As 2022 came to a close, we asked seven writers and filmmakers to reflect on Jean-Luc Godard's memory. Starting from a single aspect of his filmmaking—a particular film, image, sound cue, or affecting experience with his work—their responses evoke the breadth of his revolutionary legacy. We're thankful they found the words.The pieces below are written by Ephraim Asili, Richard Brody, A.S. Hamrah, Rachel Kushner, Miguel Marías, Andréa Picard, and Lucía Salas.In Memoriam JLGWhen I was in high school in the 1980s, I drove 50 miles with some friends to see Breathless at a student screening in a big auditorium at UConn. How did we know this screening was happening? How did we know how to get there? How did we even know anything was happening anywhere, ever? We saw listings in newspapers and paid attention to flyers. We had maps in our cars. But above all, it...
- 1/30/2023
- MUBI
Above: French grande for Love in the Afternoon (aka Chloé in the Afternoon) which was the opening night film of the 10th New York Film Festival. Designer tbd.In the catalogue for the 10th New York Film Festival in 1972, festival director Richard Roud looked back on the first decade of the NYFF, musing on the changes in cinema of the previous 10 years: “a greater freedom of subject matter,” “an accompanying new freedom of form,” the obsolescence of “the tightly plotted film,” the rise of personal filmmaking and the inroads of political cinema and documentary techniques into narrative film. He also muses on international movements: the snuffing out of the Czech Renaissance (there were no Czech films in the 1972 festival), the rise of New Hollywood and American independent cinema, and the ebbing of the movement that had in many ways defined the festival to that point, the French New Wave:Some of...
- 9/29/2022
- MUBI
Vladimir and Rosa.“Cinema contains everything. It joins writing, painting, music. It is the most complete art.”—Juliet Berto, Ciné-Bulles, 19861Juliet Berto burst onto the Parisian film scene in the rich late 60s period of experimentation and radicalization, just as the New Wave diverged into competing streams of political and humanist directors. Her biography (what scant details are publicly available) is mythical, and tragically short: Annie Jamet, born and living in southern France, attends a Grenoble film screening where Jean-Luc Godard is present; the director, captivated by 19-year-old Annie, offers her a role in his film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Annie moved to Paris, and by the end 1967, Juliet Berto (as she is credited onscreen) had appeared in three Godard films, a relationship that would deepen over the course of the radical 60s. Berto then worked with Jacques Rivette during the 70s as a key collaborator and...
- 6/1/2022
- MUBI
The 2022 Taiwan International Documentary Festival (May 6 -15) devotes two of its iconic sections to filmmaking in pandemic times and to the creative use of archival materials in documentary. “Stranger than Documentary” and “DocuMemory”are long-running Tidf sections that have turned into doc film buffs’ favorites for their explorative and avant-garde spirit and unconventional programming.
13 unique new short films will be screened in “Stranger than Documentary: the Potential Future” to highlight the dramatic impact that the Corona pandemic has had not only on people’s lives around the globe, but also on the themes, forms, scope and production methods of filmmaking.
The selected works reflect a wide tableau of impressions, reflections, and innovative filmmaking techniques during the pandemic era, and span North America, Europe, the Philippines, Japan, China, and also Taiwan. As the pandemic has confined people’s movement, filmmakers began to turn to their private lives and daily routines. A...
13 unique new short films will be screened in “Stranger than Documentary: the Potential Future” to highlight the dramatic impact that the Corona pandemic has had not only on people’s lives around the globe, but also on the themes, forms, scope and production methods of filmmaking.
The selected works reflect a wide tableau of impressions, reflections, and innovative filmmaking techniques during the pandemic era, and span North America, Europe, the Philippines, Japan, China, and also Taiwan. As the pandemic has confined people’s movement, filmmakers began to turn to their private lives and daily routines. A...
- 4/19/2022
- by Adriana Rosati
- AsianMoviePulse
With fears our winter travel will need a, let’s say, reconsideration, the Criterion Channel’s monthly programming could hardly come at a better moment. High on list of highlights is Louis Feuillade’s delightful Les Vampires, which I suggest soundtracking to Coil, instrumental Nine Inch Nails, and Jóhann Jóhannson’s Mandy score. Notable too is a Sundance ’92 retrospective running the gamut from Paul Schrader to Derek Jarman to Jean-Pierre Gorin, and I’m especially excited for their look at one of America’s greatest actors, Sterling Hayden.
Special notice to Criterion editions of The Killing, The Last Days of Disco, All About Eve, and The Asphalt Jungle, and programming of Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load, among the better debuts in recent years.
See the full list of January titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.
-Ship: A Visual Poem, Terrance Day, 2020
5 Fingers, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1952
After Migration: Calabria,...
Special notice to Criterion editions of The Killing, The Last Days of Disco, All About Eve, and The Asphalt Jungle, and programming of Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load, among the better debuts in recent years.
See the full list of January titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.
-Ship: A Visual Poem, Terrance Day, 2020
5 Fingers, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1952
After Migration: Calabria,...
- 12/20/2021
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
Above: Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson in their Hudson Street apartment, New York City, 1967.“Manny Farber writes a visual, sensory account of his thoughts, not necessarily the polished and fully articulated ones, but those which cumulatively add up to the rich life of the mind.”—Josephine Halvorson“The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma.”—Patrick Star“You start anywhere and end up anywhere.”—Luc Sante2019 has turned out to be quite the year for film’s conquering hero, the writer and painter Manny Farber (1917–2008). The January-February 2019 issue of Film Comment featured a transcription of a never-published lecture delivered by Farber at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979. Helen Molesworth put on an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles called “One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art,” in which his celebrated love of go-for-broke termiting-tapeworming-fungusing served as a “starting point for assembling...
- 11/23/2019
- MUBI
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Museum of the Moving Image
A particularly outstanding weekend for “See It Big! Action” includes Die Hard on Friday, Big Trouble in Little China and Face/Off on Saturday, and Police Story this Sunday.
A series showcasing Diana Ross runs this weekend.
A spotlight on Mexico’s queer scene is underway.
Metrograph
A Jim Jarmusch series continues.
Museum of the Moving Image
A particularly outstanding weekend for “See It Big! Action” includes Die Hard on Friday, Big Trouble in Little China and Face/Off on Saturday, and Police Story this Sunday.
A series showcasing Diana Ross runs this weekend.
A spotlight on Mexico’s queer scene is underway.
Metrograph
A Jim Jarmusch series continues.
- 6/14/2019
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Jean-luc Godard + Jean-pierre Gorin: Five Films, 1969-1971 will be available on Blu-ray from Arrow Academy on February 27th
After finishing his film Weekend in 1967, Jean-Luc Godard shifted gears to embark on engaging more directly with the radical political movements of the era, and thus create a new kind of film, or, as he eventually put it: new ideas distributed in a new way. This new method in part involved collaborating with the precocious young critic and journalist, Jean-Pierre Gorin. Both as a two-person unit, and as part of the loose collective known as the Groupe Dziga Vertov (named after the early 20th-century Russian filmmaker and theoretician), Godard and Gorin would realize some political possibilities for the practice of cinema and craft new frameworks for investigating the relationships between image and sound, spectator and subject, cinema and society.
Included here are five films, all originally shot in 16mm celluloid, that serve...
After finishing his film Weekend in 1967, Jean-Luc Godard shifted gears to embark on engaging more directly with the radical political movements of the era, and thus create a new kind of film, or, as he eventually put it: new ideas distributed in a new way. This new method in part involved collaborating with the precocious young critic and journalist, Jean-Pierre Gorin. Both as a two-person unit, and as part of the loose collective known as the Groupe Dziga Vertov (named after the early 20th-century Russian filmmaker and theoretician), Godard and Gorin would realize some political possibilities for the practice of cinema and craft new frameworks for investigating the relationships between image and sound, spectator and subject, cinema and society.
Included here are five films, all originally shot in 16mm celluloid, that serve...
- 1/31/2018
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean-Luc Godard's La gai savoir (1969) is showing from January 18 - February 17, 2017 in many countries around the world as part of the retrospective For Ever Godard.Le gai savoir (Joy of Learning, 1969) is a film by Jean-Luc Godard which, unlike classics such as Breathless (1960) or Contempt (1963) is hardly a household name. Godard’s Weekend (1967) gives us an inkling of what is to come in its postscript production credit: What translates to mean “End of story” and then “End of cinema” flashes in blue lettering on a black backdrop; a moment later, we see that this word game has been created using a statement of the film’s visa control number. Of course, Godard had already been engaging in this kind of word play for years in his credits and intertitles. Although these statements could also be taken as being typical,...
- 2/6/2017
- MUBI
I have been thrilled to bring readers to the Remedial Film School at Film School Rejects.
Here are a select few of the films that notable film personalities and critics have had me watch…
Drew McWeeny chooses Dead Man.
Drew McWeeny of Hitfix.com is our first guest, and he chose Dead Man, saying it somehow is connected to the Dreamworks animated film Home, which opens March 27.
It’s time to get things started.
McWeeny explains: So why Dead Man?
When I have the entire sum total of every movie Jeff Bayer has not seen to choose from, and I choose Dead Man, it’s a fair question. What makes that movie special? Why should that film be seen by everyone, much less by Bayer specifically?
For one thing, when I bitch in public about feeling let down by Johnny Depp’s choices for the last decade, Dead Man is...
Here are a select few of the films that notable film personalities and critics have had me watch…
Drew McWeeny chooses Dead Man.
Drew McWeeny of Hitfix.com is our first guest, and he chose Dead Man, saying it somehow is connected to the Dreamworks animated film Home, which opens March 27.
It’s time to get things started.
McWeeny explains: So why Dead Man?
When I have the entire sum total of every movie Jeff Bayer has not seen to choose from, and I choose Dead Man, it’s a fair question. What makes that movie special? Why should that film be seen by everyone, much less by Bayer specifically?
For one thing, when I bitch in public about feeling let down by Johnny Depp’s choices for the last decade, Dead Man is...
- 1/7/2017
- by Jeff Bayer
- The Scorecard Review
Starting tomorrow, May 6, and on through June 6, MoMA will present the first complete North American retrospective of the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The program will then tour North America and Europe and coincides with the Austrian Film Museum's publication of Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, a collection of essays by John Gianvito, Harun Farocki, Jean-Pierre Gorin and others edited by critic, translator and filmmaker Ted Fendt. We're collecting critical assessments, beginning with J. Hoberman's for the New York Times. » - David Hudson...
- 5/5/2016
- Keyframe
Starting tomorrow, May 6, and on through June 6, MoMA will present the first complete North American retrospective of the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The program will then tour North America and Europe and coincides with the Austrian Film Museum's publication of Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, a collection of essays by John Gianvito, Harun Farocki, Jean-Pierre Gorin and others edited by critic, translator and filmmaker Ted Fendt. We're collecting critical assessments, beginning with J. Hoberman's for the New York Times. » - David Hudson...
- 5/5/2016
- Fandor: Keyframe
In 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film, Breathless, would make him an icon of French cinema, inaugurating a career that has consistently expanded society’s definitions and expectations of cinema. That film alone would have reason enough to consider him an important filmmaker, but Godard went on to direct fourteen more features through 1967, culminating with his attack on bourgeois culture, Weekend.
Following this extraordinary run of films, Godard found himself at a moment of great change. His romantic and artistic partnership with Anna Karina had ended, to be replaced with a new (but short-lived) marriage to Anne Wiazemsky, who would serve as a bridge to the current youth culture. Godard’s politics had also changed considerably since the 1950s. His conservatism, a relic of his parents’s politics, had been replaced with an interest in Maoism and an increasing distaste for anything evoking America. (Classic Hollywood cinema initially got a pass,...
Following this extraordinary run of films, Godard found himself at a moment of great change. His romantic and artistic partnership with Anna Karina had ended, to be replaced with a new (but short-lived) marriage to Anne Wiazemsky, who would serve as a bridge to the current youth culture. Godard’s politics had also changed considerably since the 1950s. His conservatism, a relic of his parents’s politics, had been replaced with an interest in Maoism and an increasing distaste for anything evoking America. (Classic Hollywood cinema initially got a pass,...
- 10/25/2015
- by Brian Marks
- SoundOnSight
Jean-Luc Godard in his youthful days. Jean-Luc Godard solution for the Greek debt crisis: 'Therefore' copyright payments A few years ago, Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, while plugging his Film Socialisme, chipped in with a surefire solution for the seemingly endless – and bottomless – Greek debt crisis. In July 2011, Godard told The Guardian's Fiachra Gibbons: The Greeks gave us logic. We owe them for that. It was Aristotle who came up with the big 'therefore'. As in, 'You don't love me any more, therefore ...' Or, 'I found you in bed with another man, therefore ...' We use this word millions of times, to make our most important decisions. It's about time we started paying for it. If every time we use the word therefore, we have to pay 10 euros to Greece, the crisis will be over in one day, and the Greeks will not have to sell the Parthenon to the Germans.
- 6/30/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
“Where Godard wrenches out, a saturator stirs in.” This suggestive statement, adapted from an article by Jean-Pierre Gorin, can trigger a close study of the work of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien—winner of Best Director award at the recent Cannes Film Festival for his magisterial The Assassin. In this audiovisual essay, however, we return to a movie of his that has yet to receive its full due: Millennium Mambo (2001)—and we pick not one of its most spectacular or lyrical passages, but an "ordinary," long-take scene that, on inspection, reveals a multi-layered complexity of construction.>> - Adrian Martin and Cristina Alvarez-Lopez...
- 6/14/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
“Where Godard wrenches out, a saturator stirs in.” This suggestive statement, adapted from an article by Jean-Pierre Gorin, can trigger a close study of the work of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien—winner of Best Director award at the recent Cannes Film Festival for his magisterial The Assassin. In this audiovisual essay, however, we return to a movie of his that has yet to receive its full due: Millennium Mambo (2001)—and we pick not one of its most spectacular or lyrical passages, but an "ordinary," long-take scene that, on inspection, reveals a multi-layered complexity of construction.>> - Adrian Martin and Cristina Alvarez-Lopez...
- 6/14/2015
- Keyframe
"Art of the Real" is returning to the Film Society of Lincoln Center with a celebration of Agnès Varda (who will attend!) and more:
"The 2015 edition, taking place April 10-26, will again feature dozens of new works from around the world and in a variety of genres alongside retrospective and thematic selections. Opening Night will premiere new works by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata (The Last Time I Saw Macao, Mahjong), Eduardo Williams, and Matt Porterfield (I Used to Be Darker), with all filmmakers attending the evening."
Above: For The Criterion Collection, kogonada's new video essay, "Mirrors of Bergman." Abderrahmane Sissako, the director of Timbuktu, will be heading Cannes' Cinéfondation and Short Films Jury. In his NY Times home video column, J. Hoberman writes on Richard Linklater's Boyhood and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. Richard Brody writes about Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of...
"The 2015 edition, taking place April 10-26, will again feature dozens of new works from around the world and in a variety of genres alongside retrospective and thematic selections. Opening Night will premiere new works by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata (The Last Time I Saw Macao, Mahjong), Eduardo Williams, and Matt Porterfield (I Used to Be Darker), with all filmmakers attending the evening."
Above: For The Criterion Collection, kogonada's new video essay, "Mirrors of Bergman." Abderrahmane Sissako, the director of Timbuktu, will be heading Cannes' Cinéfondation and Short Films Jury. In his NY Times home video column, J. Hoberman writes on Richard Linklater's Boyhood and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. Richard Brody writes about Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of...
- 2/18/2015
- by Notebook
- MUBI
Edited by Adam Cook
Above: the incredible new issue of Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema is online now under the theme of "Manny Farber: Systems of Movement". Among the included pieces is a conversation on Farber between Kent Jones and Jean-Pierre Gorin. As a welcome break from the Best of 2014 overload, David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson continue their tradition of instead focusing their attention on the best films of the year...90 years ago:
"These lists are our way of calling attention to important silent films that some readers may have overlooked. In one case here we point out a largely forgotten film that deserves to be better known, in the hope that an archive will take the hint. With the proliferation of silent-film festivals, of DVD and Blu-ray releases with restored prints and supplemental material, and of TCM’s eclectic screenings of foreign and silent titles, there seems to be considerably...
Above: the incredible new issue of Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema is online now under the theme of "Manny Farber: Systems of Movement". Among the included pieces is a conversation on Farber between Kent Jones and Jean-Pierre Gorin. As a welcome break from the Best of 2014 overload, David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson continue their tradition of instead focusing their attention on the best films of the year...90 years ago:
"These lists are our way of calling attention to important silent films that some readers may have overlooked. In one case here we point out a largely forgotten film that deserves to be better known, in the hope that an archive will take the hint. With the proliferation of silent-film festivals, of DVD and Blu-ray releases with restored prints and supplemental material, and of TCM’s eclectic screenings of foreign and silent titles, there seems to be considerably...
- 12/31/2014
- by Notebook
- MUBI
‘Starry Eyes’: The feel disturbed movie of the year
This film is at its very core a success story. A very demented, gory, horrifying and darkly comical success story – one with tinges of satanic cult horror wrapped in psychological terror. The plot follows a young aspiring actress, Sarah, as she is called back to audition for a horror film that is being produced by a mysterious production company that pushes her to her limits – a dark exchange for fame and fortune… click here to read the article.
‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I’ is all prologue
In a previous review of the second instalment of The Hunger Games series for this website, I expressed some dismay that Catching Fire didn’t really have a conclusion to speak of, with its cliffhanger ending reminding me less of The Empire Strikes Back and more of The Matrix Reloaded orPirates of...
This film is at its very core a success story. A very demented, gory, horrifying and darkly comical success story – one with tinges of satanic cult horror wrapped in psychological terror. The plot follows a young aspiring actress, Sarah, as she is called back to audition for a horror film that is being produced by a mysterious production company that pushes her to her limits – a dark exchange for fame and fortune… click here to read the article.
‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I’ is all prologue
In a previous review of the second instalment of The Hunger Games series for this website, I expressed some dismay that Catching Fire didn’t really have a conclusion to speak of, with its cliffhanger ending reminding me less of The Empire Strikes Back and more of The Matrix Reloaded orPirates of...
- 11/22/2014
- by Ricky
- SoundOnSight
The first time I saw anything from a Godard film, I hated it.
My first encounter with his work was perhaps appropriately abrupt and fragmentary. I was in my first year as a Film Studies major, in an introductory class about the French New Wave. Having grown up on a steady diet of Hollywood classics, I was hoping this would be an exciting new discovery. Mid-lecture, the professor showed a clip from the near the end of Tout va bien, his 1972 film co-directed with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The scene was the famous ten-minute-long tracking shot in which the camera moves laterally along a supermarket’s checkout aisles as student demonstrators wreak havoc. Going in, the professor warned us that we would likely find the scene annoying and overlong, and that that was “the point.”
I watched. I waited for enlightenment.
I was unimpressed.
I did not get it, but I was a quiet,...
My first encounter with his work was perhaps appropriately abrupt and fragmentary. I was in my first year as a Film Studies major, in an introductory class about the French New Wave. Having grown up on a steady diet of Hollywood classics, I was hoping this would be an exciting new discovery. Mid-lecture, the professor showed a clip from the near the end of Tout va bien, his 1972 film co-directed with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The scene was the famous ten-minute-long tracking shot in which the camera moves laterally along a supermarket’s checkout aisles as student demonstrators wreak havoc. Going in, the professor warned us that we would likely find the scene annoying and overlong, and that that was “the point.”
I watched. I waited for enlightenment.
I was unimpressed.
I did not get it, but I was a quiet,...
- 11/17/2014
- by Mallory Andrews
- SoundOnSight
Jane Fonda movies on TCM: ‘The China Syndrome,’ ‘Klute,’ and Jean-Luc Godard drama ‘Tout Va Bien’ among highlights (photo: Jane Fonda in ‘Klute’) Turner Classic Movies’ 2014 "Summer Under the Stars" kicked off earlier today, August 1, with a day-long series of Jane Fonda movies. Still reviled by American right-wingers because of her 1972 trip to North Vietnam while the United States was at war with that country — she was photographed seated on an anti-aircraft battery — but admired by others for her liberal views, anti-war activism, and human rights advocacy, the two-time Best Actress Academy Award winner has enjoyed a highly eclectic film career, eventually becoming a rarity among rarities: Jane Fonda is the child of a film star (Henry Fonda) who not only became a film star in her own right, but who went on to become an even bigger screen legend than her famous parent. (See also: Jane Fonda “Summer Under...
- 8/2/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
This year’s Frequency Festival, held in the city of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, featured a screening of the first audio-visual work by The Society for Ontofabulatory Research. Airminded is an 18-minute essay film which counters the unchecked celebration of aviation heritage that is a defining part of the county of Lincolnshire, where the biennial digital arts festival took place over nine days. This part of rural England boasts links to the Dambusters raid and was home to many historic aircraft during the Second World War, giving rise to its nickname ‘Bomber County.’ The war efforts of the past, however, have been followed by the more recent, publicised and protested use of Lincolnshire as a base for the deployment of drones. Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles based in Afghanistan are currently operated from Raf Waddington, where a protest was staged earlier this year by campaigners opposed to the use of drones.
- 12/27/2013
- by Yusef Sayed
- MUBI
For years the essay film has been a neglected form, but now its unorthodox approach to constructing reality is winning over a younger, tech-savvy crowd
For a brief, almost unreal couple of hours last July, in amid the kittens and One Direction-mania trending on Twitter, there appeared a very surprising name – that of semi-reclusive French film-maker Chris Marker, whose innovative short feature La Jetée (1962) was remade in 1995 as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. A few months earlier, art journal e-flux staged The Desperate Edge of Now, a retrospective of Adam Curtis's TV films, to large audiences on New York's Lower East Side. The previous summer, Handsworth Songs (1986), an experimental feature by the Black Audio Film Collective Salman Rushdie had once attacked as obscurantist and politically irrelevant, attracted a huge crowd at Tate Modern when it was screened shortly after the London riots.
Marker, Curtis, Black Audio: all have...
For a brief, almost unreal couple of hours last July, in amid the kittens and One Direction-mania trending on Twitter, there appeared a very surprising name – that of semi-reclusive French film-maker Chris Marker, whose innovative short feature La Jetée (1962) was remade in 1995 as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. A few months earlier, art journal e-flux staged The Desperate Edge of Now, a retrospective of Adam Curtis's TV films, to large audiences on New York's Lower East Side. The previous summer, Handsworth Songs (1986), an experimental feature by the Black Audio Film Collective Salman Rushdie had once attacked as obscurantist and politically irrelevant, attracted a huge crowd at Tate Modern when it was screened shortly after the London riots.
Marker, Curtis, Black Audio: all have...
- 8/3/2013
- by Sukhdev Sandhu
- The Guardian - Film News
One day, sometime deep in the last millennium, I had the good fortune to be on the receiving end of a phone call from the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin telling me not to make any plans for the next day, and if I had plans, to cancel them. Why, I asked. Because, he said, we’re going to visit Chris Marker. That was all he needed to say. Chris Marker was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve – perhaps on the outskirts of Paris, perhaps in Ulan Bator. His nom-de-plume was, or wasn’t, a tribute to the fiber-tipped pen. He was in the resistance in WWII, fought with the Americans, and then became part of that fine left-bank left-wing intellectual ferment out of which came so many of the books, films, philosophies, wall slogans, and cafés without which our lives would have seemed dull and unbearable. He’s perhaps best known for "La Jetée,...
- 7/31/2012
- by Howard Rodman
- Thompson on Hollywood
The fourth annual Migrating Forms media festival, which will run May 11-20 at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC, is a compelling mix of political films, pop culture explorations, ethnographic exposés and collections of new media art.
The fest begins and ends with political films directed and curated by Eric Baudelaire. His latest work, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images, opens the festival on May 11; while a pair of films – Masao Adachi & Kôji Wakamatsu’s Red Army/Pflp: Declaration of World War and The Dziga Vertov Group’s Ici et Ailleurs closes it on May 20.
Some of the special events sprinkled throughout the event include Ed Halter‘s survey of faux experimental films made for mainstream movies and TV shows that should prove to be an amazingly entertaining and enlightening discussion; a retrospective of the highly influential animation by Chuck Jones; the interactive...
The fest begins and ends with political films directed and curated by Eric Baudelaire. His latest work, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images, opens the festival on May 11; while a pair of films – Masao Adachi & Kôji Wakamatsu’s Red Army/Pflp: Declaration of World War and The Dziga Vertov Group’s Ici et Ailleurs closes it on May 20.
Some of the special events sprinkled throughout the event include Ed Halter‘s survey of faux experimental films made for mainstream movies and TV shows that should prove to be an amazingly entertaining and enlightening discussion; a retrospective of the highly influential animation by Chuck Jones; the interactive...
- 4/26/2012
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
DVD Playhouse—February 2012
By Allen Gardner
To Kill A Mockingbird 50th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s landmark novel pits a liberal-minded lawyer (Gregory Peck) against a small Southern town’s racism when defending a black man (Brock Peters) on trumped-up rape charges. One of the 1960s’ first landmark films, a truly stirring human drama that hits all the right notes and isn’t dated a bit. Robert Duvall makes his screen debut (sans dialogue) as the enigmatic Boo Radley. DVD and Blu-ray double edition. Bonuses: Two feature-length documentaries: Fearful Symmetry and A Conversation with Gregory Peck; Featurettes; Excerpts and film clips from Gregory Peck’s Oscar acceptance speech and AFI Lifetime Achievement Award; Commentary by Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 2.0 mono.
Outrage: Way Of The Yakuza (Magnolia) After a brief hiatus from his signature oeuvre of Japanese gangster flicks,...
By Allen Gardner
To Kill A Mockingbird 50th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s landmark novel pits a liberal-minded lawyer (Gregory Peck) against a small Southern town’s racism when defending a black man (Brock Peters) on trumped-up rape charges. One of the 1960s’ first landmark films, a truly stirring human drama that hits all the right notes and isn’t dated a bit. Robert Duvall makes his screen debut (sans dialogue) as the enigmatic Boo Radley. DVD and Blu-ray double edition. Bonuses: Two feature-length documentaries: Fearful Symmetry and A Conversation with Gregory Peck; Featurettes; Excerpts and film clips from Gregory Peck’s Oscar acceptance speech and AFI Lifetime Achievement Award; Commentary by Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 2.0 mono.
Outrage: Way Of The Yakuza (Magnolia) After a brief hiatus from his signature oeuvre of Japanese gangster flicks,...
- 2/26/2012
- by The Hollywood Interview.com
- The Hollywood Interview
From John Gall, art director for Vintage and Anchor Books, comes word that legendary publisher and film distributor Barney Rosset has passed away at the age of 89. Gall points us to a lively profile by Louisa Thomas that ran in Newsweek in late 2008: "Rosset's publishing house, Grove Press, was a tiny company operating out of the ground floor of Rosset's brownstone when it published an obscure play called Waiting for Godot in 1954. By the time Beckett had won the Nobel Prize in 1969, Grove had become a force that challenged and changed literature and American culture in deep and lasting ways. Its impact is still evident — from the Che Guevara posters adorning college dorms to the canonical status of the house's once controversial authors. Rosset is less well known — but late in his life he is achieving some wider recognition. Last month, a black-tie crowd gave Rosset a standing ovation...
- 2/24/2012
- MUBI
"Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I've always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place — doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable and unable to project itself to the people who might love it." That's Guy Maddin, as quoted by Kim Morgan, introducing Maddin's Spiritismes, happening now at the Centre Pompidou in Paris ("During 'séances'... Maddin and his actors will allow themselves to be possessed by the wandering spirits of the dead, to bring their movies back to life") through March 12:
Filmmaking, dead made undead, is happening live at the Centre — lost or unrealized films by directors as diverse as Jean Vigo, Kenji Mizoguchi, Lois Weber, William Wellman, von Stroheim (I will appear in that particular Poto-Poto), Alexandre Dovjenko and more are coming — rising from the dead, in their own unique way. Maddin will be shooting one film a day.
Filmmaking, dead made undead, is happening live at the Centre — lost or unrealized films by directors as diverse as Jean Vigo, Kenji Mizoguchi, Lois Weber, William Wellman, von Stroheim (I will appear in that particular Poto-Poto), Alexandre Dovjenko and more are coming — rising from the dead, in their own unique way. Maddin will be shooting one film a day.
- 2/24/2012
- MUBI
Downton Abbey Season Two ($49.99 BluRay; PBS)
Poldark The Complete Collection ($79.99; Acorn) -- Don't tell my mother, but Downton Abbey has swiftly declined from a pale imitation of the original Upstairs Downstairs to a pale imitation of Falcon Crest. She's enjoying the show but I quickly switched from eagerness to see if the second season could build on the over-praised first to laughter at its foolishness to boredom. The first season lifted entire plot lines from U/D (and shamelessly from Mrs. Miniver) but it was fun. This season it has gone completely off the rails, with episodes ending with soap-like revelations (complete with "da-dum!" foreboding musical cues), characters behaving utterly without rhyme or reason from one moment to the next. Why, for example, has Isobel Crawley gone from a sensible if blunt woman to a blithering idiot? The plot twists come so fast and furious all you can do is laugh.
Poldark The Complete Collection ($79.99; Acorn) -- Don't tell my mother, but Downton Abbey has swiftly declined from a pale imitation of the original Upstairs Downstairs to a pale imitation of Falcon Crest. She's enjoying the show but I quickly switched from eagerness to see if the second season could build on the over-praised first to laughter at its foolishness to boredom. The first season lifted entire plot lines from U/D (and shamelessly from Mrs. Miniver) but it was fun. This season it has gone completely off the rails, with episodes ending with soap-like revelations (complete with "da-dum!" foreboding musical cues), characters behaving utterly without rhyme or reason from one moment to the next. Why, for example, has Isobel Crawley gone from a sensible if blunt woman to a blithering idiot? The plot twists come so fast and furious all you can do is laugh.
- 2/9/2012
- by Michael Giltz
- Aol TV.
"Released in 1938 and now available in a remastered edition from the Warner Archive Collection, The Great Waltz was one of Louis B Mayer's frequent attempts to bring culture to the American masses by buying up wholesale lots of European talent," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. It's a "biographical fantasy woven, with no particular concern for the truth, around the figure of the Austrian composer Johann Strauss." And now out from New Yorker Video, "the 1975 film adaptation of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet stands in roughly the same relation to The Great Waltz as Schoenberg's dissonant, 12-tone compositions do to Strauss's infectious oom-pah-pahs. Schoenberg's unfinished opera is a work of the utmost sobriety and seriousness — a philosophical assertion of monotheism that confirmed Schoenberg's reconversion to Judaism — and it is presented by Straub and Huillet in a form that avoids any theatrical effects (or,...
- 2/4/2012
- MUBI
Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): Set **** 1/2
Poto and Cabengo *****
Routine Pleasures **** 1/2
My Crasy Life **** 1/2
Jean-Pierre Gorin is probably best been known for partnering with Jean-Luc Godard in the late ‘60s to form the Dziga Vertov Group. Their aim was to take cinema in an authorless, overtly political direction and produced (among others) the Jane Fonda-starring Tout Va Bien. Thanks to Criterion’s latest Eclipse release, Gorin’s work is finally making its American DVD debut and will hopefully increase his stature to beyond just a footnote in Godard’s career.
Ratings (out of five): Set **** 1/2
Poto and Cabengo *****
Routine Pleasures **** 1/2
My Crasy Life **** 1/2
Jean-Pierre Gorin is probably best been known for partnering with Jean-Luc Godard in the late ‘60s to form the Dziga Vertov Group. Their aim was to take cinema in an authorless, overtly political direction and produced (among others) the Jane Fonda-starring Tout Va Bien. Thanks to Criterion’s latest Eclipse release, Gorin’s work is finally making its American DVD debut and will hopefully increase his stature to beyond just a footnote in Godard’s career.
- 1/31/2012
- by weezy
- GreenCine
Hellion
Today's the day Sundance 2012 opens and Salon's Andrew O'Hehir pretty well sums up why those who've written the festival off completely might want to reconsider:
If Robert Redford's annual celebration of independent film is no longer the cutting-edge cultural phenomenon it appeared to be in the 1990s, it also isn't the wretched-excess Sundance of the early 2000s, when the overly precious downtown of Park City, Utah, was bedecked with 'gifting lounges' that attracted all kinds of entertainment and sports celebrities who had no plausible connection to the independent-film business. Current festival director John Cooper took the reins from longtime director Geoff Gilmore (a charismatic and polarizing figure) two and a half years ago, just as the national economy was going south. Whether by coincidence, strategy or an inevitable consequence of structural change, Cooper's first two festivals have felt leaner and more focused on actual films and filmmakers — and...
Today's the day Sundance 2012 opens and Salon's Andrew O'Hehir pretty well sums up why those who've written the festival off completely might want to reconsider:
If Robert Redford's annual celebration of independent film is no longer the cutting-edge cultural phenomenon it appeared to be in the 1990s, it also isn't the wretched-excess Sundance of the early 2000s, when the overly precious downtown of Park City, Utah, was bedecked with 'gifting lounges' that attracted all kinds of entertainment and sports celebrities who had no plausible connection to the independent-film business. Current festival director John Cooper took the reins from longtime director Geoff Gilmore (a charismatic and polarizing figure) two and a half years ago, just as the national economy was going south. Whether by coincidence, strategy or an inevitable consequence of structural change, Cooper's first two festivals have felt leaner and more focused on actual films and filmmakers — and...
- 1/20/2012
- MUBI
If the Costa Concordia, which ran aground off the west coast of Italy last night, looks familiar to you, it's likely that it's because it's the cruise ship that's the setting for the first movement of Jean-Luc Godard's Film socialisme ("It's less a tourist cruise than an international summit of bastards," wrote David Phelps in June). The accident, which cost the lives of three people and injured many more (and around 40 of the 4000 passengers are still missing), occurred on the same evening that a rogue vigilante group going by the name of Standard and Poor's downgraded the credit ratings of nine eurozone countries.
Which brings us to our first set of DVDs. A Forum topic on Artificial Eye's release of its Theo Angelopoulos Collection has been rumbling along for half a year now and, with the third volume coming out next month, David Jenkins has a good long...
Which brings us to our first set of DVDs. A Forum topic on Artificial Eye's release of its Theo Angelopoulos Collection has been rumbling along for half a year now and, with the third volume coming out next month, David Jenkins has a good long...
- 1/14/2012
- MUBI
The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson will be the first complete retrospective of Bresson's work in North America in 14 years. Tiff Cinematheque has announced today that the series "features a restored print of his acclaimed first feature Les Anges du péché (1943), a metaphysical thriller set in a convent, and new prints of key titles struck especially for the occasion of this retrospective such as the controversial Le Diable probablement (1977), which was prohibited to viewers under the age of eighteen in France as an incitement to suicide; A Man Escaped (1956), a work of resolute beauty that rigorously elevates the gruelling routines of prison life; Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), legendary for being unavailable in North America for almost two decades; and his last masterpiece, L'Argent (1983), a terse and chilling indictment of capitalism and modernity."
While the retrospective will run at Tiff Bell Lightbox from February 9 through March 18, it'll...
While the retrospective will run at Tiff Bell Lightbox from February 9 through March 18, it'll...
- 12/13/2011
- MUBI
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Directed by: Pier Paolo Pasolini Written by: Pier Paolo Pasolini Starring: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto P. Quintavalle This Christmas season, tell that special someone you love them with the gift that keeps on giving: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom on blu ray! If you're concerned the intense scenes of sexual sadism, torture, and murder are too much of a downer for the holidays, just remember that it's nothing more than a parable, intended to comment on fascism and mindless complacency under the rule of overzealous figures of authority. The film is based on The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade with a loose Dante's Inferno structure applied overall, breaking the story down into four chapters: Anteinferno, The Circle of Manias, The Circle of Shit and The Circle of Blood. While the original book takes place in the 1700's,...
- 11/3/2011
- by Jay C.
- FilmJunk
The weekend's must-read is Michael Idov's report in GQ from the set of Ilya Khrzhanovsky's (4) latest project, Dau, which "has been in production since 2006 and won't wrap until 2012, if ever." I first came across it via a tweet from Vince Keenan: "It's Synecdoche, New York. Only it's real. And Russian." Very. Ostensibly a biopic based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau, Dau has become "an entire city, built to scale" in eastern Ukraine and populated by 300 cast and crew members who literally live, day in and day out, inside a simulacrum of Moscow, circa 1952. It is also an Institute, of which Khrzhanovsky is the Head "or simply the Boss." There's a narrative arc to Idov's piece: "A day into my stay at the Institute, I begin to feel its pull." By the third day, "I have been reduced… to a sniveling Soviet stukach, a snitch." By the way,...
- 10/30/2011
- MUBI
While Occupy Wall Street goes global, Martha Colburn has made two short films documenting the movement and Cinefoundation launches #OccupyCinema. One of the more popular recent Ows speakers has, of course, been Slavoj Žižek, and Anne Thompson reports that he and Sophie Fiennes have just completed shooting on their followup to The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, the timely Pervert's Guide to Ideology.
Even as This Is Not a Film runs a sort of victory lap through the festival circuit since its triumphant premiere in Cannes, an appeals court in Tehran has upheld the sentence against Jafar Panahi many of those same festivals have been protesting for practically a year now. Laurent Maillard, reporting for the Afp, turns to a government-run newspaper in Iran for confirmation: "The charges he was sentenced for are acting against national security and propaganda against the regime." Maillard: "Panahi was convicted in December last year over...
Even as This Is Not a Film runs a sort of victory lap through the festival circuit since its triumphant premiere in Cannes, an appeals court in Tehran has upheld the sentence against Jafar Panahi many of those same festivals have been protesting for practically a year now. Laurent Maillard, reporting for the Afp, turns to a government-run newspaper in Iran for confirmation: "The charges he was sentenced for are acting against national security and propaganda against the regime." Maillard: "Panahi was convicted in December last year over...
- 10/16/2011
- MUBI
Your Weekly Source for the Newest Releases to Blu-Ray Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
‘Twas The Night Before Christmas: 2-Disc Deluxe Edition (1974)
Synopsis: For some unexplained reason, letters to Santa Claus are being returned to the children of Junctionville. It seems some resident has angered St. Nick by calling him “a fraudulent myth!” Skeptical Albert Mouse has to be brought to his senses “and let up a little on the wonder why.” How Albert is persuaded to change his tune paves the way for Santa’s jolly return to town – and the joyous finale of the animated fable inspired by Clement Moore’s poem and produced by the merrymaking conjures of Rankin/bass studios. The voice talents of Joel grey, Tammy Grimes, John McGiver and George Gobel make this festive fable even more fun. (highdefdigest.com)
Special Features:
Tba
The 12 Dogs Of Christmas (2005)
Synopsis: A girl who uses dogs to...
‘Twas The Night Before Christmas: 2-Disc Deluxe Edition (1974)
Synopsis: For some unexplained reason, letters to Santa Claus are being returned to the children of Junctionville. It seems some resident has angered St. Nick by calling him “a fraudulent myth!” Skeptical Albert Mouse has to be brought to his senses “and let up a little on the wonder why.” How Albert is persuaded to change his tune paves the way for Santa’s jolly return to town – and the joyous finale of the animated fable inspired by Clement Moore’s poem and produced by the merrymaking conjures of Rankin/bass studios. The voice talents of Joel grey, Tammy Grimes, John McGiver and George Gobel make this festive fable even more fun. (highdefdigest.com)
Special Features:
Tba
The 12 Dogs Of Christmas (2005)
Synopsis: A girl who uses dogs to...
- 10/3/2011
- by Travis Keune
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Beverly Hills, CA - The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has awarded a $50,000 grant to underwrite the 2011 Telluride Film Festival.s Guest Director program, this year featuring musician Caetano Veloso. Veloso has over 100 film and television credits, but may be best known to moviegoers for his performance of “Cucurrucucú Paloma” (“Cucurrucucu Dove”) in Pedro Almodóvar.s Academy Award®-winning film, “Talk to Her.”
This is the fourth consecutive year that the Academy has funded the program. In 2010 the festival.s guest director was writer Michael Ondaatje; in 2009, it was Alexander Payne, the director and Oscar®-winning screenwriter of “Sideways;” and in 2008, it was Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian political philosopher and cultural critic.
“The Guest Director Program brings added depth and a rare variety of films to the Festival that we consider an integral part of our program’s success,” said Telluride Film Festival Co-Director Julie Huntsinger. “The generous...
This is the fourth consecutive year that the Academy has funded the program. In 2010 the festival.s guest director was writer Michael Ondaatje; in 2009, it was Alexander Payne, the director and Oscar®-winning screenwriter of “Sideways;” and in 2008, it was Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian political philosopher and cultural critic.
“The Guest Director Program brings added depth and a rare variety of films to the Festival that we consider an integral part of our program’s success,” said Telluride Film Festival Co-Director Julie Huntsinger. “The generous...
- 8/31/2011
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Release Date: Oct. 4, 2011
Price: Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
The extremes of Fascism are disurbingly explored in Pasolini's 1975 Salò.
The notorious final movie from Italy’s controversial filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (La Rabbia), 1975’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, has been described by critics as nauseating, shocking, depraved and pornographic, but many also consider it to be a masterpiece.
Pasolini’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s 18th century opus of torture and degradation to Fascist Italy remains one of the poet/novelist/filmmaker’s most passionately debated works.
Presented in Italian with English subtitles, the drama-thriller focuses on four wealthy and corrupt fascist libertines who kidnap a group of teenage boys and girls and subject them to four months of extreme violence, sadism and sexual and mental torture following the fall of Mussolini’s Italy in 1944.
Criterion’s Blu-ray of the movie offers a high definition digital restoration with...
Price: Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
The extremes of Fascism are disurbingly explored in Pasolini's 1975 Salò.
The notorious final movie from Italy’s controversial filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (La Rabbia), 1975’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, has been described by critics as nauseating, shocking, depraved and pornographic, but many also consider it to be a masterpiece.
Pasolini’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s 18th century opus of torture and degradation to Fascist Italy remains one of the poet/novelist/filmmaker’s most passionately debated works.
Presented in Italian with English subtitles, the drama-thriller focuses on four wealthy and corrupt fascist libertines who kidnap a group of teenage boys and girls and subject them to four months of extreme violence, sadism and sexual and mental torture following the fall of Mussolini’s Italy in 1944.
Criterion’s Blu-ray of the movie offers a high definition digital restoration with...
- 8/10/2011
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
Criterion is releasing one of cinema’s most controversial films in director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sodom, or The 120 Days of Sodom. The 1975 film is an adaptation of a Marquis de Sade story. The film is set in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist-occupied portion of Italy in 1944, with four segments loosely parallel to Dante’s Inferno: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood.
Four men of power, the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President, agree to marry each other’s daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. With the aid of several collaborator young men, they kidnap eighteen young men and women (nine of each sex), and take them to a palace near Marzabotto. Accompanying them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, whose function in the debauchery will be to recount erotically arousing stories for the men of power,...
Four men of power, the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President, agree to marry each other’s daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. With the aid of several collaborator young men, they kidnap eighteen young men and women (nine of each sex), and take them to a palace near Marzabotto. Accompanying them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, whose function in the debauchery will be to recount erotically arousing stories for the men of power,...
- 7/16/2011
- by Jon Peters
- Killer Films
It’s the time again, my friends. When I go through Hulu’s Criterion page and give you what’s new, what’s exciting and what might be a hint at a future release within the collection. There’s even a ton of new supplemental material from various films that are worth getting into. If you like this series of article, please sign up for your own Hulu Plus account. Every little bit counts and is much appreciated.
Let’s just get right to it then. Remember, all the links will be included with each listing. We make it as easy as possible for all of you. First up is a film that isn’t in the collection but I can easily see it being welcomed with open arms.
La Cérémonie (1995), a Claude Chabrol film, is about Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) who hires a new maid by the name of Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), an illiterate woman.
Let’s just get right to it then. Remember, all the links will be included with each listing. We make it as easy as possible for all of you. First up is a film that isn’t in the collection but I can easily see it being welcomed with open arms.
La Cérémonie (1995), a Claude Chabrol film, is about Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) who hires a new maid by the name of Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), an illiterate woman.
- 5/13/2011
- by James McCormick
- CriterionCast
Two and a half years ago it could fairly be said as late as daybreak on Christmas morning that Frank Miller was among the best-known comic book artists in the English-speaking world. This was due, in no small part, to a pair of strikingly popular movie adaptations of his work: 2005’s Sin City, which Miller co-directed with Robert Rodriguez, and 2007’s 300, directed by Zack Snyder. Both of these films arrived during a particularly fertile period for “comic book” movies—one arguably not quite yet exhausted—by which I mean relatively orthodox action films plugged into recognizable brands with ready-made potential for lucrative sequel and merchandizing opportunities.
Some might argue that “superhero” movies would be a more accurate term; I’d agree, but it still wouldn’t be quite exact. To my mind, the popularity of these pictures comes less from a heretofore veiled public desire for comic book subgenre particulars...
Some might argue that “superhero” movies would be a more accurate term; I’d agree, but it still wouldn’t be quite exact. To my mind, the popularity of these pictures comes less from a heretofore veiled public desire for comic book subgenre particulars...
- 4/11/2011
- MUBI
With The Adjustment Bureau now in theaters (great Pkd-centric review here, although I still really liked the film), and with Jfd's next few podcasts being writer themed (in honor of March Is Reading Month), I thought the time was right to gather up some exciting new(?) Philip K. Dick movie/TV adaptation news (most of which came over from Quiet Earth).
-First up, a match made in Heaven, as Michel Gondry is set to adapt Dick's famous 1969 novel Ubik, which was set to get a big-screen adaptation as far back as 1974 by French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin (Tout Va Bien). Dick even wrote a screenplay version himself, but the project never got off the ground. This is all probably for the best, given the evolution of reality-shifting visual effects, and also because I can't imagine another known working filmmaker of the last many years more suited for Ubik than Gondry. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind...
-First up, a match made in Heaven, as Michel Gondry is set to adapt Dick's famous 1969 novel Ubik, which was set to get a big-screen adaptation as far back as 1974 by French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin (Tout Va Bien). Dick even wrote a screenplay version himself, but the project never got off the ground. This is all probably for the best, given the evolution of reality-shifting visual effects, and also because I can't imagine another known working filmmaker of the last many years more suited for Ubik than Gondry. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind...
- 3/13/2011
- by noreply@blogger.com (Kevin, Mark & Parker)
We at Mubi think that celebrating the films of 2010 should be a celebration of film viewing in 2010. Since all film and video is "old" one way or another, we present Out of a Past, a small (re-) collection of some of our favorite of 2010's retrospective viewings.
***
This is a list of older movies I saw for the first time in 2010—not necessarily the best, but the ones that gave me the greatest sense of discovery. It’s a sad commentary on contemporary film culture that only five of the twelve films I mention are available on Netflix.
Routine Pleasures (Jean-Pierre Gorin, USA, 1986)
An essay film from the Godard’s former collaborator during his leftist Dziga Vertov Group days. The movie begins as a documentary about a group of model train enthusiasts in San Diego who have constructed an elaborate imaginary world with enormous and minutely detailed landscapes and a...
***
This is a list of older movies I saw for the first time in 2010—not necessarily the best, but the ones that gave me the greatest sense of discovery. It’s a sad commentary on contemporary film culture that only five of the twelve films I mention are available on Netflix.
Routine Pleasures (Jean-Pierre Gorin, USA, 1986)
An essay film from the Godard’s former collaborator during his leftist Dziga Vertov Group days. The movie begins as a documentary about a group of model train enthusiasts in San Diego who have constructed an elaborate imaginary world with enormous and minutely detailed landscapes and a...
- 1/5/2011
- MUBI
Updated through 8/19.
In the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim writes that Maurice Pialat's first feature film, L'enfance nue (Naked Childhood, 1968), "out on DVD this week from the Criterion Collection, can be seen as a companion piece — or perhaps a response — to François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), the beloved landmark that was synonymous with the New Wave's first flowering. Truffaut was a producer on L'enfance nue and an early champion of Pialat's, but their films, although both focused on the travails of troubled boys, diverge in tone and approach. One critical difference, as the writer and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin put it: 'We are looking at Truffaut's imp. But we are seeing through the eyes of Pialat's.'"...
In the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim writes that Maurice Pialat's first feature film, L'enfance nue (Naked Childhood, 1968), "out on DVD this week from the Criterion Collection, can be seen as a companion piece — or perhaps a response — to François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), the beloved landmark that was synonymous with the New Wave's first flowering. Truffaut was a producer on L'enfance nue and an early champion of Pialat's, but their films, although both focused on the travails of troubled boys, diverge in tone and approach. One critical difference, as the writer and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin put it: 'We are looking at Truffaut's imp. But we are seeing through the eyes of Pialat's.'"...
- 8/19/2010
- MUBI
The second annual Migrating Forms experimental media festival will descend on the Anthology Film Archives in NYC on May 14-23 featuring the world’s greatest experimental videos, cultural documentaries, some that are a little of both; plus, several filmmaker retrospectives, some classic films and the endearingly popular Tube Time! video tournament.
Migrating Forms is such an entirely different beast than its predecessor, the New York Underground Film Festival, that we don’t have to keep saying this new event arose from the Nyuff’s ashes, do we? Ok, we’ll just say that one more time. Next year we won’t mention it because, even in it’s first year, Migrating Forms proved itself to be a completely unique arena in the field of experimental media making.
A couple of highlights from the lineup below: The new feature film by cultural explorer Kevin Jerome Everson, Erie, which captures life in...
Migrating Forms is such an entirely different beast than its predecessor, the New York Underground Film Festival, that we don’t have to keep saying this new event arose from the Nyuff’s ashes, do we? Ok, we’ll just say that one more time. Next year we won’t mention it because, even in it’s first year, Migrating Forms proved itself to be a completely unique arena in the field of experimental media making.
A couple of highlights from the lineup below: The new feature film by cultural explorer Kevin Jerome Everson, Erie, which captures life in...
- 5/6/2010
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
Migrating Forms, the avant-garde and experimental media festival, comes blasting into its second year on May 14 and runs through May 23 at the beloved Anthology Film Archives in NYC. While the full, official lineup is still weeks away from being announced, fest co-directors Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry have teased what that lineup will bring with the announcement of the fest’s opening night film, plus a few, select special programs.
The opening night film on May 14 will be the fourth feature film by experimental documentary filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson. Erie is comprised entirely of single take shots of communities around Lake Erie. Everson describes the film himself as:
I’m hanging out, coolin’, on the frames that connect the necessity and the coincidence. Formally, that is. With a sense of place and historical research, my films combine scripted and documentary elements with rich elements of formalism. The subject matter is...
The opening night film on May 14 will be the fourth feature film by experimental documentary filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson. Erie is comprised entirely of single take shots of communities around Lake Erie. Everson describes the film himself as:
I’m hanging out, coolin’, on the frames that connect the necessity and the coincidence. Formally, that is. With a sense of place and historical research, my films combine scripted and documentary elements with rich elements of formalism. The subject matter is...
- 4/10/2010
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
In 1966 Roger Ebert reviewed Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou and gave it a 3 1/2 star review, 41 years later he reviewed it again and gave it only 2 1/2 stars quoting his earlier review calling the film "Godard's most virtuoso display of his mastery of Hollywood genres," only to now say he sees "it more as the story of silly characters who have seen too many Hollywood movies." Strangely enough, I have to wonder if Pierrot le fou is really about characters at all. It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina as Ferdinand and Marianne, but does their "road trip" really serve as anything more than a medium for Godard to lovingly fawn over his then-wife while at the same time speak ill of American culture and the Vietnam War? I recently reviewed Criterion's release of Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a film made two years after Pierrot le fou and...
- 9/23/2009
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
The lineup for the Telluride Film Festival, which begins tomorrow, has just been released. For the first time since the launch of this blog, Spout will not be covering Telluride this year, so I've quickly scanned the lineup and picked out some highlights that you should try to check out if you're in town: The one thing that I'm most disappointed to miss is a tribute to painter/film critic Manny Farber, who died last summer, in the form of a screening of Jean Renoir's Toni followed by a panel featuring Greil Marcus, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Kent Jones, Robert Polito, Robert Walsh and Patricia Patterson. This alone seems a fair trade off for altitude sickness. Disco And Atomic War: The big surprise find (for me, at least) at this year's Cannes market, I wrote about Jaak Kilm's documentary on the role Western pop culture played in the crumbling of the...
- 9/3/2009
- by Karina Longworth
- Spout
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