Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall

Geese, for lack of a better word, is good. Heirs apparent to the art-rock mantle, they reign in the arena less because they deserve the top spot and more because they’ve managed to slice through indie culture’s great splintering and establish a place for themselves in the zeitgeist. Geese owes its success largely to the lighting-in-a-bottle songwriting talent of its frontman, Cameron Winter, who either withheld his true gifts on Geese’s first two albums or at some point toward the end of 2024 stepped into a Brundle-like telepod and accidentally fused with some DNA from a strand of Thom Yorke’s hair. On the heels of wild acclaim for both his debut solo album Heavy Metal and Geese follow-up Getting Killed, his star rose considerably in 2025, culminating in his coronation as New King of Rock at Carnegie Hall on December 11. Anyone who was anyone was there.

For the rest of us (living within a 100-mile-or-so radius of a major metropolitan area, at least), there’s Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall, Paul Thomas Anderson’s roadshow cooldown project following the gargantuan One Battle After Another. You fall right into Cameron Winter, and it’s easy to forget the form when enveloped in the combination of Winter’s warbling and the warmth of Anderson’s photography. But the hand is there: PTA is in flexible form despite the weight of those 35mm cameras, playing with light, shadow, and sound in ways he hasn’t since the early 2000s.

Because of how much capital is bound up in their work, it’s not often filmmakers get to doodle. When they do, the results tend to reveal more about their pleasures and passions than a major work might, and Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall affords Anderson the same stylistic freedom that can be found in Junun and Anima. There are shades of orange and brown he’s never worked with before, and the film opens on a pointillist montage that resembles Frederick Wiseman’s establishing shots (whether in a deliberate nod to Wiseman, only PTA can say — the film was shot before Wiseman’s death but assembled after it). If there’s connective tissue to be found between Anderson’s fiction work and Cameron Winter, it’s that he’s still trying to find ways out of his White Elephant skin. Certain shots evoke Punch-Drunk Love — when Winter taps the keys at the far end of his piano over and over, Anderson shoots it such that it brings to mind the vulnerability and curiosity of Barry at his harmonium. Largely, though, Anderson dips back into the eternal well of Jonathan Demme’s technique, borrowing zooms and transitions from Stop Making Sense. Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall doesn’t take any great leaps, but it synthesizes PTA’s fixations — some of them long dormant — in a satisfying way.

Yet the victory really is Winter’s to be had. On stage with Geese, Cameron Winter cuts a figure somewhere between Ziggy Stardust and Labubu-toting Zillenial. Solo, he’s an impish, precocious boy (in one shot, he can be seen with his back curled over the piano like Charlie Brown) who has somehow managed to touch transcendence. The classical patina provided by the Isaac Stern Auditorium and the Steinway (Keith Jarrett’s favorite) he’s perched at helps, no doubt, and tagging Paul Thomas Anderson in to film the affair got this writer to sit up straight and pay attention. Winter’s show could’ve been shot on an iPhone, though, and still feel as textured and dynamic. “God is real,” he bellows, and a halo of light illuminates the hall and all of his audience. For a moment, we believe in the possibility of his proclamation. But that moment is delivered to us courtesy of Winter and his stage manager, not Paul Thomas Anderson.

That said, the film invites a similar introspection, at times of its own place in the moviegoing landscape. Darkness on stage in between songs, auditorium lights that seem to stretch on forever, close-ups that go in and out of focus — it embraces human fallibility and creates a mahogany container into which we can project our hopes and hang-ups. During “Love Takes Miles” (not, surprisingly, a highlight), the camera, handheld, walks down the aisle. Smartphones pop up, and they look out of place; it’s a sly dig at their magnetic disassociating quality. PTA then cuts to a shot of anonymous silhouettes enjoying the show from the balcony. The juxtaposition reminds us that there’s still a place for communal art in our world — and moreover, that cinema is one of those arts. It doesn’t need to litigate its own value—exceptional performances like Winter’s, filmed with care, are evidence enough. — ETHAN J. ROSENBERG

Tomorrow a Long Time Ago

German director Luise Donschen follows her own path, to put it mildly. Her 2018 debut feature, Casanova Gene, was a daring conceptual project that, in some respects, barely held together as a film. Using the mating patterns of finches as its governing conceit, the film took us to a wide array of locations, including a rather Fassbinderian singles’ bar, a BDSM parlor, and backstage at a theater for an unexpected cameo by John Malkovich. If there was a primary takeaway from Casanova Gene, it was that sexuality (human and otherwise) is dazzling and confusing in its infinite variety.

By comparison, Donschen’s latest film is much more unified, but that doesn’t make it any more straightforward. What it does clarify is that Donschen organizes her films according to thematic ideas that function like the tonal key of a musical composition, anchoring the material without nailing down a particular narrative meaning. Or put another way, we could say about Donschen what Jonathan Rosenbaum once said about Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Snow, and Jerry Lewis: that they are more interested in fields than in plots.

The title of Donschen’s new film, Tomorrow a Long Time Ago, seems paradoxical, until you realize that it isn’t. It refers to a concept of the future from a previous moment, a vision that was promulgated but most likely never came to pass. In this case, the director is referring to the 1990 reunification of Germany, a situation that followed from great excitement and fanfare — the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the arrival of democracy in the East, the end of the Stasi and its paranoid police state. In practical terms, however, it involved sudden inflation, the devaluation of the East German mark, and thousands out of work as entire industrial sectors were thrown into the deep end of privatization.

Tomorrow follows the post-reunification journey of Patty (Gerti Drassl), a quality inspector at a 35mm film plant who loses her job when the factory is decommissioned. However, Donschen neither tells this story allegorically nor metonymically. Patty is not somehow representative of the East German plight. She and the film that contains her are entirely too idiosyncratic for that. In fact, initially it seems that Tomorrow has an entirely different protagonist. The opening scenes focus not on Patty but on Jelena (Manuela Biedermann), a middle-aged woman we first see drawing plants in the forest.

She wends her way to the Peasants’ War Panorama, the hilltop museum in Bad Frankenhausen that contains the massive 360-degree painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany (1976-87) by East German artist Werner Tübke. Based on the discussion she has with a museum employee, it seems she has been tasked with replicating the homemade primer that was created for Tübke’s canvas. Later, after leaving the museum and heading back down the hill, we see her lying on the ground, her unmoving body being drawn by a young girl (Nele Christoph) who is actually the young Jelena. We see Patty bidding her goodbye at the train station, Jelena now having been replaced by her younger self.

This is the first of several indications that time is out of joint in Tomorrow a Long Time Ago. The film takes a literal fact — that for East Germans, the end of GDR represented the collapse of an entire way of life — and expands it into the metaphysical realm, as a rupture in time and space. We see Patty go to the bank and convert her money to the new Deutschmarks, and half the value is gone. And then we see the employee toss the old coinage in a massive bin for disposal.

This is factual, material, economic. But other changes in Patty seem to follow from this logic of monetary devaluation. The philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux, in his book Symbolic Economies, suggests that money is the universal equivalent, and when its connection to value is disrupted, it causes ripples within other economies: political, sexual, psychological, etc. So at first it might seem odd that middle-aged Patty takes a much younger lover, Franz (Clemens Bobke), or that she begins hoarding random discarded objects. But in fact, her “value” or Franz’s within patriarchy are now up for grabs, and all those objects have suddenly been recast as “commodities.” Who or what has value? Who’s to say?

In the final third of Tomorrow, Patty seems committed to reestablishing meaning, getting back to something tangible. She abandons Franz and her overstuffed apartment and goes to live in the woods. She cooks over an open fire. She treats her wounds with roots. She starts planting crops. And as we observe this behavior, the style of the film becomes more linear, more procedural. It’s as if Donschen is collaborating with Patty to lay some new groundwork for shared meaning. And while it appears that she ultimately fails in her quest, she and Donschen make room for Grace (Pola Friedrichs), a young girl who takes over as the film’s main subject. Does she represent the future of a new Germany? Or was she simply a child who happened to find herself in a particular place and time? Perhaps the real question is, can History tell the difference? — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Fevers

Even among the film festival cognoscenti, experimental films sometimes inspire their fair share of confusion. This is to be expected, since the films in question are operating within parameters different from the ones to which we are accustomed. However, even within the rare air of avant-garde showcases like TIFF Wavelengths or NYFF Currents, a film stands out as a particular kind of UFO. Several years ago, when the Ann Arbor Film Festival was under the directorship of David Dinnell, on the final day they would hold a screening called “What the Hell Was That?” It featured works from earlier in the festival that had left many festivalgoers at a loss, and it provided a chance for a second viewing and collective discussion, an attempt to wrestle with films that were less than forthcoming in revealing their mysteries.

James Richards’ film Fevers is precisely the kind of film object that requires a second (or third) viewing, the sort of work that leads even intrepid filmgoers to wonder, indeed, what the hell they just watched. Up to now, this writer had only known Richards from two very impressive films he made in collaboration with Steve Reinke, What weakens the flesh is the flesh itself (2017) and When We Were Monsters (2020). Although Fevers is radically different from Reinke’s work, the two men clearly share a certain sensibility. Like many of Reinke’s video works, Fever is constructed less as a coherent set of statements than a space for jostling ideas, where the meaning of one thing butting up against another is not immediately evident. Relationships are entirely intuitive, and one gets the sense that the finished work is primarily a record of the artist’s free association process.

Whereas Reinke’s calling card is his verbal narration, most of Richards’ film is silent. But the first 10 or so minutes contain a strange, poetically dense text that appears along the bottom of the frame as subtitles. This portion of Fevers is dominated by a rapid black-and-white flicker, one that is digital in texture, setting it apart from the classic flicker films of Conrad, Kubelka, and Sharits. However, this itself is a bit deceptive. Richards has in fact appropriated Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966) for this opening sequence. The optical quality of a digital flicker is palpably different from the celluloid version, which rapidly alternates between total darkness and pure projector light. No digital translation can darken or illuminate the screen that quickly, so the flicker in Fevers lags, introducing the problem of time and its impact on the body.

This delayed action is relevant to Richards’ primary themes. Against this throbbing raster, Richards offers a story of a cave in which prehistoric impressions of painted hands can be found, marks of a long-lost humanity situated against the pounding sea. The viewer is addressed as “you, who are named, you who have an identity,” and this suggests that the speaker is someone who lacks those distinguishing features. The narrator continues to insist that they are screaming “I love you,” that they love whoever might possibly hear the message. But this “message,” it turns out, is also appropriated from another artist’s work. The subtitles are from the English translation of Marguerite Duras’s Les mains negatives (1979), a short film in which this text is spoken (in French) against roving images of the streets of Paris. And so, Duras’ text is about the distance between the past and the present, and Richards’ use of the text is itself a gesture to a different, anterior moment.

Much like Richards takes Conrad’s analog flicker and titrates it through the digital, the next segment of Fevers is partly a recapitulation of Duras’ winding cityscape. The second movement of Fevers impersonates a roving camera within the space of a cave, although it is evident that what we are actually watching is digital animation. Richards’ “camera” finds marks and holes chiseled into the cave walls, all of them suggesting human faces of varying degrees of definition. Given the first section, with its absence of visuals and description of painted hands, one might be forgiven for thinking Fevers is charting some sort of evolution. But time is elastic in this film, presuming it is present at all. The pulses of pure light might be biblical, and the cave images might be artifacts from our ancestors. But this alleged prehistory is clearly fabricated with contemporary digital tools.

After this passage, Richards shows us time-lapse footage of animals eating a dead carcass, and a rapid succession of close-ups of human eyes with a wide array of apparent disorders. From here, Fevers veers into found footage that has been polarized or otherwise manipulated: images from art history, medical footage, more wild animals, a brief camera arc around a room, animations that approximate cell division, and a looping shot of a candle shaped like a large gummy bear, melting away and then reforming. Much of this section is accompanied by a rhythmic, repetitive tuba sound, one note slightly flanged.

From here, Richards introduces high-contrast images of birds and other animals, either taken directly from the motion studies of Muybridge and Marey or designed to resemble them. There is a Pierrot figure crouching on a stage, and finally, more distorted, high-contrast footage, this time of people running and dancing around a fire. It is deliberately unclear whether this is some religious rite or a fascist bonfire, whether spirits are being summoned or verboten objects destroyed. What is clear is that the participants are flailing in a state of ecstasy.

But here’s the important thing about Fevers. As haphazard as its images may seem at times, the soundtrack is dense and precise, a true feat of musique concrète. During the opening flicker, we hear rushing water that evolves into the Doppler-effect sound of cars zooming down the street. We hear airplanes and helicopters, shouts of crowds, all sounding on a bed of grinding metal noise. The flicker takes on a mechanical inevitability, as we are ourselves being subjected to the processes of some infernal machine. During the cave drawing segment, single tones build into symphonic chords, pure sound attaining the complexity of composed music.

It seems infinitely easier to explain how Fevers makes a viewer feel than to articulate what it means. Certainly it is a film about the paradoxes of progress, the impossibility of knowing just how much ground humanity has managed to cover in its attempted development. Richards’ use of Conrad and Duras, two defining artists of Modernism, speaks to this conundrum, since his particular use of their work seems to place them in a distant, almost prehistoric past. The primordial opening moments of the flicker were complicated by the cacophony, the simple emptiness of the image track paired with an audio track thick with technological signifiers. Fevers began to seem like an epochal palindrome, wherein we were asked to consider the era prior to civilization alongside our present era, confounded to such an extent that it was no longer possible to discern past and present.

But maybe this reading speaks more to this writer’s frame of mind than any firm evidence from the text. How does one define civilization? One possible definition: the attempt to establish structures wherein the greatest portion and greatest diversity of human beings might attain their potential. There have been many different ideas about how to achieve this, many of them spectacularly wrongheaded, some of them deadly. However, we are now facing a moment when the basic project of civilization is itself being actively undermined by some of the most powerful people on the planet. There exists a cadre of techno-fascists who are actively invested in the destruction of human history. They represent a literal, self-professed counter-Enlightenment, a group of people who are for teen pregnancy, for white supremacy, for the deskilling of the population, against global literacy, against democracy, and, for the most part, against self-determination for anyone besides themselves. Like the burning of the Library of Alexandria writ large, we have now achieved a pinnacle of technological advancement, and it is being marshaled to drive 99.999% of us back to the Stone Age.

Is this what Fevers is about? It’s difficult to be sure. However, one thing is certain. Richards depicts progress as indistinguishable from a horror show, a cavernous echo in which a hypothetical Last (or First) Person calls out in the darkness, to anyone capable of listening, anyone who might still have a name. — MICHAEL SICINSKI