Joan Didion : The Center Will Not Hold

Julian Wasser; Joan Didion, 1968

The long-awaited documentary about her life makes clear: She has escaped the demands so often placed on other authors.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Joan Didion confessed in 1976. “What I want and what I fear.” The writer was in one way taking preemptive credit — or, depending on your point of view, accepting the preemptive blame—for the explosion of personal essay-writing that, fueled by the internet and its egotism, would later become known as the first-person industrial complex. Didion, with her faith in the moral worth of introspection—her conviction that understanding oneself operates on a continuum with the understanding of everything else—helped to inspire a generation of writers to remain, via acts of performative journaling, on nodding terms with the people they used to be. Read more..

The Opulent World of Qatari Falconry

Still from The Challenge (2016), directed by Yuri Ancarani (all images courtesy Atopic Films, Dugong Production, La Bête, Ring Film)

Yuri Ancarani’s documentary The Challenge immerses viewers in the dazzling subculture of ultra-wealthy sheikhs who practice falconry.

Close to 100 falcons swarm in a gargantuan, high-ceilinged warehouse. Two men wearing thawbs (the traditional Arab garb consisting of a white headpiece and robe) slowly walk the perimeters of the room, spreading seed for the hungry birds. The score (from Lorenzo Senni and Francesco Fantini) uses woodwind, synthesiser, and xylophone in a manner cheekily reminiscent of the swelling, dramatic strings in the scores of film composer Bernard Herrmann, a frequent collaborator of Albert Hitchcock who served as sound consultant on The Birds. As more food hits the ground, many of the falcons land until only a few flutter around the emptying indoor airspace. The scene stretches over three minutes of wordless action, men feeding and falcons being fed.

This pure cinema — the reliance on juxtaposed moving images and little else to convey meaning — is typical of Italian director Yuri Ancarani’s documentary The Challenge, screening this week at the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center as a part of the annual New Directors/New Films series. Composed primarily of long, contemplative shots, the film waits 18 minutes into its 70-minute run time to introduce dialogue. Even when the characters — wealthy Qatari sheikhs obsessed with practising falconry — do speak, the dialogue is not always of much consequence to the plot, typically an observation or an aside between two individuals. Read more...