Since when did plot become the only way to judge a movie?

Steve McQueen’s postmodern ghost story, Occupied City, runs for a whopping four and a half hours and forces us to readjust and expand our understanding of how movies convey meaning. I am. The film takes an almost pointillist approach to telling history. Occupy is based on a book by McQueen’s wife, Bianca Stigter, a Dutch filmmaker and historian whose research on the Holocaust also produced one of last year’s most surprising non-fiction films, Three Minutes: A Rengning. “City of the World” is mostly composed of hundreds of videos. A static shot of Amsterdam during the pandemic lockdown. In each shot, a sober narrator (Melanie Hyams) details a corresponding crime that occurred in each location during his early 1940s era when the Nazis invaded the country.

This conceit is deliberately repetitive, and its simple, matter-of-fact approach belies the empathetic narrative manipulation that tends to dominate its subject matter. Often my mind wandered between countless enumerations of movies, which caused a pang of guilt and also helped me put things into perspective. When faced with fear of a magnitude and scope that is impossible for the human brain to fully comprehend, it is sadly easy to forget or lose focus on the process.

Every year I try to highlight a few movies from the revival section. This section features restorations of vintage titles that were previously inaccessible. “Un rêve plus long que la nuit” (Dream longer than the night) by French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle was a standout. Years ago, I visited an exhibition of de Saint Phalle, where one of his most striking works was a vagina the size of a door held between giant legs. It was the mouth. Simultaneously silly, beautiful, and horrifying, this film is a pagan fever dream that envisions feminist revolution through the eyes of a young girl, and its best parts are in the details. The versatility of papier-mâché penises is amazing. .

Revivals also features a program of short stories by Man Ray. Man Ray is an artist best known for his photography, and his films are dizzying experiments with light and movement that transform familiar objects into something alien. For Man Ray, traditional photography was about capturing reality, and his work was about expressing images that were only possible in fantasy and dreams. Now, in the fast-paced age of the internet, with increasingly sophisticated film technology at the disposal of artists, it’s worth considering films with similar ambitions: films that make unreality legible. In “The Human Surge 3,” director Eduardo Williams uses his 360-degree camera to capture the wanderings of a multicultural group of friends from different parts of the world, including Peru, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka. I am. Using eerie, stretched imagery similar to Google Earth, Williams’ startling vision of digital interconnectedness collapses borders and language barriers in startling, psychedelic ways.