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Chis Marker's Chat écoutant la musiqueThere are dog people and there are cat people, this we know, and there are even people who claim to be of both—though latent sympathies remain unspoken, like with a parent and which child is their favorite. With the Vienna Film Festival welcoming me with a tumbling collection of dog and cat short films spanning cinema's history—the Austrian Film Museum, an essential destination each year collaborating with the Viennale, is hosting a “a brief zoology of cinema” throughout the festivities—it is clear that filmmakers, too, have their preference. Silent cinema decidedly prefers the more easily trained and exhibited canine, with 1907’s surreal favorite Les chiens savants as a certain kind of cruel pinnacle. For the cats, Chris Marker, already the presiding figure over so much in 20th century art, I think we can easily claim is the cine-laureate. One need not know...

The Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival will be celebrating its 26th spectacular edition in the great city of Chicago on January 28-31. The fest’s opening night will take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center, while the other nights will play out at Columbia College Chicago’s Ferguson Theater.

Typical of many recent previous editions of Onion City, this will be a showcase of international avant-garde and experimental cinema that includes 46 short films and one feature from eight different countries, including the U.S., France, Portugal, Italy, Turkey and more.

The fest opens on the 28th with films such as the 4th entry in Phil Solomon‘s acclaimed machinima musings project, Psalm IV: “Valley of the Shadow;” a new animation by Janie Geiser, The Hummingbird Wars; plus films from experimental stalwarts like Robert Todd and Fern Silva.

The one feature screening will be on January 31 at 3:00 p.

Since I skipped a links post last week due to other projects taking up my weekend, some of these are from awhile ago, but very, very worthy of a click:

Once again for this week’s Must Read, Mark Toscano has another amazing film restoration post up, this time discussing restoring two films by Will Hindle, Pastorale d’Ete (1959) and Later That Same Night (1971). This is an important article because, as Mark notes, Hindle’s place in the underground universe has been on a bit of a slide the past few years.If you’re interested in accurately archiving Shaw Brothers movie releases, then Temple of Schlock has the ultimate post for you.This interview on Experimental Cinema with German filmmaker Klaus Wyborny goes into fascinating depth on his theories of film construction.San Francisco’s Artists Television Access interviewed Chicago filmmaker/curator Amir George on his touring program called “Watch This!

"Now in its 15th year," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, Views from the Avant-Garde, opening today and running through Monday, "has undergone a growth spurt since 2010 and has added a fourth day and enough titles to make your eyes tear from the ecstasy of excess or just exhaustion…. The titular monarch of [Ken] Jacobs's contribution, Seeking the Monkey King, appears to be the American greed and corruption that have sent the director into an agony of despair, if happily not a paralyzing one. Set to the music of Jg Thirlwell, this digital video largely consists of valleys and hills of what look like crumpled foil that Mr Jacobs, through his manipulations, has turned into landscapes that shift, undulate and seem to pop off the screen as if in 3D. Often tinted golden yellow and blue (colors used in the silent era usually to denote day and night), the...

It's an exhaustive look at cinema of the old, and the new in Austria's capital. Starting today, and moving into November (3rd), Vienna celebrates almost two weeks' worth of film culture via the Viennale (a.k.a. Vienna International Film Festival). Bookended by Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men, which took home the Grand Prix from this year's Cannes Festival, and Pedro González-Rubio's Alamar, Tiger Awardee in Rotterdam, the non-competitive fest tries to balance fiction, documentaries and short films in its main program. World premieres of this edition stem from German primary rocks like Rudolf Thome (The Red Room) and Klaus Wyborny (Studies for the Decay of the West). Another highlight is the first showing of Houchang Allahyari's fictionalised doc Die Verrueckte Welt der Ute Bock (The Crazy World of Ute Bock), portraying everyday life of a locally famed asylum helper. However, features like Sofia Coppola's...