The Moviegoer: An Interview with Dennis Lim
“When we keep saying cinema is dead or dying, we lose sight of what we have actually lost and what might still be possible, even as so much about the art form continues to change.”
“What if,” Dennis Lim asks in the May 14 issue of the Review, “a film consists wholly of blurry images?” That is the question presented by Dry Leaf, the newest film by the Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze, which was shot entirely on a nearly twenty-year-old mobile phone—one that “even at the time it would have been inconceivable to use…for any professional video production, let alone to shoot an entire feature film.” And yet the result, Lim writes, is strangely beautiful, the footage of smeary, uncertain landscapes “at times evok[ing] Impressionist and Post-impressionist vistas, the practically countable pixels suggesting the visible brushstrokes of impasto.” As digital filmmaking becomes ever more accessible, and as our lives become ever more saturated with images, the kinds of images we seek out—the kinds that delight and inspire us—may be changing.
Lim has had a long and varied career as a film critic and curator. From 2000 to 2006 he was the film editor of the Village Voice, from 2013 to 2022 the director of programming for Film at Lincoln Center, and since 2013 he has been the chief curator of the New York Film Festival. His criticism has also appeared in The New York Times, Film Comment, and elsewhere, and he is the author of two books, David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (2015) and Tale of Cinema (2022), which looks at the career of the Korean director Hong Sangsoo through an analysis of just one of his many films.
Last month, while Lim was at the Cannes film festival, I wrote to him to ask about criticism, curation, “bad” cameras, the resurgence of cinephilia, and the supposed death of cinema.
Gabriel Winslow-Yost: I was struck, reading your essay, by the idea that the blurred, carefully evocative images of Dry Leaf might be “replenishing” for contemporary eyes. Like many filmgoers, I have been struck by the number of young people have started filling up the seats at repertory and experimental screenings in New York in recent years. Is there a replenishment of cinephilia going on right now? And if so, why? What effect is it having?
Dennis Lim: There is undoubtedly a renewed energy in the New York repertory film scene, and I also sense a curiosity and openness in the audience that hasn’t always been there. I’ve heard this resurgent cinephilia characterized as a post-Covid return to real-world sociality. I think it also has to do with the very real fatigue of digital life. The opening of the online floodgates was an important development for cinephilia—it was thrilling to realize just how much could be downloaded, streamed, and shared—but it has become clear that home viewing is not a replacement for the collective experience of moviegoing. I would also credit the growing ambition and range of repertory programming in New York (and elsewhere), where curators and audiences have proved eager to move beyond the enshrined staples of the canon, and to approach the expanse of film history as a multifarious, underexplored terrain. It is striking that the theaters thriving today tend to be arthouses, cinematheques, and microcinemas—as opposed to multiplexes, where the options are more limited than ever.
Early in your essay, you describe the “arms race toward maximum hyperreal clarity” in much of contemporary cinema, in stark contrast to the expressive unclarity of Dry Leaf. Are there any good versions of that “hyperreal clarity” for you? Has there been anything approaching an 8K, high-frame-rate masterpiece yet? Is such a thing possible?
I’m sure it’s possible, although I haven’t encountered any especially interesting instances of high-frame-rate cinematography, which is used primarily for sports videography and for a certain kind of blockbuster movie. I also can’t help viewing with suspicion anything that positions absolute clarity as an ideal. That said, I do think it is possible to use just about any new technology in productive ways—CGI, 3D, VR—even if it is far more common to find these tools used in service of cheap illusion and spectacle. (And any old technology, too, as Alexandre Koberidze and his Sony Ericsson have shown us.) I have fairly limited experience with VR, and for years I was left indifferent or worse by everything I encountered that was made with it until I experienced Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s sublime installation A Conversation with the Sun, which deploys the framelessness of VR and the body of the headset-wearing viewer in fascinating ways. I think it’s one of the great artworks of the last few years.
The other recent film to commit to fuzziness as much as Dry Leaf is Hong Sangsoo’s In Water, which was shot almost entirely out of focus. (And, of course, you wrote an excellent book on Hong’s work a few years ago.) Do you think those two films came to fuzziness by similar paths, or different ones? Is there a shared impetus to work with “bad” images in this moment?
I know that Koberidze is a great admirer of Hong’s work. (Hong, for his part, has said he no longer keeps up with new movies—not an uncommon refrain for filmmakers of a certain age and mindset.) Both Dry Leaf and In Water rely for their effect on what the image lacks: the blurriness of Koberidze’s film is an invitation to immersion, asking us to complete the picture as we watch. The blurriness of Hong’s plays as a sort of ambiguous visual gag: It resonates with the hazy, unformed ideas of its callow filmmaker protagonist, and it represents a comic extension of Hong’s long-standing commitment to utilitarian cinematography, which in turn aligns with his interest in everyday experience and his rejection of spectacle.
I would say that Hong and Koberidze are both interested in rethinking from the ground up how films are made—and, by extension, what they should look like. It is at once an economic, ethical, and aesthetic consideration. I’m not sure if their perceptual experiments began from an interest per se in bad images, but given the mind-boggling volume of images in circulation today—images that are recorded, manipulated, generated—it is a good time to think about the potential uses, effects, and meanings of different types of images. I’m reminded here of one of Robert Bresson’s edicts from Notes on the Cinematograph: “Not beautiful images, but necessary images.”
In addition to your writing on film, you are, of course, the artistic director of the New York Film Festival. What is the relation, for you, of the tasks of the curator and the critic? Do you find yourself thinking differently about film while being one or the other?
My first impulse is to say that each requires me to think differently because they involve different modes of address. Criticism is in every sense a more solitary endeavor, rooted always in an individual encounter with an artwork, whereas as a curator I think about potential audiences and potential encounters. I’ve done some combination of both for many years, but I gradually became more of a curator than a critic because I found writing about film to be increasingly thankless. It is hard to be on the new-release and film-festival treadmill and not feel like a tool of the industry, an extension of the publicity apparatus. Film programming does not by any means liberate me from this system—if anything, it implicates me more—but it does offer more ways to exercise one’s agency.
But criticism and curation do have a lot in common. Your question made me realize that there is a thread that runs through almost everything I do, whether it’s writing or programming or teaching: I continue to contend with the overdetermined narrative of cinema’s death—something you address in your recent essay on the Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan. I started writing about film regularly around the time of the notorious Susan Sontag essay with which you opened your piece, and the specter of cinema’s real or imagined deaths has been a constant throughout my career. Anyone working in film today is in some sense confronting this persistent claim of the medium’s demise, which needs to be complicated if not refuted. The reflexive reversion to this extinction panic obscures the underlying stakes and the structural forces at play. When we keep saying cinema is dead or dying, we lose sight of what we have actually lost and what might still be possible, even as so much about the art form continues to change.
Before the NYFF, you edited film criticism for the Village Voice. With the recent publication of J. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now and Tricia Romano’s history of the Voice before that, many of us here at the Review’s office have been thinking about that period in criticism—a period that seems to have come to an end, sadly. Do you remember anything especially strongly from your time at the Voice? Is there some part of it you especially find yourself thinking back to these days?
I couldn’t have asked for a better first job than editing and writing for the Voice. It was a privilege—and an aesthetic and political education—to edit Jim Hoberman every week: he opened up for me new ways of watching experimental cinema and thinking about mainstream cinema and suggested pathways for everything in between. My colleagues at the Voice were and still are among the most gifted writer-editors I know: Jessica Winter, now at The New Yorker; Michael Miller, now the editor of Bookforum; and the polymathic Ed Park, as inspired a critic as he is a fiction writer. Looking back on it now, I’d say that the Voice was a great training ground because it allowed us to think both seriously and playfully about what it meant to be an alternative newspaper at a time when such a thing mattered, or could at least be meaningfully realized. The mission of proposing alternatives—of approaching the mainstream differently and pointing to options outside it—was particularly instructive when it came time to write about a popular art form within a vibrant local culture, and this way of thinking about movies has informed much of my work in the years since.
I know you’ve just been at Cannes for the past couple weeks. Anything great? Anything surprising?
At its best, Cannes can reaffirm one’s faith in movies: the festival remains the world’s most powerful and prestigious showcase of auteur cinema and there was certainly great work there this year. The new films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and James Gray are immense achievements, and I was glad to see filmmakers with more radical and idiosyncratic tendencies, like Lisandro Alonso and Radu Jude, in the selection. Surprise, on the other hand, is a scarce commodity at the big festivals nowadays—even the films by younger directors often seem to have gone through a process of homogenization that ensures they adhere narratively and stylistically to a kind of festival-sanctioned lingua franca. That said, there were a couple of striking debuts: La Gradiva, a densely atmospheric drama about a group of French teenagers on a class trip to Naples, by the cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan, and Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s 9 Temples to Heaven, about the religious and generational divides in a Thai family. It is, formally and tonally, the kind of film you might expect from a former student of James Benning and a longtime assistant director to Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
At its worst, simply because of its standing in the field, Cannes has a way of crystallizing and amplifying all that is depressing about contemporary film culture, starting with the inanity of the discourse. We are at the point where the perceived response to a given film hinges on the length of a standing ovation or some Oscar pundit’s tweet about its nomination prospects. These may seem like trivial annoyances, but they are emblematic of the skin-deep engagement, herd mentality, and risk aversion that dominate the film world and that have real effects on what gets seen and made. Perhaps these are age-old problems in new guises—André Bazin’s dispatches from Cannes in the 1940s and 1950s were bracingly clear-eyed about how the industry does not always serve the art. These qualms bear restating all the same.
Really well stated! I love reading something that isn’t reactionary or proactive. Just a point of view that is supported by observation and facts. THANKS!