Within the boundaries of Sharon Lockhart's static camera, girls from Goshogaoka junior high school practice basketball. In six uninterrupted 10 minute scenes, we see them warm up and train several typical moves, shots, and blocks. With the camera set in one position, some of the action happens off-screen, resulting in unrehearsed synchronised choreography.

کلوزآپ ، نمای نزدیک is visual narrative illustrating a crime. A cinephile, Hossain Sabzian, pretends to be filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and slowly extorts a family into believing to star in the director's next film.

“Prison is good for the good and bad for the wicked. It teaches the good a lesson but only makes the wicked worse.”

– Hossain Sabzian

An article about the case intrigued director #Kiarostami so much that he decided to film the court case against Sabzian, and ask the accused, Makhmalbaf, and the Ahankhah family to reenact some of the events.

American artist Matthew Barney dreamt of playing #AmericanFootball at Yale. His body, too short for the demanding game, became his personal battleground by way of torturous prosthetics and art performances testing its endurance. A fascination with biology – he considered medicine as his profession – is a recurring motif in his art. This will teach us that stage 1 of the cremaster cycle is the moment when the cremaster muscle – the muscle in the biological male responsible for the ascent and descent of the testes – is at its most ascended or undifferentiated state.

 

Cremaster 1, the second of the five part Cremaster cycle (1994—2002), is set at the Bronco Stadium in #Boise, #Idaho, Barney's hometown. Due of his personal connection with the place he was able to secure the stadium for a lush musical revue, complete with chorus girls and Goodyear #blimps. Instead of cheerleading yells and the crushing noise of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, we find ourselves quietly poised in an airship high above the field.

 

In each airship there is an ethereal woman (both played by gender-ambigious Marti Domination), arranging and rearranging grapes in intricate shapes, illustrating the development of the foetus from non-gendered to male. Below on luminous blue AstroTurf, the chorus line follows the same patterns.

 

Cremaster 1 is arguably the most accessible instalment of the cycle. Everyone, even if not familiar with the name Busby Berkeley, recognises the kaleidoscopic choreography. And those who have never watched a game of football in their lives, may pick up the subliminal patterns created by men dressed to overemphasise their already excessive masculinity.

The city of Liège in Belgium's Walloon region is grey. The air seems forever stained by the heavy mining that for years made its inhabitants rich and sick. Here lives Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne), a young woman trying to keep herself and her alcoholic mother afloat with measly jobs while saving up enough money so she can, finally, leave the trailer park she's forced to call home.

“Your name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta. You found a job. I found a job. You've got a friend. I've got a friend. You have a normal life. I have a normal life. You won't fall in a rut. I won't fall in a rut. Good night. Good night.”

– Rosetta

Directors Jean-Pierre and Luc #Dardenne once described this film as a war movie. It's pained, like the voices from the trenches that still scar the Belgian landscape. The camera – Alain Marcoen's – close, as if were following the girl through a rifle's scope. And raw, like the open wounds left behind by the mining companies.

Synchronous to the screening of a film that wasn't, Derek Jarman's Blue was broadcast on radio and television. Those who tuned into the radio could request a special card printed in that most spectral of colours, International Klein Blue, a blue that according to its creator Yves Klein, has “a quality close to pure space” and “immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched”.

“You say to the boy 'Open your eyes'. When he opens his eyes and sees the light, you make him cry out, saying 'Oh, Blue, come forth! Oh, Blue, arise! Oh, Blue, ascend! Oh, Blue, come in!'.”

– Nigel Terry

Submerged in #blue, seeing through what was left of Jarman's eyes, we live through the artist's life, and love, and loss. When you leave the theatre, put down that card, you're temporarily blinded by the physiological afterimage of a devastating disease. What remains is the voice of a filmmaker who lost his sight.

Wes has it all laid out. His business partner just needs to see it. And his wife. And the people from the West Coast, California, where there's smog and people and no space. They surely want a home, or a second home, in Utah. It's close to Vegas, sure they'll love it. The people.

“One cannot even be sure, whether it is a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, a church, a people, a nation, or an American subculture; indeed, at different times and places it is all of these.”

– Sydney E. Ahlstrom, historian (1982)

With Sure Fire, director Jon Jost accomplishes that what Lynch tries. A mundane gem with an ominous undertow, but all without the need for mystery or eccentric characters.

 

Just Utah, and its people.