REFLECTIONS ON FILM CULTURE

DAILY | Briefing: Chris Marker on May Day

Looks like we picked the right day to launch Keyframe Daily. It’s a newsy May 1, but before getting to all that, I want to point out an essay that addresses the theme of the day head on. At the blog dedicated to Chris Marker, the blindlibrarian recommends Trevor Stark’s “‘Cinema in the Hands of the People’: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film,” recently published in October (PDF): “Stark takes a comprehensive look back at the rencontres of filmmakers and striking workers under the name Groupe Medvedkine, situating Marker’s role and that of many others in the making of À bientôt j’espère (1967-68) and Classe de lutte (1968), while connecting the film-making initiatives to Marker’s personal journey excavating the legacy of Alexander Medvedkine. He also touches strikingly on Godard’s attempts to tackle issues of self-representation of workers in his Groupe Dziga Vertov, ‘with its parallel but ultimately irreconcilable claims for self-reflexivity, collectivity, and class consciousness.'”

Here’s a clip from Classe de lutte:

In other news. “Cinematic, again,” notes Toronto International Film Festival programmer Cameron Bailey, tweeting the news that Spartacus Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Paul Noble and Elizabeth Price have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.

Nominations for this year’s Tony Awards are out, with Once, the Broadway musical based on the 2006 film written and directed by John Carney, scoring eleven.

At Thompson on Hollywood, Sophia Savage has the recently announced full lineup for that northwestern marathon known as the Seattle International Film Festival, running May 17 through June 10.

Reading. For Bomb, Alex Zafiris has a terrific long talk with Light Industry founders Ed Halter and Thomas Beard, co-curators of the Whitney Biennial‘s film and video program.

What would we do without Catherine Grant? Her latest alert: “Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass onto its readers news of the birth of InMedia, an online French Journal, in English, of Media and Media Representations in the English-Speaking World.”

Not Coming to a Theater Near You has launched a month-long series on their favorite transformations, that is, films “about a single character’s evolution from one corporeal or mental state to another, and this evolution is typically impossible in a realistic sense.”

In the New Republic, David Thomson ruminates on the “Hawksian sub-text… risen to the surface” in Bringing Up Baby (1938).

Girish Shambu‘s been thinking about “the documentary presence of real musicians” in fictional films.

There’s a new profile up at Making Light of It: Andrew Noren.

Looking back on this year’s Ebertfest: David Bordwell and, for indieWIRE, Michał Oleszczyk.

In the works. “Of the major movies tentatively set for completion this year, but without firm release dates as yet, which will we actually see in theaters before the end of 2012?” asks Oliver Lyttelton at the Playlist, where he checks in on the progress of 15 titles, among them Tom Tyker and Andy and Lana Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas, James Gray’s Low Life, Wong Kar-wai‘s The Grandmasters, Park Chan-wook’s Stoker, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and Terrence Malick’s as-yet-untitled project (the one that’s neither Lawless nor Knight of Cups).

Variety‘s Jeff Sneider reports that Wagner Moura (Elite Squad) will be playing Federico Fellini in Henry Bromell’s Fellini Black and White: “Set in Los Angeles in March of 1957, story follows Fellini’s first voyage to America to attend the Oscars, during which he went missing for 48 hours and barely made it to the ceremony.” Also cast are Terrence Howard, Peter Dinklage and William H Macy.

Isabelle Huppert’s joined Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace, Terrence Howard and Dominic Cooper in Niels Arden Oplev’s thriller Dead Man Down, reports Deadline‘s Dominic Patten.

DVD/Blu-ray. Glenn Kenny‘s posted his “Just-Under-The Wire April 2012 Edition” of his Consumer Guide.

Viewing. You’ll have heard, but for the record, there’s a new trailer out for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.

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