Get Closer: The Intimate Gaze of Films at NYFF62

A second intimacy arises between our lives and those unfolding on screen... and in setting their sights on exploring ordinary lives at close range, filmmakers at this year's New York Film Festival deepened that intimacy to great effect

- Soleil Nathwani

Multiple paradoxes in cinema rest on the idea of the intimate. The stubborn notion that cinema is not quite art once bolstered itself on film’s peopled nature implying no intimate creative force, no single ‘artist’ speaking to the spectator. Some naysayers pointed to the sheer industry required to make a film as compared to painting, literature, sculpture or dance in which the individual’s intimacy with their medium transforms it; and yet others conversely pointed to cinema’s broad appeal, invoking an entrenched art world snobbery. In spite of these notions, film established itself (thanks in no small part to theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim, who nonetheless found sound and color dilutive) as a visual medium that represents and evokes human experience and emotion, sealing its place in the pantheon of the arts.

After making my way through a robust lineup at the 62nd New York Film Festival (NYFF), a selection that pointed to this remarkable ability of the movies to bring us in to an experience, I’ve been thinking about the camera’s intimate gaze, which intensifies evocative power, as emblematic of film’s expanding claim on art. The cinema-going experience asks us to be proximate even before a film begins, as we sit a hair’s breadth from each other. A second intimacy arises between our lives and those unfolding on screen. In forgoing scale dramas à la 2023’s Killers of The Flower Moon and Poor Things, or roving biopics in the vein of Oppenheimer and Maestro, and in setting their sights on exploring ordinary lives at close range, filmmakers at this year’s NYFF deepened that intimacy to great effect.

Take Mike Leigh’s