Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 24

Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 24

This Saturday, outdoor cafes reopen in Belgium after almost seven months of closure. To get into the mood or dream of better times when we’re welcome inside again till the early hours, here’s a round of three bar films on Sabzian. 

A pub crawl through the history of film could start in one of the joints in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), continue in the Golden Horn from Barfly (Barbet Schroeder, 1987) to hang out with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, and finish in Béla Tarr’s Titanik Bar from Damnation (1988) or at the bar called Novel that the characters in Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives (2011) keep ending up in. 

Instead, we’ve selected three docufiction films that portray a night out on the town, spent completely (or mostly) inside of bars. After months drinking with men he met on New York’s Skid Row, independent film pioneer Lionel Rogosin worked with them to write a screenplay that reflected their lives and then cast his drinking buddies as themselves in what would become On the Bowery (1956). Similarly, filmmaker Kent Mackenzie began to hang around in the bars of Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill district with some of the young Native Americans who’d left reservation life for the big city. After months, he broached the subject of working together on a script based on their own experiences, which led to the story of one wild night in The Exiles (1961). 

Directly influenced by Rogosin and Mackenzie, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020) chronicles the closing night of a Las Vegas dive bar. What appears to be an ethnographic record was actually filmed in a still active bar in New Orleans with people who aren’t regulars there. Shot on the day after Donald Trump’s presidential election, Bill and Turner Ross captured eighteen hours of consecutive footage with digital handheld cameras for their construction of the real. 

Another ideal companion piece to this film, that unfortunately isn’t streaming yet, would be Luis López Carrasco’s El año del descubrimiento [The Year of Discovery] (2020) – an almost three-and-a-half-hour split-screen docufiction film staged in a bar in Cartagena, Spain, where customers discuss the political and economic history of the region. Here you can watch a video essay by La vida útil magazine on the film and the functions of bars in cinema and our lives, including an extract from The Exiles. Cheers!

In memory of actor Michael Martin who opens and closes Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Martin passed away last Monday, on April 26th.

On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin, 1956) is available on Vimeo, iTunes and Amazon Prime (US).
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961) is available on Vimeo and Amazon Prime (US).
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill and Turner Ross, 2020) is available on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play and Kanopy

Online Selection
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03 May 2021 - 09 May 2021