Above: "Mike Bencich, Dan Ashberger, coal miners, Somerset, Colorado, 8/29/80," by Richard Avedon

Two months ago I rhapsodized about Richard Avedon's In The American West, which I consider the greatest American photographic contribution since WWII. I talked about how rare the images are and the unique circumstances in which I came to find them. I was happy to share that the images would finally become easily accessible, in the form of a reissued book.

Alas.

I had a chance to look over the new Abrams release myself, and my heart sunk as soon as I opened the pages. The pictures are there, but their essence, their life and sparkle and indomitable presence– have been removed. How? Why?

The short version: 1) I love these images. And 2) Don’t buy this book. Here’s the breakdown:

As a professional photographer familiar with darkroom practice and the difference between various printing methods I recommend avoiding this release. Printing costs for art books have risen dramatically in the last 20 years, and publishers cut corners more than they used to in order to maximize profit. Sadly, the latest reissue of this monumental series is a victim of this approach.

I own the 1985 first edition, and a side-by-side comparison with the 2025 release is a heartbreaker: the 40th anniversary book features noticeably less dynamic range, uses a non-lustre paper type that has too much texture to represent fine detail, an ink/paper combo that resists full blacks, and an overall lack of fidelity when compared to the original images. As fans of the photos know, Avedon was meticulous and supervised the original book. This publication differs wildly, and although things like tonal range and resolution sound like technical details, they do have an emotional impact. The 1985 book grabs you by the throat; this one leaves you indifferent. Which is really saying something, considering how striking Avedon's original images are.

[Because digital cameras are inferior to film on precisely the areas we're comparing, and because uncalibrated computer monitors have subtle differences of their own, the best method of highlighting the problems is to use words instead of photographs.] Thus:

These examples are all taken from images early in the book for your convenience in comparing, but the problems exist throughout the whole book:

1. In the first picture, look at Allen Silvy’s rightmost eye. In the 1985 book we can discern and visually separate his eyebrow hair, his eyelid, and his eyelash. In the 2025 book all three of these elements are muddled into the same hue of dark grey.
2. Take a look at the face of Loudilla Johnson (Loretta Lynn fan club triptych, center face); in the 1985 book, she's glowing; in the 2025 printing, her face looks greasy. The gray goes to white too quickly. Look at the out-of-focus neck of Kay Johnson, to the right of her; in 1985 we get a subtle gradation that in 2025 looks instead like digital sludge. Loretta, on the left, also had more light-colored strands of hair that in 2025 are rendered as an invisible white.
3. For a more striking example, look at the title page image (Mary Watts/Tricia Steward (factory worker with her niece); in 1985, niece Tricia's eyes pop, and her face is comprised of many shades of light grey. In 2025, her face goes to near-white almost immediately. And notice how the ink creates a different shade of black for Tricia's shirt, which feels more brittle, less rich.
4. Look at housekeeper Patricia Wilde's freckles; she has less of them in the 2025 version, and the details of her hair are less readable.
5. One of the joys of these photos has always been how crisp they are, coming as they do from 8x10 negatives; one cannot experience that joy in the 2025 reissue. For instance, Patricia’s hair strands above, and the detail in Judy Gustavson's eye (wife of unemployed copper miner Roy Gustavson, a couple pages further in).
6. But if you needed any inarguable proof that the book is presenting something different than the original intent, look at Roy Gustavson's face's skin color! It's totally changed! Did he just spend 40 years in a tanning salon?? :) What's the deal? If this doesn’t say shoddy print job, I don’t know what does. Notice also the comparative lack of tonal range in the stripes on his shirt.

In summary, the new book appears to have been taken from a third-generation source, most likely digital scans of pages of the old book, rather than first or second-generation sources like proof prints or negs. There's a reason the high online price for the 1985 and 2005 editions has not gone down, despite the availability and low price of this 2025 book; it's simply not the same experience. I encourage seeking out the earlier editions– both the 1985 and 2005 contain a line on the front matter page that reads, "printed and bound in Japan." That's how you know you're getting the good stuff.

If you've seen the prints in person, as I have, or own the 1985 book, this printing will be a massive disappointment. For Abrams and Italy's Conti Typocolor (where this book was printed, unlike all previous editions), this is an embarrassment that's offensive to Avedon's legacy and the legacy of his most significant and essential body of work. Should we be surprised, then, that this reissue is nowhere to be found on either the Avedon Foundation website nor that of Conti Typocolor?

In one important way, Abrams’ catastrophic cash grab of a blunder actually continues Avedon's wishes. The pictures were never meant to be widely available. They have always been hard to find, something you have to search for, travel far to see, not unlike Avedon himself driving for hours and days to stay in touch with the friends he found in making this series. In our day nothing is sacred because everything is accessible, repeatable, duplicable. Scarcity is the new currency of value. And Avedon's climactic, most talked-about, most influential photographic contribution has unexpectedly remained exactly that: scarce, elusive, rare. It is rare no longer by design but by the incompetence and greed of publishing bureaucracies, but maybe that's neither here nor there. What really matters is that the pictures, like the people in them, continue to live mostly hidden lives, far from the limelight, available to be appreciated only by those with eyes to see.

Better late than never– here's a recent interview with me at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library, which by the way is a Seattle treasure I can't recommend enough– a library that's open to all, sighted or otherwise, and inside a historic former auto dealership to boot! We discuss both my books and everything in between.

​Listen here! Enjoy!

​Photo by Miriam Kolker.

1. The Angle

I’m attracted to hidden lives. Those people who’ve had experiences such that they understand, often on a level beyond language, that status and wealth confer nothing upon a person’s character. I’m less impressed by someone who knows how to manipulate a stock price than I am by someone who knows how to break a chicken’s neck and cook it for dinner. This is not a judgment on people, because I have friends I adore– deeply– in all class groups; no, this is rather a critique of thought. The gospel of materialism simply doesn't quench me, because I need more than surfaces.
Have you noticed how the social messaging of our century wants us to value appearances as if they were the real thing? To equate exposure with success; to equate success with getting ahead, winning awards, dollars, prizes, memberships to the elite. Things you can point to which say, I'm special. Better than others. They want us to think this is the goal, because when we do we buy more stuff.

But what about that which is not quantifiable? In my first book I write of M–, the young single mother of three who escaped her abusive family, secretly catching the Amtrak with her kiddos, safe and sound as the train began moving finally, on their way back to her humble origins in small-town Ohio. I found her quiet, steadfast courageousness heroic, all the moreso because it was uncelebrated. Her face will adorn no billboards, I wrote, but I hope her children grow up to recognize her as the hero she is, loving, sacrificing, living.

In 1874 Thomas Hardy wrote that “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” In our contemporary discourse this observation is unsurprising, though our youngsters may not be aware how long today's central topics have been under discussion. Regardless, doesn't Hardy's line also ring true when applied to achievement? Isn't it also difficult for us to define our notions of value in a language chiefly designed to praise quantifiable success? Why do we have to clarify what we mean by success, or power, when discussing someone like M–? Why do these words default to their most superficial definitions? I want a vocabulary that recognizes the beauty and worth of so many of my dearest friends, my passengers, and countless others I'll never meet: those unknown lives so rich with incident and feeling, people who show up for their loved ones, who have modest dreams, who see through the mirage of status and understand that an easier life, or a flashier life, is not always a better one.

2. The Work
​
As you read this, and moreso if you've read my books, you won't be surprised to learn that my favorite photographic series has always been Richard Avedon's In the American West. That work, along with Sally Mann’s depictions of rural life and landscape, stand tall for me. Both are triumphs of style in the service of mood, substance, reflection. And both, critically, are celebrations of the hidden lives I mention above. 

In the American West is a collection of 123 large-format film portraits of a demythologised modern West: coal miners, drifters, waitresses, carnies, housewives, oil field workers, snake skinners, hay haulers, Hutterites, prisoners, sheep hands, grain threshers, pawnbrokers. Beginning in 1979 he spent five years with photographer Laura Wilson and a few other assistants in countless middles of nowhere, meeting strangers, finding faces, building relationships in the forgotten corners of our country's vast interior.

Why did Richard Avedon, then the most famous photographer in the world, a rock star who defined the look of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, who photographed Monroe and Bardot and Hepburn and numerous presidents, make such an unprecedented late-career pivot? After a lifetime of elevating models and celebrities, why did he now turn in the opposite direction?

The project began as a joke between a Fort Worth museum director and his curator, primarily because the idea of the world's premier fashion photographer shooting ranch hands and factory workers was both absurd and impossible to imagine. However, curator knew Avedon, and the concept made its way to him. To everyone's surprise, he was interested. The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth agreed to meet Avedon's request of a fully funded project lasting five years, with no creative oversight, the option to abandon the project if no solution was found, and a final delivery of 100 prints to be exhibited at the museum. 

He would go on to photograph 17,000 images of 752 people in 17 states. It's worth clarifying that each of those images was not 35mm, not 70mm, not even 120 or 4x5, but a full 8-inch by 10-inch negative, loaded into the camera one sheet at a time, with a resolution capacity which, if you haven't seen in person, you simply don't have the capacity to imagine, because there is no other device in existence, invented before or since, which can generate such a detailed image. You could make a print from it the size of a skyscraper and it would still look crisp.
​
It's also worth noting that the 8x10 view camera, as Avedon used it, involves a certain amount of ceremony, and I think this impacted the final portraits. There's a psychological difference between somebody with a tiny point-and-shoot and a camera that needs three people working it, a shooter, loader, and focuser, plus another keeping track of all the negative plates and other ephemera lying around. That and the large white sheet Avedon always placed behind the subject, usually over a building facade, anywhere with neutral outdoor light. He wanted no shadows, nothing to tell the viewer where to look.

Portrait photography would already have been uncommon in these times and places, decades before we all began taking selfies, but what Avedon was doing would've been especially so: he was returning the medium from reflex, which is what photo had lately become, to its original state: that of ritual. The act of creating these portraits was an undertaking, a production, and I have to assume this affected the subjects, gave it a heft and gravitas. They found themselves taking it seriously, collaborating in something that felt unique and special. Also, the camera’s plane of focus was so narrow that the subject’s eyes might be clear but not their nose or ears. They had to remain absolutely still once focus had been set. Candid shots these are not. Additionally, there was another reason for making sure the subjects didn't move: Avedon never looked through the camera after framing and focusing. He stood to one side, letting the subject develop their own private rapport with the lens, knowing there was no one staring through it at them.

Each subject was someone found in the course of Avedon and company’s travels, who agreed to be photographed. The person is shown separate from any background, under neutral daylight, on a massive, grain-free negative sheet that either is orthochromatic or appears so. The title is always the subject’s name, occupation, and date/location. The white background had hitherto only been used with models and movie stars; even today the effect remains striking. You stand in front of them and then the game begins, the game we play with all public photos because photography, with the exception of private photography, is the medium which has no meaning: we instead seek to ascribe meaning to the images. The longer we regard a photograph, the more meanings we come up with. In playing this game we learn about ourselves.

We have to remember that this vision of the West was completely new– one without landscapes, without cowboys, bereft of romance and nature. Shockingly for the time, there were no vistas in this depiction; Avedon wanted to record not the landscape, but the impact of the landscape on the body. The portraits are often unflattering. Freckles and burns and lines and evidence of toil, unseen labour and strife. He wanted to celebrate the uncelebrated. This was arguably the first large-scale reveal that the people of the American West no longer had mythic qualities; it was now a land of the poor, about to be crushed under the greed of Reagan’s deregulated capitalism and later, the corporatization of the West and the beginning of rural drug culture. The West, always a mythic construction, had now become a simulacrum of its former self. 

But this was no journalism project. Avedon didn't pretend to objectivity. “A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture,” he writes in the dense but brief essay which accompanies the images. “The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered by someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me. A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in photographs. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

3. The Search

When did Avedon's stark figure-on-white pieces first enter my life? I no longer remember. It feels truer to say they were always there, lurking, waiting for the right time. I know I'd found them by my twenties, perhaps in college, visual ephemera from 2005, the last time they were shown to the public. Avedon kept a tight leash on the pictures; during his lifetime they were never for sale, and the 17,000 images that weren't used were all destroyed at his direction. He further specified that after his death no prints from the 123 surviving negatives ever be made again, partly because Avedon's exacting printing process could never be duplicated by someone besides him... but mostly because he didn't want the worlds of fashion, high culture and Hollywood exploiting these people or their images. He had become close to these folks, and would maintain friendships with many of them for decades after the project, driving for days to the forgotten towns where they still lived. “I wish I’d never stopped photographing the people we met,” he told Laura Wilson in 2003. “I wish I could have stayed with the project my whole life.”

It's ironic that the climactic achievement of the definitive fashion photographer of the 20th century would be these portraits– dynamic and maximalist as per Avedon’s usual, but resolutely unglamorous. When the images were finally completed in 1985 no museum in New York would agree to exhibit them. The idea of poor people adorning their walls was apparently unthinkable. The Amon Carter premiered the images at their own museum in Fort Worth (this was always the contractual expectation), and the resulting furor involved every imaginable response. The images were offensive; exploitative; uncaring; dismissive; brilliant; empowering; confusing; breathtaking. In the annals of photo history we now understand them as seminal, unsurpassed in their technical exactitude, a milestone in the depiction of ordinary people, the culminating– if unexpected– masterwork of Avedon's long and storied career. I think they're the most significant American photographic work made in the postwar period.

The images are nevertheless very hard to find. Any photographer knows that a reproduction of a print from an 8x10 negative cannot seriously be called a likeness; the drop in resolution and tonal range is akin to a Xerox photocopy of the Mona Lisa, or a VHS recording of a TV broadcast of a Christopher Nolan IMAX feature, although this comparison itself falls flat since an 8x10 negative has over 16 times the resolution of the largest IMAX film. Basically, you really want to see the real thing.

But the full set of 123 has only been exhibited once; 78 of the images were shown again in 2005. Each massive final print was the result of at least 50 drafts, with dozens of dodges and burns per picture, in total using over 60,000 square feet of silver-coated paper and a million gallons of water. They were so hard to create that only three sets of prints were ever made: those belonging to the Amon Carter; another that's archived behind closed doors at the University of Arizona; and a set gifted by Avedon to the original printer, Ruedi Hofman, which the Avedon Foundation refuses to recognize because they’re unsigned. If you missed the 1985 and 2005 shows, like I did, you're out of luck.

The next best thing is the book. All museum exhibitions have an accompanying monograph, and both editions of In The American West, printed the years of the above shows, went out of print instantly. The 1985 first edition in particular continues to fetch high prices online, and every used or rare book bookstore I’ve walked into in the last twenty years has the same answer when I ask, “Do you have Richard Avedon’s In the American West?” They always say no instantly, with confidence, because they know exactly what I’m talking about. This is a title people search for, and it’s not one they give away. I’ve looked in bookstores in LA, New York, Seattle; I’ve gone to the rare book room at Powell’s; I’ve combed through countless photography sections, looking halfheartedly under A for Avedon, a thing you do out of habit, knowing the outcome but trying it anyway. 

Only now do I realize my bus stories are after something quite similar to what Avedon was doing with these pictures. I too am channeling into art my experiences with dismissed and ignored peoples, in order to explore themes of my own choosing. Avedon famously said, “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is . . . the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.” I too am taken by the mysteries and hardship of existence, and compelled to make art from my time with the uncelebrated lives I encounter. I was searching for In the American West before I even had a blog, let alone begun my books.

In 2025 I was in a used bookstore in Lambertville, New Jersey, population 4,139. It was my second time passing through there. The owner, incredibly, remembered my face from my only previous visit, while also noting that my companion hadn’t been in the store before. This was true. We found ourselves in the photography section. Last time I had been surprised to notice a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the Walker Evans/James Agee collaboration about impoverished Dust Bowl farmers. This time we were excited to discover a boxed first edition of August Sander’s People of the 20th Century, Volumes I-VII. Delightful, but not necessary to purchase. Then my eye wandered to the left. By this point I no longer consciously searched for In the American West. I had lost all expectation. I just looked at the tall, thin book in my periphery because it had an unusual brown cloth binding on its spine.

I remember my brain stumbling on the size of the moment. Could it be? Right here? My companion and I couldn’t believe it. Lambertville. The store had not one but three copies of In the American West, including one that was signed! They had Avedon’s The Sixties. They had Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful for $700. You just never know. We found it. Or so it felt; I think it found us. Because naturally in the course of poring over the book’s reproductions, we couldn’t resist looking up the exhibition history. Would we ever get to see these in person? Sure, they’d only been shown twice in the last four decades, but you find yourself checking anyway, the way you check all the bookstores…

Imagine our surprise. The images were on display right now, 40 of them, for the 40-year anniversary, in Fort Worth, at the original museum and the only place the public has seen the series, on display for… another three weeks.

​Of course we dropped everything and went. We had to. This is what I save money for. This is my rainy day. I mention above the uniqueness and dense clarity of an 8x10 negative, how you really have to see the prints in person. We walked into the room and stood there, inches away from them, no glass between us and the print surface, incredibly, nothing separating us from these faces but time. The first image we came to is also the one on the book cover:

​“Sandra Bennett, twelve year old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, 8/23/80.” ​

In life it is over six feet tall. You find yourself stunned, by the impossible clarity of every strand of hair. Nothing can prepare you for this level of crisp detail. And the punchy blacks, darker than anything mere ink can achieve. You remember that ink on wood pulp cannot touch the vertiginous richness of silver halide crystals burned by light. The gradations of deep grey, almost black but not quite, revealing secrets you never saw in the book. The faces coming alive because they’re bigger than you now, almost able to speak, about to blink, faces you have to look up at. In person there can be no argument: these portraits are clearly and unambiguously reverential. Avedon’s deep respect for each of them fairly oozes from the frames. 

Who are the pictures for? And why did Avedon choose to do this project, with its focus so unlike his previous subjects? I think the images are their own answer. Abrams is reissuing the book version of the series later this year, and they will once again be available at long last, the images able to speak for themselves if only in book form, calling to those who thirst for immediate, unvarnished life, hidden life, who have that great allergy to the limelight I describe above, who have definitions of success our language struggles to capture. 
​
The first people Avedon ever showed prints of this project to were a group of coal miners he'd individually photographed in Reliance, Wyoming, population 714. Avedon found that of all the groups he shot, coal miners were generally the most sensitive, perhaps because of their proximity to sudden death. They worked in absurd and miserable conditions and looked out for each other’s lives daily. Laura Wilson writes that they were taken aback when they first saw the prints, tacked up on a building facade as a morning surprise when the workers showed up. They slowed down and took their time, regarding the images with silence and the occasional murmur, considering themselves as seen by another.

I look upon their portraits and wonder what they saw. I hope the thought crossed their mind: My life has value. It is filled to bursting with detail, and emotion, and significance, for no other reason than that I am human.

---

​UPDATE: We caution against buying the Abrams reissue, which has a substandard printing process to the previous editions, resulting in reduced tonal range and, for me, a noticeably less emotionally involved experience. Much more in a follow-up post here.

First image: "Debbie McClendon, carney, Thermopolis, Wyoming, 7/29/81."
​Second image: "Roberto Lopez, oil field worker, Lyons, Texas, 9/28/80."

Please note that the images above are not art. They are reproductions of reproductions of reproductions, intended only to give a vague idea. Get the book if you can; or see the prints yourself at the Carter, through August 10th. A note on the Paris show, which is on through October 12: those are just 16" x 20" proof prints, although proofs of all 123 images are on display. But they are not the full-size prints viewable at the Carter Museum, which are either 56" or 76" tall per image. For once you want to be going to Texas, not Paris...

Sources:
Avedon, R. (1985). In the American West. Harry N Abrams Incorporated. 
Wilson, L. (2003). Avedon at work: In the American West. Harry Ransom Humanities Research. 

This is the top half of the list, continuing from the bottom, which is available here. 

10. Crossing, by Levan Akin. 106m. ​Domestic Trailer.

“What would you tell her if you found her?”

It's possible this belongs much higher up on this list. I need a rewatch in order to write intelligently about it. There's a lot going on in the deceptively simple story, about an aging aunt seeking her long-lost (trans) daughter. It has a cumulative power I wasn't expecting, and like Audiard's work manages to be many things at once, albeit in a quieter and more focused key. Regardless of what a second viewing reveals: what an ending!! A powerful reminder that regardless of how convinced some are by bigoted views and putting up walls between themselves and others, tolerance always– always– ages best. Acceptance even moreso.

9. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, by George Miller. 148m. Trailer 1.​

“Laszlo, I am alive.”

What an opening line. It's one for the ages. Neither of the lead couple discusses their concentration camp experiences, but it is those traumas which inform the action here. Brutalist architecture was an attempt to dispense with the past and create a new history by looking only forward. It is creativity born from trauma, but neither character is of the inclination or the generation to talk much about these motivating forces; their traumas are privately lived. The American-born characters around them don’t understand where they’re coming from, but we do. We feel their loneliness. 

There are very few films about the relationship between the artist and the financier. Every artist knows how frustrating it is to have to justify all creative decisions from a financial perspective, and this film has the guts to demonstrate what too often ends up happening between the two parties (hint: it isn't the artist who comes out on top). I disagree with the film's final line, but understand why the characters, who have been through what they've been through, would cling to it as a truism. We choose the ideas that make sense of our lives.

If you saw it in theatres, you got the 15-minute intermission, shaved down to 1 minute for home video, which accounts for the difference in runtimes above. I felt it to be an important part of the film; to be confronted with the photograph for that time, while listening to the modernist piano performance that echoed softly while the timer counted down. I spent the time walking slowly around the huge room, regarding the photo from up close and far away. There was time to reflect on what we'd just seen, and we learned the power a great image has when held for a long time. It was also a highly impactful way to introduce the Erzsébet character.

6. Monica, by Andrea Pallaoro. Trailer.

“She doesn’t know who I am.”

I'm taking advantage of delayed domestic release dates to sneak this 2022(!) picture in, because it deserves the praise and nobody's heard of it. A trans woman returns home to her mother, who doesn't recognize her. Queer stories lend themselves well to exploring the universal condition of loneliness, and this quiet masterpiece is no exception; director Pallaoro emphasizes the singularity and solitude of the protagonist’s experience with a boxy 1.33 frame and shallow depth of field (don't try this focus pulling at home!). Even aside from its deeply moving and humanist narrative it would deserve a place here on the strength of its ravishing visuals alone. 

Some of the films on this list aren't for everyone (Love Lies & Furiosa perhaps too violent; Anora too profane; Kindness and Needle too misanthropic; Brutalist too long; and then there's Perez). But Monica deserves a chance. Try the trailer, above. Who doesn't relate to the loneliness of being oneself?

5. Anora, by Sean Baker. 139m. Trailer. 

“I don't have Instagram. I'm an adult, man.”

The qualities of this Palme d’or– and four-time Oscar winner have been discussed extensively elsewhere. It's a portrait of people at work, and a portrait of four people who form a bond that, although antagonistic, is a bond nevertheless, and one their bosses cannot access. As a champion for the working classes myself, how can I resist this punky, vibrant salute to a collection of lives its tuxedo-clad Cannes audience wouldn't have known the first thing about how to make a movie about?

Thank goodness for Mr. Baker's talent and empathy, and nerve in ending as he does; the film plays better on repeat viewings because the final scene reveals the film is aware of dynamics we haven't yet considered. Ani is so good at putting up a guard, at confrontation and conflict, standing up for herself, and usually she's in situations where these skills are required; hence her mastery of them. But like no small amount of folks I've met on the street, she's utterly unprepared when confronted with vulnerability, decency and kindness. I wonder if she knows it's her loss. As a friend said afterward about the ending, “It's a sad film. I'm glad it knows it's sad." ​

​4. La Chimera, by Alice Rohrwacher. Domestic Trailer.

“Those were not intended to be seen by the eyes of humans, but by those of souls.”

Technically a 2023 release in the States, I'm once again looking to UK release dates to sneak a gem in. A film that in its narrow focus ends up being a film about everything. Like Sean Baker, Rohrwacher knows about worlds that most major filmmakers are too wealthy to have access to. She milks this advantage on all her projects, illuminating beauty we didn't know existed. Chimera has an awareness of class that American movies lack, and explores the ribald relationship between the present and ancient past as can only happen in Italy. How do we assign value to the invaluable? Why do we bother? What cost does the soul pay when we ‘get away with’ something? Rohrwacher uses the tale of an English foreigner robbing Etruscan gravesites to explore these questions and more.

I recently tried to rewatch this at home, but found that I couldn't. Footage originating on 16mm is often unacceptably pixelated on streaming services, where the bitrate of an internet signal simply can't keep up with the amount of changing data asked of each pixel (this is why any streaming movie suddenly looks terrible when there's shots of fire or ocean waves; too much movement). Rent the Blu-ray if you can; the Kanopy stream looks like VHS, and I only know this film has beautiful cinematography because I saw it in theatres. At once a celebration and a lament, about time, love, and loss– in other words, again, everything. 

3. All We Imagine As Light, by Payal Kapadia. 118m. Trailer. ​

We need art now, like we never have before. In times of ease and peace we forget its value, and confuse it with entertainment. Entertainment has to be 1) fun and 2) easy to understand. Art, on the other hand, is not so limited. It can transcend mere fun, and shake your soul. Art is the only profession that explores what it means to be alive. Unlike science, religion and philosophy, it is not constrained by the obligation to provide answers. It just is. As Milan Kundera wrote, "Only the most naïve questions are worth asking. They are the questions with no answers." And Art is all about such big questions. This is why AI has nothing on art and never will: it is incapable of experience. It can only acquire knowledge, never wisdom. It cannot conceive of the intangible. Art is how we will find each other again, make sense of our squandered age, and build back up anew. 

Below is my list of films for last year. Film is the great empathy-building machine, and there was never a more urgent time for empathy. We've been atomized by communications technology, isolated and alienated. This is how they make society incapable of uniting, of revolution, of communal love and respect. Smartphones, social media and the 24-hour news feed have made everyone else in real life an Other, and each of us into an island, our old communities replaced by digital approximations of community. Maybe we once thought the positives of this would outweigh the negatives. Maybe they do. But these days, I feel the negatives. Film and other art is a solace for me. 

My training is in filmmaking and photography; this list is not critic's list but a filmmaker's list, so form/style/aesthetics is as important to me as subject; and, I'm trying these days to remember not to evaluate Art as if it's supposed to be Entertainment. Art doesn't have to be easy to understand. It can be about challenge, or even pain. All the most important moments in life involve pain. Only art can help us through those moments. Escape is not an antidote to despair. Somehow we seem to innately grasp all this when it comes to music. People value the great breakup albums (l have my favorites), and they don't require answers from music. I see cinema in the same way. This is not a list of fun or easily digestible films, but don't click away! We never remember those for very long anyway. This is instead a list of ten (okay, actually twenty) interesting films, films with flaws but which take on challenges, ask hard questions, and the best of which push the medium to new places.

Beginning from the bottom:

20. Love Lies Bleeding, by Rose Glass. 104m. Trailer.​

“Anyone can feel strong hiding behind a piece of metal. I prefer to know my own strength.”

The ending shot is a question, and an acknowledgment of accepting flawed humanity. The most interesting relationship in this fascinating picture is the one between Sterwart and her father, Ed Harris. What is Stewart thinking in that last shot? (SPOILERS:) That, perhaps, I am not so different from the father I was desperate to distance myself from, whom I thought was so different than me. What am I doing here, performing the exact same action he once did, and which I so detested: burying undeserving innocent bodies in holes in the desert? It is a reconciliation of sorts, after the fact. She has a choice about where she goes from here, now that she can name this similarity. We are always more like our parents than we realize.

Like Drive, another contemporary ~100 minute genre thriller that's actually about loneliness, Bleeding’s violent moments are too violent for me. But the rest, including Kristen Stewart's incomparable performance (another masterclass in indistinguishably fusing acting, reacting and being), make it worth the journey.

19. Pigen med nålen (The Girl With the Needle), by Magnus von Horn. 123m. Trailer.

“I dreamt he was alive more than once.”

One of the most affecting special features I've encountered is the Victor Erice interview on the Criterion disc of his unfinished 1983 gem, El Sur. In it he describes, years later and with great detail, what the second half of his film would've been, had he been able to make it. The exacting specificity of Erice’s memory reveals what a crushing blow this was for him. You can feel the heartbreak. He wouldn't make another fiction feature until this one, 40 years later. What did Erice do, now finally willing and able to make a film again? Did he shoot the rest of El Sur, and try to make right the past? No. Close Your Eyes is about an aging director beguiled by a film he started 40 years earlier but never got to complete. Erice knows we cannot correct the past; we can only process it.

You can feel the cathartic liberation of Erice working through the pain, channeling his frustration into art, finding something beautiful in the journey. I wonder if he knows that El Sur is a better and more mysterious film in its incomplete state. This new work suggests that, at long last, he does. A film about belief, the unknowable, and peace.

​16. Kinds of Kindness, by Yorgos Lanthimos. 164m. Trailer.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Andrea Arnold takes so long in between making her portraits of young women on the cusp of self-awareness that each of her last three outings represents a portrait of a different generation. Bird, the latest, is the first to dive deep into a world of youngsters who grew up with the Internet, smartphones, social media and all the splintered multitudes they bring. Her empathy for even these oft-derided souls astounds me, and humbles me with its sincerity and gentle glow. It is easy to dislike the unfamiliar, and young people live in a world unfamiliar to me; but Ms. Arnold, generations older than both me and her subjects, reminds us all how universal a quality goodness remains, and how valuable a perception aware of it is.

​14. Parthenope, by Paolo Sorrentino. 137m. Trailer.

"It's very difficult to see, because it's the last thing you learn.”

Okay, I'm not going to try to defend the film's squarely male gaze (the cinematographer actually being a woman should be noted)- the film isn't perfect, and there are moments I can only call preposterous… but one thing this reworking of the eponymous myth can't be called is misogynist. It isn't dismissive or contemptuous of any of its female characters, least of all its witty and thoughtful heroine; it's a celebration, not of physical beauty but of an attitude that transcends it. Like her mythic namesake, the protagonist is shackled by her beauty and the effect it has on others. But she isn't defined by it, nor by romantic or familial obligation. If beauty opens doors for her, it's her intelligence that gets her across the threshold every time.

This Parthenope doesn't throw herself into the sea after being rejected by Odysseus, as per the ancient story; she instead bears the sorrow of losing a loved one to that act, and chooses to embrace life, joy, optimism, and possibility, alongside the undercurrent of melancholic mystery that never leaves those of us who have lost. Although there may be things to criticize here, I see much to treasure. Notice how Parthenope returns the gaze of Mr. Sorrentino and Ms. D’Antonio’s camera with a gaze of her own, cheekily taking over the agency of sight at key moments.

Most of all, I shake my head in awe at the wisdom of Sorrentino’s writing (I was actually pausing to scribble down lines in the third act, they were so attuned to the questions I ask of life), and his inspiring inability to judge any character. A film that leaves you elated by its end, utterly committed to go out there into the world being your beautiful best self.
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​13. Emilia Pérez, by Jacques Audiard. 132m. Teaser.

“Truth is the most painful form of freedom.”

I know, I know, I know. Hear me out here. We forget that this was well-loved when it played at Cannes, that it got great reviews both stateside and in Europe… but we do remember when American audiences subsequently discovered it via its slew of Oscar nominations and Twitter fallout with one of its actors, and how much they hated it. It's become especially fashionable to hate Pérez online, but my concern here is with the film itself and nothing surrounding it. Mediocrity in filmmaking bores me, and one thing Pérez can’t be called is boring. I have a weakness for wild swings, and Pérez is a wild swing if there ever was one, imperfect but endlessly intriguing. I’m actually not sure the film is about transitioning so much as Audiard’s career-long fascination with the possibility of the second self. He presents different outcomes of this concern in each of his pictures; here, the supporting character played by Karla Gascon has such clear aims for good, and is mostly successful... but she cannot quite escape her first self (I'm not referring to gender here, but character: her entitlement and treatment of others), and in doing so she both reveals her humanity and signs her fate. I’m aware this is an awkward thematic overlap, but Audiard trusts the intelligent viewer to recognize the distinction. His question here is: How many of us are able to transcend our habits? Gascon's character aspires to be a saint. The final scene is a question only the viewer can answer. 

12. La passion de Dodin Bouffant (The Taste of Things), by Tran Anh Hung. 135m. Trailer.

I'm still blown away with gratitude that this even happened. I bow to Rocco DeVito and everyone else who helped put this together, and who took a chance on me playing such a significant role in this wonderful conference. Thank you to all of the friendly faces, all the kind comments in passing, liminal exchanges in hallways and tables and parking lots, the backs of conference rooms and along the trails of the park outside. I take none of it for granted.

Enjoy the video below and share it around! For those who weren't there, this is a speech about the importance of integrating community and humanity into transit planning, and features updated versions of two bus stories, followed by a Q&A.