Before moving on to today’s roundup of cinema-related news and views, let me just say that our thoughts are with the victims of the drunken driver who tore through downtown Austin last night.
Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert wonder if it’s “really true that American cinema has largely been made irrelevant by television’s serial dramas and serious-minded comedies?… How can television replace cinema, if the two are utterly different media, with different artistic aims, temporalities, and commercial motivations? Why can’t we just enjoy both for what they are?” For a new symposium, “Home Theater,” they’ve challenged RS contributors to “select a television show, one that emerged within the past fifteen years or so during what has been called the television renaissance…, and also a corresponding film that would be fruitful to compare to that series.”
Andy Rector’s posted a newly rediscovered interview with Luc Moullet conducted by John W. Hughes and Bill Krohn in 1977.
Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s daughter—she scored Full Metal Jacket and shot that widely viewed documentary about the making of The Shining—has been tweeting pix of herself and her father. Paul Gallagher‘s gathered several onto one page at Dangerous Minds.
“Can Women Save Film Criticism?” is the question posed at the recent Fusion Film Festival in New York and, for Criticwire, Tomris Laffly reports on responses from Miriam Bale, Inkoo Kang, Farran Nehme and Dana Stevens.
“One of the best American films of the last few years is Joanna Arnow‘s i hate myself [smiley face],” argues Craig Keller. “Ostensibly it’s a ‘diary film,’ a term which means less and less as all our media converge into something indistinguishable between film, festival projection, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Simple Machine, NoBudge, and so on. Dan Sallitt has already beaten us all to the punch by expounding upon the nuances of the film back in July 2013.”
When Derek Jarman met William S. Burroughs, London 1982, via Dangerous Minds
The Library section of the Dirty Looks NYC site has become a vital resource for texts on experimental queer film, notes Jillian Steinhauer at Hyperallergic.
“The Exhibitionist’s most contentious borrowing from Cahiers is a version of its politique des auteurs.” The journal’s new senior editor, Julian Myers-Szupinska, explains.
New interviews at BOMB: Alan Licht with Michael Snow and Paolo Javier with Lynne Sachs.
“Recent studies on the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity on film hail cinema as the medium best equipped to take Classics out of the realm of the elite classroom and to make the subject speak to everyone,” writes Francesca Martelli in the TLS. “But any account of cinema’s debt to ancient texts and traditions poses a challenge. The imperative that underlies all ‘reception studies’—to engage fully with the post-classical medium that is supposedly in dialogue with the texts of classical antiquity—is particularly pressing in this instance. For if film is the medium that supplements and, in many cases, supplies the Western viewer’s cultural memory of the distant past, it is not a passive or inevitable receptacle of that past, but an autonomous art form with its own history. To deny or dilute that history is to patronize cinema, and to misunderstand how it has fashioned antiquity in its own image.”
“Metropolis [1927] may be Fritz Lang’s most famous silent film, and its popularity probably exceeds that of any of his sound films,” writes Cullen Gallagher. “However, more so than Metropolis or anything else from his silent period, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler [1922] is the moment when Lang fully comes into his own.” Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Lindsay Peters on Harakiri (1919), Jared Eisenstat on The Spiders (1919), Gallagher on The Wandering Shadow (1920), Veronika Ferdman on Four Around the Woman (1921) and Matt Barry on Destiny (1921).
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jon Boorstin, whose Mabel and Me: A Novel about the Movies will be out in April, describes how he fell hard for Mabel Normand.
It’s Jean Eustache Day @ DC’s.
IN OTHER NEWS
Richard Linklater “will receive the prestigious Founder’s Directing Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival, now in its 57th year,” reports Ryan Lattanzio for Thompson on Hollywood.
The Wolf of Wall Street Chest Thump Mix from Eclectic Method.
“A week after revealing their full feature film lineup, the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival [has] announced its lineup of 58 short films, 29 of which are world premieres.” And Nigel M. Smith‘s got ’em at Indiewire.
“Hong Kong multihyphenate Fruit Chan will be the guest of honor at the 16th Far East Festival in Udine, Italy, Europe’s biggest showcase of genre and mainstream Asian cinema,” reports Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli.
“The 2014 Sarasota Film Festival lineup looks—as ever—to be a nice mix of Sundance, SXSW and international titles, with a few discoveries to be had as well,” reports Sarah Salovaara for Filmmaker.
Der Tagesspiegel reports that cinematographer Michael Ballhaus is suffering from a form of glaucoma that’s slowly taking away his eyesight.
GOINGS ON
New York. “Does a museum show occupy space—or should it send us hurtling through it?” asks J. Hoberman in the New York Review of Books. “Such is loosely the premise of two very different New York shows, the New Museum’s Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s The Shadows Took Shape, both featuring art inspired by 1960s and 1970s science fiction films.”
“The documentaries of Kim Longinotto place viewers in impossibly tense and personal situations, steeping us in worlds that, as we watch, we can’t believe she secured access to,” writes Alan Scherstuhl in the Voice. “It’s heartening, then, that the women whose stories she tells are possessed of ferocious will and, just as vitally, a savvy adaptability.” Starting this weekend, Spectacle presents Three Films by Kim Longinotto.
Part 2 of the Japan Society’s tribute to the late scholar Donald Richie, Richie’s Electric Eight: The Bold & the Daring, begins today. The eight, by the way, are Shohei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima, Kohei Oguri, Kazuo Hara, Shunsuke Kaneko, Makoto Shinozaki, Kazuhiro Soda and Yoshitaro Nomura.
A new clip from Flicker Alley: Abel Gance‘s La Roue (1923)
San Francisco. The Center for Asian American Media film festival opens today and runs through March 23. In the Bay Guardian, Kimberly Chun celebrates the lineup’s female directors, while Cheryl Eddy previews the docs and talks with Hong Kong International Film Festival Society Executive Director Roger Garcia about the late, great Sir Run Run Shaw.
Chicago. The Reader‘s Ben Sachs previews the Nightingale‘s George Kuchar 16mm double feature, House of the White People and Unstrap Me!, both from 1968.
IN THE WORKS
“Elaine May and husband Stanley Donen have co-written a comedy about filmmaking to be produced by Mike Nichols. A private reading took place recently featuring Christopher Walken, Charles Grodin, Ron Rifkin, and Jeannie Berlin.” That’s just the cream that’s risen to the top of Film Comment editor Gavin Smith‘s new column at Filmlinc Daily. He also has news of projects in the works by Larry Clark, André Téchiné, Otar Iosseliani, Louis Garrel, Jim Jarmusch, Terrence Malick, Warren Beatty and many more.
Meantime, at Flavorwire, Jason Diamond‘s glad that all the attempts to adapt John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces have failed. It should never happen, he argues.
OBIT
“Hal Douglas, a voice-over artist who narrated thousands of movie trailers in a gravelly baritone heard by ‘audiences everywhere,’ as he might have put it, ‘thrilled by images never before seen … until now!,’ died on Friday,” reports Paul Vitello for the New York Times. “His dramatic range, from Olympian-thunderous to comic-goofy, suited him for trailers for movies as diverse as Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Coneheads, Meet the Parents and Lethal Weapon. (‘Under 17 not admitted without a parent.‘)”
ENDNOTES
Just before he headed back home to San Francisco, our new CEO, Ted Hope, spoke with Indiewire‘s Paula Bernstein at SXSW about Fandor’s role in that rapidly evolving eco-system we call cinema.
Listening (118’34”). On Filmwax Radio, Adam Schartoff interviews Lili Taylor, New Directors/New Films programmers Dennis Lim and Jytte Jensen, Eliza Hittman (It Felt Like Love) and Matt Wolf (Teenage).
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