REFLECTIONS ON FILM CULTURE

Rushes: Berlinale | Tech | Noir | Sundance

OCTOBER

18.January.2012 Berlinale announced yesterday that a newly reconstructed version of Sergei Eisenstein’s October will premiere as part of the “Red Dream Factory” Retrospective program. The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra will perform Edmund Meisel’s original score for the gala screening at the Friedrichstadt-Palast. The festival also announced several more presentations in its Berlinale Speciale program, including a screening of Volker Schlöndorff’s Der Fangschuss in honor of the 60th anniversary of the French film journal Positif, as well as a showing of Ulrike Schamoni’s documentary Farewell to Frogs to mark the 50th anniversary of the Oberhausen Manifesto which famously declared, “The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.” The Oberhausen anniversary has inspired an informative new web resource.

From the new issue of Filmmaker comes an intriguing, somewhat loopy bit of futurism by filmmaker Lance Weiler called “Listen As Your Story Talks to the Internet.” Weiler speculates how the rapid proliferation of wireless technologies is creating new reality-based interfaces for film narrative: “Within a few years, most things—from cars to appliances to toys—will be able to wirelessly interface with the Internet. Think of them as objects in search of a story.”

Whether you think this sounds like a storyteller’s dream or Orwell’s nightmare, technology is evidently on people’s minds heading into this year’s Sundance Film Festival. In the New York Times festival director John Cooper reflects talks with Brooks Barnes about how the evolving speed of the filmmaking process has resulted in movies handling current events with greater alacrity: “‘After 9/11 we didn’t start seeing films reacting to it until a few years later,” he said, “But even when the recession hit a few years after that, you felt the impact of it more quickly.’”

The tenth annual Noir City Film Noir Festival opens this Friday at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre with a Frisco-themed double bill of Dark Passage and The House of Telegraph Hill. Matt Sussman raises the specter of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander in his preview of the “dame-heavy titles” playing this year’s festival: “Something of Salander’s icy remove is detectable in mid-1960s Angie Dickinson, who will be feted and interviewed in person at a double bill of two of her best: The Killers (1964) and Point Blank (1967). Whereas Ava Gardner simmered her way through Robert Siodmak’s 1948 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, the temperature of Dickinson’s Killers mob girl is harder to take in Don Siegel’s remarkably brutal remake: a Monroe in harsher lines with nothing of the little girl lost about her.” Sussman also nods to the ongoing Henri-Georges Clouzot (who went down with the Inferno) retrospective at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive for a “more nuanced gloss on noir’s troubled women.”

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