REFLECTIONS ON FILM CULTURE

DAILY | Brooklyn Rail, Vilém Flusser, Celeste Holm

Video artist Jim Supanick: “The July/August issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes a recent conversation between myself and Montreal-based filmmaker Caroline Martel, whose new installation, Industry/Cinema, is on view at the Museum of the Moving Image until August 12.” Introducing the interview, Supanick notes that “Martel belongs to a vital artistic and critical tradition within Canada that actively engages with the history of technology and communications, a lineage that includes Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner, and Glenn Gould.”

Bovines

Emmanuel Gras’s ‘Bovines’

Also in the new Brooklyn Rail: Rebekah Rutkoff on the reconstruction of Gregory Markopoulos’s Eniaios, Steve MacFarlane on Ali Samadi Ahadi’s semi-animated Arab Spring documentary The Green Wave, “a bizarrely dogmatic watching experience,” and Daniel Walber: “The recent handful of wordless, zoological documentaries is one of the more charming surprises of the last few years. Critical acclaim for 2009’s Sweetgrass and 2010’s Le quattro volte has branched out into a bit of a mini-genre, including this year’s safari park entry from Denis Côté, Bestiaire. They have now been joined by Emmanuel Gras’s Bovines, a film perhaps even more poignant in its agrarian minimalism than its predecessors.”

More reading. “Of all the great philosophers whose work has brushed against cinema, Vilém Flusser may be the purest in his activity of theorizing.” Adrian Martin revises a piece for LOLA 2.

“When it comes to film culture, Wisconsin yields to no one in weird-assery,” argues David Bordwell. “I’ve chronicled Mad City Movie Mania on other occasions (here and here), and a current flap has just added to the annals of the addled. It revolves around Madison’s Orpheum Theatre, a 1927 movie palace that has gone through many incarnations.” He looks back on “the glorious, not to mention the inglorious, days of this old house.”

DVD/Blu-ray. For the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim revisits Ken Russell’s Altered States, “a Jekyll-Hyde head trip and a spaced-out meditation on science and spirituality” as well as “a time capsule of ’80s-style, early-MTV montage and special effects, which Russell piles on with typical gusto.”

Obit. “Academy Award winner Celeste Holm has died at age 95,” reports Brian Scott Lipton for TheaterMania. “Holm earned an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the film, Gentlemen’s Agreement, and received Oscar nominations for Come to the Stable and All About Eve. Her other films included The Tender Trap, High Society, and Three Little Girls in Blue.”

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