"Since when does my father have a grave?"

As an act of recovered memory, this is an astonishing achievement that exists in a continuum with some of the other great modernist works of formalized trauma: Straub-Huiillet's stark use of nature as silent testament of those who have died on it; Heiny Srour's pointed illustrations of how women were slowly erased from the visible struggle of Arabs by their own men; the lucid dreaming PTSD of Pedro Costa's Fontainhas films; even,…

As much a distillation of the entire silent era as Sunrise, and maybe even more so, cramming into 75 perfectly elemental minutes German expressionism, French impressionism, even aspects of the earliest forms of documentary realism (the level of detail of coal dust coating the shimmering bodies of ship engine men is astonishing). The intertitles attain the high poetry of low pulp well before the golden age of noir, and each gesture or quick, abashed look between longing lowlifes says more…