Christian Petzold’s Afire on the IFC Center marquee Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
In the second instalment with director/screenwriter Christian Petzold on Afire starring Paula Beer, Thomas Schubert (winking at the audience like Ryan Gosling’s Ken in Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster Barbie), Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, and Matthias Brandt we touch upon Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in reference to Paula Beer in the wheelchair; pronouncing Walter Benjamin and Uwe Johnson; Margarethe von Trotta’s film series Jahrestage; Devid Striesow in Yella; new Baltic Sea tourism in the old east, and the goulash in and out of the bag.
Christian Petzold on Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr: “Oh, this is a fantastic movie! It all comes back now!” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Friends Felix (Langston Uibel) and Leon (Thomas Schubert) are on their...
In the second instalment with director/screenwriter Christian Petzold on Afire starring Paula Beer, Thomas Schubert (winking at the audience like Ryan Gosling’s Ken in Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster Barbie), Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, and Matthias Brandt we touch upon Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in reference to Paula Beer in the wheelchair; pronouncing Walter Benjamin and Uwe Johnson; Margarethe von Trotta’s film series Jahrestage; Devid Striesow in Yella; new Baltic Sea tourism in the old east, and the goulash in and out of the bag.
Christian Petzold on Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr: “Oh, this is a fantastic movie! It all comes back now!” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Friends Felix (Langston Uibel) and Leon (Thomas Schubert) are on their...
- 7/26/2023
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Nuri Bilge Ceylan likes to take his time. The Turkish director is one of the greatest living practitioners of slow cinema. The filmmaking ethos — pioneered by Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky and taken up by the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Albert Serra, Béla Tarr, Kelly Reichardt and Lav Diaz — eschews the rapid editing and relentless nonstop forward-driving plots of the Hollywood blockbuster (looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) for a more contemplative, metaphysical approach.
The characters in a Ceylan movie don’t do much. There’s little action or traditional suspense, and the storylines are fairly basic. In 2002’s Distant, a rural factory worker visits his cousin in Istanbul. Homicide police unearth the body of a murder victim and take a long drive back to the city for the autopsy in 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. An old actor, his wife and his sister sit...
The characters in a Ceylan movie don’t do much. There’s little action or traditional suspense, and the storylines are fairly basic. In 2002’s Distant, a rural factory worker visits his cousin in Istanbul. Homicide police unearth the body of a murder victim and take a long drive back to the city for the autopsy in 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. An old actor, his wife and his sister sit...
- 5/27/2023
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
“It provided this window into the inner life of the characters,” shares “Transatlantic” co-creator, writer, and executive producer Anna Winger on what appealed to her about Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Portfolio,” which served as the basis for her Netflix limited series. She is a novelist herself, so she appreciated how the book “really got into the minds of the characters” to tell the “crazy story that brings together Americans with Germans and French” in the “melting pot of Marseille.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“Transatlantic” is set in 1940 Marseille, France, and follows the efforts of real life figures including Varian Fry and Mary Jayne Gold and the Emergency Rescue Committee as they attempt to evacuate a list of individuals from Europe as the Nazis begin to seize control. Since many of the events depicted in the series took place, Winger wanted most of all to accurately capture...
“Transatlantic” is set in 1940 Marseille, France, and follows the efforts of real life figures including Varian Fry and Mary Jayne Gold and the Emergency Rescue Committee as they attempt to evacuate a list of individuals from Europe as the Nazis begin to seize control. Since many of the events depicted in the series took place, Winger wanted most of all to accurately capture...
- 5/3/2023
- by David Buchanan
- Gold Derby
“Transatlantic” focuses on a rescue mission orchestrated by the Emergency Rescue Committee in France and depicts one of the most significant events in World War II history. Under Varian Fry’s direction, a rescue operation was launched with the goal of helping a large number of refugees reach the United States. But, because the French government refused to provide them with exit permits, the plan encountered several obstacles. “Transatlantic” portrays certain fictional accounts of real-life characters while also depicting some fictional characters in order to add a bit more drama to this historical story of resistance. While real-life figures like Lisa Fittko, Hans Fittko, and Albert Hirschman have been shown serving for the Emergency Rescue Committee, the series fabricated a character named Paul Kandjo, who opposed Nazi oppression on behalf of all black immigrants. However, owing to the brilliance of the narrative, Paul Kandjo fit in with the other characters...
- 4/10/2023
- by Poulami Nanda
- Film Fugitives
Each year, members of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab take a look at the interactive works at Sundance’s New Frontiers section. This dispatch explores the storytelling potential of artificial reality.
The projects in this year’s New Frontier section at the Sundance Film Festival ranged from the latest cutting-edge virtual reality to decidedly low-tech dance and theater performances. The most thought-provoking of these pieces incorporated media forms across the technological spectrum to explore the leading scientific development and debate of the day: the ascendance of artificial intelligence (A.I.).
As economists and social scientists debate the ramifications of A.I. on their respective disciplines, artists, unsurprisingly, are feeling compelled to do the same. Accordingly, the pieces at Sundance chose not to question issues like the future of work but rather cut to the philosophical core of the matter: in the era of AI, what does it mean to be human?...
The projects in this year’s New Frontier section at the Sundance Film Festival ranged from the latest cutting-edge virtual reality to decidedly low-tech dance and theater performances. The most thought-provoking of these pieces incorporated media forms across the technological spectrum to explore the leading scientific development and debate of the day: the ascendance of artificial intelligence (A.I.).
As economists and social scientists debate the ramifications of A.I. on their respective disciplines, artists, unsurprisingly, are feeling compelled to do the same. Accordingly, the pieces at Sundance chose not to question issues like the future of work but rather cut to the philosophical core of the matter: in the era of AI, what does it mean to be human?...
- 2/5/2018
- by Sara Rafsky
- Indiewire
This is the diary Angela Schanelec wrote when she visited Marseilles in March 2002 in preparation to making her film Marseille, released in 2004. Originally translated and published as a complement to the fifth issue of Fireflies, which celebrates the cinema of Angela Schanelec and Agnès Varda. Angela Schanelec's Marseilles. Courtesy of Schramm Film.Marseilles, 1-10 March 2002 My mood was free of all desire.—Walter Benjamin, Hashish in MarseillesFriday. Marseilles, Provence. At the airport you can choose your destination: Aix, Marseilles, the sea or the mountains. You can see the mountains, light and craggy, beyond the airfield. The highway passes through urban canyons in the middle of the city. The houses are the same colour as the mountains. Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse. In Marseilles there are innumerable buildings like this one, unit agglomerations designed with varying degrees of passion, each unit a cell housing life. The hotel is on the third floor,...
- 11/27/2017
- MUBI
Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey … as the list of harassment allegations in Hollywood grows, can we any longer separate cinema from the morality of its makers?
The 1949 film The Third Man casts Orson Welles in the role of smirking Harry Lime, a black-market racketeer who sees himself as an artist. War-torn Vienna is his canvas; its desperate people his oils. He needs a climate of fear and darkness in order to paint his masterpiece. “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” Lime explains. “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
The Third Man was scripted by Graham Greene, but its most famous speech was improvised on the spot. Welles would later say he’d pilfered it from “an old Hungarian...
The 1949 film The Third Man casts Orson Welles in the role of smirking Harry Lime, a black-market racketeer who sees himself as an artist. War-torn Vienna is his canvas; its desperate people his oils. He needs a climate of fear and darkness in order to paint his masterpiece. “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” Lime explains. “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
The Third Man was scripted by Graham Greene, but its most famous speech was improvised on the spot. Welles would later say he’d pilfered it from “an old Hungarian...
- 11/10/2017
- by Xan Brooks
- The Guardian - Film News
Mubi is partnering with the New York Film Festival to present highlights from Projections, a festival program of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Five short films from this year's selection will be paying on Mubi from October 16 - November 29, 2017 in most countries around the world.Wherever You Go, There We AreProjections, the festival-within-the New York Film Festival dedicated to experimental cinema, expands the moving image as a critical space. Curated by the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Dennis Lim and independent curator Aily Nash, Projections has become a survey of visions that explore the endless possible relationships between images and the subject. Since its reconception from “Views of the Avant-garde” to “Projections” in 2014, the festival has taken a decisive curatorial turn: from visual perception to projected visions. Its move from “viewing” to “projecting” was one step forward...
- 10/30/2017
- MUBI
It’s been an interesting run-up to the Toronto International Film Festival, and in terms of the survival of the species, the good ol’ U.S.A. has been something of a race to the bottom. What would do us in first: violent neo-Nazis whose activities are almost explicitly condoned by the Klansman In Chief? Or a 1,000-year weather event on the Gulf Coast whose magnitude surely owes something to global climate change, and whose aftermath of collapsing dams and exploding chemical factories has everything to do with systematic neglect?Given the state of things down here, who wouldn’t want to repair to Canada for some challenging cinema? As always, the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) is the place to be in September, and Wavelengths once again features the best of the fest. This is because the films selected for Wavelengths are the opposite of escapism. Whether they tackle...
- 9/7/2017
- MUBI
The Open City Documentary Festival, taking place across London between the 5th and 10th of September 2017, will present three films by Belgian filmmaker Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd: Lost Land (2011), For the Lost (2014) and The Eternals (2017). The films, shot mostly on 16mm and Super 8, are poetic essays exploring the lives of those affected by exile, conflict, loss, and the ecology of harsh environments, hauntingly soundtracked by British Avant-Garde musician Richard Skelton. Ahead of the festival I interviewed Vandeweerd concerning the aesthetic and thematic connections between his films, his anthropological approach and the role of language in his cinema.Notebook: You’ve studied anthropology, amongst other subjects, and you’ve worked as a teaching assistant in a Philosophy and Literature department. What led you to utilize filmmaking as an extension of your research? Pierre-yves Vandeweerd: The first area I worked in as an anthropologist, at the beginning of the 90s, was Niger in West Africa.
- 9/4/2017
- MUBI
Barbet Schroeder speaks about the influence of Walter Benjamin and Raoul Hausmann on Amnesia and Ibiza Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Barbet Schroeder in our conversation remembers his famous grandfather Hans Prinzhorn, Walter Benjamin in San Antonio, Raoul Hausmann and the fascinating water system of Ibiza architecture, employing a time frame in Amnesia (for Marthe Keller, Max Riemelt, Bruno Ganz, Corinna Kirchhoff, Fermí Reixach, Marie Leuenberger, Joel Basman) going ten years back to 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, More and the music of Pink Floyd.
Jo (Max Riemelt): "Basically, it's cubes and every cube can collect the water."
Anne-Katrin Titze: Let's talk about the spirit of place. The house on Ibiza for me resembled the mood of Georgia O'Keeffe's house in New Mexico. Despite the fact that the landscape is very different. Can you tell me a bit about the house in Amnesia?
Barbet Schroeder: The architecture of...
Barbet Schroeder in our conversation remembers his famous grandfather Hans Prinzhorn, Walter Benjamin in San Antonio, Raoul Hausmann and the fascinating water system of Ibiza architecture, employing a time frame in Amnesia (for Marthe Keller, Max Riemelt, Bruno Ganz, Corinna Kirchhoff, Fermí Reixach, Marie Leuenberger, Joel Basman) going ten years back to 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, More and the music of Pink Floyd.
Jo (Max Riemelt): "Basically, it's cubes and every cube can collect the water."
Anne-Katrin Titze: Let's talk about the spirit of place. The house on Ibiza for me resembled the mood of Georgia O'Keeffe's house in New Mexico. Despite the fact that the landscape is very different. Can you tell me a bit about the house in Amnesia?
Barbet Schroeder: The architecture of...
- 7/22/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Marthe Keller stars in Barbet Schroeder's Amnesia
Barbet Schroeder's Amnesia, starring Marthe Keller and Max Riemelt with Bruno Ganz, Corinna Kirchhoff, Fermí Reixach, Marie Leuenberger, and Joel Basman is a supremely personal chamber piece by the filmmaker who brought us Hollywood films such as Reversal Of Fortune (which won Jeremy Irons an Oscar), Barfly (Faye Dunaway, Mickey Rourke) or Single White Female (Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh), who worked with Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard and directed an episode of Mad Men.
Barbet Schroeder with Anne-Katrin Titze on Nelly Quettier: "She's a great editor." Photo: Steven Beeman
In New York before the opening, Barbet spoke with me about his editing on a "huge white wall" with Nelly Quettier (Terror's Advocate, Claire Denis' Beau Travail, Ursula Meier's Home, Léos Carax's Holy Motors), a Nanni Moretti-like Mia Madre idea, Walter Benjamin and Raoul Hausmann, the mood of Georgia O'Keeffe's house,...
Barbet Schroeder's Amnesia, starring Marthe Keller and Max Riemelt with Bruno Ganz, Corinna Kirchhoff, Fermí Reixach, Marie Leuenberger, and Joel Basman is a supremely personal chamber piece by the filmmaker who brought us Hollywood films such as Reversal Of Fortune (which won Jeremy Irons an Oscar), Barfly (Faye Dunaway, Mickey Rourke) or Single White Female (Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh), who worked with Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard and directed an episode of Mad Men.
Barbet Schroeder with Anne-Katrin Titze on Nelly Quettier: "She's a great editor." Photo: Steven Beeman
In New York before the opening, Barbet spoke with me about his editing on a "huge white wall" with Nelly Quettier (Terror's Advocate, Claire Denis' Beau Travail, Ursula Meier's Home, Léos Carax's Holy Motors), a Nanni Moretti-like Mia Madre idea, Walter Benjamin and Raoul Hausmann, the mood of Georgia O'Keeffe's house,...
- 7/20/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Opening in L.A. and other cities June 16, “Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe” is a stylishly accomplished and intellectually well thought out character study of a man who was the most popular author in the world in the 1920s and 1930s and who, today, is nearly forgotten. Told through six windows of 20 minutes each, this unique storytelling technique gives the film an immediacy as each part of Stefan Zweig’s life plays out in real time.
Stefan Zweig’s books have been made into 23 movies around the world, including his novel, Letter from an Unknown Woman, which was adapted to the screen in 1948 by Max Ophüls and starred Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdain. His writings have also inspired Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel”.
Having just read his memoir, The World of Yesterday and having been on my own private search for what it means to have to leave your...
Stefan Zweig’s books have been made into 23 movies around the world, including his novel, Letter from an Unknown Woman, which was adapted to the screen in 1948 by Max Ophüls and starred Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdain. His writings have also inspired Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel”.
Having just read his memoir, The World of Yesterday and having been on my own private search for what it means to have to leave your...
- 6/14/2017
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Oscar-winner signs on to Second World War escape drama that Fortitude International will introduce to Cannes buyers.
Colin Firth will star in Benjamin’s Crossing as Walter Benjamin, the Jewish philosopher who escaped from the Nazis by fleeing across the Pyrenees in 1940.
Pat O’Connor, who worked with Firth on the Un Certain Regard entry A Month In The County, will direct and production is expected to start this autumn.
Benjamin’s Crossing is based on Jay Parini and Devon Jersild’s adaptation of Parini’s novel of the same name.
Benjamin fled his home in Paris and met Lisa Fittko who agreed to help the ailing man escape over the mountains to Spain.
Carl Effenson of Artimage Entertainment produces with Sally Jo Effenson of Joule Films, and Lucas Jarach, along with Fortitude’s Robert Ogden Barnum and Nadine de Barros.
Fortitude International, co-founded by de Barros and Barnum, is financing the project and will begin pre-sales...
Colin Firth will star in Benjamin’s Crossing as Walter Benjamin, the Jewish philosopher who escaped from the Nazis by fleeing across the Pyrenees in 1940.
Pat O’Connor, who worked with Firth on the Un Certain Regard entry A Month In The County, will direct and production is expected to start this autumn.
Benjamin’s Crossing is based on Jay Parini and Devon Jersild’s adaptation of Parini’s novel of the same name.
Benjamin fled his home in Paris and met Lisa Fittko who agreed to help the ailing man escape over the mountains to Spain.
Carl Effenson of Artimage Entertainment produces with Sally Jo Effenson of Joule Films, and Lucas Jarach, along with Fortitude’s Robert Ogden Barnum and Nadine de Barros.
Fortitude International, co-founded by de Barros and Barnum, is financing the project and will begin pre-sales...
- 5/15/2017
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
Exclusive: Oscar-winner Colin Firth is set to star in the Pat O'Connor-helmed Benjamin's Crossing, based on the novel by Jay Parini. Firth will play Walter Benjamin, the real life Jewish philosopher who made a daring escape from Nazi-occupied Europe through the Pyrenees Mountains in 1940. Fortitude International is financing and launching sales at Cannes. Production is set to go in the fall of 2017. The political thriller reteams Firth and O'Connor who worked together on…...
- 5/15/2017
- Deadline
I wanted to let all of you know about an interesting last minute event The Goethe Institute will be hosting on Thursday, April 13th at 7.00pm in L.A. at the Goethe-Institut.Man Ray’s Glass Tears
Did you know that the cinema is one of the foremost places of shedding tears in Western cultures, and movies are regularly listed among the strongest triggers of tears?
As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin once claimed, in the cinema people who are no longer moved or touched by anything in everyday life learn to cry again.
Weeping Warm Tears — On Having a Good Cry in the Cinema
In this multimedia presentation and lecture, Julian Hanich will talk about how we, as film spectators, experience our tears in the movie theater: What is it actually like to cry when other viewers are sitting next to us? Hanich focuses on five crucial features that characterize cinematic weeping,...
Did you know that the cinema is one of the foremost places of shedding tears in Western cultures, and movies are regularly listed among the strongest triggers of tears?
As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin once claimed, in the cinema people who are no longer moved or touched by anything in everyday life learn to cry again.
Weeping Warm Tears — On Having a Good Cry in the Cinema
In this multimedia presentation and lecture, Julian Hanich will talk about how we, as film spectators, experience our tears in the movie theater: What is it actually like to cry when other viewers are sitting next to us? Hanich focuses on five crucial features that characterize cinematic weeping,...
- 3/30/2017
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro (1999) is showing March 23 - April 22, 2017 in the United Kingdom in the series Kitano x 3.1With each viewing, Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro becomes increasingly porous. The gaps are clear: though the film is the story of Masao, a young boy searching for his estranged mother, and Kikujiro, the former yakuza forced to accompany him, they and the strangers they encounter exist without much background. The sleepy-eyed Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) speaks only in short murmurs. Meanwhile, Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano) spends most of the film gambling off the two’s spending money at the track cycling racetracks, only to develop a compassion so subtle that he himself does not notice it. Simply put, the film is a blur, or a series of blurs.But these lacks of interconnectedness are why Kikujiro has only gotten better with age,...
- 3/23/2017
- MUBI
Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s intellectually stimulating movie – part essay, documentary and quirky drama – is in a class of its own
Following on from their superb but sadly little-seen dramatic features, Helen and Mister John, Irish co-directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy take their unique approach to cinema to the next level with Further Beyond. An aptly titled work in every sense, this sui generis piece is by turns an essay film in the tradition of Chris Marker (San Soleil) and Patrick Keiller (London), a documentary, and a quirky drama about loss and exile. There’s moving footage of Lawlor’s late mother whose life is sketched here, riffs on ideas about photography and representation found in Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin, and a series of cinematic “notes” or tests towards a biopic about the 18th-century Irish adventurer Ambrose O’Higgins (played by Jose Miguel Jimenez) that Lawlor and...
Following on from their superb but sadly little-seen dramatic features, Helen and Mister John, Irish co-directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy take their unique approach to cinema to the next level with Further Beyond. An aptly titled work in every sense, this sui generis piece is by turns an essay film in the tradition of Chris Marker (San Soleil) and Patrick Keiller (London), a documentary, and a quirky drama about loss and exile. There’s moving footage of Lawlor’s late mother whose life is sketched here, riffs on ideas about photography and representation found in Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin, and a series of cinematic “notes” or tests towards a biopic about the 18th-century Irish adventurer Ambrose O’Higgins (played by Jose Miguel Jimenez) that Lawlor and...
- 10/27/2016
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Guardian - Film News
This was a busy year at Tiff, where I was a juror for Fipresci, helping to award a prize for best premiere in the Discovery section. Not only did this mean that some other films had to take a back burner—sadly, I did not see Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge—but my writing time was a bit compromised as well. Better late than never? That is for you, Gentle Reader, to decide.Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa, Germany)So basic in the telling—a record of several days’ worth of visitors mostly to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienberg, Germany—Austerlitz is a film that in many ways exemplifies the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. What is the net effect for humanity when, faced with the drive to remember the unfathomable, we employ the grossly inadequate tools at our disposal?Austerlitz takes its name from W. G. Sebald’s final novel.
- 9/20/2016
- MUBI
The following text is an excerpt from an essay commissioned by the specialist publishing house Hatori Press (Japan) for a tribute to the great critic, scholar and teacher Shigehiko Hasumi on the occasion of his 80th birthday (29 April 2016). Other contributors to this book (slated to appear in both Japanese and English editions) include Pedro Costa, Chris Fujiwara and Richard I. Suchenski. Beyond Prof. Hasumi’s many achievements in criticism and education (he was President of the University of Tokyo between 1997 and 2001), his ‘method,’ his unique way of seeing and speaking about films, has served as an immense inspiration for a generation of directors in Japan including Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shinji Aoyama. The online magazines Rouge (www.rouge.com.au) and Lola (www.lolajournal.com), co-edited by Martin, provide the best access to Hasumi’s work in English (see references in the notes below).Leos Carax and Shigehiko Hasumi. Photo by Michiko Yoshitake.
- 3/30/2016
- by Adrian Martin
- MUBI
New York: Capital of the 20th Century by Kenneth Goldsmith “Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion.” Goldsmith is a conceptual poet who does uncreative writing — massive blocks of found text placed in massive quotes — and his new book is billed as his version of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, with New York standing in for Paris in a collage of other people’s words. I can’t decide whether kicking it off with the opening lines of Manhattan is either a crowd pleaser, or all too familiar. Like his recent recitation of the autopsy of Michael Brown — though for different reasons — leading with Woody Allen won’t win him any new fans on Twitter.This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell “Dogs start the day with a spoonful of Alpo or some other canned meat on top of a heap...
- 11/12/2015
- by Christian Lorentzen
- Vulture
“Future warfare will present a new face which will permanently replace soldierly qualities by those of sports; all action will lose its military character, and war will assume the countenance of record-setting.” —Walter Benjamin, Theories of German FascismThe one challenge facing cinema and the arts today is that of finding a new vocabulary, a linguistic palette able to chronicle a reality whose manifestations no longer seem to find in the conventional modes of expression an adequate way to be represented. When history moves faster than language can keep up with, it gets increasingly difficult for “figurative” arts to meaningfully relate to how the world that bears them is changing. Science fiction has, after an early period of technological positivism, critically dissected the present by speculatively projecting the future. Travels to outer space were often nothing more than explorations of our inner space; by blowing up the consequences of tomorrow, science...
- 5/28/2015
- by Celluloid Liberation Front
- MUBI
Adieu au langageWhen I stumbled out of the theatre after my first viewing of Jean-Luc Godard’s newest film, Adieu au langage—which will be released on home video by Kino Lorber on April 14—I felt that nagging feeling that only a few films can give. That feeling isn’t necessarily limited to great or even good films, but belongs instead to a certain special, disparate troupe. I left feeling that Godard had made a film that wanted to think about film in some way, aligning itself with the films that made their ways into books of philosophy by film theorists Noël Carroll and Stanley Cavell.Admittedly, there’s a danger in these feelings. Adieu au langage, as well as the whole lot of these “thinking” films, could simply be playfully “meta,” purposefully toying with the conversations that critics and academics love. Maybe I’ve just taken the filmmaker’s bait here,...
- 4/14/2015
- by Zach Lewis
- MUBI
From the Pudsey The Dog movie to Joe Cornish and Roger Ebert, what happens when critics make films themselves?
Arts critics tend to get a rough time of it in the movies. Even looking at this year's awards season hopefuls, Birdman casts a wonderfully scabrous Lindsay Duncan as a theatre critic who is determined to kill the hero's play, and Mr. Turner presents John Ruskin as a lisping, pretentious fop, a representation that has led some to take mild umbrage.
To look even further back, at Ratatouille's sneering Anton Ego, or Lady In The Water's film-savvy 'straw critic', or Theatre Of Blood's gleefully murderous tract, there's not a whole lot of love for critics in film. Any of this might give way to the preconception that critics, especially film critics, don't actually like films and that they're out of touch with both the filmmakers whose works they...
Arts critics tend to get a rough time of it in the movies. Even looking at this year's awards season hopefuls, Birdman casts a wonderfully scabrous Lindsay Duncan as a theatre critic who is determined to kill the hero's play, and Mr. Turner presents John Ruskin as a lisping, pretentious fop, a representation that has led some to take mild umbrage.
To look even further back, at Ratatouille's sneering Anton Ego, or Lady In The Water's film-savvy 'straw critic', or Theatre Of Blood's gleefully murderous tract, there's not a whole lot of love for critics in film. Any of this might give way to the preconception that critics, especially film critics, don't actually like films and that they're out of touch with both the filmmakers whose works they...
- 1/22/2015
- by simonbrew
- Den of Geek
Today's roundup of news and views has to begin with A.O. Scott's essay, "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture." We're also looking at pieces on Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941), Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie (1971), Edward D. Wood Jr.'s Glen or Glenda (1953), Adrian Lyne's Flashdance (1983) and Walter Benjamin on the nature of film. Plus: Jessica Chastain will star in Xavier Dolan's first film in English, Isabelle Huppert has three projects in the works—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 9/11/2014
- Keyframe
Today's roundup of news and views has to begin with A.O. Scott's essay, "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture." We're also looking at pieces on Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941), Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie (1971), Edward D. Wood Jr.'s Glen or Glenda (1953), Adrian Lyne's Flashdance (1983) and Walter Benjamin on the nature of film. Plus: Jessica Chastain will star in Xavier Dolan's first film in English, Isabelle Huppert has three projects in the works—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 9/11/2014
- Fandor: Keyframe
I don’t make films myself, but it seems obvious to me there are but two places to learn how to make movies: in the outside world constrained by so-called reality, and in the inside world of the cinema’s darkness, constrained by so-called illusion. Travelogue tales and quotidian reportage being of little interest here, a log for illusionary research and experience, I must duly deliver my film report on the films that came upon me in the darkness of the Melbourne International Film Festival, which ran from July 31 - August 17, and the lessons learned.
Awe Sum
Epic of Everest
So many academics and cinephiles alike seem consternated by Walter Benjamin's paen to the the aura of an original artwork, something squandered, lost, obfuscated, or obliterated in the mechanical reproduction of art in post cards, photographic duplicates, and, of course, cinema. But upon encountering at the festival a restoration...
Awe Sum
Epic of Everest
So many academics and cinephiles alike seem consternated by Walter Benjamin's paen to the the aura of an original artwork, something squandered, lost, obfuscated, or obliterated in the mechanical reproduction of art in post cards, photographic duplicates, and, of course, cinema. But upon encountering at the festival a restoration...
- 8/20/2014
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
In an episode of The Big Bang Theory (a sitcom lampooning modern “geek” culture with varying degrees of success), physicist Dr. Sheldon Cooper refuses to watch the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series before the Clone Wars movie. He explains, “I prefer to let George Lucas disappoint me in the order he intended.” Though likely unintentional, this offhanded remark reveals the central dilemma of the Star Wars fandom. Does the franchise “belong” to Lucas or does it “belong” to the public, as an artifact of cultural history? With the 2011 release of the 6-part Star Wars saga on Blu-ray came the announcement that the version of the trilogy available in the set would not be from the original theatrical prints, but the 1997 “Special Edition” versions of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, which include additional scenes and updated technology. Many fans of the franchise see...
- 7/22/2014
- by Mallory Andrews
- SoundOnSight
Thoughts occasioned by the release of Adieu au langage
Godard and the Permanently New
One “It has to face the men of the time and to meet/The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has/To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, and, like an insatiable actor, slowly and/With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat…”
Two “…no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. …what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it….novelty is better than repetition.”
-and modernity, novelty, superventing contemporareity in his cinema begins with a re-evaluation of screen time, direction, and space and his satisfactions at segmenting space as determined by...
Godard and the Permanently New
One “It has to face the men of the time and to meet/The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has/To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, and, like an insatiable actor, slowly and/With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat…”
Two “…no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. …what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it….novelty is better than repetition.”
-and modernity, novelty, superventing contemporareity in his cinema begins with a re-evaluation of screen time, direction, and space and his satisfactions at segmenting space as determined by...
- 6/4/2014
- by Jim Robison
- Trailers from Hell
Rose Marcus KnowMoreGames 14 February - 19 March 2014 Rose Marcus Eli Ping/ Frances Perkins 6 March - 13 April 2014
Rose Marcus’s recent overlapping exhibitions of color photographs speak to the city’s telling and accumulated uncertainties as well as its pleasures. The first series of medium-sized photographs at KnowMoreGames, with their reflective perspectives, its glints and glimmers and facets, has as its subject the porous city and the shifting relationships between interior and exterior spaces, between public and private. Marcus points to the ambiguous hallucinatory city, the city of glass, reflective of a variety of texts.
By contrast, Marcus’s exhibition of large scale photographs at Eli Ping/Frances Perkins of people hanging out at an art opening refers to soma, the social body and the disassociated urban self.
For Marcus there is no grand narrative of Metropolis possible. The city resists easy definition and the artist work veers away from providing totalizing coherencies.
Rose Marcus’s recent overlapping exhibitions of color photographs speak to the city’s telling and accumulated uncertainties as well as its pleasures. The first series of medium-sized photographs at KnowMoreGames, with their reflective perspectives, its glints and glimmers and facets, has as its subject the porous city and the shifting relationships between interior and exterior spaces, between public and private. Marcus points to the ambiguous hallucinatory city, the city of glass, reflective of a variety of texts.
By contrast, Marcus’s exhibition of large scale photographs at Eli Ping/Frances Perkins of people hanging out at an art opening refers to soma, the social body and the disassociated urban self.
For Marcus there is no grand narrative of Metropolis possible. The city resists easy definition and the artist work veers away from providing totalizing coherencies.
- 3/25/2014
- by Dominique Nahas
- www.culturecatch.com
Recommended Reading: Scorsese Defends ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ – True Surrealism – Netflix and more
The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World.
TV Is The New Cinema: Putting 2013 Behind Us.
Leonardo DiCaprio on Wolf of Wall Street: ‘We Don’t Like These People’ (Q&A).
Martin Scorsese Defends The Wolf of Wall Street: (Q&A)
Netflix reportedly plans streaming purge for January 1.
True surrealism: Walter Benjamin and The Act of Killing.
Why is Hollywood making big-budget movies about sleazy Jewish crooks?
Video: Superman vs. Hulk The Fight Part 3
***
The post Recommended Reading: Scorsese Defends ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ – True Surrealism – Netflix and more appeared first on Sound On Sight.
TV Is The New Cinema: Putting 2013 Behind Us.
Leonardo DiCaprio on Wolf of Wall Street: ‘We Don’t Like These People’ (Q&A).
Martin Scorsese Defends The Wolf of Wall Street: (Q&A)
Netflix reportedly plans streaming purge for January 1.
True surrealism: Walter Benjamin and The Act of Killing.
Why is Hollywood making big-budget movies about sleazy Jewish crooks?
Video: Superman vs. Hulk The Fight Part 3
***
The post Recommended Reading: Scorsese Defends ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ – True Surrealism – Netflix and more appeared first on Sound On Sight.
- 1/1/2014
- by Ricky
- SoundOnSight
"There is no better starting point for thought than laughter; speaking more precisely, spasms of the diaphragm generally offer better chances for thought than spasms of the soul." --Walter Benjamin At first, it feels like a lost transmission from the late '70s or early '80s, the opaque and grainy warmth of its images both hypnotic and alienating. "The Eric André Show," which started its second season on Adult Swim last week, is a cognitive rift on the TV screen, a conceptual manslaughter of the clichéd rituals of late-night talk shows and their soothing intimacy. The cordial musical number is replaced with an outburst of free jazz on whose notes Eric André, the boisterous host and creator of the series, barges in ripping the set apart, literally. Rigidly scheduled sketches are knocked down by a corporeal comedy show where the instincts of humor are followed remorselessly. André chews,...
- 10/10/2013
- by Celluloid Liberation Front
- Indiewire
“If images don’t do anything in this culture,” I said, plunging on, “if they haven’t done anything, then why are we sitting here in the twilight of the twentieth century talking about them? And if they only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing them, we are. Therefore, if our criticism aspires to anything beyond soft-science, the efficacy of images must be the cause of criticism, and not its consequence—the subject of criticism and not its object. And this,” I concluded rather grandly, “is why I direct your attention to the language of visual affect—to the rhetoric of how things look—to the iconography of desire—in a word, to beauty!” I made a voilá gesture for punctuation, but to no avail. People were quietly filing out. —Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon.
“Originally, the embeddedness of an artwork in the...
“Originally, the embeddedness of an artwork in the...
- 8/5/2013
- by Uncas Blythe
- MUBI
For years the essay film has been a neglected form, but now its unorthodox approach to constructing reality is winning over a younger, tech-savvy crowd
For a brief, almost unreal couple of hours last July, in amid the kittens and One Direction-mania trending on Twitter, there appeared a very surprising name – that of semi-reclusive French film-maker Chris Marker, whose innovative short feature La Jetée (1962) was remade in 1995 as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. A few months earlier, art journal e-flux staged The Desperate Edge of Now, a retrospective of Adam Curtis's TV films, to large audiences on New York's Lower East Side. The previous summer, Handsworth Songs (1986), an experimental feature by the Black Audio Film Collective Salman Rushdie had once attacked as obscurantist and politically irrelevant, attracted a huge crowd at Tate Modern when it was screened shortly after the London riots.
Marker, Curtis, Black Audio: all have...
For a brief, almost unreal couple of hours last July, in amid the kittens and One Direction-mania trending on Twitter, there appeared a very surprising name – that of semi-reclusive French film-maker Chris Marker, whose innovative short feature La Jetée (1962) was remade in 1995 as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. A few months earlier, art journal e-flux staged The Desperate Edge of Now, a retrospective of Adam Curtis's TV films, to large audiences on New York's Lower East Side. The previous summer, Handsworth Songs (1986), an experimental feature by the Black Audio Film Collective Salman Rushdie had once attacked as obscurantist and politically irrelevant, attracted a huge crowd at Tate Modern when it was screened shortly after the London riots.
Marker, Curtis, Black Audio: all have...
- 8/3/2013
- by Sukhdev Sandhu
- The Guardian - Film News
Jem Cohen’s highly recommended Museum Hours — the winner of the Filmmaker-sponsored 2013 Cinema Eye Heterodox Award — opens in theaters today from Cinema Guild. Below is an excerpt (about half) of my interview with Cohen in the current print issue of Filmmaker. You can read the whole interview in the issue, and in the iPad version there’s also a 12-minute video with Cohen explicating various scenes in the film. What does it mean, in 2013, to photograph — to reproduce — a painting? Does it, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the …...
- 6/28/2013
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
"A successful meme is by definition reproducible, shareable, and recognizable," Lauren Kaelin says on her website.
The Brooklyn-based artist has become quite the expert on the topic of meme-ology, most recently as the founder and content compiler behind the Tumblr, Benjameme. In it, she transforms viral trends into painterly works of art. Grumpy Cat, the Prancercise lady, Texts from Hillary... you name it, Kaelin paints it, reproducing low-brow fodder as high (or at least higher)-brow visual feasts.
The project was inspired by the ideas of German theorist Walter Benjamin, a man who earned a reputation in the 20th century for his landmark essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In the essay, Benjamin argued an artwork loses its "aura," or true value, when it is reproduced.
Suffice it to say Kaelin turns Benjamin's concepts on their head, giving a whole new "aura" to her chosen subject matter,...
The Brooklyn-based artist has become quite the expert on the topic of meme-ology, most recently as the founder and content compiler behind the Tumblr, Benjameme. In it, she transforms viral trends into painterly works of art. Grumpy Cat, the Prancercise lady, Texts from Hillary... you name it, Kaelin paints it, reproducing low-brow fodder as high (or at least higher)-brow visual feasts.
The project was inspired by the ideas of German theorist Walter Benjamin, a man who earned a reputation in the 20th century for his landmark essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In the essay, Benjamin argued an artwork loses its "aura," or true value, when it is reproduced.
Suffice it to say Kaelin turns Benjamin's concepts on their head, giving a whole new "aura" to her chosen subject matter,...
- 6/19/2013
- by Katherine Brooks
- Huffington Post
I haven’t been seeing many movies lately and it’s been killing me; I feel like my mind’s shrunk into a leathery, walnut-sized nub. The 99% of the population who don’t spend hours every day watching movies often look askance at people like me; they seem to think that I’ve been wasting my time, while they, who spend those same hours shopping for napkin rings, cleaning their shower-tile grout, or—even worse—writing poetry, seem to think that their own cogitations are more spiritually uplifting. But recently I remembered just how creative watching movies can be when I re-read Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”, in which the noted bibliophile wrote about a book collector’s relationship with his possessions. Surprisingly, there aren’t that many similarities between book collecting and cinephilia, but the differences do remind me why I’ve been feeling the need to...
- 6/17/2013
- by Doug Dibbern
- MUBI
Critic and director Mark Cousins is receiving rave reviews at Cannes for his inspirational film about cinema and childhood. He tells Charlotte Higgins why it's the decade of the cine-essay
You can tell a lot about Mark Cousins from his tattoos. The Edinburgh-based, Belfast-born presenter, critic and film-maker, whose richly poetic A Story of Children and Film has just premiered to five-star reviews at Cannes, has arms inscribed with words. There's "Forough" on his right. That's Forough Farrokhzad, "the first great Iranian film director," he says. "Her The House Is Black is one of the greatest movies ever made." On his left there's "Le Corbusier", the French architect; and "Eisenstein", the Russian director about whom he recently made a film while undertaking a three-day tramp through Mexico City.
Then, on the inside of his left arm, are the words "the oar and the winnowing fan". This is a reference to...
You can tell a lot about Mark Cousins from his tattoos. The Edinburgh-based, Belfast-born presenter, critic and film-maker, whose richly poetic A Story of Children and Film has just premiered to five-star reviews at Cannes, has arms inscribed with words. There's "Forough" on his right. That's Forough Farrokhzad, "the first great Iranian film director," he says. "Her The House Is Black is one of the greatest movies ever made." On his left there's "Le Corbusier", the French architect; and "Eisenstein", the Russian director about whom he recently made a film while undertaking a three-day tramp through Mexico City.
Then, on the inside of his left arm, are the words "the oar and the winnowing fan". This is a reference to...
- 5/20/2013
- by Charlotte Higgins
- The Guardian - Film News
From James Bond's boiled eggs to Queequeg's beefsteak, the first bite of the day is one of literature's less celebrated themes
In fiction, breakfast is far from omnipresent. We generally assume that it must be happening but, like a character going to the loo or scratching their knee, off-camera. When the American poet Anne Sexton declared that breakfast is "the sexiest meal of the day", she may as well have been saying "it's another of those things we don't talk about".
When we do witness breakfast, it is usually because the author is trying to tell us something about the person eating it. Breakfast is the most habitual meal of the day, a routine so key to inner wellbeing that Hunter S Thompson called it a "psychic anchor", drawing, uncharacteristically, on an image of weighty predictability. If somebody is having toast with marmalade this morning (or, in the case of Thompson,...
In fiction, breakfast is far from omnipresent. We generally assume that it must be happening but, like a character going to the loo or scratching their knee, off-camera. When the American poet Anne Sexton declared that breakfast is "the sexiest meal of the day", she may as well have been saying "it's another of those things we don't talk about".
When we do witness breakfast, it is usually because the author is trying to tell us something about the person eating it. Breakfast is the most habitual meal of the day, a routine so key to inner wellbeing that Hunter S Thompson called it a "psychic anchor", drawing, uncharacteristically, on an image of weighty predictability. If somebody is having toast with marmalade this morning (or, in the case of Thompson,...
- 2/23/2013
- The Guardian - Film News
The authors wish to acknowledge with gratitude the venues in which some version of this article previously appeared: Cinema Scope 24 (Fall, 2005), Trafic 62 (Summer, 2006), and the late and twice-lamented The New-York Ghost (Dec. 26, 2006).
In the Place of No Place
Every movie contains its alternates, phantom films conjured variously by excess or dearth: textures and movements that carry on their own play apart from the main line of the narrative, an obtruding performance or scene, an unexplained ellipsis or sudden character reversal, the chunk life of an object seizing the frame in an insert whose plastic beauty transcends its context.
Though the extremes of pure narrative economy (in which each detail exists purely for transmission of plot) or utter dispersal (in which no piece connects to any other) can never exist, we can tentatively use the concepts as limit-cases to differentiate films which make room for their phantoms (or, in the worst case,...
In the Place of No Place
Every movie contains its alternates, phantom films conjured variously by excess or dearth: textures and movements that carry on their own play apart from the main line of the narrative, an obtruding performance or scene, an unexplained ellipsis or sudden character reversal, the chunk life of an object seizing the frame in an insert whose plastic beauty transcends its context.
Though the extremes of pure narrative economy (in which each detail exists purely for transmission of plot) or utter dispersal (in which no piece connects to any other) can never exist, we can tentatively use the concepts as limit-cases to differentiate films which make room for their phantoms (or, in the worst case,...
- 2/18/2013
- by B. Kite and Bill Krohn
- MUBI
Deborah Kass is an artist whose paintings examine the intersection of art history, popular culture, and the self. She received her Bfa in Painting at Carnegie-Mellon University, and studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and at the Art Students' League. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of Art; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum; the Jewish Museum; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the Cincinnati Museum; the New Orleans Museum; the Weatherspoon Museum; and numerous public and private collections.
A survey show, Deborah Kass, The Warhol Project, traveled across the country from 1999 to 2001. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. She is a Senior Critic in the Yale University Mfa Painting Program. She is represented by Vincent Fremont and the Paul Kasmin Gallery. The Andy Warhol Museum...
A survey show, Deborah Kass, The Warhol Project, traveled across the country from 1999 to 2001. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. She is a Senior Critic in the Yale University Mfa Painting Program. She is represented by Vincent Fremont and the Paul Kasmin Gallery. The Andy Warhol Museum...
- 1/22/2013
- by bradleyrubenstein
- www.culturecatch.com
Figure 1: The 400 Blows.
"In my view, the concept [the move] does not refer to the literal, physical movements of either the performers or the camera (although it can include these elements). It does not necessarily involve powerfully dramatic (or comic) large-scale alterations in plot. It does not have to entail any grand-slam subversion of social, ideological or cultural conventions. But something, in a filmic move, will indeed have to shift, perhaps gently, but tellingly so."
—Adrian Martin (2010: 23) [my emphasis]
Before being frozen, framed and immortalized in the static final shot of Les quatre cents coups (1959), Antoine Doinel undergoes its antithesis—a sequence of camera movements that re-frames, follows and foregrounds his actions. Escaping the juvenile delinquent centre, the character runs on a rugged country road, the destination of which neither he nor we know; the camera tracks the dash laterally in a medium shot. Visualizing his exuberance, Antoine performs a childlike half-run,...
"In my view, the concept [the move] does not refer to the literal, physical movements of either the performers or the camera (although it can include these elements). It does not necessarily involve powerfully dramatic (or comic) large-scale alterations in plot. It does not have to entail any grand-slam subversion of social, ideological or cultural conventions. But something, in a filmic move, will indeed have to shift, perhaps gently, but tellingly so."
—Adrian Martin (2010: 23) [my emphasis]
Before being frozen, framed and immortalized in the static final shot of Les quatre cents coups (1959), Antoine Doinel undergoes its antithesis—a sequence of camera movements that re-frames, follows and foregrounds his actions. Escaping the juvenile delinquent centre, the character runs on a rugged country road, the destination of which neither he nor we know; the camera tracks the dash laterally in a medium shot. Visualizing his exuberance, Antoine performs a childlike half-run,...
- 12/23/2012
- by Hoi Lun Law
- MUBI
“When history is what it should be, it is an elaboration of cinema.” —Ortega y Gasset
“The key for me is finding some rhythm of the film, not so much in the plot from a traditional sense but, rather, from its internal rhythm.” —Matías Piñeiro
1
There are works of art that affect in bulk, all at once; these are the aesthetic experiences that unify, that impose boundaries on the license of eye and ear. Other works of art achieve a dissociated and dissociating stylistic program; these are the works that cannot be experienced or understood as feats of synthesis, or as products of a single point of view.
While much of the art of the past century might be described as an effort toward a radical disaffiliation of elements—word and image, depth and surface, form and content—awareness of a quarrelsome relationship between two presumably incompatible ways of making...
“The key for me is finding some rhythm of the film, not so much in the plot from a traditional sense but, rather, from its internal rhythm.” —Matías Piñeiro
1
There are works of art that affect in bulk, all at once; these are the aesthetic experiences that unify, that impose boundaries on the license of eye and ear. Other works of art achieve a dissociated and dissociating stylistic program; these are the works that cannot be experienced or understood as feats of synthesis, or as products of a single point of view.
While much of the art of the past century might be described as an effort toward a radical disaffiliation of elements—word and image, depth and surface, form and content—awareness of a quarrelsome relationship between two presumably incompatible ways of making...
- 8/20/2012
- MUBI
A forgotten albeit flawed masterpiece, this thriller about a priest accused of murder – bound to keep secret the confession made to him by the real killer – smoulders gloriously
On the surface, it looks as if collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and Hungarian-born scriptwright George Tabori were doomed to failure. Tabori worked on the scripts for two of Hitch's films: he was replaced on North By Northwest by Ernest Lehman, who came up with the cropduster scene, and was dropped from I Confess after the production company found the ending of his script too shocking.
In 1986, Tabori – widely championed as one of Europe's greatest theatre directors when he died in 2007 – gave an interview with a German newspaper in which he said: "I was never a particular fan of Hitchcock's work." The problem, he explained, was that he had grown up as part of generation of European filmmakers who still had aspirations and ideals about cinema.
On the surface, it looks as if collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and Hungarian-born scriptwright George Tabori were doomed to failure. Tabori worked on the scripts for two of Hitch's films: he was replaced on North By Northwest by Ernest Lehman, who came up with the cropduster scene, and was dropped from I Confess after the production company found the ending of his script too shocking.
In 1986, Tabori – widely championed as one of Europe's greatest theatre directors when he died in 2007 – gave an interview with a German newspaper in which he said: "I was never a particular fan of Hitchcock's work." The problem, he explained, was that he had grown up as part of generation of European filmmakers who still had aspirations and ideals about cinema.
- 8/8/2012
- by Philip Oltermann
- The Guardian - Film News
Richard Prince: 14 Paintings 303 Gallery Through June 22, 2012
In a 1927 article on fetishism Sigmund Freud allowed that a person who erotically fixated on an inanimate object had found a substitute for their perceived missing phallus. He gave as an example a young male patient who had fetishized the "shine on the nose" of a woman. In fixating on this elusive phenomenon, the patient had chosen as his erotic object a condition that characterized eroticized elements in general; that is, they cannot actually be possessed and therefore are eternally elusive. The desired thing is ultimately ungraspable.
In some ways the work of Richard Prince has been an investigation into the American fetish object for decades. His car hood sculptures, reproduced images of Brooke Shields and Hollywood movie star promo pictures, and silk-screened paintings of jokes and cartoons from those ultimate fetish-culture publications Playboy and The New Yorker have all been about aesthetic depictions...
In a 1927 article on fetishism Sigmund Freud allowed that a person who erotically fixated on an inanimate object had found a substitute for their perceived missing phallus. He gave as an example a young male patient who had fetishized the "shine on the nose" of a woman. In fixating on this elusive phenomenon, the patient had chosen as his erotic object a condition that characterized eroticized elements in general; that is, they cannot actually be possessed and therefore are eternally elusive. The desired thing is ultimately ungraspable.
In some ways the work of Richard Prince has been an investigation into the American fetish object for decades. His car hood sculptures, reproduced images of Brooke Shields and Hollywood movie star promo pictures, and silk-screened paintings of jokes and cartoons from those ultimate fetish-culture publications Playboy and The New Yorker have all been about aesthetic depictions...
- 6/14/2012
- by bradleyrubenstein
- www.culturecatch.com
How a DVD landslide swept me back in time
The other day I brushed incautiously against a packed, unstable shelf in my bedroom and caused a catastrophic DVD-slide, which almost swept me down the stairs and into the street. It took 40 sweaty and bad-tempered minutes to stuff them back in, as semi-forgotten films suddenly pressed themselves on my consciousness. Enter the Dragon. The Sorrow and the Pity. Dodgeball.
Every time I look, I have more DVDs. Hundreds. Are they breeding? They are double- and triple-stacked. The ones at the back are condemned to be utterly forgotten. Many more are crammed horizontally over the top, always the sign of a neglected shelf. Film companies send me discs in the hope of a review. I now have enough to fill a skip.
Putting all those DVDs back was a strange experience. In his essay Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin recounts the smell...
The other day I brushed incautiously against a packed, unstable shelf in my bedroom and caused a catastrophic DVD-slide, which almost swept me down the stairs and into the street. It took 40 sweaty and bad-tempered minutes to stuff them back in, as semi-forgotten films suddenly pressed themselves on my consciousness. Enter the Dragon. The Sorrow and the Pity. Dodgeball.
Every time I look, I have more DVDs. Hundreds. Are they breeding? They are double- and triple-stacked. The ones at the back are condemned to be utterly forgotten. Many more are crammed horizontally over the top, always the sign of a neglected shelf. Film companies send me discs in the hope of a review. I now have enough to fill a skip.
Putting all those DVDs back was a strange experience. In his essay Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin recounts the smell...
- 6/10/2012
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
The Avengers, which has had the biggest Us opening in history, climaxes with towers crumbling and mayhem in Manhattan. Squeamishness, it seems, is shortlived in Hollywood
Mad terror in the streets as flying whatsits and killer robots from outer space ricochet off and, more often, crash through 70-story skyscrapers. Mighty towers crumble; concrete chunks spray from the screen. Total Sensurround: the theatre itself shakes as the non-stop cosmic battle-cum-pinball game that is The Avengers reaches its climax in a digital midtown Manhattan.
It's complete mayhem and, reader, I confess that I enjoyed every minute of this ear-splitting, brain-jarring, inordinately protracted cataclysm – even though something similar, if on a far smaller scale, occurred a bit more than 10 years ago, six blocks from my home. On 11 September 2001, planes crashed, buildings collapsed, and debris rained. Some were buried alive, others ran stunned and screaming through New York's concrete canyons.
My neighbours saw jets...
Mad terror in the streets as flying whatsits and killer robots from outer space ricochet off and, more often, crash through 70-story skyscrapers. Mighty towers crumble; concrete chunks spray from the screen. Total Sensurround: the theatre itself shakes as the non-stop cosmic battle-cum-pinball game that is The Avengers reaches its climax in a digital midtown Manhattan.
It's complete mayhem and, reader, I confess that I enjoyed every minute of this ear-splitting, brain-jarring, inordinately protracted cataclysm – even though something similar, if on a far smaller scale, occurred a bit more than 10 years ago, six blocks from my home. On 11 September 2001, planes crashed, buildings collapsed, and debris rained. Some were buried alive, others ran stunned and screaming through New York's concrete canyons.
My neighbours saw jets...
- 5/11/2012
- by J Hoberman
- The Guardian - Film News
Adam Kossoff's Moscow Diary does most things a good documentary should. We get a complex, intellectually fascinating subject (a famous writer's trip to Russia in the 1920s, and his thoughts on the nascent Communist party) presented as objectively as circumstances allow. There's an easy hook (the writer's affair with another man's woman) and a deeper, more academic angle (Kossoff shot the whole thing on a mobile phone, in part as a commentary on our relationship with technology and the ways it compels us to view the world). So why is it so dull?Okay, perhaps 'dull' is a little harsh, but a film that should offer any number of ways to engage the audience ends up frustratingly unfulfilling. The story of the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin...
- 5/8/2012
- Screen Anarchy
In 1973, Susan Sontag travelled to post-war Israel to film a documentary. As Promised Lands returns to the big screen, Steve Rose finds out how the movie holds up today
Did Susan Sontag enjoy making Promised Lands, her fragmented documentary about the 1973 Yom Kippur war? Shortly after its completion, and its less than enthusiastic reception, she wrote: "Film-making is nitpicking, anxiety, fights, claustrophobia, exhaustion, euphoria. Film-making is catching inspiration out on the wing. Film-making is flubbing the catch, and sometimes knowing the fool that's to blame is yourself. Film-making is blind instinct, petty calculations, smooth generalship, daydreaming, pigheadedness, grace, bluff, risk."
It can't have been easy for her. Sontag, who died in 2004, was best known as the "dark lady of American letters", the producer of influential essays, novels, short stories and plays. But in writing so authoritatively about culture, photography and every aspect of cinema, from sci-fi to the nouvelle vague,...
Did Susan Sontag enjoy making Promised Lands, her fragmented documentary about the 1973 Yom Kippur war? Shortly after its completion, and its less than enthusiastic reception, she wrote: "Film-making is nitpicking, anxiety, fights, claustrophobia, exhaustion, euphoria. Film-making is catching inspiration out on the wing. Film-making is flubbing the catch, and sometimes knowing the fool that's to blame is yourself. Film-making is blind instinct, petty calculations, smooth generalship, daydreaming, pigheadedness, grace, bluff, risk."
It can't have been easy for her. Sontag, who died in 2004, was best known as the "dark lady of American letters", the producer of influential essays, novels, short stories and plays. But in writing so authoritatively about culture, photography and every aspect of cinema, from sci-fi to the nouvelle vague,...
- 4/23/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
To profane a Botticelli with a knife is something likely to go down well even with the Windsor Knitting Club these days, less so forty years ago when John Berger literally did so on national television. Though staged for the benefit of an oblivious public, this iconoclastic gesture, accompanied by Berger’s declaration that “it is not so much the paintings themselves which I want to consider as the way we now see them,” your average prime time TV was not.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its original airing, the BFI is screening Berger’s seminal TV series Ways of Seeing, inaugurating “Broadcasting the Arts”, a new programme exploring the way(s) television has dealt with literature, music, theatre, dance and fine art. Judicious choice that of starting with this particular series—the focal point of this 1972 televisual experiment being that of investigating how the perception of images was...
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its original airing, the BFI is screening Berger’s seminal TV series Ways of Seeing, inaugurating “Broadcasting the Arts”, a new programme exploring the way(s) television has dealt with literature, music, theatre, dance and fine art. Judicious choice that of starting with this particular series—the focal point of this 1972 televisual experiment being that of investigating how the perception of images was...
- 4/11/2012
- MUBI
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