Daniel Kasman

Inner and Outer Space: Wang Bing Talks About Mrs. Fang

By Daniel Kasman & Christopher Small An old face—skin drawn tautly over jaw and cheekbone, thinning grey hair, eyeballs quivering like tadpoles—is the central image in Wang Bing’s Golden Leopard winner Mrs. Fang. The naked, sober image of this face, which belongs to Fang Xiuying, the film’s bedridden 68-year-old protagonist, is studied at length and…
Read More

Mrs. Fang (Wang Bing, France/China/Germany) — Wavelengths

By Daniel Kasman & Christopher Small Published in Cinema Scope 72 (Fall 2017) An old face—skin drawn tautly over jaw and cheekbone, thinning grey hair, eyeballs quivering like tadpoles—is the central image in Wang Bing’s Golden Leopard winner Mrs. Fang. The naked, sober image of this face, which belongs to Fang Xiuying, the film’s bedridden…
Read More

Let the Corpses Tan (Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, Belgium/France) — Midnight Madness

By Daniel Kasman Having plunged as deep as their knives could go into the long-dead corpse of the giallo genre in Amer and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani now forge a kind of hybrid of the spaghetti Westerns and Italian crime films of the late ’60s, stripping out…
Read More

Artifact Bonfire: Ken Jacobs and Reichstag 9/11

By Daniel Kasman I stopped looking at video footage of September 11, 2001, a long time ago as I find these moving images of expressionistically variable quality and cubist perspective anguished, frightful, and daunting. Two years after the attack, I moved to New York City, and over time I became a part of the city—or…
Read More

Circumnavigating Cinema: Kidlat Tahimik’s Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III

By Adam Cook and Daniel Kasman To be upfront, we weren’t familiar with Kidlat Tahimik. Multiple tips led us to seeing his new film, Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III, at its premiere in the Forum section of the Berlinale, in the way that one is often pushed towards unknown filmmakers: on the recommendations…
Read More

Episode of the Sea (Van Brummelen & De Haan and the inhabitants of Urk, Netherlands)

By Daniel Kasman One of the most original films at the Toronto International Film Festival, Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Hann’s ethnographic documentary Episode of the Sea reveals, if not declares, its antecedents immediately. This was not unexpected, since the filmmakers’ previous short in Wavelengths, and one of the best films of 2012, View…
Read More