Friday at FNC

Two films screening at FNC today reviewed: a documentary about the feminist video collective Insoumuses and the latest from Swedish auteur Roy Andersson.

The 48th annual Festival du Nouveau Cinéma runs through Oct. 20. Here are our reviews of films screening today: 

Delphine et Carole: Insoumuses 

Delphine et Carole: Insoumuses is an informative documentary that sheds light on a feminist video collective called Insoumuses, founded and operated in France throughout the 1970s and 80s. The focus of the film is on two of its best-known members, actress and filmmaker Delphine Seyrig and radical filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos. Short and to the point, the movie explores the collective’s goals, Seyrig’s cinematic career and the friendship between the two titular subjects. While Seyrig may be one of the most iconic faces of the avant-garde, the film offers insight into her role as a public figure: She regularly appeared on French panel shows to discuss social and political ideas, as well as a filmmaker in her own right.

More than just informative, the film is inspirational in how it treats questions of representation and highlights the value of audiovisual mediums as an agent of change and a tool of resistance. Video, a precursor to the accessibility of digital, liberated the audiovisual arts from the elites helping to forge a new cinematic language. The movie, though humble, is intimate and informative. The clips from Seyrig and Roussopoulos’s films make you want to see them. It’s worth noting that a collection of their collaborations is also screening at the festival today. (Justine Smith)

Delphine et Carole: Insoumuses screens Friday, Oct 18 at 5:30 p.m. in Quartier Latin (350 Émery).

About Endlessness

It seems almost arbitrary that Roy Andersson’s films are even split up into features and given titles. They’re so often constructed along the same lines that they could be presented as an endless supercut or individual, bite-sized tableaus and presumably lose nothing of their power. About Endlessness is no different, with only a trim running time (76 minutes) and minute aesthetic variations (not every tableau here is peopled with Andersson’s usual company of doughy, middle-aged, moonfaced white people — just most of them).

There’s not much point in expounding what happens in About Endlessness — it’s a series of short, one-shot tableaus that are alternately banal, absurd, beautiful and grotesque. They’re rarely connected, though there is a throughline of a massively depressed priest going through an embarrassing public crisis of faith and of another guy obsessed with meeting a man from his past. Andersson’s grey, beige and brown palette remains intact, and the film’s slightly more gentle tone gives it a bizarrely comforting feeling — bizarre considering that this is Andersson’s most hope-filled movie, and he has never struck me as a hopeful filmmaker. (Alex Rose)


About Endlessness screens Friday, Oct 18 at 7:30 p.m. in Quartier Latin (350 Émery) and again on Sunday, Oct 20 at 5:15 p.m. in Quartier Latin.

See the complete Festival du Nouveau Cinéma program here.