TL:DR:
2024 was a great year for game video essays and pop culture nostalgia.
Disclaimer:
At time of writing, I have not seen Daughters (Natalie Rae and Angela Patton), Last Things (Deborah Stratman), Pictures of Ghosts (Kleber Mendonça Filho), Porcelain War (Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev), Intercepted (Oksana Karpovych), The Bibi Files (Alexis Bloom), Plastic People (Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong), Soundtrack to a Coupe D'État (Johan Grimonprez), Union (Brett Story and Stephen Maing) and 2073 (Asif Kapadia).
Ands yes, Apolonia, Apolonia was made in 2022, but not released until much later.
Review highlights:
Apolonia, Apolonia (Lea Glob, 2022, France)
Although the title only mentions one woman, Glob’s documentary chronicles the intertwined lives of three heroines: the titular artist, the filmmaker herself and Femen Ukrainian activist O’s also a story of resistance. . In many ways, this is also the story of the inexorable decline of the bohemian ethos, juxtaposing it against the relentless rise of neoliberal hypercapitalism. This narrative elegantly captures the transformation from a world where art thrived in its purest form to a modern reality where art has been co-opted as a commodity by hordes of hedge fund managers. Yet, it
Flipside (Christopher Wilcha, 2023, USA)
Flipside is an insightful Gen X rumination on creativity, authenticity, selling out, relocating, reinventing yourself, hoarding (memories, hotel soaps, LPs...) and aging gracefully, constructed with a patchwork of unfinished projects. Unlike the shallow naval-gazing of your typical Millennial documentarian (Zia Anger’s forgettable My First Film comes to mind), Flipside is basically an How to with Chris Wilcha, either the LA spin off? or the perfect companion to John Wilson’s equally fascinating, if occasionally indulgent, series set in NY (for the most part). It lingers, it resonates, and, most importantly, it leaves a mark.
Witches (Elizabeth Sankey, 2024, United Kingdom)
We turn to fiction to decipher reality, only to reshape reality in fiction’s image. The simulacra advance, an endless parade of media. Outside this spectacle, reality dissolves. The video essay is the quintessential byproduct of postmodern thought, a thought steeped in its own kind of enchantment, reverie and projection. Postmodernism thrives on magical thinking, and Elizabeth Sankey is a master of this kind of sorcery.
Grand Theft Hamlet (Pinny Grillis, Sam Crane, 2024, United Kingdom)
Alongside Knit's Island (2021), Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’s Grand Theft Hamlet is a groundbreaking game-driven cinematic production that combines performance, gaming, and theater. Both documentaries were created during the Covid-19 lock-downs, which proves that real art thrives during challenging times. MUBI purchased the global theatrical and streaming rights for Grand Theft Hamlet because this is the kind of film that requires human curation.
New Americans: Gaming a Revolution (Ondi Timoner, 2023, USA)
The thing is: most of Ondi Timoner’s features perfectly capture the Zeitgeist. Point in case: Gaming a revolution puts all the other insta docs on the Gamestop stonk phenomenon to shame, yes, all of the 56 of them, as well as things like Dumb Money, which completely missed the point. Timoner connects all the right dots, talks to all the right people, and illuminates the gamification of finance much better than most fintech journos. Like We Live in Public (2009), Gaming a Revolution will become a cult doc about an online cult.
Kim's Video (David Redmon, Ashley Sabin, 2024, USA)
This was too painful to watch in one sitting: it took me three days on/off. When the filmmakers found the damaged VHS tapes, I cried. Redmon and Sabin provide an in-depth anthropological study of Italian cialtroneria (See John Hooper). I side with Alex Ross Perry: Who on Earth thought it was a good idea to take Kim’s monumental, one-of-a-kind collection to Sicily? In the end, American ingenuity prevails over Italian menefreghismo. Although it’s nowhere as profound as Wilcha’s Flipside, Kim’s Video does chronicle Millennials’ nostalgia/obsession for a pop culture era that has been hijacked by Filterworld (Kyle Chayka).
32 Sounds (Sam Green, 2022)
Playful and interactive, 32 Sounds is, in many ways, an expanded version of Annea Lockwood/A Film About Listening (2021). Deeply personal and yet able to speak to diverse audiences, 32 sounds is a wonderful audiovisual essay, one that could be simply listened to, like a podcast, rather than watched.
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