkie itching for a fix. Pierre’s cable car is too crowded, his new ice crampons look silly alongside other tourists in tees, his scenic glacier-top tent is hemmed-in by more tents. Nevertheless, he prefers not to rejoin civilization — he’s Bartleby the Backpacker, holding out for something he can’t explain.Though this is a story about an urbanite plunging into treacherous conditions, the camping itself appears easy. Pierre looks impressive scaling cliffs. “A change from the climbing gym,” he says placidly. It’s equally incredible that, when the weeks begin to blur, he maintains his neat goatee without ever appearing to shave — and even catches the eye of a quixotic resort chef (Louise Bourgoin) despite having the conversational skills of a rock.Truly communing with nature, however, proves difficult. That is, until the film’s one surprise, a hallucinatory twist which comes so long after the audience has been lulled into the quiet contemplation of snow and clouds that it almost feels like we, too, might be low on oxygen. Some might see the final act as body horror. To the director, it’s a metaphysical sacrament — and all along, his camera has hinted that mankind must commit to the planet before it’s too late.The MountainNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Venice Film Festival Finds Drama Without Zendaya

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      Day 1 brought challenges but not “Challengers,” the film that had been scheduled to open this usually starry event until it was delayed by the strikes.The sky in Venice wept on Wednesday, for there were no pictures to be taken of Zendaya in couture clambering from a speedboat.No? Too much? Well, it’s hard not to sound melodramatic at a film festival where the movies are big but the mood swings are even bigger. Let me clear my throat, take a swig of this Aperol spritz, and start again …The 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off on this rainy Wednesday with several big-name auteurs in attendance but few of the stars that this event has come to count on. With dual strikes by the writers and actors guilds forcing a Hollywood shutdown, and the actors forbidden from promoting studio films during the labor action, Venice will inaugurate a fall film season that is still in significant flux.The first day was meant to be turbocharged by the presence of Zendaya, who turned heads here two years ago in a series of stunning dresses while publicizing the first installment of “Dune.” But the shutdown cost Venice the new film she stars in, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” in which she plays a tennis pro who has to make a romantic choice between two best friends, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (the cheeky marketing materials tease that on at least one night, she chooses both).Without its lead available to support the film, MGM delayed the release of “Challengers” to spring 2024 and yanked it from the Venice lineup. Taking its place as the festival’s opening-night film was “Comandante,” a World War II film told from the point of view of Italian submariners. While it’s well-shot and full of suspenseful battle sequences, “Comandante” features exactly zero tennis hotties contemplating a threesome, which may hinder its ultimate appeal with a Venice audience that was promised starry romantic high jinks.Though the festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, admitted at a news conference on Wednesday that the likes of Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) will not be attending Venice because of the strike, other actors who hail from more independent productions have managed to secure guild waivers, including “Ferrari” star Adam Driver, “Memory” lead Jessica Chastain, and the cast of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” They’re expected to show up on the Lido this week alongside a posse of high-powered directors that includes David Fincher (“The Killer”), Ava DuVernay (“Origin”) and Richard Linklater (“Hit Man”).Still, the strikes loom large. At Barbera’s news conference, the jury president, the filmmaker Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), dressed for maximum solidarity, donning a “Writers Guild on Strike!” shirt and a similar button on the lapel of his sport coat. He noted that as of Wednesday, the writers had been on strike for 121 days, with the actors joining them for the last 48 days, and he called on studios to compensate those artists fairly.“I think there’s a basic idea that each work of art has value unto itself, that it’s not just a piece of content, to use Hollywood’s favorite word right now,” Chazelle told reporters, adding that that idea “has been eroded quite a bit over the past 10 years. There’s many issues on the table with the strikes, but to me, that’s the core issue.”Chazelle was joined by the directors Martin McDonagh and Laura Poitras, who both wore shirts supporting the Writers Guild. They are part of a jury that includes the filmmakers Jane Campion and Mia Hansen-Love, among others.“I’m not sure I entirely deserve this spot, but I will do my best to live up to it,” Chazelle said. “I thank Mr. Barbera for his foolishness in letting me try it out.”Though Chazelle has been to Venice a few times before, to debut “La La Land” and his follow-up, “First Man,” he said he still found the place quite surreal. “That fact that you take a boat to a screening, it’s silly,” Chazelle said. “Cinema, to me, is a waking dream and that, to me, is Venice.”See what I said about melodrama? When you’re in Venice, where even the paint peels in the most picturesque way, you just can’t help yourself from indulging. That’s how your columnist felt last night in the rain, mulling over two of the worst disasters to hit Italy in quite some time: St. Mark’s Square was flooded, and there was no Zendaya. But at least the sun will come out tomorrow here, as will the new films by Michael Mann and Wes Anderson. More