As I mentioned yesterday, Farran Smith Nehme will be introducing a screening of Leo McCarey‘s The Awful Truth (1937) tomorrow afternoon at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Directly afterwards, Peter Labuza, who also has a new book out, Approaching the End: Imagining the Apocalypse in American Film, will introduce a screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995). “A pronounced failure at the box-office the first time out, this button-pushing science-fiction sprawler is, with the benefit of hindsight, one of the most distinctive Hollywood films of its decade,” writes Eli Goldfarb for the L.
J. Hoberman for Tablet: “Created by the Hungarian media artist Péter Forgács using film material largely drawn from the 75 or so landsmenshaftn films, mainly 16mm and 8mm amateur movies of Polish Jewish communities, made between World Wars I and II and held in the YIVO archives, Letters to Afar is played out on nine intermittently reconfigured screens. Projected images are variously doubled, frozen, mirrored, slowed down, or staggered, their shadowy presence underscored by the Klezmatics’ spare, almost jazzy accompaniment and occasional bits of ambient sound. Forgács’s new work is the most epic and immersive example of what might be called the Jewish material-memory film, a form defined by the reworking of amateur movies by or about (mainly) European Jews and their New World descendants.”
On view at the Museum of the City of New York through March 22.
“Three years ago,” Paul Schrader tells Courtney Duckworth in Slate, “I was walking outside my 23rd Street building when a young woman approached me and said, ‘My God, it’s you! I’ve been looking at your picture all day.’ It turned out her name was Monya Rowe and she had a small gallery around the corner, on 22nd Street. She was in the process of curating a show titled Being Paul Schrader, a collection of art she’d chosen based on my films. I was very flattered and went to the opening and it was very nice. A couple years later, Monya contacted me again and asked if I would curate a show based on a theme of my choice. I chose the theme Absent Friends and mixed some work by her artists with art borrowed from friends, like Sally Mann and David Salle.” On view through January 4.
Los Angeles. Filmforum’s bringing Jesse McLean out west for a program called The Message is the Medium. Pamela Cohn talked with McLean about her award-winning work this summer for BOMB.
On Monday at REDCAT: Beyond 3D: The Animated World of David OReilly.
Barcelona. The exhibition Harun Farocki: 4 films from 1967–1997. An homage curated by Antje Ehmann will be on view at àngels barcelona through December 5. Carles Guerra for Art Agenda: “The unassuming atmosphere is the perfect setting for this 76-minute program bringing together examples from Farocki’s varying and strategic forms of narrative, from militancy to critique. The Words of the Chairman (1967) and Their Newspapers (1968) recall the agitprop and politically informed practices in art and film of the late 1960s; whereas Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on a film based on Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” (1983) and The Expression of Hands (1997) are representative of his strong and analytical approach to film culture.”
Kassel. Two exhibitions open at the Fridericianum tomorrow: Paul Sharits: A Retrospective and Eric Baudelaire: FRMAWREOK FAMREWROK FRMAEOWRK FOMARERWK.
Vienna. “Can we say that with the demise of film a central allegory of the long 20th century is also in the process of disappearing?” This and other questions are to be addressed from Wednesday through Sunday at the Austrian Film Museum as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations. The Invisible Cinema: Film, Art, History, and the Museum will feature lectures by and conversations with Nicole Brenez, Chris Dercon, Noam M. Elcott, Daniel Fitzpatrick, Lars Henrik Gass, Siegfried Mattl, Winfried Pauleit, and Jacques Rancière.
For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily. Get Keyframe Daily in your inbox by signing in at fandor.com/daily.
