Lots going on besides Tribeca, Boston, and San Francisco, and we begin in New York, where James Nares’s Street is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 27. It’s “an engrossing and celebratory hour-long, oversized video projection of life in New York City,” writes J. Hoberman at the NYRBlog, “fashioned from sixteen hours of material, recorded in six-second bursts from a vehicle moving through city streets at a rate of thirty miles per hour. Nares used a high-speed Phantom camera capable of filming up to one thousand frames per second; this footage was then slowed down by a factor of twenty so that each six-second pan was distended to two minutes, transforming the artist’s urban safari into a smooth, continuous glacial crawl…. Street may be considered a descendent of the moving panoramas—theatrical spectacles that flourished, mainly in England, France, and the United States, from the late 1700s into the early twentieth century.”
Los Angeles. TCM’s Classic Film Festival opens today and runs through the weekend, and in the Weekly, Michael Nordine suggests that the joys of the fest “are twofold: seeing perennial favorites on a big screen for the first time and discovering unearthed gems for the first time anywhere. The former category is as stacked as ever this year—highlights include John Huston‘s The African Queen, William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur and a brand-new restoration of Terrence Malick’s Badlands.” But he particularly recommends Claude Autant-Lara’s La Traversée de Paris (1956), with “the legendary Jean Gabin (of Grand Illusion, Daybreak, and Pépé le Moko fame) as one of two black marketeers attempting to smuggle suitcases full of pork in Nazi-occupied Paris; it’s more or less impossible to find on DVD…. Perhaps the most enticing offering is the blacklisted Cy Endfield‘s Try and Get Me [1950], based on a real-life kidnapping incident from 1933, which led to an equally real lynch mob.” That one “represents the best of TCM Fest: a film that was potentially dangerous to watch when it was released and has been difficult to see in the decades since.”
In the Times, Susan King talks to execs at Warner Bros. and Sony about the new restorations of Funny Girl, “the 1968 musical that introduced Barbra Streisand to the big screen, and King Vidor‘s 1925 World War I epic The Big Parade, starring John Gilbert.” She also interviews Max von Sydow, who’ll be on hand for TCM’s tribute screenings of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975).
Update: Not Coming to a Theater Near You has just introduced a special section devoted to TCM’s festival, where reviews will be appearing over the next several days.
Chicago. Lew Ojeda: “This Saturday night at midnight, indie filmmaker and instructor Michael Smith will present Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira‘s very rarely seen and incredibly strange opera, The Cannibals (Os Canibais [1988]), for Facets Night School. Straddling between the two cinematic worlds of art house finesse and grind house excess (think Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe), The Cannibals promises to blow your mind (if you don’t blow your chunks in the process).” So Ojeda asks Smith all about it.
Criterion recommends catching Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours (1983), screening Saturday and Tuesday at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the series Starring Sandrine Bonnaire.
Toronto. The 20th anniversary edition of Hot Docs opens today and runs through May 5. The Globe and Mail‘s already posted reviews of over two dozen films, the Star‘s got capsules of 16, and, at the Film Experience, Amir begins his review of the opener, The Manor, by quoting its director, Shawney Cohen: “My friends had parents who were dentists or ran stores. My parents own a strip club.”
Seattle. “For those who don’t know, NFFTY (pronounced ‘nifty’) is the National Film Festival for Talented Youth, which has grown into the largest youth film festival in the world over the past seven years,” writes David Schmader in the Stranger, where he previews three titles.
Berlin. Wagner-Kino, a series of 20 films “enhanced by introductions, discussions, and musical performances,” not to mention a symposium that’ll lead to a book, opens today at the Zeughauskino and runs through May 31. Those who read German will want to see Thomas Groh‘s overview in die taz, “Der geistige Vater des Film-Pathos.”
Meantime, at realeyz, Andrew Horn looks back on this year’s Achtung Berlin festival.
London. There’s a John Boorman season on at the BFI accompanied by an exhibition of scripts, posters, photographs, and designs. Nathalie Morris gazes at a few of the items on display, including the Holy Grail and Lee Marvin’s shoe.
Ferrara. The Italian city in the Po Valley is the birthplace and childhood home of Michelangelo Antonioni, and Lo sguardo di Michelangelo. Antonioni e le arti, on view through June 9, is an exhibition at the Palazzo dei Diamanti that “traces the creative arc of Antonioni’s career, putting his work alongside that of great artists such as De Chirico, Morandi, Rothko and Pollock, and presenting a new and stimulating dialogue between film and painting, literature and photography.”
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