Now that I have time to watch movies at home (and, it would seem, as many of them as I’d like), I find myself overwhelmed by the number of choices I have. Firstly there are all the DVDs my wife Kathleen and I have collected over the years, many of which we still haven’t watched. Then there are the films available through our subscriptions to Netflix and the Criterion Channel. And on top of that, there are those movies popping up online in brief windows or at scheduled times. On Sunday night I watched IWOW: I Walk on Water, a new 200-minute experimental documentary-cum-autobiography by Khalik Allah (Black Mother), during the short interval after Allah put the movie on YouTube and before it was taken down. This week Kat plans to virtually attend shorts programs at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, which is currently taking place online.
In its genre play, metafictional techniques, and adoring focus on female performers, La Flor suggests an expansion on Jacques Rivette’s 1974 classic Celine and Julie Go Boating, yet there’s something distinctly South American about Llinás’s literary sensibility. The writer-director chases premises regardless of where they lead him, and this reminded me of the fiction of such giants as Julio Cortázar, Felisberto Hernández, and Gabriel García Márquez. The second episode, for instance, begins as a 50s-style women’s picture about a melancholy singer before evolving into a bizarre conspiracy narrative involving scorpion venom; the fourth episode starts as a self-reflexive, making-of mockumentary before venturing into the delusions of a madman at a sanatorium. The latter development playfully equates storytelling (particularly the sort of epic storytelling one finds in La Flor) with madness, reminding us that both suck us into vast, internal experiences.
