Carte Blanche: Scott Macaulay and 20 Years of Filmmaker Magazine opens tonight at MoMA with Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998) and runs through April 15. Big congrats to Scott, who’s written up notes for each of the films and, at Filmmaker, naturally, adds: “I’m showing 11 features in addition two programs highlighting short work from our ’25 New Faces’ series, and early on, when putting this program together, I realized that it was pretty impossible to summarize the history of the magazine, much less the last 20 years of American independent film, in 12 days. So, drawing mostly from the MoMA collection, I’ve curated a mix of seminal works, passions and idiosyncrasies—a blend of films that have been important to the magazine and its readers.”
Also in New York, and also at MoMA, running through May 6, is The Weimar Touch. Graham Fuller at Artinfo: “As opposed to a conventional retrospective of German Expressionist films made during the Weimar Republic (1918-33), the program was curated from subsequent international movies that were topically or stylistically shaped by the movies of that era, or shared talent with them. Expressionism—described by Thomas Elsaesser as ‘a rebellious artistic intervention’—was only one strand of a cinema that in ‘the battle between popular culture and high culture tilts notably in favor of the popular.'”
“Tonight, Light Industry will reconstruct the January 21, 1926 inaugural screening (or séance) at the Studio des Ursulines, among the most influential cinemas in interbellum France. On that date, the Montparnasse theater presented a triple bill of Léonce Perret‘s Mimosa, la dernière grisette (1910), a re-edited version of René Clair and Francis Picabia’s Dada interlude Entr’acte (1925), and G.W. Pabst’s Weimar morality tale Joyless Street (1924), establishing the cine-club format of combining early cinema (‘avant-guerre,’ or pre-WWI), the avant-garde, and feature films outside commercial distribution, often foreign.”
The 20th New York African Film Festival opened last night with Ousmane Sembène’s Guelwaar (1992) and runs through April 25. Christine Delorme’s documentary Ousmane Sembène All At Once (2008) screens on Monday, and Aaron Cutler writes: “While preferring to write literature, Sembène—who was born in 1923 and died in 2007—saw cinema as ‘a kind of shared myth for the public’ that could accessibly teach the need for Africa’s freedom from European colonialism and its legacy in both tragic and comic ways.”
Also in the L, Max Nelson recommends Miguel Gomes‘s The Face You Deserve (2004), screening on Saturday as part of The Life of Film: Celebrating a Decade of Reverse Shot, a series at the Museum of the Moving Image on through Sunday.
Tonight at 92YTribeca, Bilge Ebiri, Godfrey Cheshire, and Simon Abrams present John Boorman’s Leo the Last (1970).
PIG/1334 (Nico B, 1998/2011) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.
Tomorrow at the Spectacle Theater: PIG/1334, with director Nico B in attendance.
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