News

I’m looking for the black Range Rover with the glittery pink license-plate frame.

It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the passenger pickup at Lax is packed and lawless. When the SUV pulls up, Addison Rae is behind the wheel in a striped pinafore with nothing underneath it but black tape in two giant X’s covering her nipples.

It was Rae’s idea to pick me up from the airport, and her car is as chaotic and ultra-femme as her persona. There are Chanel lipsticks and full-size bottles...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Bam

A Different Man director Aaron Schimberg has assembled an all-35mm retrospective of films that inspired his new feature, including work by Lynch, Lubitsch, Nicholas Ray, and Tsai; the 50th-anniversary restoration of The Conversation begins a run.

Museum of Modern Art

A career-spanning Johnnie To retrospective has begun, featuring the director in-person.

Anthology Film Archives

An Ingrid Caven retrospective includes films by Fassbinder and Eustache; work by Joseph Cornell, Tony Conrad, and Bruce Conner plays in “Essential Cinema.”

Film at Lincoln Center

An essential retrospective of Brazil’s L.C. Barreto Productions continues.

Roxy Cinema

Faces and A Woman Under the Influence screen.

Museum of the Moving Image

A retrospective of the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden continues; two films by Joanna Hogg screen on Saturday; Young Frankenstein and The Warriors have standalone showings, the latter on 35mm.

Film Forum

The Searchers...

The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about topics in the wider film conversation.Crossroads.It was early last March when, after twenty-three years and over two thousand reviews, A. O. Scott announced he would resign from his post as film critic at the New York Times, leaving his readers to wrestle with some cataclysmic prophecies. “The current apocalypse,” he wrote on his way out,… is that streaming and Covid anxiety are conspiring to kill off moviegoing as we have known it, leaving a handful of I.P.-driven blockbusters and horror movies to keep theaters in business while we mostly sit at home bingeing docuseries, dystopias and the occasional art-film guilt trip. Am I worried? Of course I’m worried. The cultural space in which the movies I care most about have flourished seems to be shrinking. The audience necessary to sustain original...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

The films of Kijū Yoshida are now playing in a massive retrospective. Read our piece on him here.

Roxy Cinema

A five-film retrospective of Matthew Modine (read my interview here) takes place this weekend, including work by Abel Ferrara, Alan Rudolph, and the man himself.

Museum of the Moving Image

A career-spanning Todd Haynes retrospective begins, with the director present on Friday and Saturday; Robert Altman’s Popeye plays on 35mm this Saturday and Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art

A massive Ennio Morricone retrospective begins, this weekend bringing Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy.

Anthology Film Archives

The films of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project are screening, while Joseph Cornell, Tony Conrad, and Bruce Conner programs run in Essential Cinema; a Hollis Frampton retrospective is also underway.

Film Forum

Michael Powell’s career-killing masterwork Peeping Tom plays in a long-overdue restoration,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWe're thrilled to announce Notebook magazine, a new biannual print-only publication dedicated to the art and culture of cinema, with original contributions by film artists, writers, curators, and archivists about a unique and eclectic array of cinematic subjects. Inside our pilot Issue 0 you'll find Apichatpong Weerasethakul reflecting on his personal journey and Wes Anderson on The French Dispatch and The New Yorker; explorations of moviegoing and odes to movie magazines; conversations between the cinema exhibitors of Milan's Cinema Beltrade and Dubai's Cinema Akil, as well as between directors Emma Seligman and Mike Leigh; movie posters from a milestone MoMA exhibition; sheet music handwritten by Nino Rota; new translations of writings by Yasujiro Ozu; and much more. This issue is printed in a limited edition and available for pre-order to Mubi subscribers only—get yours now,...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.In 1878, Eadward Muybridge stood atop Nob Hill in San Francisco and took a panoramic picture of the city. It was the same year that he captured a horse in motion, but this was a different type of temporal photograph. He’d developed a new method that mimicked the experience of the human eye rotating 360 degrees, creating a seamless panorama of the city, a still moving picture. This is one place to start a primer on San Francisco on film, at the very beginning. Two decades before the Lumières premiered their first actualities, Muybridge was capturing a portrait of San Francisco in time. As I began researching this primer, Muybridge seemed like a key precedent for many 20th century Bay Area filmmakers. He was an innovator that developed a new technology parallel...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe Venice Film Festival is moving forward with its plans for a “real red carpet” and theatrical screenings this September. The Toronto International Film Festival has also announced its plans for a mix of physical and virtual screenings, with fifty new features set to premiere.Recommended VIEWINGFrom June 22-29, watch Bruce Conner's Looking For Mushrooms, a "psychedelic travelogue film" that follows Conner and his wife Jean as they hunt for mushrooms in rural Oaxaca. The new trailer for Werner Herzog's latest feature, Family Romance, LLC. Mubi is releasing the film, which premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival, on July 4 in many countries, following a free preview on July 3.

A teaser trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa's upcoming romance thriller, Wife of a Spy, co-written with Ryusuke Hamaguchi (!) and starring Yu Aoi.Recommended...

The skeleton crew of Josephine Decker’s first feature “Butter on the Latch” was small, even by the standards of the wave of micro-budgeted films that were hitting festivals during the first half of the decade: a sound recordist and cinematographer, Ashley Connor. “I was producing, directing and costume designing, running around the woods being the Pa and all the writing was improvised,” said Decker. “So Ashley really determined so much about the look of that film.”

The result was an entirely unique approach to creating in-camera effects, but it took six years of experiments before they figured it all out.

The ability of new digital Slr still photography cameras’ to record high-quality video, which made films like Decker’s debut possible, came with some trade-offs. The cameras had a shallow depth of field and the ability to precisely adjust (or rack) focus proved difficult. Connor, who was operating herself...

Offon by Scott Bartlett (1968)

This film’s title is spelled various ways in different sources. Variations include Off-On, Off/On, and Offon. The Canyon Cinema Catalog 3, published in Spring 1972, spells it Offon. However, all film titles in the catalog are spelled in all caps, so the Underground Film Journal has opted to spell it as Offon, also based on the title screen, which is in all caps. Some sources also give a completion year of 1967, but 1968 is correct.

Offon is considered one of the first works to combine film and video together. It was celebrated upon its release for both its technical ingenuity as much as for its artistic integrity.

Over the weekend of May 10th, 1968, Offon screened at the first Yale Film Festival at Yale University, where it was awarded First Prize by judges Annette Michelson, Willard Van Dyke, Bernard Hanson, and Jonas Mekas, who wrote about the festival...

In 1966, after six years of existence, the Canyon Cinema experimental film collective of San Francisco, California started its own cooperative distribution center, first listing films in the November ’66 issue of their News newsletter, in which they stated that they would be following in the footsteps of New York City’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative that had been distributing underground films since 1962.

This origin of the Canyon Cinema cooperative is covered in Scott MacDonald’s exhaustive history of the organization, in which he lays out the timeline of publication of the first two catalogs:

November 1966: Canyon lists films to rent in their News publication

December 1966: Canyon Cinema Cooperative Catalog, Number 1

1968: Catalog Number 2

1969: Catalog Number 2, Supplement Number 1

1970: Catalog Number 2, Supplement Number 2

1970: Catalog Number 2, Supplement Number 3

MacDonald states that the second Catalog was 128 pages long, but the Supplement Number 1 begins its numbering on its title page with Page 125. The...

This is Part Two in a series of articles on the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema (Rbmc). As detailed in Part One, the Rbmc was an experimental film screening series in New York City, started by filmmaker Brian L. Frye.

Frye programmed the first screening on May 12, 1998 at the Collective Unconscious theater space. The screening included the feature-length documentary Underground by Emile de Antonio about the left-wing militant group the Weather Underground, and a kinoscope of Richard M. Nixon’s infamous “Checker’s Speech.” At the screening, fellow media artist Bradley Eros introduced himself to Frye and the pair co-programmed the Rbmc together for several years.

The goal of the screenings was to present work that typically wouldn’t be projected anywhere else, such as small gauge film formats and expanded cinema performances. The Rbmc would also host filmmakers in town for larger shows elsewhere in the city and asked them to screen their older,...

Dani Leventhal's PlatonicThis review, I think, might best be understood as an example of “slow criticism.” This is a term coined by Filmkrant editor Dana Linssen to describe “wayward articles,” ones that have a personal or political element that is somehow not timely. We can imagine that the reverse of this is “fast criticism,” the up-to-the-minute report from a film festival, the 140-character response tweeted out the minute the first press screening is over. These thoughts are not timely. The Whitney Biennial closed on June 11th, and the film program screened its final program on May 21st. So although I expect many of these films to have a life long after their appearance at the Whitney, I am not providing any kind of late-breaking news flash from the film or art world by writing about these works in this forum.But in a way, that is the point. Even...

Michael Almereyda with Hampton Fancher on the form of Escapes, executive produced by Wes Anderson: "This is my tribute to Bruce Conner." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In my Escapes conversation with Michael Almereyda (Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard) and Hampton Fancher (co-screenwriter of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049) we start out with Federico García Lorca, Bruce Conner, Philip K Dick and Chris Marker. Then we encounter a Jean-Pierre Léaud, Tina Sinatra, Michael Pfleghar (Romeo Und Julia 70) connection and next stop over at Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, Brian Kelly and Flipper, Skinningrove on photographer Chris Killip, Yasujiro Ozu's influence on Wim Wenders (Yuharu Atsuta in Tokyo-Ga) and Jim Jarmusch.

Hampton Fancher: "It's looking at my life through other people's eyes."

Michael Almereyda's approach in Escapes turns the idea of a biopic inside out. Clips from Hampton Fancher's television and movie performances mixed with those...

My work is described as beautiful, horrible, hogwash, genius, maundering, precise, quaint, avant-garde, historical, hackneyed, masterful, trivial, intense, mystical, virtuosic, bewildering, absorbing, concise, absurd, amusing, innovative, nostalgic, contemporary, iconoclastic, sophisticated, trash, masterpieces, etc. It’s all true. —Bruce Conner

What does it all mean? This question, when applied to the ever-expanding mythology of “Twin Peaks,” typically leads to a series of murky pathways and dead ends, but they’re usually irrelevant. Sure, it’s fun to dig through the pileup of circumstances that led FBI Agent Dale Cooper from investigating a small-town murder to becoming trapped in the red-hued inter-dimensional prison known as the Black Lodge. Play that game if it makes you happy — IndieWire’s TV team has done it beautifully — but that doesn’t mean Lynch or co-creator Mark Frost will always make the journey worthwhile.

The show, which has recreated its appeal from the ground up in...

(Click image to read article as originally printed.)

From the Arizona Republic, March 16, 1964:

Twelve American filmmakers will receive a total of $118,500 from the Ford Foundation in its first move to aid creative artists in motion pictures. The grants range up to $10,000 for a one-year period. They will be used by the recipients either to produce short films or for travel and study.

The awards are part of a long-range plan of the foundation to include motion pictures in its program.

The undertaking was described as a “pilot project” by W. McNeil Lowry, director of the foundation’s program in humanities and the arts, when it was established last June.

The moviemakers chosen are professionals but their works are generally unknown to viewers of popular film fare.

The 12 winners were selected from 177 nominees considered by a panel of judges. More than 400 letters had been sent to producers, directors, writers, critics...

The Oscars can have its annual celebrity luncheon. This week, several documentarians celebrated the Cinema Eye Honors with an after-hours field trip to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Conceived in 2008 as a bid to broaden awareness for documentary achievements, the Cinema Eyes highlight a dozen categories that range from best director to best cinematography to graphic design. However, while it began as a tonic to the five-nominee limitations that circumscribe the Oscars, the Cinema Eyes have evolved into an idiosyncratic celebration all its own. Although the awards are Wednesday night at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the ceremony is now only the culmination of a full week of programming that includes three days of activities.

“It’s kind of like senior skip week,” said co-founder and filmmaker Aj Schnack, catching his breath on Monday night before delivering a speech to the filmmakers in attendance. “Yes,...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

The Philip Seymour Hoffman retro has a banner weekend, including Doubt and Synecdoche, New York introduced by John Patrick Shanley and followed by a Charlie Kaufman Q & A, respectively.

The logical pairing of Agnès Varda‘s Le Bonheur and Hype Williams‘ Belly happens on Sunday.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

If you like good things,...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

A Robert Aldrich retrospective has begun and is rich with pleasures.

The Howard Hughes-produced Cock of the Air and Visconti‘s Sandra screen on Sunday.

Chantal Akerman‘s masterpiece News from Home plays this Friday and Saturday. The Disney documentary Monkey Kingdom shows on the latter day and Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art...

NEWSWe wish we were at the Telluride and Venice film festivals, but since we're not that lucky, we've been voraciously following the buzz. To see what the critics are saying from the Telluride, which was last weekend, and Venice (on-going) check out David Hudson's round-ups at Keyframe. From the former, we're particularly excited about Barry Jenkins' Moonlight and Clint Eastwood's Sully, and from the latter, can't wait to see Uhlrich Seidl's Safari.Recommended VIEWINGSince we just wrapped our Kelly Reichardt retrospective on Mubi, we're feeling much need for her new film, Certain Woman. Starring Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, and Kristen Stewart, its first trailer is only getting us even more excited.We love Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice. And we also love the video essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Sight & Sound has made made the connection and presents Haunted Memories, exploring "the joy and regret...

2016 New York Film Festival poster - Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Cemetery Of Splendor director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has designed the 54th New York Film Festival poster to join the ranks of Laurie Anderson, Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Richard Avedon, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Diane Arbus, Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Bridges, Maurice Pialat, John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons.

Bruce Conner's Angels (1986) at MoMA in New York City Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th will open the festival, Mike Mills' 20th Century Women starring Annette Bening with Billy Crudup, Elle Fanning, Lucas Jade Zumann and Greta Gerwig is the centrepiece and James Gray's The Lost City Of Z with Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland and Charlie Hunnam is the Closing Night Gala selection.

“Apichatpong Weerasethakul is more than just a ‘logical’ choice to do our poster—he’s one of the world’s greatest filmmakers...

NEWSFilm scholar V.F. Perkins, author of the essential book Film As Film (1972), has died at the age of 80.The BFI in London has announced Black Star, the UK's largest celebration of black screen actors, to run October 17 - December 31, 2016.Consummate Hollywood director Garry Marshall, best known for Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride and such television productions as Happy Days and Mork & Mindy, has died at 81.Filmmaker and Mubi team member Kurt Walker and filmmaker Isaac Goes are launching online film exhibition space Kinet, "catered to the dissemination of new and boundary pushing avant-garde cinema." Kinet's first program, which begins next week, includes Masha Tupitsyn's epic Love Sounds.Recommended VIEWINGThe feature debut of Canadian director Isiah Medina, 88:88, which received its global online premiere on Mubi last spring, is now streaming for free.An English-subtitled, behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Johnnie To's excellent thriller, Three.The teaser trailer for...

NEWSThe lineup for the 69th Locarno Film Festival has been announced, with new movies by Yousry Nasrallah, Matías Piñeiro, João Pedro Rodrigues (O Ornitólogo, above) and Axelle Ropert in the International Competition, short films by Thom Andersen and Jia Zhangke, and more.Recommended VIEWINGThe trailer for Jeff Nichols' new film Loving, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May.A new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, "It's All True," is devoted to American avant-garde director Bruce Conner. The Museum has generously put online the 1996 version of Conner's film Looking for Mushrooms.Recommended Reading"American Horror Story": Ezekiel Kweku's brief, moving and must-read analysis of trying to analyze the proliferating videos of deaths at the hands of the American police:The postmortem, the part we’re going through now, is also tiring. The videos of the death go viral, everyone talks about how shocking it is, which...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

Before his masterful Sunset Song begins its U.S. run, Terence Davies will be given a complete retrospective at MoMI. His self-titled trilogy screens on Saturday and Sunday; the latter day also brings Distant Voices, Still Lives and, with a post-screening Q & A to boot, The Long Day Closes.

Metrograph

“Welcome...

This spring, David Domingo, one of Spain’s most important underground filmmakers, embarks on his first U.S. tour, organized by Los Angeles Filmforum. He is presenting his unique super-8 films in super-8mm. Domingo, aka Stanley Sunday lets his imagination run wild and exposes his own fantastic universe through a highly iconoclast and hilarious associative cascade. His personal imagery includes a series of popular artifacts and icons such as Disney films, Michael Jackson, picture-card albums, comic-book superheroes, and cassette.

There is also a homoerotic imagery and a series of recurring motifs with an explicit sexual symbology, such as the phallic Frankfurt Weiner, which has become his trademark. By combining footage taken from classic films or B-movies with his own shootings, and abstract moments with life-action scenes played by his own “star-system”, David Domingo deconstructs normal hierarchies and cause-effect approaches in order to generate a continuous flow of images which create surprising and enigmatic associations.

Here are the details:

What: David Domingo: A Super 8 Odyssey. David Domingo in person from Spain!

When: Sunday April 24, 2016, 7:30 pm.

Where: At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028

Tickets: $10 general; $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.

Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at http://daviddomingo.bpt.me or at the door.

Screening:

A Super 8 Odyssey: A program of David Domingo’s splendorous Super 8 films

- "Súper 8" (Super 8) (1996, color, sound, 7:44)

-"La mansión acelerada" (The Speedy Mansion) (1997, b&w, sound, 10 min.)

-"Desayunos y meriendas" (Breakfast and Snacks) (2002, color, sound, 7 min.)

-"Rayos y centellas" (What the…!) (2004, color, sound, 3:52)

-"Película sudorosa" (Sweaty Movie) (2009, color/b&w, sound, 18 min.)

-"A Movie that Portrays the Wonders of the World as Seen Through the Eyes of a Cat" (Disney Attraction Highlights Nº 1) (2009, color/b&w, sound, 5 min.)

David Domingo (aka Stanley Sunday, aka Davidson) was born in Valencia in 1973. He is currently based in Barcelona. Through 18 short films, 3 feature-length videos (including his personal vision of Disney´s "Bambi and The Exorcist. The Musical"), plenty of music videos for independent bands, crazy live performances of Super 8 and 16 mm screenings, and his quinquennial fanzine “One day in the life of Jonas Mekas”, he has become one of the main underground film makers in Spain. In his early days he just used a VHS camera and player to make remakes, found footage films and homemade short films starred by his sister and grandmother. However, he soon turned to Super8, the format most of his work is filmed on. He shows a deep knowledge of avant-garde and experimental film tradition, paying homage to the films by Bruce Conner, Andy Warhol, Iván Zulueta, Kenneth Anger or the Kuchar Brothers through quotations and references.

After broadening his horizons through the incursion in 16 mm filmmaking, more recently he has started to use digital technology, which has enabled him to go beyond by finding new textures and possibilities.

David Domingo’s films have been screened and exhibited in some of the main museums, art centers and film festivals in Spain, such as Xcèntric (the cinema of the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo and La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe and S(8) Mostra de cine periférico in Coruña, Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia or Valencia´s Festival Cinema Jove.

The program “A Super 8 Odyssey” shows his most emblematic Super 8 films, starting with his acclaimed first short film, Super 8 (1996), which was chosen as part of the traveling film program “From ecstasy to rapture. 50 years of the other Spanish cinema”, curated by the Contemporary Culture Center from Barcelona (Cccb), and screened at the Acmi (Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia), Anthology Film Archives (NYC, USA), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC, USA), Tiff Cinematheque (Toronto, Canada), Pacific Cinematheque (Vancouver, Canada), Národní filmový archiv in Prague (Czech Republic), Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), Tate Modern (London, UK), Wro Art Center (Wroclaw, Poland), or National Gallery of Art (Vilnius, Lituania), amongst many other venues.

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...

51st, 52nd, 53rd New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Heart of a Dog director Laurie Anderson has designed the 53rd New York Film Festival poster, joining the ranks of Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Richard Avedon, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Diane Arbus, Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Bridges, Maurice Pialat, John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons.

The 2015 New York Film Festival poster

Even though this year's New York Film Festival runs from September 25 through October 11, the Opening Night Gala world premiere of Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk in 3D, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit with Ben Kingsley, Charlotte Le Bon and Ben Schwartz, will be held on September 26.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center Board Chairman Ann Tenenbaum expressed her delight when the new poster was announced “We are thrilled to welcome Laurie Anderson to the Nyff family, and to have an artist of her...

Ross Lipman is a filmmaker and restorationist who, working for the UCLA Film & Television Archive, has made astounding contributions to film culture, restoring films by John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger, Charles Burnett and Kent Mackenzie. The list goes on. His latest completed restoration is Film (1965), the legendary 24-minute work written by Samuel Beckett (his only screenplay), directed by Alan Schneider (though Beckett was a constant presence on the set), and starring Buster Keaton. Now he's working on Notfilm, a "kino-essay" about Film's making—and we need to help him complete it. » - David Hudson...

Ross Lipman is a filmmaker and restorationist who, working for the UCLA Film & Television Archive, has made astounding contributions to film culture, restoring films by John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger, Charles Burnett and Kent Mackenzie. The list goes on. His latest completed restoration is Film (1965), the legendary 24-minute work written by Samuel Beckett (his only screenplay), directed by Alan Schneider (though Beckett was a constant presence on the set), and starring Buster Keaton. Now he's working on Notfilm, a "kino-essay" about Film's making—and we need to help him complete it. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of news and views: Charles Mudede on John Sayles's The Brother from Another Planet, André Gregory and Wallace Shawn's list of top ten Criterion releases, Terrence Rafferty on Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge, Mike D'Angelo on John Ford and Native Americans, Philippa Snow on Ana Lily Armirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, Patrick Wang on Lisa Joyce's performance in Jonathan Demme's A Master Builder, Kevin Hatch on Bruce Conner, Ryan Gilbey on Wim Wenders, interviews with Jia Zhangke, Hannah Gross and Deragh Campbell—and more. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of news and views: Charles Mudede on John Sayles's The Brother from Another Planet, André Gregory and Wallace Shawn's list of top ten Criterion releases, Terrence Rafferty on Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge, Mike D'Angelo on John Ford and Native Americans, Philippa Snow on Ana Lily Armirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, Patrick Wang on Lisa Joyce's performance in Jonathan Demme's A Master Builder, Kevin Hatch on Bruce Conner, Ryan Gilbey on Wim Wenders, interviews with Jia Zhangke, Hannah Gross and Deragh Campbell—and more. » - David Hudson...

First in New York and then in Los Angeles, Serge Bromberg will be presenting new restorations of films made by Charles Chaplin between 1915 and 1917. More goings on in the next few days: Darren Aronofsky and Patti Smith in New York, Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner in Los Angeles, James Benning and Richard Linklater in San Francisco, Orson Welles and Lav Diaz in Seattle, the Austin Asian American Film Festival, plus Gregory J. Markopoulos in Vienna and Alexandra Navratil in Zurich. » - David Hudson...

First in New York and then in Los Angeles, Serge Bromberg will be presenting new restorations of films made by Charles Chaplin between 1915 and 1917. More goings on in the next few days: Darren Aronofsky and Patti Smith in New York, Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner in Los Angeles, James Benning and Richard Linklater in San Francisco, Orson Welles and Lav Diaz in Seattle, the Austin Asian American Film Festival, plus Gregory J. Markopoulos in Vienna and Alexandra Navratil in Zurich. » - David Hudson...

In a festival whose dedication to celluloid is readily apparent, why not declare it directly? And so one of the Vienna International Film Festival's Special Programs this year is a bastion of that most wonderful format, 16mm film. Programmed by Katja Wiederspahn and Haden Guest with an admirably variegated range, the programs were gathered around collective films, war films, sex films, expanded cinema, and more. Key to the section's expanse, which begins in the 1920s and touches every decade between here and there, is also in highlighting new work done in this increasingly outmoded, "out of date," and unprojectionable format. Included amongst these are films every bit as exciting as the history and canon "Revolution in 16mm" touches on: Jodie Mack's Razzle Dazzle (written about here), Richard Touhy's masterpiece of color Ginza Strip, and, most excitingly, a quartet of new films by Nathaniel Dorsky, the film poet who makes...

Why don’t we take humor seriously? There have been exceptions to the pattern. Bruce Conner’s films were funny, but he “made up” for it by having an instantly recognizable style. The avant-garde comic whose work has probably been afforded the most serious attention over the years is Owen Land, but this is owing to the nature of his jokes. They are academic, abstruse and deeply hermetic, lending them an air of the “funny-strange” that offsets any perceived frivolity in his moments of “funny-ha-ha” (jokes about salted plums, giant pandas or outright parodies of Hollis Frampton). As I often point out, P. Adams Sitney’s classic tome Visionary Film, now in its third edition, addresses pranksters George and Mike Kuchar in a single sentence, which strikes me as damning evidence for the prosecution.>> - Michael Sicinski...

Why don’t we take humor seriously? There have been exceptions to the pattern. Bruce Conner’s films were funny, but he “made up” for it by having an instantly recognizable style. The avant-garde comic whose work has probably been afforded the most serious attention over the years is Owen Land, but this is owing to the nature of his jokes. They are academic, abstruse and deeply hermetic, lending them an air of the “funny-strange” that offsets any perceived frivolity in his moments of “funny-ha-ha” (jokes about salted plums, giant pandas or outright parodies of Hollis Frampton). As I often point out, P. Adams Sitney’s classic tome Visionary Film, now in its third edition, addresses pranksters George and Mike Kuchar in a single sentence, which strikes me as damning evidence for the prosecution.>> - Michael Sicinski...

Sundance coverage continues with Glenn on "The Girl from Nagasaki"

Avant-garde cinema isn’t for all audiences. The Girl from Nagasaki proves that it’s not for all directors, either. For whatever virtues Michel Conte has as an artist and a photographer (of which I am unfamiliar), filmmaking may not be of the same league. His debut feature, co-directed alongside his wife Ayako Yoshida, is a wild re-interpretation of Puccini’s famed Japanese-set opera, Madame Butterfly that dissolves into an assault of seemingly meaningless imagery; an experimental, visually symphonic and unfortunately misjudged piece of cinema.

Taking the story of Cio-Cio San and her breakdown at the absence of her American soldier husband and father of her child, Conte’s film at least fails while attempting something bizarrely different. Sadly, in his effort to turn the table on the conventions of narrative film, he has crafted a sort of Frankenstein’s...

On November 18 at the Academy Film Archive in Hollywood, California, Jeff Lambert of the National Film Preservation Foundation presented a selection of experimental films that will be included on the upcoming DVD box set Treasures VI: Next Wave Avant-Garde.

A follow-up to the hugely popular Treasures IV box set, which was released in 2009, the new Treasures VI will focus primarily on the so-called “second wave” of avant-garde filmmakers of the ’70s and ’80s, many of whom were taught and influenced by the “first wave” of filmmakers found on Treasures IV. As such, Treasures VI will include work by lesser known and appreciated filmmakers from a typically overlooked period in underground film history.

Lambert announced at the event that Treasures VI will include 33 films by 28 filmmakers, then proceded to screen six of those films. Those six were:

A Trip to Indiana, dir. Curt McDowell and Ted Davis

Plumb Line, dir. Carolee Schneemann

Radio Adios,...

November 18

7:30 p.m.

Linwood Dunn Theater

1313 Vine Street

Hollywood, California 90028

Hosted by: Academy Film Archive

Jeff Lambert of the National Film Preservation Foundation will be on hand to present selections from the highly anticipated “Treasures VI” DVD collection, which will be focused on avant-garde and experimental films.

While the exact contents of Treasures VI have not been released yet, this screening is said to include work by Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Conner and Andrea Callard.

As this screening is part of the Academy Film Archives’s series on film preservation, Lambert will lead a discussion about the process and challenges of preserving avant-garde films.

A report on this screening event, including titles and descriptions of the films shown, can be found here.

Another article will be written when the contents of the Treasures VI box set is announced.

From The Pocono Record, The Stroudsburgs, Pa. – Sat., Feb. 5, 1966. Article Excerpt:

Film Can Borrow From All Arts

By Charlotte Roberts

Pocono Record Reporter

Stroudsburg – As an art form, film is unique in its capacity for incorporating elements from other art forms.

To projected photography have been added the dimensions of motion, sound, graphic art, drama, and frequently music and dance.

“Underground” film makers have begun to realize further dimensions which can be projected on film. Some film artists paint and scratch designs directly on film to evolve a new kind of moving art.

One journalist has noted three directions in the experiments of contemporary film makers. He writes that they are all forms of departure from the narrative or dramatic form “which has dominated the major body of cinema since the early 1900s:

“That of the realists who pursue an unvarnished view of life; and in contrast the work of...

Over at IndieWire, A.D. Jameson has written a compelling article about whether or not GIFs (the bitmap image format known as Graphics Interchange Format) can be considered cinema. The piece is miles from a imminently clickable gimmick made to start an argument – Jameson’s case is intelligently and thoroughly argued, and he trots out everything from Bruce Conner’s A Movie to Charles and Ray Eames’s Atlas to make it. While far from a heated question (as Jameson points out, the question of whether or not gifs are movies presumes an argument that does not, in fact, exist), it’s an important one. With something as seemingly simple and trivial as the gif, we can ask not only what something called cinema means in and for the 21st century, but also how moving image communication in the age of the Internet communicates in particularly cinematic terms. So I offer something of a refutation, or...

News.

Above: Filmmaker Andrei Ujică in conversation with Dennis Lim.

Dennis Lim is the new year-round Cinematheque programmer for the Film Society at Lincoln Center. Not too long ago we reported Robert Koehler had taken the position, but due to family health issues, he has stepped down. We congratulate Dennis Lim and our thoughts are with Robert Koehler. He may not be a household name, but he meant a lot to those who knew him: Ric Menello passed away at the age of 60 last week. Menello is known for co-writing Two Lovers and Lowlife with James Gray, and for directing this. Take a look at the Ditmas Park Corner blog's remembrance of Menello.

Editor of The Chiseler and Notebook contributor Daniel Riccuito has a new book coming out, and it's a humdinger: The Depression Alphabet Primer, with illustrations by Tony Millionaire. You can find a sample of the delights...

News.

The latest issue from Bright Lights Film Journal has arrived, featuring pieces on Godard, Polanski, a feature article on film editing, and much more. The first of two Kickstarter projects to bring to your attention: Mason Cardiff, son of the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff who worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell and John Huston among others, is trying to raise money in order to restore his father's film Steel:

"During World War 2 he was assigned films to photograph about the war effort. One of these films was called Steel.

Steel was made in 1945 as World War 2 was approaching its end. Shot in several locations around England, this beautiful film shows the process of making steel chronicling the journey from the iron fields to the steelworks.

This 30-minute film uses the American process of Technicolor to spotlight some of the highly skilled craftsmen who for generations devoted their working lives to steel.

The Montreal International Documentary Festival (Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal – Ridm) starts on Wednesday, November 7th. My Dad worked for the National Film Board for 30 years in Montreal, Ottawa, Fredericton, Halifax and Montreal (again). Growing up as an Nfb brat was to grow up breathing the language of cinema and to believe passionately that the divisions between animation, documentary, short films and features were artificial – like pretending that vanilla ice cream and chocolate ice cream weren’t different flavours, but completely different species of frozen milk-based desserts.

That said, there is no denying that the general public believes in that artificial division and that documentary film suffers from it, so Ridm, Québec’s only documentary film festival is our best local opportunity to show some love to documentaries. I would urge anyone in Montreal to take a chance and check out some of the films that Ridm is programming.

This week’s Must Read: Making Light of It has posted another one of its wonderful filmmaker profiles, this time for Marie Menken.Here’s a new site to take notice of: The Avant-Garde Film Index, which does exactly what its name implies, indexing experimental, avant-garde and underground films. The site appears to be in its very early stages, but we wish them the best of luck and we’ll keep our eye on it as it grows into the essential resource we’re sure it’ll become.At the Chicago Reader, Ben Sachs interviewed filmmaker Lori Felker about a program of films by Robert Nelson that screened over the weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center.The Tucson Weekly profiles the Arizona Underground Film Festival, which is going on right now and is having its biggest year ever, especially focusing on the film The Exhibitionists.For the next couple of months,...

Dear Fern,

I'm glad you caught Oliveira's Gebo and the Shadow too, and inadvertently placed it next to To the Wonder. I felt like those were inverse films of each other: one constantly floating, the other firmly rooted; one whose spoken words are all offscreen, the other who's words are all stringently, theatrically on camera; the Malick repeating abstractions on light and love, the Oliveira on loss and misery. And each resolutely, repetitiously dedicated to these methods of presentation, fluid, searching philosophy in flitting figures vs. the concrete weight of bodies, age, poverty. Gebo, based on a play by Raul Brandão, saves its magic for outside of its single setting house, a glimpse of a Virgin Mary on a street corner, the flat, computer generated harbor you mention that opens the film, hands coming out of the shadows to grasp at the audience like the gunfighter who ends Edwin S. Porter...

September is here again, and it's time to delve into the cinematic bounty of the Wavelengths section of the Toronto International Film Festival, that rambunctious and idiosyncratic corner of the Reitman Machine largely cordoned off from commercial concerns and set aside for lovely and sometimes difficult film art. Despite the ever-changing profile of Tiff, stalwart programmer Andréa Picard has [cue needle-scratching-record sound] What? Yes, last year at this time, the avant-garde community thought we were seeing Ms. Picard leaving this position behind. Fortunately for us all, Tiff won her back.

And this is where things get interesting. Starting with this 2012 edition of the festival, the Wavelengths section is a much more broadly based, festival-wide category. In essence, it now subsumes the old Visions designation, which was Tiff’s home for formally challenging, feature-length arthouse fare. This merger, which may seem like a bit of a shotgun wedding to some, does in fact make sense.

Robert Downey Sr.’s films are ribald, socially-conscious, highly experimental works that make Richard Lester’s oeuvre seem polite and Godard’s plot-heavy. Though he achieved cult success with 1969’s Putney Swope, some of Downey’s other, more radical works from the period are arguably more interesting, and their revival by way of an Eclipse box set is exceptional news. Up All Night With Robert Downey Sr. brings together five early films which show the director at his unhinged best, and if nothing else should prove a hedge against Downey becoming a mere footnote to his more famous son’s career.

A part of New York’s avant-garde film scene in the 60s, Downey screened his works alongside underground icons Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger. What he shared with his contemporaries was a patent disregard for convention and an ability to make films on the cheap. He cast his friends and family,...

Interior and exterior spaces are transformed into mystical places in Peggy Ahwesh‘s lyrical meditation of an experimental short film, Bethlehem.

While the film is mostly about general states of being, she does manage to tie in two actual Bethlehems: The most famous one in Jerusalem and the other one in mid-east Pennsylvania, which is Ahwesh’s home state.

Ahwesh also alternates between inside and outside spaces, as well as between populated locations and people-less ones, giving all the same mythic quality through, obviously, the lyrical score, but also how the mostly non-moving camera soaks in its subjects through obtuse angles and framing. Many shots, particularly of Ahwesh’s human subjects, are from below or in intense close-up, granting them an element of grandeur even though they are occupying fairly mundane spaces.

While the film has an epic quality to it, Ahwesh describes it as having a very personal basis:...

Amos Vogel, creator of the influential Manhattan avant garde film club Cinema 16 and co-founder of the New York Film Festival, died Tuesday in his apartment off Washington Square Park. He was 91. With New York missing the serious film societies prevalent in his native Austria, Vogel and his wife Marcia in 1947 founded Cinema 16 to screen "films you cannot see elsewhere." Photos: Hollywood's Notable Deaths of 2012 During the next 16 years, Vogel opened the public's eyes to such filmmakers as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Brian De Palma, Georges Franju, Richard Lester,

read more...

Larry Jordan, occasionally known in more formal circles as Lawrence Jordan, has been making experimental and animation films for half a century now. He grew up in Denver, won a scholarship to Harvard, then dropped out to start a theater back in Colorado with his high school friend, Stan Brakhage. "Stan was always the director," Jordan wrote in a remembrance in the Millennium Film Journal in 2003. "He seemed to have far-reaching radar for locating people and works in the art world. Five of our gang came out to San Francisco in about 1954. (Stan came first — always the avant-garde.) When I arrived, he was living in the basement of poet Robert Duncan and painter Jess Collins. We had one old car, a flatbed trailer for our gear, and about five films between us. So naturally we started out to tour California, showing our wares."

They eventually wound up in New York,...