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Part of the Jerry Lewis tribute A Mubi Jerrython. Over the course of my forty years as the Los Angeles correspondent for Cahiers du cinema, I wrote about what was happening in American cinema, inventing a way of doing so inspired by Joan Didion’s essay “Having Fun,” which first appeared in The New Yorker. Ironically, Didion’s essay was a blast at the seriousness of people writing about film from outside the business who didn’t understand the inner workings of the studio system. When I met Serge Daney, the editor-in-chief of the Cahiers, at the New York apartment of Jackie Raynal and Sid Geffen on the occasion of the first Semaine des Cahiers in New York in 1977, which I had helped organize, we hit it off immediately. But he was understandably reluctant to entrust to someone who appeared to have been living in a subway the job I...

FrancofoniaIt seems slightly off-kilter to term a film by Alexander Sokurov, everyone’s favorite Slavophile modernist, a “mash-up.” Yet Francofonia, which opened the Museum of the Moving Image’s fifth annual First Look festival, brings to mind an idiosyncratic synthesis of motifs derived from Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma and Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomacy. With more than a passing resemblance to the ever-popular fiction/non-fiction hybrid film, Sokurov’s rambling meditation on the aesthetic imperatives of authoritarianism was an appropriate choice to open a festival that specializes in experimental hybridism. New work by such disparate filmmakers as Dominic Gagnon, Léa Rinaldi, and Louis Skorecki traverses generic boundaries—even though, for seasoned festival audiences, this sort of genre-bending is now more of a routine occurrence than a transgressive event. First Look’s desire to showcase subversive hybridity was evident in Quebecois filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s double bill—Pieces and Love...

New York's Museum of the Moving Image has announced the lineup for the fifth edition of its annual First Look Festival, running from January 8 through 24 and featuring a slew of Us and NYC premieres. Opening with Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia, highlights also include Manuel Mozos’s portrait of João Bénard da Costa, the late director of the Portuguese Film Museum; a playful autobiographical work by the French film critic and filmmaker Louis Skorecki; and a duo of intimate behind-the-scenes films about Jim Jarmusch. Plus films by Margaret Honda, Ken Jacobs, Bjoern Kammerer, and the late Andrew Noren; and formally innovative films such as Jonathan Perel’s structuralist study of oppressive Argentine architecture, and Dominic Gagnon's gonzo YouTube assemblages. » - David Hudson...

New York's Museum of the Moving Image has announced the lineup for the fifth edition of its annual First Look Festival, running from January 8 through 24 and featuring a slew of Us and NYC premieres. Opening with Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia, highlights also include Manuel Mozos’s portrait of João Bénard da Costa, the late director of the Portuguese Film Museum; a playful autobiographical work by the French film critic and filmmaker Louis Skorecki; and a duo of intimate behind-the-scenes films about Jim Jarmusch. Plus films by Margaret Honda, Ken Jacobs, Bjoern Kammerer, and the late Andrew Noren; and formally innovative films such as Jonathan Perel’s structuralist study of oppressive Argentine architecture, and Dominic Gagnon's gonzo YouTube assemblages. » - David Hudson...

Lionel Baier is a Swiss filmmaker born in 1975, a teacher and an active cinéphile, the director of many documentaries and features, among them Garçon stupide, a refined fiction with a documentary posture (and something in common with the first films by Alain Guiraudie) and Un autre homme, a film about a film critic (a cousin to Louis Skorecki’s trilogy Les Cinéphiles).

Baier belongs to a generation of filmmakers who had to deal with the fact that they were coming “after.” After their own “masters” or mentors, after their own film culture. After the revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s. After. A source of political and artistic angst that led to choices spanning from whining nostalgia to merciless caricature, from fake indifference to abstract reconstruction, from respectful tributes to philological or critical questioning.

Baier’s new film is a comedy set in 1974, a straightforward filmic charge against Switzerland's “help...

April 13-18

Fifty years after Jean-Luc Godard, Serge Bozon and the .young turks. of Cahiers du cinéma resolved that the best way to criticize movies was to make their own films. The result was the creation of another exciting .new wave. of critic-filmmakers, hailing from the iconoclastic film magazine La lettre du cinéma(1997-2005), boldly storming the gates of the French film establishment.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center brings writer, director, actor and DJ, Serge Bozon to New York to present this first major North American survey of films by the Lettre du cinéma circle as well as to curate and present a series of screenings of rarities (along with Anthology Film Archives) that have influenced his work. Also introducing and discussing their films will be his fellow filmmakers, Jean-Charles Fitoussi and Aurélia Georges. And if that weren.t enough, Bozon will also put his DJ skills on display,...