The revelatory ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ and the best movies in L.A. this week
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
It was announced this week that, at long last, the Vista Theatre in Los Feliz will be reopening on Nov. 17. Under the stewardship of new owner Quentin Tarantino, the theater, which recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, will screen new movies on 35mm or 70mm film prints, no DCPs or video. Tarantino, of course, also owns L.A.’s New Beverly Cinema, whose marquee declares “always on film.”
Lance Alspaugh, the Vista’s previous owner who has remained onboard during the transition, told our Jen Yamato that Tarantino‘s staunchly pro-film stance could have reverberations throughout the exhibition industry.
“It’s a good thing for possibly the world, but certainly America, that he has taken that position,” said Alspaugh. “In a way, his stance is going to help the whole film [movement] because it could wake some of the studio heads up a little bit and put a little pressure on the industry to remember the art of the actual film print.”
Bérénice Reynaud tribute
The curator, critic, scholar and author Bérénice Reynaud died on Sept. 17 following an extended battle with cancer. This Sunday, there will be a tribute to Reynaud at the REDCAT, where she was founding co-curator when the theater launched in 2003 and remained until her death.
Her work as a curator helped make the world of experimental film and video a little less foreboding for local audiences, finding a bridge to more readily accessible independent filmmaking. Born and raised in France, Reynaud taught at the CalArts School of Film/Video for more than 30 years.
Sunday’s tribute, also available via livestream, will give some sense of how many lives Reynaud’s work touched. Among those giving tributes in person and on video will be Abigail Severance, dean of CalArts School of Film/Video, “Los Angeles Plays Itself” filmmaker Thom Anderson, curator Jheanelle Brown, critic Robert Koehler, curator Cheng-Sim Lim, filmmaker Nina Menkes, former REDCAT co-curator Steve Anker and filmmaker Minda Martin.
In a statement, Severance and Anker said that Reynaud possessed “a brilliant, rigorous relationship to cinema that influenced generations of students. She was fiercely intelligent, loving, and a tireless advocate for the filmmakers, activists and rebels that made up both her local and global family.”
They also noted, “Bérénice touched the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of artists and film lovers. Tenacious, totally dedicated and unerringly brilliant, she was truly one of a kind.”
The fresh flavors of ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’
Since its premiere at Sundance, Raven Jackson’s feature debut “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” has remained one of the most remarkable films of the year. An impressionist portrait that skips across the decades of a woman’s life in rural Mississippi, the film captures both the power of individual moments and also how those memories add up to the combinative power of a life. The film is now in theaters in limited release.
In his review, Justin Chang wrote, “Jackson has composed a sensory poem of extraordinary tactility and stealthy emotional force, but she has also constructed a story from fragments you immediately recognize and contextualize: the tragedy of losing a home, the pleasure of hearing a song in church and the consolation of resting your head in your grandmother’s lap. … There’s risk in this approach, of course: artistic risk, commercial risk, the risk of turning off audiences that react with indifference and sometimes hostility to new ways of seeing. But sometimes an audience faces a risk of its own, namely that it might overlook as powerful and uncompromised a work of American art as any to have appeared in a movie theater this year.”
Jackson has been participating in our year-long project “The Independents,” which has followed the journey of seven filmmakers from Sundance 2023. Jackson’s most recent installment is a diary entry on a day in her working life. For the first-person piece, she chose the day “All Dirt Roads” played at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center as part of the New York York Film Festival. As Jackson writes, “When I was a graduate film student at New York University several years ago, I’d attend screenings at the festival often. In so many ways, bringing ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ to NYFF felt like a second world premiere of the film.”
As well as her entire introductory speech, her entry also includes this description of the moment she stepped onstage to introduce the film: “I can’t see faces, but I hear loud applause. And several people saying my name. I feel joy. Right in my chest. In my heart. Waves of it. I let this love, this joy, really land and spill over me as I open the folded paper in my hand. A smile on my face that shows all of my teeth.”
Other points of interest
‘Mod F— Explosion’ brings back the ‘90s Whammy Analog Media will be screening the new 2K restoration of Jon Moritsugu’s wild, shocking and freewheeling “Mod F— Explosion,” which, aside from having an amazing title, is also an essential artifact of early ‘90s underground culture. A teenage girl (Amy Davis, Moritsugu’s frequent collaborator and wife) is looking for love and/or a leather jacket when she stumbles across a rumble between local mods and Japanese bikers.
Writing about the film in 1994, The Times’ Kevin Thomas heralded it as “a real discovery … a dynamic punk odyssey of a pair of innocent teens adrift in a violent urban world; Moritsugu unleashes a barrage of powerful images and hard-driving music.”
Remembering Terence Davies English filmmaker Terence Davies died on Oct. 7 at age 77, and the American Cinematheque is launching a tribute series on Saturday with a 4K restoration of his 1988 debut feature, “Distant Voices, Still Lives.” Also screening as part of the series will be 1992’s “The Long Day Closes,” 2011’s “The Deep Blue Sea” starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston, 2000’s Edith Wharton adaptation “The House of Mirth” starring Gillian Anderson and 2022’s “Benediction.”
In an appreciation of Davies’ work, Justin Chang wrote, “Part of what distinguishes Davies’ stories has always been the unfashionable stateliness of their telling, their quality of contemplation. For the uninitiated, the precision of his compositions, the graceful drift of his camera movements and the fastidiousness of his musical choices can seem restrained to the point of stiffness. Don’t be fooled; Davies trusts us to bridge the distance he places between us and his characters, and it’s precisely his formal composure that makes his pictures so enveloping, lyrical and finally overwhelming in their dramatic force.”
‘A Poem Is a Naked Person’ There has been a lot of conversation recently about concert films, but not all movies on musicians have to be straight documents of a performance. On Sunday Brain Dead Studios will be screening Les Blank’s “A Poem Is A Naked Person,” made in the early 1970s but not released until 2015. An unconventional portrait film of the musician Leon Russell, the film is like stepping into someone else’s world, hanging out and spending time with them. There is also indeed some marvelous concert footage — not just of Russell, but featuring Willie Nelson and George Jones — but it is Blank’s patience and fascination for everything else happening around the making of music that makes the film truly special. The filmmaker’s son Harrod Blank, who worked for years to get the film a proper release, will be there for a Q&A after the film with journalist Jessica Hundley.
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