Big Ears 2020 Film Lineup: Rare Experiments from International Auteurs

There are usually two possible reactions to any given Big Ears lineup announcement: (1) feeling utterly perplexed by a list of completely unfamiliar names, or (2) feeling ecstatic and profoundly seen by a list of artists that are exactly your brand of weird. I’ve had both reactions over the years, but this year’s Big Ears film lineup is something a little different. This time, you may recognize the names of many filmmakers, who have been acclaimed the world over for their festival-winning masterpieces – but you might not recognize the films themselves.

Most of these obscure titles by beloved filmmakers are presented as part of a fascinating film program called Standard Definition, which is devoted to the experimental films made possible by the advent of digital video prior to the development of HD. During this era, both amateur and professional filmmakers discovered that the lower financial and technical barriers of DV production allowed new and different ways of shooting, resulting in projects that explored new and imaginative cinematic territory. Many of these films are now extremely hard to find outside of a setting like Big Ears.

The Gleaners and I (2000) by Agnès Varda

Down There (2006) by Chantal Akerman

Perhaps the most high-profile film in the Standard Definition lineup is The Gleaners & I (2000) by Agnès Varda [France], a filmmaker who only just received a full profile in Arts Knoxville ahead of a local screening of her final film, Varda by Agnès. In short, Varda is known for being one of the landmark female filmmakers of the French New Wave and for her many great works spanning both narrative and documentary forms (Cléo from 5 to 7 and Faces Places being two examples). In The Gleaners & I, Varda uses her handheld camera to interview and observe the lives of “gleaners” – people at the outskirts of society and scavenging for uneaten food across cultivated fields and garbage heaps. The film is generally considered one of Varda’s best, but has been out of print on the home video market since shortly after its release.

On the other end of the spectrum, one film I didn’t even know existed before reading this lineup is Down There (2006) by Chantal Akerman [Belgium]. The work of Chantal Akerman is some of the most highly influential and formally rigorous cinema ever made; with its extreme commitment to silence, stillness, and duration, Akerman challenges her audience to enter the emotional space of women living mundane and repetitive lives in films such as Jeanne Dielman, Je Tu Il Elle, and News From Home. Much of her work also explores the immigrant experience of the Jewish diaspora after WWII (both of her parents being holocaust survivors), and Down There seems to be perhaps her most direct confrontation of that subject, as it is a document of Akerman spending one month in Israel – but the camera is, in true Akerman fashion, confined to her apartment. This film has only ever been released on home video as part of an often-overlooked box set.

*Corpus Callosum (2002) by Michael Snow

Worldly Desires (2005) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Another notable film on the Standard Definition lineup is *Corpus Callosum (2002) by Michael Snow [Canada]. Although I’m less personally familiar with Snow’s work, he’s developed a towering reputation in the world of avant-garde cinema and video installation art: Wavelength is known for being made up almost entirely of a 45-minute slow zoom through an office building, and La Region Centrale is a 3-hour pan across the Canadian mountains. *Corpus Callosum seems to show Michael Snow operating in a much more metafictional mode, with fictional elements popping in and out of the frame nonsensically and Snow’s own voice being heard giving direction on the film’s audio track. This highly strange feature is currently only available on YouTube; watching it in a darkened theater is sure to be a surreal experience. (Side note: anyone especially interested in this film should keep an eye on my podcast Cinematary, which will be dedicating an episode to both Callosum and Wavelength in the weeks leading up to Big Ears.) *Corpus Callosum will also be preceded by Snow’s new short film Cityscape – which will make Knoxville one of the only cities to see it.

One of my most anticipated films of the festival is Worldly Desires (2005) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pimpaka Towira [Thailand]. I’m not 100% sure what to expect from this as a collaborative project, but the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul are uniformly brilliant: especially his magical realist films Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Cemetery of Splendour, which visualize Thai mysticism alongside grounded political realities. These films are about as slow as Chantal Akerman’s work, but rather than feeling packed with tension, they instead feel like a long, meditative exhale. Weerasethakul is the only filmmaker I’ve ever heard of who invites his audiences to sleep as a part of the cinematic experience, and even designed an overnight installation experience called Sleepcinemahotel. This film, Worldly Desires, seems like it will be a beautiful fairy tale, with Weerasethakul himself summarizing it thusly: “A couple escaped their family to look for a spiritual tree in the jungle. There is a song at night, a song that spoke about an innocent idea of love and a quest for happiness.” To my knowledge, this film has never had a theatrical release in the United States – nor has his short film Windows, which will precede the feature.

Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) by Abbas Kiarostami

High Life (2019) by Claire Denis

Another film I’m greatly anticipating is Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) by Abbas Kiarostami [Iran]. The recently deceased Kiarostami was a multifaceted filmmaker, working in several different languages and across many different cinematic modes – he made a pseudo-documentary with Close-Up, the increasingly metafictional Koker Trilogy, slow cinema classics like Taste of Cherry and Like Someone In Love, and the computer-generated landscape film 24 Frames, which was composed of 24 shots of window frames, paintings, and more. Five Dedicated to Ozu seems very much in the same vein, with Kiarostami constructing an entire film out of five landscape shots meant as a tribute to the interstitial nature imagery placed between dialogue scenes in films by beloved Japanese auteur Yasujirō Ozu. I’m especially excited to see this on the big screen, as I tried to no avail to watch it last year while working my way through the book Slow Movies; it has only ever been released in the States on a long-out-of-print DVD.

Also worth noting here are four films by French filmmaker Claire Denis: Bastards (2013), Let the Sunshine In (2017), Toward Mathilde (2005), and last year’s High Life (2019). None of these films are included as part of the Standard Definition program (and they aren’t particularly hard to track down, either) but Claire Denis is a filmmaker who shares many sensibilities with the filmmakers listed above – especially Akerman, Weerasethakul, and Kiarostami. Her films are highly sensorial, fragmented, and clinical – always taking a circuitous path towards their surprisingly moving conclusions. These films are being presented at this years Big Ears as a celebration of their scores by Tindersticks, who will also be playing the festival (though not live-scoring the films, sadly). Additionally, a rare Tindersticks-directed film project called The Waiting Room (2016) will also be screened as part of the festival.

There are dozens and dozens of other films on the Big Ears film lineup. Just like the music lineup year after year, the full list is densely packed with obscure artists worth taking a chance on sight-unseen for what are sure to be singular experiences. Among them is Kevin Jerome Everson, returning to Big Ears with his feature film Spicebush (2003) and his 30-minute short Company Line (2009) after presenting both a shorts and installation program at the festival back in 2017. Other returning voices include Johann Lurff, Blake Williams, and Lillian Schwartz, all of which will be reprising their place in the also-returning Stereo Visions 3D program, which (hopefully!) may end up becoming a Big Ears staple. This year’s Stereo Visions is a bit lighter on feature films than it was in 2018, but I’m excited to see Blankets for Indians (2012) by Ken Jacobs – his film Ulysses in the Subway was one of my favorites of Big Ears 2018 – as well as Those Redheads from Seattle (1953) by Lewis R. Foster, the first 3D musical!

Worth a special mention here is the premiere screening of Electric Appalachia, a collaborative project in celluloid- and musical-performance by harpist Mary Lattimore, guitarist William Tyler, and Arts Knoxville’s own Eric Dawson, who has put together “a meditation on electricity and modernity in East Tennessee” using footage from the archives of TAMIS.