4.April.2012: Pacific Film Archive’s bookish Raúl Ruiz retrospective continues this evening with The Penal Colony, the Chilean director’s loose adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” Fandor founder Jonathan Marlow conducted an interview with Ruiz before his untimely death last year that’s just been published on the Keyframe blog. Additionally, you can stream Ruiz’s 2003 film That Day on Fandor now.
Anthology Film Archives screens legendary avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos’s mid-’60s epic, The Illiac Passion, tonight along with his shorter film Bliss. Writing for Artforum on occasion of a Whitney retrospective of Markopoulous’ films in 1996—the first time many had screened in the States since the filmmaker left America for Europe in the 1960s—Kristen M. Jones wrote of The Illiac Passion, “For a viewer seeing this extravagant ode to creation some thirty years after its making, the film’s most plangent moments involve Markopoulos’ affectionate casting of friends as mythical figures—Andy Warhol’s Poseidon pumping on an Exercycle above a sea of plastic, Taylor Mead’s Demon leaping, grimacing, and streaming vermilion fringes, and Smith’s bohemian Orpheus, spending a quiet afternoon at home with Eurydice.” Tomorrow evening longtime Markopoulos champion P. Adams Sitney will deliver a lecture called “Markopoulos’ Vision” at the CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery.
You may have heard that a certain titanic blockbuster is returning to screens Wednesday retrofitted in 3D. The New York Times offers a demonstration of the technological fixes (“‘The ship still sinks,’ the director James Cameron said back in October”), while The Guardian’s Phil Hoad argues that Titanic marked the end of the “event movie.” The Village Voice’s Nick Pinkerton, meanwhile, compares the new Titanic unfavorably to the reboot of another Clinton-era franchise: American Pie. “As for the viewer, like myself,” he writes, “who saw Titanic as a teenager on the first go-round, it is certainly a difficult movie to grow up with, for it has so little use for adulthood.” Whereas, “Taken altogether, the Pie movies offer a cohesive worldview, showing each of life’s stages as the setting for fresh-yet-familiar catastrophes, relieved by a belief in sex, however ridiculous it might look, as a restorative force.”
Jason Hedrick continues his posts on the Ann Arbor Film Festival, which wrapped Sunday, with some notes on Craig Baldwin’s power point presentation last Thursday. “In a bit of a frenzy,” he writes, “Baldwin tied together the aggressiveness of the Dada-ists, the idealism of the Hippies, the action of the Situationists, the media savvy of the Culture Jammers, and the currency of the Occupy Movement in a sort of art lecture equivalent of the MC5 (with Guy Debord as the front man) that he called ‘Masochism of the Margins of the Society of the Spectacle.’”Even if you couldn’t make it to Michigan, Fandor is currently streaming seven of Baldwin’s culture jamming collage films.
Today’s Stanley Kubrick “news” comes courtesy of Shaun Usher’s Lists of Note blog. The Stanley Kubrick Archives book provides a notebook page of the auteur’s handwritten map of possible titles for Dr. Strangeglove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dr. Doomsday and his Nuclear Wisemen, anyone?
