Monthly Archives: April 2025

José Arroyo In Conversation with Diego Cepeda on OUTSKIRTS

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I recently discovered the existence of a new and exciting film magazine: OUTSKIRTS, a yearly independent print magazine of between 160-190 pages of original essays, interviews, reviews, translations, and dossiers on the past and present of cinema.

OUTSKIRTS is in English, though mostly written by people for whom English is a second language or who don’t speak English at all. Translation, in multiple senses, is an integral part of the magazine.  It’s a handsome physical object, originating in the Locarno Critics Academy but speaking a different film culture: off-centre, from the margins or the periphery. In this podcast, I talk to one of the editors, Diego Cepeda (the others are Nathan Latoré, Sofie Cato Maas, Raymond Shik and Christopher Small), with filmmaker/critic Felix Cordero Bello contributing illuminating contexts and asides.

Near the beginning of the podcast Diego cites a poem by Farid Ud-din Attar,

‘The birds had departed towards a distant luminosity that attracted them.

Those who did not perish on the way would understand upon arrival that they had been transformed into that light that now attracted others’.

OUTSKIRTS is a magazine that in itself  embodies a romance of movies, film culture, film history, woven through with friendship. It aims to put at the centre marginalised filmmakers and film cultures; and asks its readers to slow down, look back, look deeply, and think. The launch of each issue is accompanied by live events, often including readings and screenings. Diego cites Abraham Polonsky at the end, ‘The only fights worth fighting are for lost causes’.

Speaking to Diego and Felix, in English,  a second-language for them, a whole cinema culture comes alive. They cite LA VIDA UTIL and Lucía Salas as an inspiration: a spirit of sharing knowledge, friendship and dialogue, enthusiasm for cinema, a similar way of thinking about film history. Diego and Felix both also write for SIMULACRO magazine edited by Julia Scrive-Loyer (https://www.simulacromag.com/), participate in its weekly cine-club and are connected to the Chavón School of Film and Design, itself associated with Parsons, with Diego as one of its key lecturers. ‘How can we approach the history of images and sounds from a place that maybe didn’t have (a film industry) whilst creating tools for understanding those elements that did exist (newsreels, home movies, a rich culture of filmgoing)?’, asks Diego.

The conversation ranges from the origins of the magazine, its aims (to defend cinema from this place, that is on the margins), it’s focus (to shine a light on the overlooked), how each issues tries to create a thread of thought. We detour through a brief account of a history of cinema in the Dominican Republic, where the conversation took place. All this and much more can be listened to in the podcast below:

 

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The new issue comes out in June and can be purchased at: https://outskirtsmag.com/

José Arroyo

 

 

La Venganza (Juan Antonio Bardem, Spain, 1958

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Saw LA VENGANZA on the plane back home yesterday and was bowled over by the mise-en-scène. I’ve never thought of Juan Antonio Bardem, Javier’s uncle, as a great visual stylist and I have to think on the film some more. There were some scenes – maybe the most daring to film in 1957, the reason the film eventually suffered censorship issues – that seem crude and by the ‘communist party’ handbook and have the effect of taking you out of this most absorbing and otherwise fine-tuned melodrama; these are the ‘political’ scenes, the ones about labour struggles, oppression by large land-owners and the need for unionisation. But there is something about the co-ordination of the composition of the figures in and against that beautiful but harsh Manchegan landscape, the precision of the camera movement, and the use of close-ups, often and unusually of extras, that seem great and thrilled me. The story is a noirish one: a man (Jorge Mistral), falsely accused of murder,  returns to his village where his sister Andrea (Carmen Sevilla, then ‘la novia de Espańa’/ Spain’s sweetheart) eggs him on to kill El Torcido (Raf Vallone) whom she holds responsible. The siblings join a gang of reapers headed by El Torcido to be sure he is the one responsible for the framework before killing him off and restoring family honour. Trouble ensues when Andrea and El Torcido fall in love. The structure is interspersed with flamenco songs, the cante jondo variant, that work within the narrative to contribute to the distinctive tone of sadness, oppression, pain and longing that the film communicates so well. It seems one of those films that are great in spite of not every element working. I could kick myself for not watching it sooner and for some reason it’s made me want to rewatch, Marcel Carné’s THÉRÈSE RAQUIN, with Vallone opposite an extraordinary Simoe Signoret. The film was filmed as set in the time it was filmed – of personal interest to me as my Dad worked as a reaper for hire in those years —  but shown as being set in the 30s to minimise it being understood as a critique of the regime. It won the critics prize at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award for BEST FOREIGN FILM.

 

José Arroyo

 

 

La Bachata del Biónico (Yoel Morales, Dominican Repubic, 2024)

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I saw La Bachata del Biónico with a friend last night in a commercial theatre in Santo Domingo, with an audience that laughed out loud throughout. It’s a brilliantly funny film about l’amour fou as lived by a crackhead. El bionico (Manuel Raposo) is crazy in love with La Flaca (Ana Minier), also an addict but now getting clean in a detox centre. The film is shot as a mockumentary in which a film crew follows El Bionico and his sidekick (Calvita) as they try to score a flat worthy of La Flaca so they could set up a home and get married. Their addiction, her ex, and well….life…all get in the way. The tone is up-beat, the pace is raggaeton-y, the world depicted is gritty, with surreal flights that recall magical realism. The film’s achievement is that it’s funny AND touching, that it depicts the pleasures of the drugs, the friendships and community that go along with the addiction, without once minimising its horrors and its sometimes deadly consequences. It’s a real achievement from director Yoel Morales. He has a great feel for the sights and sounds of a particular place in a particular time and conveys it so that it feels a structure of feeling come to life, wonderful to bask in and substantial enough to think upon. Comedy is like the Bermuda Triangle of discussions of national cinemas, they somehow disappear or are minimised in the final accounting. Yet this film brings a culture to life more vividly and with at least as much depth as so called serious films. Hugely enjoyable. I hope it gets picked up for distribution abroad.

José Arroyo

José Arroyo in Conversation with Paul Cuff on Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU (2024)

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Such a pleasure to talk to Paul Cuff about Robert Egger’s version of NOSFERATU. He knows so much that the conversation unfurls into a discussion of the various other versions, Murnau’s original (1922), Herzog’s version (1979), David Lee Fisher’s version (2023), and onto the films of Guy Maddin, Pablo Berger’s BLANCA NIEVES (2012), various versions of THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE and even THE ARTIST (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011), which Paul loathes. We were entertained by, enjoyed — with reservations — the rich visual world of Egger’s version, the thick and dense sound, and we praise Nicholas Hoult as the emotional anchor of the film. But Paul articulates his uncertainty about whether the film was a parody of itself or the genre or Nosferatu in its various incarnations. The film seems to be drawing on Murnau, Herzog, Caspar Friedrich’s paintings. But it seems to create a world in which God ostensibly exists but no one seems to believe in the ideology that would sustain this. Paul notes with interest on how Eggers credits the screenplay of the original Nosferatu but not Murnau, the director and we discuss the significance of this while highlighting how Nosferatu was itself a rip-off of Bram Stoker’s work. We also speculate on the significance of the titles of the most prominent version (Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (Murnau) and the German title of Herzog’s version,Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night.) What all versions have in common is that they’re all about sex and death, all about sex and the maiden; all versions have Nosferatu as a  sexual figure as well as a figure of death and pestilence,.How does Egger’s version sit on the shoulder of previous versions and what does it add to them? We discuss our love of the performances of Max Schrek,Klaus Kinski and much else in the podcast below:

 

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The podcast from Eavesdropping at The Movies on Nosferatu Paul refers to may be listened to here:

Pal has written on the afterlife of Nosferatu HERE.

José Arroyo

 

Michael Betancourt, ‘Judy at Carnegie Hall’

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I was unaware of this series, the album equivalent of the BFI classic series, and Manuel Betancourt’s Book on JUDY AT CARNEGIE HALL is so good, I plan to try out more. Betancourt covers the so-called ‘greatest night in showbusiness’ from many perspectives, the audience, the songs, the performance, the performer, the recording, the liveness. And one gets a rich understanding of Garland’s career to that point, the movies, her significance, how much of the career draws on nostalgia for a different time, race, androgyny. It ends with an analysis of Rufus Wainright’s homage, bringing all of these elements together through comparing the performances whilst exploring Garland’s relationship to queer cultural histories, exploring why Garland is always positioned as a gay icon whose significance lies in a previous generation of gay culture (BOYS IN THE BAND figures prominently in this part of the analysis) in the face of objective evidence that later generations ‘get’ and ‘use’ her in ways not too different.

I love Betancourt’s book and I learned a lot from it (the double album was no. 1 for 13 weeks and charted for 73) but, as I am often feeling now in relation to Garland, there is an over-emphasis on her gay audience. Isn’t what her Betsy Booth meant to young girls or what her radio recordings might have meant to young soldiers or what her persona throughout the 40s when she was a top box office attraction and her personal problems still unknown of any interest? It should be. The majority of those  boys and girls (and parents and grandparents, and grandchildren) would not have been gay. How that minority that were would have shared both a mainstream understanding, a subcultural one, and the tensions between them.  I of course welcome a study of what she meant and continues to mean to queer subcultures but I’d like to see that in relation to, in play with, what she meant to a more broadly popular audience for such a long time, and this is less a criticism of Betancourt than it is a criticism of the over-emphasis of a particular positioning of Garland as a cultural figure.

José Arroyo