“How to get a grip on Jacques Rancière’s approach to cinema?” Stoffel Debuysere offers “a few pointers, as a modest attempt to put some of his thinking in perspective.” This, in particular, leaps out: “Cinema, precisely because it is not an established language, because it escapes any systematic order of knowledge, as the living art of the democratic age, particularly lends itself to the method of emancipation: looking always also means acting.”
More reading. The July/August 2013 issue of the Brooklyn Rail is out, featuring the second part of Andrew Lampert‘s interview with Peter Kubelka, Joshua Sperling‘s interview with Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), Paul Dallas on Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, Leo Goldsmith on Matías Piñeiro, and Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker‘s interview with Margarethe von Trotta.
Speaking of whom, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Moira Weigel writes that “von Trotta has often repeated the familiar chiasmus that she is not a feminist filmmaker, but a filmmaker who happens to be female. Yet, she has built a career making biopics about important women and dramas that examine events in German history through their impact on ordinary women’s lives. Having started as an actress in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff, to whom she was married for two decades, von Trotta emerged as a director toward the end of the heyday of the New German Cinema.” Weigel then considers a trilogy, Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1979), Marianne and Juliane (1981), and Three Sisters (1988), before turning to Hannah Arendt, “also a secret sister film, or girlfriend crush film, the real subject of which is Arendt’s relationship to Mary McCarthy.”
“Phil Solomon‘s rare contribution to experimental film spans collaborations with Stan Brakhage all the way to machinima.” Doug Cummings introduces an interview for Moholy Ground Magazine that features an exclusive clip from American Falls (2010).
With Blue Jasmine out at the end of the month, Woody Allen’s been making the rounds. The Los Angeles Times‘s Mark Olsen is the latest to interview him.
Trailer for Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave
with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch,
Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard, and Brad Pitt
In the works. David Cronenberg has begun shooting Maps to the Stars, a Hollywood satire written by Bruce Wagner and featuring Robert Pattinson, John Cusack, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Olivia Williams, Sarah Gadon, and Evan Bird. Jeff Sneider reports for TheWrap.
For Cineuropa, Birgit Heidsiek reports on a round of projects that’ve just received funding. In Dominik Graf’s Die Zielfahnder: Flucht in die Karpaten (Police Investigator: Flight to the Carpathians), Ronald Zehrfeld goes after a Romanian criminal; Oskar Roehler’s Punk is an autobiographical project “about a 19 year-old who moves in the 1980s to West Berlin”; Özgur Yildirim’s Boy 7, based on the novel by Mirjam Mous, is about a boy who “wakes up disoriented on a subway train and doesn‘t know why the police are after him”; and we’ve already heard about Benoît Jacquot’s 3 Hearts, with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Catherine Deneuve, Léa Seydoux, and Benoît Poelvoorde, but it’s nice to hear that the film’s getting another little boost.
Beastie Boy Mike D (Michael Diamond) is in talks to join Ben Stiller, Adam Driver, Naomi Watts, and Amanda Seyfried in the cast of Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, reports the Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth.
New York. Ray L. Birdwhistell’s Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos (1969) and Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon’s The Ax Fight (1975) screen tonight at Light Industry.
