InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 9

FILM REVIEWS
JACKALS & FIREFLIES
Charlie Kaufman
Depending on your disposition, New York City’s claustrophobic
crush of humanity is either unsettling or liberating, if not both
simultaneously — it’s not easy to find your foothold in a place
where crying in public is both a rite of passage and a punchline.
There are many, many love letters to New York City out there, but
Charlie Kafuman’s Jackals & Fireflies is less a declaration of
devotion than a wistful, extended Missed Connection. An
unnamed narrator, played with gentle gravitas by the poet Eva
H.D., crisscrosses the city in an unspecified time frame, noting or
forging fragments of connection amidst the buffeting streams of
urban ambiance. In keeping with Kaufman’s surrealist
sensibilities, Jackals & Fireflies is a meandering tone poem
whose only other major character is the city itself.
H.D., who wrote the 20-minute film’s script, most recently
collaborated with Kaufman by penning the poem “bonedog” for
I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Like fellow flaneur Leopold Bloom,
who wanders through Dublin in equally mesmerizing fashion,
H.D.’s narration is a loose amalgamation of stream of
consciousness and internal monologue, peppered with wry
observation and personal reflection. Cinematographer Chayse
Irvin (Blonde and BlacKkKlansman) shot the film with a Samsung
Galaxy S22 Ultra as part of a new campaign, but unlike
high-budget shot-on-iPhone features, Jackals & Fireflies retains
a down-to-earth moodiness that befits its pensive subject. Even
in the face of solitude, there’s more than a little serendipity; it’s
their fleeting coexistence that Kaufman, in his own understated
way, chooses to celebrate. — SELINA LEE
DIRECTOR: Charlie Kaufman; CAST: Eva H.D.; DISTRIBUTOR: —;
STREAMING: February 12; RUNTIME: 20 min.
GODS OF MEXICO
Helmut Dosantos
Helmut Dosantos’ feature debut, Gods of Mexico, is an ethereal
work of observation, informing tonality through compositional
rigor, the beauty on display siphoned into a controlled stasis. In
opposition to historical narratives of modernization and the
industrial imperialism that ravages the landscapes of indigenous
communities, Dosantos seeks an immobility that dignifies itself
through the act of statis-as-resistance. He frames a collection of
indigenous peoples in a plethora of tableaux so that, when
brought together, they might construct a new perception and
narrative of resilience. But this well-meaning survey of beauty
and might quickly collapses into the ornamental.
At a point, the film’s stillness and observation becomes rote, its
capacity to evoke its ideas and aestheticized vision begins to
stifle, and the whole thing pretty openly flails toward
ethnographic gaze. One might be able to extrapolate intention in
invoking beauty as a faculty of the very representation it
expresses, but there isn’t enough of a sense of subjectivity as the
camera’s inherent estrangement seriously affects our perception.
These people become objects of a leering gaze, one that flirts in
spectacle and only affirms that the indigenous subjects are
being made fetish. A black-and-white portraiture motif adopted
during the film’s mid-section reads as grotesquely projected
nostalgia, seeking to render those images of history as specters
within a reimagining of this process, wherein their ghosts are
caught in that quest for an image. These forms, if
reappropriated, offer little new but a pointed reflexivity. In the
portraits, we see figures ripped from their storied landscapes
and placed on display.
The intent is clear enough: of seeking reclamation of these
historied images through a context of labor and inserting — and
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