by Silvia Maglioni (originally published in CLUSTER)

If films are to have a value at all they should be like a cobblestone hurled into the cinema. So said Philippe Garrel presenting his first feature film Marie pour mémoire at the Festival of Young Cinema at Hyères in april ’68. Meanwhile, as Garrel was hurling his cobblestone at Hyères, Serge Bard, another cineaste who shared a similar passion for stone-throwing, was shooting Détruisez-Vous, a film which takes its title from a piece of graffiti on the walls of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts ("Aidez-nous, détruisez-vous"). It was the beginning of Zanzibar. And then there was May ’68 and the barricades, and Garrel’s encounter with Nico and subsequent entropy, but that’s a whole other story. 

by Graeme Thomson (originally published in CLUSTER)

Marseille. The 19th edition of the International Documentary Festival has hardly begun and we’re already being invited to put our feet up and take a (well deserved?) break along with the drilling crew of Wang Bing’s magnificent, sprawling 14 hour epic of Chinese venture capitalism, Crude Oil.
Despite its rather spartan furnishings, the workers’ rest cabin seems like a convivial hang-out. You can almost imagine an extension of the table where they sit or lie in various postures of fatigue, filmed for the most part in a single long-take, projecting out from the screen into the auditorium, beckoning us to join them sleeping, chatting, listening to music on a mobile phone’s tinny internal speakers, in this suspended moment of borrowed time, lost in the Gobi desert far from home, the dark rumble of the derrick outside briefly invading the sound field every time one of them enters or leaves according to his shift, a noise that in the end becomes almost comforting in its constancy though at the same time serves as a reminder that I too should be elsewhere, out there, watching other films, writing about them, adding more fuel to the furnaces of the culture industry.