Early in the documentary Pictures of Ghosts, writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho cuts to a television interview with his late mother, Joselice Jucá, a historian and a key figure in the film. The interviewer asks why she’s chosen an oral history as the medium for a project on Brazilian abolitionist leader Joaquim Nabuco. As she explains her process, Mendonça Filho’s voice enters to note that “it may seem like I’m discussing methodology, but I’m talking about love.” The filmmaker seems to have taken his mother’s emotional investment in her subject matter to heart, as the methodology in Pictures of Ghosts—a historical document of his hometown of Recife, with a particular focus on its movie theaters—is ultimately in service of the filmmaker’s own personal relationship to the people, places, and images that he captures.
It’s hardly the first time that Mendonça Filho’s...
It’s hardly the first time that Mendonça Filho’s...
- 10/8/2023
- by Brad Hanford
- Slant Magazine
Los Angeles is such a large and sprawling city, it doesn't have a singular identity. As can be seen from the wide variety of movies set here, neighborhoods in the east, south, and west of LA, from the beaches to the vast San Fernando Valley, all have extremely different flavors. LA is a city of transplants and immigrants, and I'm no exception, as I moved here 6.5 years ago from the UK. Most of the best-known LA movies were made by outsiders trying to get to grips with a city that in one sense is dominated by the movie industry but also has a rich cultural life outside of that.
One of the best ways to discover LA is through documentaries, such as "City of Gold" (2015), "Los Angeles Plays Itself" (2003), and "Dogtown and Z-Boys" (2001). Like most people, my perception of LA was entirely built by the movies I watched growing up,...
One of the best ways to discover LA is through documentaries, such as "City of Gold" (2015), "Los Angeles Plays Itself" (2003), and "Dogtown and Z-Boys" (2001). Like most people, my perception of LA was entirely built by the movies I watched growing up,...
- 3/26/2023
- by Fiona Underhill
- Slash Film
By H. Perry Horton
An ode to the City of Angels.
The article Los Angeles Plays Itself: The City in Cinema appeared first on Film School Rejects.
An ode to the City of Angels.
The article Los Angeles Plays Itself: The City in Cinema appeared first on Film School Rejects.
- 9/1/2017
- by H. Perry Horton
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Michael Almereyda with Hampton Fancher on the form of Escapes, executive produced by Wes Anderson: "This is my tribute to Bruce Conner." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
In my Escapes conversation with Michael Almereyda (Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard) and Hampton Fancher (co-screenwriter of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049) we start out with Federico García Lorca, Bruce Conner, Philip K Dick and Chris Marker. Then we encounter a Jean-Pierre Léaud, Tina Sinatra, Michael Pfleghar (Romeo Und Julia 70) connection and next stop over at Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, Brian Kelly and Flipper, Skinningrove on photographer Chris Killip, Yasujiro Ozu's influence on Wim Wenders (Yuharu Atsuta in Tokyo-Ga) and Jim Jarmusch.
Hampton Fancher: "It's looking at my life through other people's eyes."
Michael Almereyda's approach in Escapes turns the idea of a biopic inside out. Clips from Hampton Fancher's television and movie performances mixed with those...
In my Escapes conversation with Michael Almereyda (Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard) and Hampton Fancher (co-screenwriter of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049) we start out with Federico García Lorca, Bruce Conner, Philip K Dick and Chris Marker. Then we encounter a Jean-Pierre Léaud, Tina Sinatra, Michael Pfleghar (Romeo Und Julia 70) connection and next stop over at Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, Brian Kelly and Flipper, Skinningrove on photographer Chris Killip, Yasujiro Ozu's influence on Wim Wenders (Yuharu Atsuta in Tokyo-Ga) and Jim Jarmusch.
Hampton Fancher: "It's looking at my life through other people's eyes."
Michael Almereyda's approach in Escapes turns the idea of a biopic inside out. Clips from Hampton Fancher's television and movie performances mixed with those...
- 7/26/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
It’s exceedingly likely that your primary association with Hampton Fancher is Blade Runner, on which he served as co-writer and executive producer; and if you have another, it’s probably Blade Runner 2049, on which he also served as co-writer and the story’s architect. Little is it known that the scribe, actor, and director has had one of Hollywood’s strangest ascendancies, a trip marked by happenstance, romance, crossing paths with legends, and perhaps divine fate — a series of stories so good that Michael Almereyda (Marjorie Prime, Experimenter) turned them into a feature-length documentary whose intoxicating style is somewhere between the career-spanning De Palma and juxtaposition-heavy films of Thom Anderson (Los Angeles Plays Itself).
Escapes, executive produced by Wes Anderson, begins its theatrical run in just under two weeks, and we’re happy to exclusively debut the trailer courtesy of Grasshopper Film. Word has been strong since it premiered at BAMcinemaFest last month,...
Escapes, executive produced by Wes Anderson, begins its theatrical run in just under two weeks, and we’re happy to exclusively debut the trailer courtesy of Grasshopper Film. Word has been strong since it premiered at BAMcinemaFest last month,...
- 7/13/2017
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.
- 10/11/2016
- MUBI
This fall semester I started taking an Italian language class two evenings a week with my daughter, and Thursday night I was looking to decompress after our first big quiz. (Scores haven’t been revealed yet, but I think we did just fine.) So I started rummaging through my shelves and came across the Warner Archives DVD of Francesco Maselli’s A Fine Pair (1968), an ostensibly breezy romantic caper comedy which reteams Rock Hudson and Claudia Cardinale, a pairing their public was presumably clamoring for after their previous outing together in Blindfold (1965), a Universal programmer written and directed by Phillip Dunne, the screenwriter of, among many other notable movies, How Green Was My Valley. I’ve had a mad crush on Claudia ever since I first saw her in Circus World (1964) with John Wayne when I was but a youngster, and I always welcome the chance to visit movies of...
- 9/11/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Dan Sallitt has published his extensive companion on the films of Mikio Naruse.
A lost Marx Brothers musical has found its way back on stage, The New Yorker reports.
Watch a video on Pedro Almodóvar‘s obsession with the color red:
Los Angeles Plays Itself director Thom Andersen names his 10 favorite films of the last 10 years at Grasshopper Film.
Vox‘s Aja Romano on the strange story of how a machine was trained to “watch” Blade Runner:
Broad’s goal was to apply “deep learning” — a fundamental piece of artificial intelligence that uses algorithmic machine learning — to video; he wanted to discover what kinds of creations a...
Dan Sallitt has published his extensive companion on the films of Mikio Naruse.
A lost Marx Brothers musical has found its way back on stage, The New Yorker reports.
Watch a video on Pedro Almodóvar‘s obsession with the color red:
Los Angeles Plays Itself director Thom Andersen names his 10 favorite films of the last 10 years at Grasshopper Film.
Vox‘s Aja Romano on the strange story of how a machine was trained to “watch” Blade Runner:
Broad’s goal was to apply “deep learning” — a fundamental piece of artificial intelligence that uses algorithmic machine learning — to video; he wanted to discover what kinds of creations a...
- 6/6/2016
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
Since any New York 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.
Metrograph
A full-career Brian De Palma retrospective is now underway. Sisters and Carrie play on Friday, and Saturday brings The Phantom of the Paradise — but that’s not even half of the first weekend.
Prints of Gilda, Space Jam, and shorts by Charles and Ray Eames screen this Saturday.
Museum of the Moving Image
Discover the...
Metrograph
A full-career Brian De Palma retrospective is now underway. Sisters and Carrie play on Friday, and Saturday brings The Phantom of the Paradise — but that’s not even half of the first weekend.
Prints of Gilda, Space Jam, and shorts by Charles and Ray Eames screen this Saturday.
Museum of the Moving Image
Discover the...
- 6/3/2016
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Since any New York 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.
Metrograph
The “Old School Kung Fu Fest” comes to the Lower East Side this weekend, offering the likes of Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, and Tsui Hark, among others.
A print of My Neighbor Totoro screens on Saturday morning.
Frederick Wiseman‘s Hospital begins a week-long run.
A restoration of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari screens this Monday.
Metrograph
The “Old School Kung Fu Fest” comes to the Lower East Side this weekend, offering the likes of Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, and Tsui Hark, among others.
A print of My Neighbor Totoro screens on Saturday morning.
Frederick Wiseman‘s Hospital begins a week-long run.
A restoration of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari screens this Monday.
- 4/8/2016
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Engram of ReturningThe selection at this year’s installation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real film festival, an annual showcase dedicated to conveying the spectrum of nonfiction filmmaking, are an intriguing bunch culled from a variety of seemingly opposing cultures, yet still exhibiting a fascination with interrogating the past. That this fixation is explored through a miscellany of aesthetic methods is only testament to the veracity of the festival’s undertaking.As this year’s sidebar retrospective of avant-garde giant Bruce Baillie’s work evinces, the nuances and vagaries of the term ‘“nonfiction” allow for fruitful pairings of works that continue the lineage of the abstract, non-narrative work that comes to define our idea of the American avant-garde with those of more familiar documentary tendencies. Daïchi Saïto’s superlative Engram of Returning, playing as part of the second shorts program,is certainly the film...
- 4/7/2016
- by Eric Barroso
- MUBI
It’s that time of year. Sleigh bells have been rung, gifts have been given and we have officially closed the door on what was 2015. A year that saw us once again take a journey into a galaxy far, far away, revisit the post apocalyptic landscape of Mad Max and the ever expanding reach of world and documentary cinema, 2015 has been one of the greatest of film years, arguably the very best since 2007 (probably cinema’s greatest year?) and as one has likely already one hundred top [insert arbitrary number] films list, why not make it one hundred and one? Be it a group of young women attempting to break free of the backwards patriarchy that has them oppressed or a bravura, epic-length satire from one of world cinema’s foremost artists, these are the ten best films that 2015 had to offer.
Honorable mention: Have you heard about this new thing called television?...
Honorable mention: Have you heard about this new thing called television?...
- 1/4/2016
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
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50 fabulous documentary films, covering hard politics through to music, money and films that never were...
Thanks to streaming services such as Netflix, we’ve never had better access to documentaries. A whole new audience can discover that these real life stories are just as thrilling, entertaining, and incredible as the latest big-budget blockbuster. What’s more, they’re all true too. But with a new found glut of them comes the ever more impossible choice, what’s worth your time? Below is my pick of the 50 best modern feature length documentaries.
I’ve defined modern as being from 2000 onwards, which means some of the greatest documentaries ever made will not feature here. I’m looking at you Hoop Dreams.
50. McConkey (2013)
d. Rob Bruce, Scott Gaffney, Murray Wais, Steve Winter, David Zieff
Shane McConkey was an extreme skier and Base jumper who lived life on the edge, and very much to the full.
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50 fabulous documentary films, covering hard politics through to music, money and films that never were...
Thanks to streaming services such as Netflix, we’ve never had better access to documentaries. A whole new audience can discover that these real life stories are just as thrilling, entertaining, and incredible as the latest big-budget blockbuster. What’s more, they’re all true too. But with a new found glut of them comes the ever more impossible choice, what’s worth your time? Below is my pick of the 50 best modern feature length documentaries.
I’ve defined modern as being from 2000 onwards, which means some of the greatest documentaries ever made will not feature here. I’m looking at you Hoop Dreams.
50. McConkey (2013)
d. Rob Bruce, Scott Gaffney, Murray Wais, Steve Winter, David Zieff
Shane McConkey was an extreme skier and Base jumper who lived life on the edge, and very much to the full.
- 11/12/2015
- by simonbrew
- Den of Geek
Documentary cinema is in a golden period. While many filmmakers get more and more esoteric with their subjects, others are getting more and more sensory in their aesthetic, and even more are getting more and more distinct in their voice. Films like Room 237 and the various documentaries from Terence Davies have helped usher in a new age of “essay” film, with pictures like Los Angeles Plays Itself proving that the genre of filmmaking once relegated to the special features of any home video release worth its stock can become something far greater.
And then there’s Laurie Anderson.
Best known as a musician, Anderson is also an accomplished visual artist, and has subsequently offered to film goers one of the greatest and most emotionally resonant essay pictures of this golden age.
Entitled Heart Of A Dog, Anderson takes a decidedly more personal route for this essay film, very much...
And then there’s Laurie Anderson.
Best known as a musician, Anderson is also an accomplished visual artist, and has subsequently offered to film goers one of the greatest and most emotionally resonant essay pictures of this golden age.
Entitled Heart Of A Dog, Anderson takes a decidedly more personal route for this essay film, very much...
- 10/23/2015
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
Thom Andersen and Pedro Costa on stage at the Courtisane Festival. Photo by Michiel Devijver.This year’s Courtisane Festival paired Pedro Costa and Thom Andersen as their artists in focus. Both filmmakers hung out with each other and the public for the full five days of this under-recognized gem of a festival in Ghent. What at first might seem very different directors with distinct backgrounds actually proved to be kindred spirits. In the end credits of his new cine-history, The Thoughts That Once We Had, Andersen thanks Costa, because “without [him] this motion picture would have been poorer.” Andersen has admired Costa’s work ever since he discovered In Vanda’s Room (2000) at the Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in 2001. He wrote about this experience and about Colossal Youth (2006) in Film Comment in 2007. Andersen has invited Costa to CalArts, where he teaches, more than once, and Cinema Scope published a...
- 7/17/2015
- by Ruben Demasure
- MUBI
“Yet if you should forget me for a whileAnd afterwards remember, do not grieveFor if the darkness and corruption leaveA vestige of the thoughts that once we hadBetter by far you should forget and smileThan that you should remember and be sad.”—Christina Rossetti, Remember (1862)An opening title card from director Thom Andesen’s new feature film, The Thoughts That Once We Had, directly identifies the cinematic writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze as the project's primary subject and inspiration. Deleuze’s two volumes on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), are today synonymous with a certain modernist school of thought that, while integrated in academia to such a degree as to be all but understood, remains quite radical. Unquestionably dense and provocatively pedantic, the French empiricist’s filmic texts integrate an array of theories and conceptualizations into a fairly delineated taxonomy, and are therefore fairly conducive...
- 5/8/2015
- by Jordan Cronk
- MUBI
Above: the 2015 Crossroads Film Festival kicks off on Friday, April 10th, and features Paul Clipson's Hypnosis Display with a live soundtrack by Grouper. Check out the rest of the amazing lineup here. Like everyone, we're devastated that David Lynch will not be directing the Twin Peaks revival season after all. Above: the latest issue of La Furia Umana is online now and includes an intriguing survey of "What's (Not) Cinema Becoming?"From the new issue of The Brooklyn Rail: pieces on Tsai Ming-liang's Rebels of the Neon God, J.P. Sniadecki's The Iron Ministry, and an interview with Xin Zhou.For Cinema Scope, Jordan Cronk writes on this year's True/False Film Festival. There are two incredible websites for you to browse from La Cinématheque Francaise: one on Pier Paolo Pasolini, and one on Michelangelo Antonioni. For his blog Following Film, Christoph Huber writes on "The Siodmak Variations":...
- 4/10/2015
- by Notebook
- MUBI
Edited by Adam CookAbove: Adam Nayman interviews Jauja director Lisandro Alonso for Reverse Shot. If like us you're excited to see James Wan's Furious 7, we recommend this piece by Orlando Whitfield from The White Review which surveys the franchise up to now. Filmmaker Robert Greene is not pleased with the HBO documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. For AnOther, Mark Cousins has created a video tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini. Above: Filmmaker Gina Telaroli has a new exhibition opening Friday March 27th (and runs until April 25th) at the 308 at 156 Project Artspace. It features an installation with her new film Silk Tatters and Johann Lurf's Twelve Tales Told, as well as video pieces that appropriate the work of Michael Mann, Tony Scott, John Carpenter. At Toronto Film Review, David Davidson takes a look at Cahiers du Cinéma's writing on Martin Scorsese during the eighties.
- 3/31/2015
- by Notebook
- MUBI
I’ve heard many mistake the voiceover in Los Angeles Plays Itself as belonging to its writer-director Thom Andersen when it’s actually Encke King. A fair assumption — King speaks in a first person voiceover in a rather curmudgeonly monotone, fitting for the film’s occasionally cantankerous examination of the relationship between the physical spaces of Los Angeles and the way Hollywood films have portrayed them. The real Andersen is a more elusive character. His voice is more casual but less direct, his articulated knowledge of his own projects is tempered, bouncing around a given topic than directly addressing it. He pauses […]...
- 3/11/2015
- by Peter Labuza
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
I’ve heard many mistake the voiceover in Los Angeles Plays Itself as belonging to its writer-director Thom Andersen when it’s actually Encke King. A fair assumption — King speaks in a first person voiceover in a rather curmudgeonly monotone, fitting for the film’s occasionally cantankerous examination of the relationship between the physical spaces of Los Angeles and the way Hollywood films have portrayed them. The real Andersen is a more elusive character. His voice is more casual but less direct, his articulated knowledge of his own projects is tempered, bouncing around a given topic than directly addressing it. He pauses […]...
- 3/11/2015
- by Peter Labuza
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Awards season is over so it’s time to start thinking about your next project. If your next project is a Web series, indie film or short, think back to awards season. Why relive that belabored pantomime? Because some of last season’s most honored films, including Oscar winners such as “American Sniper” and “Whiplash,” were shot around L.A. Want to capture the same on-location magic? Check out the screening of “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” a documentary made up of clips from films shot on location in the Southland. A Q&A with filmmaker Thom Andersen follows the Feb. 27 event, which is being held at Union Station’s Fred Harvey Room. More details are available here. Other events for Los Angeles actors include: Open House: The Hatchery Press Workspace for WritersMarch 1 from 12-5 p.m.5611 Clinton St., Los AngelesCheck here for more details. A Movie Fanatics Screening of “Focus” Feb.
- 2/27/2015
- backstage.com
Like Los Angeles Plays Itself by way of Ross McElwee, Jenni Olson‘s The Royal Road surveys the landscape of Southern California as a way of exploring her past relationship troubles. That may sound like the sort of arty navel-gazing that many viewers are allergic to, but this is an utterly transfixing piece of work. The 16mm cinematography of Los Angeles and San Francisco is gorgeous and hypnotic, and it’s more than just pretty pictures. Olson’s narration works in concert with the architecture and geography, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly. She purposefully establishes herself as a “shadow” — her voice is heard but she is unseen, and in fact, the whole film is bereft of human presence. She is, in a way, becoming the film, holding a conversation with the audience. Olson talks not just about her often tempestuous romantic misadventures but about Vertigo, the Spanish conquest and subsequent American annexation of the American Southwest, nostalgia...
- 1/26/2015
- by Nonfics.com
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
When is a gimmick not a gimmick? When it underscores strong storytelling rather than distracting from a bad script. It was easy to think of the selling points behind “Boyhood” (actors age in real time during a production spread out over a dozen years); “Locke” (movie centered around one man in a car making phone calls) or “Birdman” (camera and editing tricks employed to make the film look like one continuous take) as mere hoopla – and then we saw the movies.
Not all of the year’s best films employed such razzle-dazzle, but it was heartening to know that in...
Not all of the year’s best films employed such razzle-dazzle, but it was heartening to know that in...
- 12/24/2014
- by Alonso Duralde, Inkoo Kang and James Rocchi
- The Wrap
Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (Spwa) has acquired world rights to the Duplass Brothers Productions’ comedy starring Melissa Rauch, Gary Cole, Thomas Middleditch, Sebastian Stan, Cecily Strong and Haley Lu Richardson.
Bryan Buckley is shooting The Bronze in Ohio from a screenplay by Rauch and her husband and writing partner Winston Rauch.
The story centres on a foul-mouthed former gymnastics medallist who fights for her local celebrity status when a young athlete threatens to steal her limelight.
Stephanie Langhoff produces and Jay and Mark Duplass serve as executive producers alongside Bryan Buckley and Melissa and Winston Rauch.
Spwa brokered the deal with Gray Krauss Stratford Des Rochers and Wme Global.
Cinema Guild has picked up Us rights to four Thom Andersen films previously unreleased on home video or digital: documentaries Los Angeles Plays Itself, Red Hollywood and Reconversão; and the biopic Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer.monterey media has acquired Us rights to Jeff Barnaby’s drama Rhymes For Young Ghouls starring...
Bryan Buckley is shooting The Bronze in Ohio from a screenplay by Rauch and her husband and writing partner Winston Rauch.
The story centres on a foul-mouthed former gymnastics medallist who fights for her local celebrity status when a young athlete threatens to steal her limelight.
Stephanie Langhoff produces and Jay and Mark Duplass serve as executive producers alongside Bryan Buckley and Melissa and Winston Rauch.
Spwa brokered the deal with Gray Krauss Stratford Des Rochers and Wme Global.
Cinema Guild has picked up Us rights to four Thom Andersen films previously unreleased on home video or digital: documentaries Los Angeles Plays Itself, Red Hollywood and Reconversão; and the biopic Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer.monterey media has acquired Us rights to Jeff Barnaby’s drama Rhymes For Young Ghouls starring...
- 7/9/2014
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
Maps to the Stars
Written by Bruce Wagner
Directed by David Cronenberg
Canada/USA, 2014
Los Angeles, the city that homes the superstars and studios responsible for mainstream cinema culture, has consistently received its due criticism from those who either reject it or work within it. Look no further than Thom Andersen’s nearly comprehensive Los Angeles Plays Itself to see the town utilized as an easy space for shooting, a battleground for the melodrama of the privileged, and home field for telling stories about the storytellers. The business-driven artistic culture that pervades the town has been satirized in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Player, and Barton Fink to the point that a simple update of finger-pointing to the 21st century may be seen as a rehashing. Bruce Wagner’s crazy script for David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars instead paints the town as a machine capable of rehashing through...
Written by Bruce Wagner
Directed by David Cronenberg
Canada/USA, 2014
Los Angeles, the city that homes the superstars and studios responsible for mainstream cinema culture, has consistently received its due criticism from those who either reject it or work within it. Look no further than Thom Andersen’s nearly comprehensive Los Angeles Plays Itself to see the town utilized as an easy space for shooting, a battleground for the melodrama of the privileged, and home field for telling stories about the storytellers. The business-driven artistic culture that pervades the town has been satirized in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Player, and Barton Fink to the point that a simple update of finger-pointing to the 21st century may be seen as a rehashing. Bruce Wagner’s crazy script for David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars instead paints the town as a machine capable of rehashing through...
- 5/29/2014
- by Zach Lewis
- SoundOnSight
The 52nd annual Ann Arbor Film Festival will be a jam-packed experimental feature and short film screening event running for six days and nights, this time on March 25-30.
Opening Night will feature a reception and an after-party, and stuffed between those will be a block of nine short films, including new ones by Bryan Boyce, Michael Robinson, Jennifer Reeder and Martha Colburn, as well as a never-before-released work by the legendary Bruce Baillie called Little Girl in which Baillie captured scenes of natural beauty.
Special Events scattered throughout the festival include a retrospective of indie filmmaker Penelope Spheeris that will feature her rock ‘n’ roll-based work, including the original The Decline of Western Civilization, plus The Decline of Western Civilization Part III, her influential punk film Suburbia (screening twice) and a collection of short films.
There will also be several films and presentations by filmmaking scholar Thom Andersen, such...
Opening Night will feature a reception and an after-party, and stuffed between those will be a block of nine short films, including new ones by Bryan Boyce, Michael Robinson, Jennifer Reeder and Martha Colburn, as well as a never-before-released work by the legendary Bruce Baillie called Little Girl in which Baillie captured scenes of natural beauty.
Special Events scattered throughout the festival include a retrospective of indie filmmaker Penelope Spheeris that will feature her rock ‘n’ roll-based work, including the original The Decline of Western Civilization, plus The Decline of Western Civilization Part III, her influential punk film Suburbia (screening twice) and a collection of short films.
There will also be several films and presentations by filmmaking scholar Thom Andersen, such...
- 3/18/2014
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
A Tangled Tale (dir. Corrie Francis, 2013)
The Off animation block was full of great contenders of various animation styles. Snowdysseus played like a stop-motion, nightmare-fueled version of Gravity featuring an astronaut trapped in a land plagued with skeletons; the crowd-pleasing, mannequin-starring Baby Chicken sported a short adventure of a deadly breakfast; the French animated short The Little Blond Boy with a White Sheep favored the use of imagination and frolicking with farm animals to standardized tests; and even a computer-rendered children’s film narrated by George Takei, The Missing Scarf. Yet, of all the shorts presented, the atmospheric A Tangled Tale has managed to make the most lasting impression, mixing mediums of what looks like chalk and watercolor and allowing the music and sound design to tell the story, any visuals being abstract, yet powerful. Rough outlines of color against a black background reveal hints of a body of water,...
The Off animation block was full of great contenders of various animation styles. Snowdysseus played like a stop-motion, nightmare-fueled version of Gravity featuring an astronaut trapped in a land plagued with skeletons; the crowd-pleasing, mannequin-starring Baby Chicken sported a short adventure of a deadly breakfast; the French animated short The Little Blond Boy with a White Sheep favored the use of imagination and frolicking with farm animals to standardized tests; and even a computer-rendered children’s film narrated by George Takei, The Missing Scarf. Yet, of all the shorts presented, the atmospheric A Tangled Tale has managed to make the most lasting impression, mixing mediums of what looks like chalk and watercolor and allowing the music and sound design to tell the story, any visuals being abstract, yet powerful. Rough outlines of color against a black background reveal hints of a body of water,...
- 2/16/2014
- by Zach Lewis
- SoundOnSight
The best movie culture writing from around the internet-o-sphere. There will be a quiz later. Just leave a tab open for us, will ya? “The Most (and Least) Oscar-Bait-y Movies Ever, According to Science” — Science! Joshua Keating at Slate profiles a new social study that boldly claims When A Stranger Calls was not made to impress Oscar voters, but they’re clearly wrong about Hotel For Dogs “12 Years a Slave is a masterpiece — try not to hold that against it” — Nicholas Barber at The Guardian’s Film Blog implores people not to be daunted by greatness. Or Oscar-bait-y-ness. “Shots From the Canon #16: Los Angeles Plays Itself” — In their ongoing series, Robert Greene at Nonfics offers a company town injected into its own product as a new classic. “Carson, Set Up the Universal Remote” — Why do Americans love Downton Abbey? Joyce Wadler shares her butlerized fantasy.
- 1/16/2014
- by Scott Beggs
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Senses of Cinema has published their 2013 World Poll, with nearly 140 entries, many by Notebook contributors: Celluloid Liberation Front Ted Fendt Daniel Kasman Boris Nelepo Michael Pattison David Phelps & myself As part of a "Year in Review" piece, Various To Be (Cont'd) contributors offer their thoughts on what stood out to them in 2013. For the A.V. Club, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky pays tribute to Run Run Shaw. Louis C.K. is planning to release his 1998 directorial debut Tomorrow Night (C.K. and Steve Carell are pictured on set above) online. Cinephilia and Beyond has assembled various conversations with filmmakers from The Walker Art Center’s Regis Dialogue.
Above: Dp/30's outstanding interview with Martin Scorsese. More Marty, "A Letter to my Daughter" (I can't help but include the entire piece):
"Dearest Francesca,
I’m writing this letter to you about the future. I’m looking at it through the lens of my world.
Above: Dp/30's outstanding interview with Martin Scorsese. More Marty, "A Letter to my Daughter" (I can't help but include the entire piece):
"Dearest Francesca,
I’m writing this letter to you about the future. I’m looking at it through the lens of my world.
- 1/8/2014
- by Adam Cook
- MUBI
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Written and directed by Thom Andersen
USA, 2003
It comes as no surprise that film sets and locations have been reused throughout the history of the movies. The fact that many of these locations are within or around Los Angeles, a city whose very ontology includes Hollywood and film business, is equally predictable. Yet these locations, distorted to us through the magic of movie production and narrative engagement, hold significant value to the residents of Los Angeles, particularly California Institute of the Arts film instructor Thom Andersen, using what he saw as the denigration of his beloved city on screen to begin a lecture and, ultimately, a film: Los Angeles Plays Itself. “I live here,” he begins his narration through Encke King over a series of establishing shots of the city from various films. “Sometimes I think this gives me the right to criticize the ways movies depict my city.
Written and directed by Thom Andersen
USA, 2003
It comes as no surprise that film sets and locations have been reused throughout the history of the movies. The fact that many of these locations are within or around Los Angeles, a city whose very ontology includes Hollywood and film business, is equally predictable. Yet these locations, distorted to us through the magic of movie production and narrative engagement, hold significant value to the residents of Los Angeles, particularly California Institute of the Arts film instructor Thom Andersen, using what he saw as the denigration of his beloved city on screen to begin a lecture and, ultimately, a film: Los Angeles Plays Itself. “I live here,” he begins his narration through Encke King over a series of establishing shots of the city from various films. “Sometimes I think this gives me the right to criticize the ways movies depict my city.
- 9/25/2013
- by Zach Lewis
- SoundOnSight
Jacques Demy
October 4–17
Starry-eyed dreamer of the French New Wave, Demy's frothy, seductive fairy tales may not have been as political or naturalistic as the work of his peers, but their exuberant sense of mise-en-scène still offers timeless appeal. Leading up to a revival of Demy's newly restored, all-sung Catherine Deneuve rhapsody The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (October 18–24), Film Forum's unmissable two-week series includes many more restorations, from his 1961 debut, Lola (starring Anouk Aimée as a yearning cabaret singer), through his final 1988 feature, Three Seats for the 26th, an Yves Montand vehicle by way of MGM song-and-dance homage. Los Angeles plays itself in Demy's only American stint, Model Shop...
October 4–17
Starry-eyed dreamer of the French New Wave, Demy's frothy, seductive fairy tales may not have been as political or naturalistic as the work of his peers, but their exuberant sense of mise-en-scène still offers timeless appeal. Leading up to a revival of Demy's newly restored, all-sung Catherine Deneuve rhapsody The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (October 18–24), Film Forum's unmissable two-week series includes many more restorations, from his 1961 debut, Lola (starring Anouk Aimée as a yearning cabaret singer), through his final 1988 feature, Three Seats for the 26th, an Yves Montand vehicle by way of MGM song-and-dance homage. Los Angeles plays itself in Demy's only American stint, Model Shop...
- 9/4/2013
- Village Voice
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
"The comedies of John Cassavetes cut deeper," Thom Andersen explains in Los Angeles Plays Itself, "because he had an eye and an ear for ordinary madness—those flickers of lunacy that can separate us from our fellows." Nathan Silver's Exit Elena adopts many working methods typical of a Cassavetes production—shot almost entirely in Silver's family home, the film stars his girlfriend (Kia Davis, who is superb), his mother (Cindy Silver), and himself—but its affinity with a film like Love Streams, its closest likeness, runs deeper than their shared independent sensibility. Silver locates the ordinary madness bubbling just beneath the surface of his own life, and flickers of lunacy abound: Exit Elena relates the story of a young live-in a...
- 7/10/2013
- Village Voice
I have to write about this great series because after all, I am a Los Angelina myself!
Los Angeles Filmforum was started in 1975 by Terry Cannon. Adam Hyman became director in 2003 as an act of love for films which would not reach the light of day without his work. That Moca is supporting him in this series is also important and it shows that Los Angeles has a sense of itself and finds the sense in preserving what film history has created.
Los Angeles Filmforum at Moca is supported through both organizations by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and at Moca by Catherine Opie.
Additional support of Filmforum's screening series comes from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Additional support to Filmforum generously provided by American Cinematheque. They also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Los Angeles is perhaps the most photographed, yet least understood city in the world. For all of the countless images, it is as though few people have actually seen the city well enough to depict it. Coinciding with A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California, Los Angeles Filmforum at Moca presents a program of recent films that break this mold, and in so doing document the changing landscape of the city in the 21st century. Thom Andersen, Alexandra Cuesta, and Clay Dean use poignant and at times even poetic images of buildings, immigrant neighborhoods, deteriorating signage, and readymade still lifes to give us a sense of place as well as the uncanny. Serving as an elegiac prologue to this recent efflorescence of observational cinema is Kent MacKenzie’s heartbreaking Bunker Hill 1956, a rich documentary memorializing the site whose destruction preceded downtown’s current incarnation as a corporate office block (and home to Moca).
In person: Thom Anderson and Clay Dean
What: Los Angeles Filmforum at Moca Presents: This is the City
When: Thursday, July 11, 2013 – 7pm
Where: Moca Grand Avenue, Ahmanson Auditorium, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles 90012
Tickets: $12 general admission; $7 students with valid ID
Tickets available at moca.org
Free for Moca and Los Angeles Filmforum members; must present current membership card to claim free tickets
Info 213/621-1745 or education[a]moca.org
“Get Out [of the Car]” began as an outgrowth of “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” inspired by a peeling billboard. The film became a 30-minute symphony devoted to the remnants of a vanished Los Angeles of neighborhood farms and demolished concert halls. —Saul Austerlitz, New York Times
“Although Los Angeles has appeared in more films than any other city, I believe that it has not been well served by these films. San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo have all left more indelible impressions. It happens that many film-makers working in Los Angeles don’t appreciate the city, and very few of them understand much about it, but their failures in depicting it may have more profound causes.
“In Los Angeles Plays Itself, I claimed that the city is not cinematogenic. ‘It’s just beyond the reach of an image.’ Now I’m not so sure. In any case, I became gradually obsessed with making a proper Los Angeles city symphony film.” —Thom Andersen, “Get Out of the Car: A Commentary”
Screening:
Kent MacKenzie, Bunker Hill 1956
1956, 16mm, black and white, sound; 18min.
Print courtesy of USC.
Before making his landmark feature The Exiles, Kent MacKenzie produced this intelligent and sensitive portrait of the Bunker Hill neighborhood, which was already in 1956 under very serious threat of total redevelopment and eradication. The film focuses in particular on the single, elderly pensioners who lived in the neighborhood, and proposes that far from being a slum, Bunker Hill was a very defined and beloved community. —Mark Toscano
Alexandra Cuesta, Despedida (Farewell)
2013; 16mm, color, sound; 10 min.
Shot in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this transitory neighborhood resonates with the poetry of local resident Mapkaulu Roger Nduku. Verses about endings, looking and passing through open up the space projected. A string of tableaus gather a portrait of a place and compose a goodbye letter to an ephemeral home. —AC
Clay Dean, Not West of Western
2011; 16mm, black and white, sound; 13.5 min.
Walking within parameters that define the heart of Los Angeles, Not West of Western explores the cross section of still photography and cinema while at the same time calling attention to the unique cross-cultural landscape of the city. —CD
Thom Andersen, Get Out of the Car
2010; 16mm, color, sound; 35 min.
Direction: Thom Andersen; camera: Madison Brookshire, Adam R. Levine; editing: Adam R. Levine; sound: Craig Smith
Get Out of the Car is a city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks (including El Monte Legion Stadium and the Barrelhouse in Watts). The musical fragments compose an impressionistic survey of popular music made in Los Angeles (and a few other places) from 1941 to 1999, with an emphasis on rhythm’n’blues and jazz from the 1950s and corridos from the 1990s. The music of Richard Berry, Johnny Otis, Leiber and Stoller, and Los Tigres del Norte is featured prominently. —Ta
Total Running Time: 76.5 min.
Programmed by Madison Brookshire
Los Angeles Filmforum at Moca furthers Moca’s mission to be the defining museum of contemporary art by adding a bimonthly series of film and video screenings organized and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum—the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation.
Los Angeles Filmforum was started in 1975 by Terry Cannon. Adam Hyman became director in 2003 as an act of love for films which would not reach the light of day without his work. That Moca is supporting him in this series is also important and it shows that Los Angeles has a sense of itself and finds the sense in preserving what film history has created.
Los Angeles Filmforum at Moca is supported through both organizations by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and at Moca by Catherine Opie.
Additional support of Filmforum's screening series comes from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Additional support to Filmforum generously provided by American Cinematheque. They also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Los Angeles is perhaps the most photographed, yet least understood city in the world. For all of the countless images, it is as though few people have actually seen the city well enough to depict it. Coinciding with A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California, Los Angeles Filmforum at Moca presents a program of recent films that break this mold, and in so doing document the changing landscape of the city in the 21st century. Thom Andersen, Alexandra Cuesta, and Clay Dean use poignant and at times even poetic images of buildings, immigrant neighborhoods, deteriorating signage, and readymade still lifes to give us a sense of place as well as the uncanny. Serving as an elegiac prologue to this recent efflorescence of observational cinema is Kent MacKenzie’s heartbreaking Bunker Hill 1956, a rich documentary memorializing the site whose destruction preceded downtown’s current incarnation as a corporate office block (and home to Moca).
In person: Thom Anderson and Clay Dean
What: Los Angeles Filmforum at Moca Presents: This is the City
When: Thursday, July 11, 2013 – 7pm
Where: Moca Grand Avenue, Ahmanson Auditorium, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles 90012
Tickets: $12 general admission; $7 students with valid ID
Tickets available at moca.org
Free for Moca and Los Angeles Filmforum members; must present current membership card to claim free tickets
Info 213/621-1745 or education[a]moca.org
“Get Out [of the Car]” began as an outgrowth of “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” inspired by a peeling billboard. The film became a 30-minute symphony devoted to the remnants of a vanished Los Angeles of neighborhood farms and demolished concert halls. —Saul Austerlitz, New York Times
“Although Los Angeles has appeared in more films than any other city, I believe that it has not been well served by these films. San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo have all left more indelible impressions. It happens that many film-makers working in Los Angeles don’t appreciate the city, and very few of them understand much about it, but their failures in depicting it may have more profound causes.
“In Los Angeles Plays Itself, I claimed that the city is not cinematogenic. ‘It’s just beyond the reach of an image.’ Now I’m not so sure. In any case, I became gradually obsessed with making a proper Los Angeles city symphony film.” —Thom Andersen, “Get Out of the Car: A Commentary”
Screening:
Kent MacKenzie, Bunker Hill 1956
1956, 16mm, black and white, sound; 18min.
Print courtesy of USC.
Before making his landmark feature The Exiles, Kent MacKenzie produced this intelligent and sensitive portrait of the Bunker Hill neighborhood, which was already in 1956 under very serious threat of total redevelopment and eradication. The film focuses in particular on the single, elderly pensioners who lived in the neighborhood, and proposes that far from being a slum, Bunker Hill was a very defined and beloved community. —Mark Toscano
Alexandra Cuesta, Despedida (Farewell)
2013; 16mm, color, sound; 10 min.
Shot in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this transitory neighborhood resonates with the poetry of local resident Mapkaulu Roger Nduku. Verses about endings, looking and passing through open up the space projected. A string of tableaus gather a portrait of a place and compose a goodbye letter to an ephemeral home. —AC
Clay Dean, Not West of Western
2011; 16mm, black and white, sound; 13.5 min.
Walking within parameters that define the heart of Los Angeles, Not West of Western explores the cross section of still photography and cinema while at the same time calling attention to the unique cross-cultural landscape of the city. —CD
Thom Andersen, Get Out of the Car
2010; 16mm, color, sound; 35 min.
Direction: Thom Andersen; camera: Madison Brookshire, Adam R. Levine; editing: Adam R. Levine; sound: Craig Smith
Get Out of the Car is a city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks (including El Monte Legion Stadium and the Barrelhouse in Watts). The musical fragments compose an impressionistic survey of popular music made in Los Angeles (and a few other places) from 1941 to 1999, with an emphasis on rhythm’n’blues and jazz from the 1950s and corridos from the 1990s. The music of Richard Berry, Johnny Otis, Leiber and Stoller, and Los Tigres del Norte is featured prominently. —Ta
Total Running Time: 76.5 min.
Programmed by Madison Brookshire
Los Angeles Filmforum at Moca furthers Moca’s mission to be the defining museum of contemporary art by adding a bimonthly series of film and video screenings organized and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum—the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation.
- 6/19/2013
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
The first part of my first ‘Reel Ink’ of 2013 is a bit of a catch up, as this instalment of the column features books which were all published in 2012.
Reel Ink #2 Part 1 includes the autobiography of a member of a Hollywood dynasty, a look at the city of Los Angeles within the context of the film industry’s role in its history and the evolution of the city’s image, and an examination of how politics and social and cultural agendas impacted and shaped ‘70s American cinema.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Tom Mankiewicz was a true scion of whatever it is that passes for Hollywood royalty; his father was Academy Award-winning director and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz (A Letter To Three Wives, All About Eve, Cleopatra) and his uncle Herman Mankiewicz was the co-writer of Citizen Kane. While nowhere near as well-known as his illustrious relatives, Mankiewicz’s posthumously published autobiography My Life As...
Reel Ink #2 Part 1 includes the autobiography of a member of a Hollywood dynasty, a look at the city of Los Angeles within the context of the film industry’s role in its history and the evolution of the city’s image, and an examination of how politics and social and cultural agendas impacted and shaped ‘70s American cinema.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Tom Mankiewicz was a true scion of whatever it is that passes for Hollywood royalty; his father was Academy Award-winning director and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz (A Letter To Three Wives, All About Eve, Cleopatra) and his uncle Herman Mankiewicz was the co-writer of Citizen Kane. While nowhere near as well-known as his illustrious relatives, Mankiewicz’s posthumously published autobiography My Life As...
- 3/8/2013
- by Ian Gilchrist
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Entering its second year, the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look series provides a strong, welcome antidote to the generally anemic cinematic landscape that is January. Its eclectic selection of undistributed features and shorts, programmed by Dennis Lim, Rachael Rakes, and David Schwartz, occasions an invigorating mixture of moods and approaches from established as well as emerging directors. It’s indicative of the series’ dedication to distinctive, often divisive cinematic voices that Bruno Dumont’s decidedly non-crowd-pleasing Hors Satan was chosen as the opening night film nearly two years following its Cannes premiere.
Whereas earlier films like Twentynine Palms or Hadewijch pushed the French director’s worldview in new directions, Hors Satan sits solidly in Dumont’s comfort zone, down to the cryptically religious title that links it to his debut, The Life of Jesus. His protagonist is a drifter with a scruffy, narrow face like Pasolini’s proletarian Christ,...
Whereas earlier films like Twentynine Palms or Hadewijch pushed the French director’s worldview in new directions, Hors Satan sits solidly in Dumont’s comfort zone, down to the cryptically religious title that links it to his debut, The Life of Jesus. His protagonist is a drifter with a scruffy, narrow face like Pasolini’s proletarian Christ,...
- 1/11/2013
- by Fernando F. Croce
- MUBI
Short films are the loose change in the treasury of world cinema usually dismissed in favor of feature films, an over-valued currency not infrequently resulting into toxic assets. The cheap label slapped on shorts unjustly omits their pivotal role in a film industry that needs them but ignores them. It is common knowledge that in 90% of cases the calling card for new directors comes in the short format, yet it would not come as natural to name the title of a short film made by an established filmmaker.
Confined to the extra features of DVD reissues, programme fillers at major film festivals, sidebar curiosities for bored cinephiles, shorts lack in visibility because they are not as profitable as their longer brothers. Even imagination has its monetary value, and stock exchange…
Shorts nonetheless possess intrinsic values: they have a snapshot quality and are able to focus intensely on a single subject.
Confined to the extra features of DVD reissues, programme fillers at major film festivals, sidebar curiosities for bored cinephiles, shorts lack in visibility because they are not as profitable as their longer brothers. Even imagination has its monetary value, and stock exchange…
Shorts nonetheless possess intrinsic values: they have a snapshot quality and are able to focus intensely on a single subject.
- 7/18/2012
- MUBI
Quite the rave from Roberta Smith in the New York Times:
One of the best Whitney Biennials in recent memory may or may not contain a lot more outstanding art than its predecessors, but that's not the point. The 2012 incarnation is a new and exhilarating species of exhibition, an emerging curatorial life form, at least for New York.
Possessed of a remarkable clarity of vision, a striking spatial intelligence and a generous stylistic inclusiveness, it places on an equal footing art objects and time-based art — not just video and performance art but music, dance, theater, film — and does so on a scale and with a degree of aplomb we have not seen before in this town. In a way that is at once superbly ordered and open-ended, densely structured and, upon first encounter, deceptively unassuming, the exhibition manages both to reinvent the signature show of the Whitney Museum of American...
One of the best Whitney Biennials in recent memory may or may not contain a lot more outstanding art than its predecessors, but that's not the point. The 2012 incarnation is a new and exhilarating species of exhibition, an emerging curatorial life form, at least for New York.
Possessed of a remarkable clarity of vision, a striking spatial intelligence and a generous stylistic inclusiveness, it places on an equal footing art objects and time-based art — not just video and performance art but music, dance, theater, film — and does so on a scale and with a degree of aplomb we have not seen before in this town. In a way that is at once superbly ordered and open-ended, densely structured and, upon first encounter, deceptively unassuming, the exhibition manages both to reinvent the signature show of the Whitney Museum of American...
- 3/3/2012
- MUBI
The Pawnbroker (1964)
"Sidney Lumet: Experimental Filmmaker?" That title's a grabber and the link to Fergus Daly's essay in the new Winter 2011 issue of Experimental Conversations, Cork Film Centre's online journal of experimental film, art cinema and video art, began bopping around, given a propulsive boost from Girish Shambu and Catherine Grant:
When Lumet died and tributes started to flood in from luminaries such as Scorsese, Allen and Pacino, it was easy to forget the disdain with which Lumet was often met with throughout his career, most notably the appalling attacks on him by the likes of celebrity reviewer Pauline Kael, an unaccountably influential figure in American film criticism who assassinated Lumet time and again, personally and professionally… In the final analysis, Kael's type of neurotic and unconsidered attack may be entertaining for celebrity culture devotees but in the end it has nothing to do with the cinema.
"Sidney Lumet: Experimental Filmmaker?" That title's a grabber and the link to Fergus Daly's essay in the new Winter 2011 issue of Experimental Conversations, Cork Film Centre's online journal of experimental film, art cinema and video art, began bopping around, given a propulsive boost from Girish Shambu and Catherine Grant:
When Lumet died and tributes started to flood in from luminaries such as Scorsese, Allen and Pacino, it was easy to forget the disdain with which Lumet was often met with throughout his career, most notably the appalling attacks on him by the likes of celebrity reviewer Pauline Kael, an unaccountably influential figure in American film criticism who assassinated Lumet time and again, personally and professionally… In the final analysis, Kael's type of neurotic and unconsidered attack may be entertaining for celebrity culture devotees but in the end it has nothing to do with the cinema.
- 1/21/2012
- MUBI
Maybe the season of goodwill has done something to John Patterson but he's full of fond memories of 2011. Just don't mention Your Highness ...
I live in Los Angeles, I have a nice, powerful, old muscle car and I love driving too fast on the beautiful freeways that are supposed to be the bane of our city. Surprise, surprise then, Drive was one of my favourite movies this year (though only after a reluctant second viewing turned me around). Like John Boorman in Point Blank, the Dane Nicolas Winding Refn eats up the city with his outsider's eyes – and kills a lot of people very nastily, as is his habit. Refn earns his place in any revised version of Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself. The city hasn't looked this good, or bad, since Michael Mann's Collateral.
Another Scandinavian exile, Sweden's Tomas Alfredson, tackled the bygone mores of 1970s British...
I live in Los Angeles, I have a nice, powerful, old muscle car and I love driving too fast on the beautiful freeways that are supposed to be the bane of our city. Surprise, surprise then, Drive was one of my favourite movies this year (though only after a reluctant second viewing turned me around). Like John Boorman in Point Blank, the Dane Nicolas Winding Refn eats up the city with his outsider's eyes – and kills a lot of people very nastily, as is his habit. Refn earns his place in any revised version of Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself. The city hasn't looked this good, or bad, since Michael Mann's Collateral.
Another Scandinavian exile, Sweden's Tomas Alfredson, tackled the bygone mores of 1970s British...
- 12/24/2011
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) has had it with the movies in "The Artist"Over at Fandor's Keyframe blog I'll be musing about the Oscar race on a biweekly basis. This week's topic is the unusual abundance of movies about movies in this year's Oscar race from Marilyn Monroe (My Week With Marilyn) to George Melies (Hugo) to Hollywood's seismic sound shift in the late 20s (The Artist). But one thing I didn't dwell on too much in the article (which I hope you'll go and read!) is the lack of Oscars won for movies about movies.
Everyone predicting a win for The Artist (2011) before the nominations are even announced should consider the following list and sobering fact: No movie about movies has ever won Best Picture.
Movies About Movies: How Do They Do With Oscar?
(Best Picture Nominees are in red)
Janet Gaynor (already an Oscar winner) was nominated again...
Everyone predicting a win for The Artist (2011) before the nominations are even announced should consider the following list and sobering fact: No movie about movies has ever won Best Picture.
Movies About Movies: How Do They Do With Oscar?
(Best Picture Nominees are in red)
Janet Gaynor (already an Oscar winner) was nominated again...
- 11/23/2011
- by NATHANIEL R
- FilmExperience
Above: Zoulikha Bouabdellah's Al Attlal (Ruines), left, and Pierre Léon's À la barbe d'Ivan, right.
Nicole Brenez has curated two programs of new work from the French avant-garde for this year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema 2011 in New York; below she has offered her program notes in French. Program one (on Saturday) concentrates on filmmakers reappropriating images; program two (Sunday) is the new feature by Ange Leccia, Nuit bleue. Below, I’ve translated Brenez’s extended appreciation of Leccia and Nuit bleue; as usual, I’ve tried to stay faithful to the sound and rhythm of the original where possible. Beneath the translated extract you'll find the full article by Ms. Brenez in its original French. —David Phelps
***
…Although Ange Leccia has also practiced re-appropriating images (especially Jean Luc-Godard’s) in his installations and his films, Nuit bleuetakes up a different aesthetic vein, one rich with a long tradition of the French avant-garde.
Nicole Brenez has curated two programs of new work from the French avant-garde for this year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema 2011 in New York; below she has offered her program notes in French. Program one (on Saturday) concentrates on filmmakers reappropriating images; program two (Sunday) is the new feature by Ange Leccia, Nuit bleue. Below, I’ve translated Brenez’s extended appreciation of Leccia and Nuit bleue; as usual, I’ve tried to stay faithful to the sound and rhythm of the original where possible. Beneath the translated extract you'll find the full article by Ms. Brenez in its original French. —David Phelps
***
…Although Ange Leccia has also practiced re-appropriating images (especially Jean Luc-Godard’s) in his installations and his films, Nuit bleuetakes up a different aesthetic vein, one rich with a long tradition of the French avant-garde.
- 3/19/2011
- MUBI
Have you ever wondered what are the films that inspire the next generation of visionary filmmakers? As part of our monthly Ioncinephile profile (read here), we ask the filmmaker the incredibly arduous task of identifying their top ten list of favorite films. We cap off the year with Ry Russo-Young, whose Sundance Film Festival selected and Gotham Award winner You Wont Miss Me finally receives a December 10th release followed by a nationwide roll out. Here are Ry's Top 10 Films. Close-Up - Abbas Kiarostami (1990) "This film articulates the complex dialogue between art and life. Part documentary, part staged re-enactment with real subjects, it’s about the trial of a man who impersonates the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf." The Conversation - Francis Ford Coppola (1974) "The way sound is used, the paranoia and the incredible use of Gene Hackman’s grey raincoat." Days of Heaven - Terrence Malick (1978) "I know a lot of...
- 12/4/2010
- IONCINEMA.com
#15. Get Out of the Car (Part of Wavelengths 1) Director: Thomas Andersen Buzz: There's a part of me wishing I could have a "different" film festival experience. The cinephilia side in me would love to embrace all the offerings from the Wavelengths programs. The one item at the top of that list, would be from the artist is was often mentioned on many top 100 lists of the past decade with "Los Angeles Plays Itself". Using montage once again, this is an update of sorts on the city of angels. The Gist: This is another city symphony exploring Los Angeles' gentrification through a thoughtful montage of façades and a playful excursus through its musical history. Tiff Schedule: Friday September 10 9:00:00 Pm Jackman Hall - Ago ...
- 9/7/2010
- IONCINEMA.com
Thom Andersen's 34-minute Get Out of the Car, slated for screenings at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, is the filmmaker's response to his own previous film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, notes Vadim Rizov in the La Weekly: "The film depicts Los Angeles as wasteland, with lots of decaying or empty billboards, functional murals and ad hoc decorations but no visible human life. On the sound track, neighborhood residents and skeptical passersby question the value or entertainment factor of the emptiness being captured; others angrily lament the destruction of neighborhood landmarks like South Central Farm. Musical snippets — old soul and rock, gospel choirs, norteño — add their own allusions." Vadim surveys the oeuvre, interviews Andersen via email and adds that the new film "comes home to La" tonight as part of Cinefamily's Evening with Thom Anderson: "Get Out of the Car marks his return to 16 mm film, and it...
- 8/19/2010
- MUBI
Wavelengths 1: Soul of the City
As the pace of the contemporary urban experience grows faster and the world becomes increasingly fractured, artists are documenting the vestiges and layers revealed in flux; global updates on the city symphony.
Tomonari Nishikawa’s Tokyo-Ebisu (Japan) is a 16mm in-camera patchwork constructed from multiple viewpoints from the platforms of Tokyo’s busiest railway line, Yamanote, and a masking technique which exposes 1/30th of a frame 30 times in order to capture an image of spectral apparitions. The Soul of Things (U.S.A) from Dominic Angerame presents luscious chiaroscuro images of the construction and destruction of modern structures exposing their inner soul. From Thom Andersen, director of Los Angeles Plays Itself, Get Out of the Car (U.S.A.) is a city symphony exploring Los Angeles’ gentrification through a thoughtful montage of façades and a playful excursus through its musical history. Callum Cooper’s Victoria,...
As the pace of the contemporary urban experience grows faster and the world becomes increasingly fractured, artists are documenting the vestiges and layers revealed in flux; global updates on the city symphony.
Tomonari Nishikawa’s Tokyo-Ebisu (Japan) is a 16mm in-camera patchwork constructed from multiple viewpoints from the platforms of Tokyo’s busiest railway line, Yamanote, and a masking technique which exposes 1/30th of a frame 30 times in order to capture an image of spectral apparitions. The Soul of Things (U.S.A) from Dominic Angerame presents luscious chiaroscuro images of the construction and destruction of modern structures exposing their inner soul. From Thom Andersen, director of Los Angeles Plays Itself, Get Out of the Car (U.S.A.) is a city symphony exploring Los Angeles’ gentrification through a thoughtful montage of façades and a playful excursus through its musical history. Callum Cooper’s Victoria,...
- 8/4/2010
- by tiffreviews
- TIFFReviews
They drank, fought, chased women and died. But La's Native Americans live on in a lost gem of a film: The Exiles
In Los Angeles Plays Itself, the cult documentary by Thom Andersen about "the most photographed city in the world – and the least remembered", the director heaped praise on an all-but forgotten La movie: Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles, which documented a riotous and boozy Friday night in the lives of several Native Americans, originally from Arizona, living in the Bunker Hill area of downtown La in the late 1950s.
Unlauded and largely unseen in its day, it has received ecstatic plaudits from Us critics ever since. Today it's seen as both a unique moment in the history of Native American film-making and a record of the vanished community (and the beautiful Victorian architecture) that once existed where La's skyscrapers now stand.
The Exiles, which is out on DVD this week,...
In Los Angeles Plays Itself, the cult documentary by Thom Andersen about "the most photographed city in the world – and the least remembered", the director heaped praise on an all-but forgotten La movie: Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles, which documented a riotous and boozy Friday night in the lives of several Native Americans, originally from Arizona, living in the Bunker Hill area of downtown La in the late 1950s.
Unlauded and largely unseen in its day, it has received ecstatic plaudits from Us critics ever since. Today it's seen as both a unique moment in the history of Native American film-making and a record of the vanished community (and the beautiful Victorian architecture) that once existed where La's skyscrapers now stand.
The Exiles, which is out on DVD this week,...
- 2/17/2010
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
"'Star Wars: The Phantom Menace' was the most disappointing thing since my son."
That's the daffy opening line of filmmaker Mike Stoklasa's "'Star Wars: The Phantom Menace' Review," an insightful, rudely funny takedown of George Lucas' prequel. And it's as good a place as any to start an appreciation of a hybrid of the video essay and the mash-up -- an emerging format that's often more entertaining than the work it cannibalizes.
Let's start by distinguishing straightforward mash-ups and video essays from works created by Stoklasa and his siblings-in-spirit. The term "mash-up" was first applied to musical works that combined existing pieces of recording music in order to create something new. The YouTube equivalent is defined by Wikipedia as a work that "combines "multiple sources of video -- which often have no relation to each other -- into a derivative work, often lampooning...
That's the daffy opening line of filmmaker Mike Stoklasa's "'Star Wars: The Phantom Menace' Review," an insightful, rudely funny takedown of George Lucas' prequel. And it's as good a place as any to start an appreciation of a hybrid of the video essay and the mash-up -- an emerging format that's often more entertaining than the work it cannibalizes.
Let's start by distinguishing straightforward mash-ups and video essays from works created by Stoklasa and his siblings-in-spirit. The term "mash-up" was first applied to musical works that combined existing pieces of recording music in order to create something new. The YouTube equivalent is defined by Wikipedia as a work that "combines "multiple sources of video -- which often have no relation to each other -- into a derivative work, often lampooning...
- 1/20/2010
- by Matt Zoller Seitz
- ifc.com
by Jeffrey M. Anderson
The Exiles
directed by Kent MacKenzie
1961, 72 minutes, USA
Milestone Films
Most people have probably never heard of Kent MacKenzie's historically and culturally essential film The Exiles (1961). Some clips of it surfaced in Thom Andersen's exceptional 2004 cine-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself—about the The City of Angels as depicted in movies—but unfortunately, most people have never heard of that film either. Andersen included it prominently because it managed to find vivid corners of the city that didn't actually look like set dressing. Now, thanks to Milestone Films (who also gave us the 2007 re-release and 2008 DVD of Charles Burnett's extraordinary Killer of Sheep), The Exiles has been released uncut on an outstanding two-disc set—presented by Burnett himself.
Continued reading DVD Of The Week: The Exiles...
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The Exiles
directed by Kent MacKenzie
1961, 72 minutes, USA
Milestone Films
Most people have probably never heard of Kent MacKenzie's historically and culturally essential film The Exiles (1961). Some clips of it surfaced in Thom Andersen's exceptional 2004 cine-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself—about the The City of Angels as depicted in movies—but unfortunately, most people have never heard of that film either. Andersen included it prominently because it managed to find vivid corners of the city that didn't actually look like set dressing. Now, thanks to Milestone Films (who also gave us the 2007 re-release and 2008 DVD of Charles Burnett's extraordinary Killer of Sheep), The Exiles has been released uncut on an outstanding two-disc set—presented by Burnett himself.
Continued reading DVD Of The Week: The Exiles...
Comments (0)
Comments on this Entry:...
- 11/20/2009
- GreenCine Daily
Los Angeles Plays Itself Giveaway Sweepstakes 2009 Official Rules No Purchase Necessary. Void In Puerto Rico And Where Prohibited. 1. Sweepstakes Period. 'Los Angeles Plays Itself Giveaway' Sweepstakes (the 'Sweepstakes') begins 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time ('Et') Wednesday, November 11, 2009 and ends at 11:59 p.m. Et on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 ('Sweepstakes Period'). 2. Eligibility: Sweepstakes is offered only in the United States to legal residents of the 50 United States (and the District of Columbia) excluding Puerto Rico, who both submit a completed Official Registration Form (as described below) and are aged 18 or older (as of the submission date). Employees of Tribeca Enterprises ('Sponsor') and their respective sponsors, affiliates, subsidiaries, officers, directors, shareholders, agents and advisors, and all others associated with the development and the execution of this Sweepstakes, and the immediate family or members of the households of each, whether or not related (collectively, 'Sweepstakes Entities') are ...
- 11/11/2009
- TribecaFilm.com
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