Criterion Premieres: Magellan

[Ribs]

Janus Films has acquired Lav Diaz’ Magellan

[FrauBlucher]

Keep an eye on this... Today on Janus' Instagram story they teased Lav Diaz' Magellan with a link to the International Feature website

[yoloswegmaster]

What exactly are we supposed to keep an eye on? Magellan was already announced to be picked up by Janus a while back.

[Matt]

Maybe to be submitted as the Philippines' entry for Best International Film at the Oscars? But that's already happened.

[FrauBlucher]

What exactly are we supposed to keep an eye on? Magellan was already announced to be picked up by Janus a while back.

I didn't know it was picked up. It's not on their website yet. Wise guy

[FrauBlucher]

Janus Films has acquired Lav Diaz’ Magellan

Very excited for this.
The Magellan page has been added

[brundlefly]

Janus Films has acquired Lav Diaz’ Magellan

Trailer.

[Finch]

Magellan looks absolutely breathtaking. I avoided Diaz's other films because of the intimidating running times but i'd go see this one if it plays near me.

[beamish14]

Magellan looks absolutely breathtaking. I avoided Diaz's other films because of the intimidating running times but i'd go see this one if it plays near me.

Batang West Side really doesn’t feel like it’s 4 hours long at all. It goes by in a flash

[Matt]

According to "The Cinegogue," Magellan was shot on a Panasonic Lumix GH7, a consumer-level still camera that retails for $1,800.

[zedz]

Magellan looks absolutely breathtaking. I avoided Diaz's other films because of the intimidating running times but i'd go see this one if it plays near me.

The trailer makes it look a lot more 'heritage' than it actually is, but it's certainly visually breathtaking (like most of Diaz's films). No need to be afraid of the runtimes. They are 'slow cinema', but they usually deliver layered, complex, novelistic plots that justify the duration, and after an hour or two they suck you in.

Magellan is a fine entry point to his cinema, but it's a grubby, ground-level historical film, so don't expect high drama or star turns.

[Finch]

You had me at novelistic plots.

[therewillbeblus]

Lav Diaz is a major blind spot for me. If I was to watch just one or two, what’s his best work(s)?

[zedz]

Norte: the End of History sounds like a film for you then, Matt.

Regarding long-duration films, we're in the age when binge-watching 10+ hour TV series is normal, and that can sometimes be like eating a ten-course meal of candy floss, so the stubborn stigma about 'slow cinema' should be a thing of the past.

I remember an encounter back in the 00s when a colleague who was aware of my peculiar film tastes asked me if I saw "that seven-hour Hungarian film" from the film festival several years back (Satantango). I told him I saw it twice and loved it, and he thought it was absolutely insane to spend so much time watching something that self-evidently boring. This is the same colleague who more than once tried to convince me to watch test cricket with him.

[Finch]

That's a very fair point about our willingness to binge several episodes of a show but shying away from a 3 hr or more film. I've been guilty of that too and my film viewing is often broken up even with films of regular length because I get tired and unintentionally doze off. I started the 4K of High and Low last Sunday fully intending to watch all 160 mins in one setting, yet I found myself getting physically tired and I didn't want to miss anything, so I paused it about 30 mins in. I still haven't found time to finish the rest of it but plan to do that on Friday.

[zedz]

twbb: It looks like I've seen about eighteen or so of Diaz's films. Some of the most rewarding watches are the vast epics (like the 10 hour Evolution of a Filipino Family or the 8 hour Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery: films for connoisseurs of Stockholm Syndrome!) but they're lousy starting points. Likewise, there are a number of shorter films (under two hours), but they're all atypical and mostly play like overlong short films (so they sometimes feel 'slower' than his features).

Batang West Side gets a lot of love, and it's a great film, but his earlier work is a lot rougher and might be more of a challenging place to start. If you want to kick off with an early film, though, this might be the best.

I'd recommend beginning with a more recent work. They're generally more polished and better paced, and his visual sense has developed beautifully, often with a Ford / Murnau handsomeness of composition. My suggestions for a starting point would be:

Norte: The End of History - An emotionally draining, transfixing elaboration on Crime and Punishment.

From What Is Before - An ominous epic set in the period of Martial Law under Marcos. Like much of Diaz's work (including Magellan), the focus is on the impact of sweeping political actions on local, indigenous communities.

The Halt - An ingenious, prescient science fiction film set in a future Manila. One of the definitive Covid 19 films, even though it predated the virus. Diaz manages to create a convincing future on no budget with a few drones and a lot of black.

When the Waves Are Gone - This one's a doddle at only three hours (a fair hunk of which is the extraordinary climactic scene). A police corruption drama in more than one sense.

And Magellan, I suppose, but it's an atypical Diaz film in many respects.

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks for the thorough rundown!

[Peacock]

I’d have to slightly disagree with zedz and recommend the director’s cut of Butterflies Have No Memories as a nice starting point. It’s only an hour long but encapsulates a lot of Diaz’ rhythms, at least during that phase of his career. It’s also a pretty dramatic tragedy, although Diaz’ films are never short of drama or tragedy.

It was my first of his films back when the Visitors DVD that it’s on came out, and I’ve never looked back since.

[ryannichols7]

worth noting that Lav Diaz's promotion of this film in the Philippines has been vastly different to his promotion of it elsewhere. hilarious seeing him in this context, even if there are no subtitles

[zedz]

I’d have to slightly disagree with zedz and recommend the director’s cut of Butterflies Have No Memories as a nice starting point. It’s only an hour long but encapsulates a lot of Diaz’ rhythms, at least during that phase of his career. It’s also a pretty dramatic tragedy, although Diaz’ films are never short of drama or tragedy.

It was my first of his films back when the Visitors DVD that it’s on came out, and I’ve never looked back since.

That was my first Diaz film as well (same DVD) and hooked me too, but it's been a very long time since i last saw it, so thanks for the reminder.

Mulling over what I posted yesterday, I was thinking about the three-hour When the Waves Are Gone and realized that the amount of plot it contains would require at least six hours if it were a Netflix series. The syntax is completely different. Diaz's scenes are typically long and patient, but he makes up for it with narrative ellipses and oblique storytelling (you have to make connections, identify characters and relationships, and follow different timeframes on your own), whereas a streaming series tends to fill in all the gaps, provide constant exposition and re-exposition, and devote a lot of time to manufacturing superficial action, creating a lot more redundancy (and thereby allowing viewers who are only half there to keep up.)

[therewillbeblus]

Yes, if When the Waves Are Gone were a Netflix series, the focus would be on the dynamics and story between the two men in earlier, unseen activity, rather than this languid purgatory of psychological torment we witness as our protagonist suffers for hours, completely isolated even when around others. This one didn't have quite the impact of Norte, the End of History for me, but I did admire its commitment to fatalistic direction. I particularly liked how increasingly decrepit the iconography gets as the film goes on, reflecting the narrative collision and individualized agonies. The climax reflects the futility of forgiveness -including self-forgiveness- while simultaneously affirming the human drive to seek connection and strive for that reconciliation. It's a gut-punch that postures at humanism under the umbrella of a grayer realism.

[zedz]

Welcome aboard the (slow, slow) Lav Diaz train, therewillbeblus!

(You're right: the Netflix version would be bloated with carefully datelined flashbacks trying to make the backstory look more complicated than it actually is.)

[therewillbeblus]

That's a good point about its lack of complication. The complexity lies within the struggle for human beings to connect around shares ideas and on an emotional level, to yield a catharsis of any kind. I think if the film is 'about' anything, it's that social connection and forgiveness could help us heal, but the perceived (and starkly real) barriers to achieving this stunts our ability to overcome these challenging mental states (that, for our principal character, becomes physical!)

[zedz]

And Diaz - alongside filmmakers like Hou and Yang - provides a layer of 'literary' complexity (rather than complication) by revealing backstory without conventional exposition. We're piecing it together over the course of the film rather than waiting for the flashback to drop. We have to observe and infer rather than passively consuming information, which for me makes their films much more engaging and satisfying (and novelistic) than standard Hollywood narrative models.

[therewillbeblus]

Exactly, I only arrived at that reading in its final act, or really final moments. It is like finishing a book and marveling at what the last page reveals.