ANOHNI

“This first one is Derek Jarman, Jubilee. It’s a kind of dystopian, post-apocalyptic, punk landscape of England that’s very based in, like, the kind of dreams of the English punks. Adam Ant was particularly cute in it. So I put that on the box set.”

“Then here’s a movie by Alain Resnais that I saw when I was quite young, called Night and Fog. It’s a meditation on Auschwitz, which sounds quite heavy going, but I think it’s a portrait. It’s very still. And I just remember it being a very powerful sort of entry point into… early entry point for me into ideas about animism and about the density of memory and the past that exists in materiality.”

“This is a film called The Times of Harvey Milk. I saw this also as a young person, and it really made a big impression on me. He’s such a beautiful creature, and he was good friends with Divine. It’s the early ’80s, or late ’70s into early ’80s, it, like, shows that American sadness of dreams, and then just the perverse level to which corrupted intention can undermine goodness and wellness. And then community comes together and grieves.”

“Okay, here’s a really great film: Paris is Burning. It’s by Jennie Livingston. Of course, it’s a real classic, it’s just such a moving film, you can watch it a thousand times. I especially love the outtakes of this. There’s beautiful outtakes of Venus Xtravaganza, who I love so much, and Angie Xtravaganza. I mean, they’re just heartbreaking. And Venus talks about her relationship to God, and these very, very profound, meditations that are quite startling and were probably too much to include in the original edit, but are so great to see. So that film is beautiful.”

“This movie’s a film that had a big influence on me. It’s 1984. The Eurythmics did the soundtrack for it. It was one of the best Eurythmics records. It has this really beautiful song called “Julia.” It’s almost a sort of industrial-sounding soundtrack at times. These ideas in the book 1984 are really expressed visually in the film, about the dread of surveillance. And this film now to watch will probably confuse young people because the baseline of expectation of privacy has eroded so substantially in the last 20 years that people now have this almost blasé kind of resignation, or even embrace of, a surveillance state. Anyway, this film, it’s just a killer. I would recommend it highly, but it’s quite scary. But it might not be scary anymore.”

“And then the final film that I chose is Jean Painlevé. This is such a great film, and it’s probably the one I’ve seen more than any one of these others. He did this early aquatic photography where he did these really beautiful, pastoral, kind of art nouveau portraits of underwater sea life, and they’re so spectral and so lush and so unfurling. He also has a really good sense of humor. It’s all in French, but it’s quite funny. I’m obsessed with Jean Painlevé’s films of the ocean, especially now that the Great Barrier Reef and all coral life, it’s been declared that it’s going to be extinct by 2030, or functionally extinct, which means a 90% mortality or greater. These films are time capsules of a time where we presumed that nature would always prevail.”

“These are a group of films I’ve not seen, Josef von Sternberg: Underworld, The Last Command, and The Docks of New York. I love Josef von Sternberg, and I love Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. I don’t think she’s in any of these, but that German expressionist aesthetic, the way of the shadow, the early photography, it was just such an important benchmark in underground dreaming. The glass ceiling of the technology gave us a window, gave us an opportunity to explore a very specific aesthetic that was particularly beautiful, that celluloid aesthetic, and the way that black-and-white film received light and expressed it.”