8 Arthouse Filmmakers You Didn’t Notice Released Films In 2016

Catalan independent filmmaker Albert Serra is probably cinema at its most minimalist and radical. His naturalist approach to famous characters, both fictional and nonfictional, sometimes adjoined in the same film, subordinates every possible high-keyed plot point, character reaction or incident to basically nothing, centring on the idleness of life with understated fixed-camera shots, laid-back performances and unaffected ambient sounds. One could remove the word “motion” from his pictures, inasmuch as they feel more like pictorial sights than, well, the illusion of moving images.

He did his own thing with Don Quixote, the Magi, and even Casanova meets Dracula in Universal ensemble monster film fashion, but is his latest entry the one that denotes the absolute depuration of his style. As the title implies, it’s about the last days of Louis the Great. Period. Two hours of footage figure as the spelling of a king’s agony in his bedroom because of gangrene, the paradox of power facing impotence and a sumptuous life facing ordinary death.

It’s incredibly lethargic, just as Serra’s previous works, but for people with iron patience and cottony receptiveness, it can be one of the most powerful filmic experiences so far this century. The sole fact of watching Jean-Pierre Léaud, the boy who once starred in Truffaut’s masterpiece The 400 Blows, now turned into a dying old man, will prove visceral enough for cinephiles.