This article appeared in the October 16, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Compensation (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1999)

The past is full of surprises. It was news to me—bracingly delivered by Northern Lights (1978)—that more than a century ago, North Dakota birthed a socialist-inspired farm-labor movement that sought to blunt the cruelty of unfettered capitalism with state-controlled banks and industries. John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s independent film revisits the 1915 rise of the Nonpartisan League in order to remind North Dakotans—and people everywhere—of their “rebel roots.” A new restoration premiered in the Revivals section of the 62nd New York Film Festival, in a lineup strong on titles that resurrect forgotten or intentionally buried histories, and that honor the everyday rituals of work. Labor and dreams, monotony and escape, repression and resistance weave through these diverse films, many made in defiance of financial or political obstacles.

Northern Lights is as sharp and invigorating as the smell of snow. Cinematographer Judy Irola, shooting on black-and-white 16mm, gives vivid texture to both landscapes and faces. Frost outlines the furrows of bare fields, the wind keens through dry grasses, and leafless birch trees and weathered barns shine cleanly in the winter light. Against this bleak beauty, human warmth flickers, flares, and sometimes gutters out. Enduring the misery spawned by callous financial interests, Nonpartisan League organizer Ray Sorenson (Robert Behling) must also fight the stubborn skepticism of farmers toward politics and the government. There are moments of tenderness, of solidarity and even jubilation, but there is also a bone-deep chill of loneliness among these taciturn Scandinavian immigrants. As Ray’s dedication to canvassing for the League separates him from his childhood sweetheart and fiancée Inga (Susan Lynch), he laments, “You struggle for a good life, but you never get to live it.”

Another film that brings the past to life with economical grace is Compensation (1999), the feature debut of Zeinabu irene Davis. While Hanson and Nilsson use freeze-frames and voice-over diary entries to suggest a historical record, Davis employs archival photographs of early-20th-century Chicago, as well as silent movie–style intertitles, to evoke the historical currents around her characters. Inspired by a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem, the film moves back and forth between 1911 and the turn of the millennium to tell two stories of relationships between Deaf women and hearing men, played by the same actors and set in the same locations. The film starts as a charmingly handcrafted miniature, then unfolds in a vaulting emotional and stylistic arc, building a detailed, expansive portrait of Black and Deaf cultures and communities in America across time. The sound of a pen scratching on paper, and the wait to read words as they’re slowly written on a slate or spelled out with fingers, call attention to the fragile physicality of language, and the power and limits of communication.

It is those limits that are harrowingly depicted in Camp de Thiaroye (1988), a pan-African production directed by Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow, which indicts the French military’s abuse of African colonial troops who served in World War II. With naturalistic detail and furious clarity, the film catalogs the racism ingrained in every aspect of colonialism. The highly educated Sergeant Diatta (Ibrahim Sane), a central figure in the collective cast, speaks excellent French and English, loves classical music, and has a white wife in Paris, yet his skin color subjects him to constant humiliations in his own country. In a pointed cultural reference, he lends a French officer a copy of Le Silence de la mer, a 1942 underground novel that recounts the disillusionment of a cultured, idealistic German officer who loves the nation he is occupying. Evil systems can’t be redeemed by art or by a few liberal voices, like that of the sympathetic Captain Raymond (Jean-Daniel Simon). Despite the boldness of the African infantrymen in demanding their rights, there is a horrible sense of inevitability in the conflict that culminates in a shocking atrocity. It is hardly surprising that the film, like the facts of the Thiaroye massacre, was long suppressed in France and other parts of the world.

Also predictably, Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (1977), the earliest surviving Iranian feature directed by a woman, has never screened openly in its country of origin: the rebellion of its female protagonist is no less potent for being mostly wordless and inchoate. Eighteen-year-old Roo-Bekheir (Flora Shabaviz) lives in a southwest Iranian village of mud-walled huts and dirt-packed courtyards, where women cook on the ground amid roaming chickens. In static long shots inspired by the formal remove of Persian miniatures, we watch Roo-Bekheir go about her repetitive daily chores, carrying trays of dishes balanced on her head, sifting grain and harvesting plants. We hear about her rejecting one suitor after another. The village chief notes that women can no longer be forced into marriage, but the modern world of cars, new buildings, and Western clothes that encroaches on the community seems to offer little real change. Instead, Roo-Bekheir finds some release alone on a riverbank, where she removes her headscarf and undresses during a rainstorm. She faces away from the camera, silent and motionless, leaving us to imagine the sensuality and liberation she is experiencing. When she later erupts in a sudden, violent breakdown, the village concludes that she is possessed and arranges a ritual exorcism.

In Filipino auteur and activist Lino Brocka’s Bona (1980), as in The Sealed Soil, we spend a lot of time watching the title character perform menial tasks: carrying heavy jugs of water, cleaning, cooking. She has eagerly submitted to this servitude, devoting herself abjectly to a vain small-time actor who treats her as a combination of maid and mother, while carrying on affairs with other women right in front of her. No one understands why Bona, a quiet young woman from a middle-class family, puts up with this humiliating treatment. The film lays bare a society of patriarchal violence and masculine entitlement, but it is also a merciless portrait of romantic delusion. Bona (Nora Aunor) and Gardo (Phillip Salvador), the object of her obsession, are equally in thrall to a glamorous fantasy. His shabby apartment in a muddy slum is papered with sexy photos of himself and pinups of women, and Bona’s chores include polishing his white cowboy boots and carrying his wardrobe to the sets where he plays bit parts in cheesy genre movies.

There is a scene in Robert Bresson’s gorgeous Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) where two characters attend the premiere of an action flick full of noisy gun battles and hammy death scenes, a hilarious intrusion into the director’s legendarily refined and austere world. In this adaptation of Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights,” the poker-faced style of Bresson’s “models” (nonprofessional performers whom he directed to avoid expressive interpretation) adds both gravity and dry humor to a portrait of romantic obsession and solipsism. Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts), a young painter, becomes infatuated with Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten), who is suicidal over the absence of the man she loves but barely knows. Long difficult to see, the restored film may be Bresson’s most sensually pleasurable work. When Jacques dips his brush in pure, saturated reds and yellows and touches it to the canvas, we hear its whispery strokes. He and Marthe wander through a hushed, nocturnal Paris where they are serenaded by roaming folk singers and spellbound by the colored lights of boats gliding on the dark Seine.

Another nocturne, Robina Rose’s Nightshift (1981), takes place over a single night at a small hotel in London. It is structured by the mundane routines of a reception clerk (played by punk icon Jordan), who’s even more stone-faced than a Bresson model: we watch her filling out forms, counting change, wrapping croissants in cellophane, vacuuming, polishing mirrors and windows. As the night drifts into the wee hours, the interruptions to these tasks grow increasingly phantasmagoric, with the deadpan comedy of eccentric guests giving way to a string of surreal visions. The film captures both a spectral state between sleep and waking and the liminal unreality of hotels, where everyone is in transit. For the desk clerk and the filmmaker—not to mention the audience—bearing witness to loneliness and desperation, ethereal fantasies and writhing nightmares, is all in a night’s work.

Imogen Sara Smith is the author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. She has written for The Criterion Collection and elsewhere, and wrote the Phantom Light column for Film Comment.