Sabzian is a free online magazine that relies on the work of a group of dedicated volunteers. We could use your support. Please consider a donation! Sabzian est un magazine en ligne gratuit qui dépend du travail d’un groupe de bénévoles dévoués.  Votre soutien nous aide beaucoup. Pensez à faire un don ! Sabzian is een gratis online magazine dat afhankelijk is van het werk van een groep toegewijde vrijwilligers. We kunnen uw steun goed gebruiken. Overweeg een donatie!

SUPPORT SUPPORT SUPPORT

On Barbara Loden’s Wanda

Article
07.05.2025
EN

Loden’s prescience rests in focalizing pressing considerations of labor, gender, and survival, made in advance of two key films of women’s refusal and drift: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985). The gestural specificity of Loden’s performance, her habitation within the exhausted lifetime of rural Appalachia, its aesthetics of passivity and failure, resonate deeply with tendencies afoot in contemporary cinemas of duration and observation.

Conversation
07.05.2025
EN

We of the Madison Women’s Media Collective travelled to Milwaukee to meet with Ms. Loden in conjunction with the showing of her feature film Wanda[.] Though a little shy and nervous, Loden answered our questions for hours in the afternoon prior to the screening and continued the interview late into the night. Loden: “I know a lot of women are insulted by Wanda because they think it shows women in a bad way. To me it’s valid; it’s like showing myself and a way that I was. People say, ‘We don’t want to see anybody like that.’ Those are the people who wouldn’t want me to exist, and they would say that I was not valid or that I shouldn’t be heard.”

On Johan van der Keuken

Article
07.05.2025
EN NL

Van der Keuken makes a world exist, he creates a reality. Describing then is not representing something that already exists but rather realising “a” reality. By creating forms, he creates a world of things that comes to life in our imagination. Herman does exist, as form. The good fortune Van der Keuken makes us part of is just that magical realisation of the world on the screen, where the inner suddenly becomes outer.

Interview with Isabelle Huppert

Article
30.04.2025
EN

After In Another Country [2012], shaped day by day in Korea, and Claire’s Camera [2017], filmed in Cannes as if in a dream, Isabelle Huppert reunites with Hong Sangsoo for A Traveler’s Needs, winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2024. On the occasion of its French release, the actress reflects on her work with the prolific director – his approach, which blends improvisation with precision – and her own vision of acting, her quest for “living access points.”

Béla Tarr’s Atrophy of Causation

Article
30.04.2025
EN

The return to the point of departure, in Tarr’s work, is more structurally fundamental than the betrayal itself. For all their pessimism, Tarr’s films are not Hobbesian tales of universal human untrustworthiness. Pessimism, in Sátántangó or Damnation, does not concern human failures but rather the gravity of what is: its tendency to arrest change, to brutally overpower what could be. Much of Tarr’s nihilism resides precisely in his portrayal of the atrophy of causation. 

Godard’s Posthumous Films

Article
23.04.2025
EN

What is new in these posthumous films is the amount of access they offer into Godard’s working process, his thinking about films, and his working relationship to his collaborators in the last two decades of his life. There is a want to see these films as Godard’s testament, a personal statement on the fact of his impending death. Instead, one might take them for what they are, fragments of a future “that will never exist,” but which nonetheless point us in a different direction. Insofar as the problems to which Godard dedicated his life, artistically and politically, remain unresolved, they remain for us both the most pressing and the most generative.

Article
02.04.2025
NL EN

Completely unclassifiable, this second feature film of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro; how wonderful this journey into the world calmly pierced by our perceptions, between the accuracy of dreaming and the inaccuracy of waking, all through the vertigo of the present. Perhaps there are not enough films left that make you want to whisper, in delight, “Where am I?” Less out of fear of being lost or astray, than to recover the emotion of the sleeper who, when waking up, does not know where he’s coming from, in which refuge he has just rested, and which world he’s waking up to.

Article
26.03.2025
EN

The directorial debut of António Reis was something of a bolt from the blue. While it was certainly not the first instance of a great first work in Portuguese cinema – a cinema whose most interesting directors have, ultimately, been those who showed themselves as such in their earliest works – Jaime was nonetheless an arresting spectacle, due to its own beauty as a work as well as the striking impression that it conveyed. Reis’s first work impressed itself upon our cinematic landscape as a unique showing of raw materiality and instinctive force. It turned heads for its extreme modernity as well as its extreme originality; it instigated an unheard-of formal permissiveness and an approach to expression that was at once ascetic and rigorously precise.

On Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (2023)

Article
19.03.2025
NL EN

Jean Baudrillard described obscenity as an excess of visibility, an excess of transparency in which nothing more is suggested or concealed, where there’s no room for seduction as a game of distance and mystery. Maestro succumbs to exhibitionism in this sense: Cooper forces all his effort and skill on the viewer unasked. The illusion – Cooper plays Bernstein – remains incomplete. The film is a constant reminder of the performance itself, of the blood, sweat and tears that made Maestro possible. The acting process is emphatically exposed, as if revealing something that should have remained hidden, something that doesn’t need to be seen.

Article
05.03.2025
NL FR EN RU

L’espace cinématographique est avant tout chose un espace artistique. C’est un espace de discussion. Ne commettons pas l’erreur de considérer l’espace artistique, l’espace des représentations et des modèles abstraits, comme un domaine d’actions de notre vie physique et matérielle. Ce que je dis est une platitude, une évidence. Je me dois malheureusement de répéter encore et encore cette évidence.

NEWS
05.05.2025
EN

This month, Japan Society presents the first part of a rare retrospective on Japanese director Mikio Naruse, Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us, commemorating the 120th anniversary of the master Japanese filmmaker’s birth.