Editor’s Picks: Martin Scorsese’s Osage Nation Epic

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s book about the murder of dozens of prominent members of the Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma is not his first epic to tackle settler colonial violence. In 2016, he released Silence, based on a 1966 novel by Shūsaku Endō about Portuguese Christians attempting to spread Catholicism in Japan during the early part of the Edo period (1603–1868).

 

That film bombed at the box office, and it seems to have been all but forgotten in recent years, but it is a masterful study of fanaticism, European colonial arrogance and the transformative power of violence. Winning critical acclaim after it premiered at Cannes this year, Killers of the Flower Moon will very likely be the success Silence wasn’t. I hope the attention it brings to this side of Scorsese’s filmography leads many to the 2016 forebear.

Victor Heringer, The Love of Singular Men (2023)

This Brazilian novel was first published in Portuguese in 2016 and appeared in the US and UK last summer. It is the second and final novel by Heringer, an extraordinarily talented poet who died by suicide in 2018, aged 29. The Love of Singular Men opens with a weather report – ‘The temperature of this novel is always over 31C’ – and a story of the creation of the world.

The first thing to form out of formlessness? The suburbs of Rio. Zadie Smith called it ‘genuinely new’ and compared Heringer to Donald Barthleme, Julio Cortázar, Vladimir Nabokov and Grace Paley. When was the last time you heard all those names brought together to describe one writer? 

Phew, Phew (1981) 

Our Likeness (1992/2023)

The Japanese singer and composer Hiromi Moritani, who performs under the moniker Phew, just wrapped up a two-day residency at Café Oto in Dalston, London. To prepare, I spent a few weeks revisiting her back catalogue, which included the 2023 reissue of Our Likeness, available in digital formats for the first time.

Among my favourites is her eponymous 1981 debut. Fresh from her post punk band, Aunt Sally, Hiromi recorded Phew in Cologne with the krautrockers of Can, dipping their musique concrète in cold steel. It is tinny, driving music, electrically experimental – like something you could imagine playing from a ‘World Receiver’ by Isa Genzken. 

_{Main image: Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon, 2023, film still. Courtesy: Apple TV}