Prismatic Ground is becoming a must-attend filmmaker-centered showcase on the rise for underground documentaries, avant-garde, and experimental cinema in the heart of New York City. Founded by Maysles Documentary Center co-programming director Inney Prakash, the initial virtual festival counter-responded to the approaches of many institutions that have inadequately handled virtual exhibitions and poorly supported artists. Prismatic Ground pays filmmakers screening fees, doesn’t divide features and shorts via “waves,” and merges early career and established voices in its accessible presentation of politically engaged, personal, and speculative imagery.
As this hybrid festival adapts the in-person components each subsequent year, the 3rd Prismatic Ground will present works at the Museum of the Moving Image, Maysles Documentary Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dctv’s Firehouse Cinema, Light Industry, and Anthology Film Archives with limited selections available online.
Taking place May 3-7, check out our picks to see below and learn more here.
Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk)
The 2016 U.
As this hybrid festival adapts the in-person components each subsequent year, the 3rd Prismatic Ground will present works at the Museum of the Moving Image, Maysles Documentary Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dctv’s Firehouse Cinema, Light Industry, and Anthology Film Archives with limited selections available online.
Taking place May 3-7, check out our picks to see below and learn more here.
Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk)
The 2016 U.
- 5/1/2023
- by Edward Frumkin
- The Film Stage
Rooftop Films folks have announced the grant recipients for the large swath of filmmakers’ funds and in the narrative feature categories we have the likes of Carlos López Estrada, Andrew Thomas Huang, Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli grabbing some coin. Estrada who has directed Sundance selected Blindspotting and Summertime has Kill Yr Idols in the works. Tandem of Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli who gave us the TIFF-Sundance preemed Violation will next be working on Honey Bunch. A lab fellow at Sundance, Andrew Thomas Huang continues to piece together his directorial debut in Tiger Girl. Here is the complete list of 2023 Rooftop Filmmakers Fund short and feature film grant recipients:
Water Tower Feature Film Cash Grants (Feature Film)
Carlos López Estrada – “Kill Yr Idols”
Jodie Mack – “Early Mourning, Tarpon Springs/Lindsey’s Color Service”
Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli – “Honey Bunch”
Reid Davenport – “Life After”
Eastern Effects Equipment Grant (Feature Film)
Alex Ross Perry...
Water Tower Feature Film Cash Grants (Feature Film)
Carlos López Estrada – “Kill Yr Idols”
Jodie Mack – “Early Mourning, Tarpon Springs/Lindsey’s Color Service”
Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli – “Honey Bunch”
Reid Davenport – “Life After”
Eastern Effects Equipment Grant (Feature Film)
Alex Ross Perry...
- 4/6/2023
- by Eric Lavallée
- IONCINEMA.com
Rooftop Films has announced the recipients of their 2023 Filmmakers Fund grants. A total of 21 cash and service grants will be awarded to a variety of independent filmmakers to support the production of their next short or feature film. Four Rooftop Films Water Tower Feature Film cash grants will be exclusively awarded with support from the Laurence W. Levine Foundation.
Rooftop Filmmakers Fund grants are made accessible to Rooftop Films alumni directors who have had their work screened during the annual Sumer Series in New York City. This years grantees include a demographic of over 60% women, 30% people of color and 10% people a part of the LGBTQ+ community.
“We’re unbelievably excited about the projects we’ve had the privilege of helping to fund this year! Every single one of these filmmakers approach their subjects in ways that are wholly unique to their style and vision, and we can’t wait to see the finished works,...
Rooftop Filmmakers Fund grants are made accessible to Rooftop Films alumni directors who have had their work screened during the annual Sumer Series in New York City. This years grantees include a demographic of over 60% women, 30% people of color and 10% people a part of the LGBTQ+ community.
“We’re unbelievably excited about the projects we’ve had the privilege of helping to fund this year! Every single one of these filmmakers approach their subjects in ways that are wholly unique to their style and vision, and we can’t wait to see the finished works,...
- 4/6/2023
- by McKinley Franklin
- Variety Film + TV
Dreams Under Confinement.This year marks the second installment of Prismatic Ground (May 4 – May 8), a new festival focusing on experimental documentary and avant-garde film and video. Last year’s inaugural edition was a completely virtual affair, but this year the festival returns in a hybrid version with in-person screenings and online viewing available for most of the films in its impressive 14 programs. Co-presented by the Maysles Documentary Center and Screen Slate, Prismatic Ground brings festival-goers a wide range of politically engaged, formally challenging new work by up-and-coming artists alongside established ones like Bill Morrison, Jodie Mack, and this year’s Ground Glass Award recipient, Christopher Harris. In the world of experimental film where visibility and opportunities to premiere new work can be hard to come by, the festival is poised to make a significant splash.Founded by Inney Prakash in 2021, last year’s edition consisted of four programs of films,...
- 5/6/2022
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Titane (2021).Actor Vincent Lindon has been announced as the president of this year's Cannes competition jury, leading a group that includes Rebecca Hall, Deepika Padukone, Jeff Nichols, and Joachim Trier. The festival has also added several pleasant surprises to the lineup: films by Serge Bozon, Albert Serra, Louis Garrel, Patricio Guzmán, and more.Subscribe to our limited-edition, print-only Notebook magazine by April 30 to secure your copy of Issue 1, featuring a conversation between Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Yoshitomo Nara, a carte blanche contribution by Christopher Doyle, and much more.Recommended VIEWINGAbove: I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) .Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation has launched a virtual screening room for restored films, called the Restoration Screening Room. The fun begins with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1945 film I Know Where I'm Going!, which will be available for...
- 4/27/2022
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSHong Sang-soo's The Novelist's Film (2022)The competition slate has been announced for this year's Berlinale, featuring the latest by Hong Sang-soo, Claire Denis, Rithy Panh, Phyllis Nagy, Ulrich Seidl, and more. Find the rest of the lineup here. In an interview with Variety, executive Mariette Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian discuss their plans for the festival to be an in-person event. Actor Michel Subor has died at the age of 86. Subor captivated audiences with his performances in films like Jean-Luc Godard's Le petit soldat (1960)—he also was the narrator for François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962)—and a number of films by Claire Denis, from Beau travail (1999) and L'intrus (2004) to White Material (2009) and Bastards (2013). We recommend reading Yasmina Price's excellent essay on L'intrus and Subor's distinct historiography as an actor. Recommended VIEWINGThe...
- 1/19/2022
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Fox Maxy's Maat Means Land (2020) MoMA has announced the lineup and schedule for “To The Lighthouse,” a thrilling carte blanche program by curator Mark McElhatten featuring new films by Nathaniel Dorsky, Ernie Gehr, Jodie Mack, Dani and Sheilah ReStack, and more, along with older films by Rivette, Joseph H. Lewis, Claire Denis, and Marguerite Duras.An essential annual list, Filmmaker Magazine's 25 new faces of film for 2021 includes Kate Gondwe (the founder of Dezda Films), filmmaker Fox Maxy, Omnes Films (the collective behind Tyler Taormina's Ham on Rye), and others. A24 and Emma Stone’s production company, Fruit Tree Banner, have come together to back Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw The TV Glow. The film, a follow-up to Schoenbrun's debut from this year, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, follows...
- 10/13/2021
- MUBI
The Criterion Channel’s July 2021 Lineup Includes Wong Kar Wai, Neo-Noir, Art-House Animation & More
The July lineup at The Criterion Channel has been revealed, most notably featuring the new Wong Kar Wai restorations from the recent box set release, including As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, 2046, and his shorts Hua yang de nian hua and The Hand.
Also among the lineup is a series on neo-noir with Body Double, Manhunter, Thief, The Last Seduction, Cutter’s Way, Brick, Night Moves, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, and more. The channel will also feature a spotlight on art-house animation with work by Marcell Jankovics, Satoshi Kon, Ari Folman, Don Hertzfeldt, Karel Zeman, and more.
With Jodie Mack’s delightful The Grand Bizarre, the landmark doc Hoop Dreams, Orson Welles’ take on Othello, the recent Oscar entries Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time and You Will Die at Twenty, and much more,...
Also among the lineup is a series on neo-noir with Body Double, Manhunter, Thief, The Last Seduction, Cutter’s Way, Brick, Night Moves, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, and more. The channel will also feature a spotlight on art-house animation with work by Marcell Jankovics, Satoshi Kon, Ari Folman, Don Hertzfeldt, Karel Zeman, and more.
With Jodie Mack’s delightful The Grand Bizarre, the landmark doc Hoop Dreams, Orson Welles’ take on Othello, the recent Oscar entries Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time and You Will Die at Twenty, and much more,...
- 6/24/2021
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Killers of the Flower Moon (2021)From Osage News, the first official image from Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, featuring Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio. Recommended VIEWINGFollowing the release of his series The Underground Railroad, Barry Jenkins has also released The Gaze, a 50-minute non-narrative video piece that captures the show's background actors in moments of stillness. The film challenges the notion of the "white gaze" by pursuing what Jenkins refers to as "the Black gaze; or the gaze distilled." Shudder has released an official trailer for George A. Romero's The Amusement Park, a restoration of the long-lost 1973 film. Originally a commissioned work by the Lutheran Society, The Amusement Park was shelved for its terrifying depiction of elder abuse. The film will premiere on Shudder on June 8. Over at Ecstatic Static,...
- 5/12/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe winners of this year's socially distanced Academy Awards ceremony include Daniel Kaluuya, Youn Yuh Jung, and Chloé Zhao. Find our full list of winners and nominees here.The legendary layout artist Roy Naisbitt has died at 90. Best known for his intricate and interweaving visions, Naisbitt worked on films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Space Jam, Balto and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Recommended VIEWINGAn extension of This Long Century, Ecstatic Static is a database of films and information from a broad community of artists. The site is currently screening films like Simon Liu's Signal 8, and also has an extensive library featuring new notes on filmmaking by Jodie Mack, Helena Wittmann, and more. Anthology Film Archives has announced a new online festival, presented in partnership with production company Vanda. Entitled Vanda Duarte: Dissident Films by Latin American Women Directors,...
- 4/28/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Lee Isaac Chung's Minari. Nomadland, Minari, Soul, and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm are among this year's Golden Globe winners. Find our complete list of nominees and winners here. Canyon Cinema Foundation has announced a new curatorial fellowship, Canyon Cinema Discovered, that will offer four fellows the opportunity to curate programs from Canyon's collection of films. Applicants can be based in anywhere in the world. Spike Lee and HBO will be teaming up for the multi-part documentary NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½, described as “an epic chronicle of life, loss and survival in the city of New York over the twenty years since the September 11th attacks.” The film will include first-hand stories told by over 200 New Yorkers. Recommended VIEWINGThe official teaser trailer for Barry Jenkins' series The Underground Railroad, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel,...
- 3/3/2021
- MUBI
Without going into the specifics of the obstacles that were overcome by the heroic efforts of film distributors, 2020 was a stronger year for films released in the United States than could have been reasonably expected, though it only sparingly reached the heights of last year. Note the specific term “released”: all of the films on my list premiered before 2020 even began, which only further heightens the importance of both the festival circuit and the people dedicated to giving films their proper due, whether it be in repertory theaters or in virtual cinemas. One special mention: my favorite film released this year from the previous decade is Hong Sang-soo’s Yourself and Yours, which premiered in 2016 but only just received a release; my personal eligibility rules limit the films on this list to a two-year window, but otherwise it would be at the very top of this list.
Honorable Mentions: Lovers Rock,...
Honorable Mentions: Lovers Rock,...
- 1/2/2021
- by Ryan Swen
- The Film Stage
As Martin Scorsese once said, “Music and cinema fit together naturally. Because there’s a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images work when they’re put together. It’s been said that cinema and music are very close as art forms, and I think that’s true.” Indeed, the right piece of music–whether it’s an original score or a carefully selected song–can do wonders for a sequence, and today we’re looking at the 20 films that best expressed this notion this year.
From seasoned composers to accomplished musicians, as well as a smattering of soundtracks, each musical example perfectly transported us to the world of the film. Check out our rundown of the top 20, which includes streams to each soundtrack in full where available.
20. Wendy (Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin)
19. She Dies Tomorrow (Mondo Boys)
18. The Nest (Richard Reed Parry)
17. Ammonite (Dustin O’Halloran and...
From seasoned composers to accomplished musicians, as well as a smattering of soundtracks, each musical example perfectly transported us to the world of the film. Check out our rundown of the top 20, which includes streams to each soundtrack in full where available.
20. Wendy (Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin)
19. She Dies Tomorrow (Mondo Boys)
18. The Nest (Richard Reed Parry)
17. Ammonite (Dustin O’Halloran and...
- 12/29/2020
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
For our most comprehensive year-end feature we’re providing a cumulative look at The Film Stage’s favorite films of 2020. We’ve asked contributors to compile ten-best lists with five honorable mentions—a selection of those personal lists will be shared in the coming days—and after tallying votes, a top 50 has been assembled.
It should be noted that, unlike our other year-end features, we placed no requirement on a selection being a U.S theatrical release, so you may see some repeats from last year and a few we’ll certainly discuss more over the next twelve months. So: without further ado, check out our rundown of 2020 below, our ongoing year-end coverage here (including where to stream many of the below picks), and return in the coming weeks as we look towards 2021.
50. The Metamorphosis of Birds (Catarina Vasconcelos)
The most purely, incandescently beautiful movie of the year is a...
It should be noted that, unlike our other year-end features, we placed no requirement on a selection being a U.S theatrical release, so you may see some repeats from last year and a few we’ll certainly discuss more over the next twelve months. So: without further ado, check out our rundown of 2020 below, our ongoing year-end coverage here (including where to stream many of the below picks), and return in the coming weeks as we look towards 2021.
50. The Metamorphosis of Birds (Catarina Vasconcelos)
The most purely, incandescently beautiful movie of the year is a...
- 12/24/2020
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
While we aim to discuss a wide breadth of films each year, few things give us more pleasure than the arrival of bold, new voices. It’s why we venture to festivals and pore over a variety of different features that might bring to light some emerging talent. This year was an especially notable time for new directors making their stamp, and we’re highlighting the handful of 2020 debuts that most impressed us.
Below, one can check out a list spanning a variety of different genres and many are available to stream here. In years to come, take note as these helmers (hopefully) ascend.
The 40-Year-Old Version (Radha Blank)
Playwright Radha Blank’s spirited directorial debut The 40-Year-Old Version in an often hilarious and heartfelt autobiographical tale of reinvention. Surrounded in a shoebox apartment of memories of her past including 30 Under 30 Awards, Blank plays herself, a playwright who is faced...
Below, one can check out a list spanning a variety of different genres and many are available to stream here. In years to come, take note as these helmers (hopefully) ascend.
The 40-Year-Old Version (Radha Blank)
Playwright Radha Blank’s spirited directorial debut The 40-Year-Old Version in an often hilarious and heartfelt autobiographical tale of reinvention. Surrounded in a shoebox apartment of memories of her past including 30 Under 30 Awards, Blank plays herself, a playwright who is faced...
- 12/15/2020
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
Each month, we're commissioning a different artist to create a movie poster for a film exclusively playing on the platform. This May, Patrick Thomas has made three posters for Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre, which is showing April 9 - May 8, 2020 in Mubi's Undiscovered series.************Patrick has also shared with us some behind the scenes images (and animations) of his design process for the posters.
- 4/20/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Nobuhiko Obayashi in his "humble workspace." (Photograph by Aiko Masubichi for Mubi.) We're devastated by the loss of three great titans within the last week, each totally singular and significant to the history of movies: Bruce Baillie, avant-garde filmmaker and founder of Canyon Cinema and the San Francisco Cinematheque, the prolific pacifist and green-screen master Nobuhiko Obayashi (whose penultimate film Hanagatami was featured on Mubi in January of 2019), and Pan-African cinema pioneer Sarah Maldoror, known for her portraits of women's role in African liberation struggles. The Cannes Film Festival, which earlier announced plans to postpone the festival until the end of June to early July, has confirmed that this will no longer be possible, and that the festivities can no longer take place in their "original form." Recommended VIEWINGThis Long Century, a digital...
- 4/15/2020
- MUBI
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.
Braguino (Clément Cogitore)
Le Cinéma Club excels in presentation—opening their clean website every Friday reveals a free, new, conveniently sized film playing alongside original written content—but more important is their reach: time and again they’re screening unavailable, underseen, sometimes thought-missing work by auteurs established and upcoming alike. Their current program concerns recent documentaries—starting today is French filmmaker Clément Cogitore’s Braguino, which surveys two rival families in images merging you-are-there immediacy with stunning high-definition clarity. At 49 minutes the experience is ideal for your dense quarantine lineup. – Nick N.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Columbia Noir
To celebrate their one-year anniversary, The...
Braguino (Clément Cogitore)
Le Cinéma Club excels in presentation—opening their clean website every Friday reveals a free, new, conveniently sized film playing alongside original written content—but more important is their reach: time and again they’re screening unavailable, underseen, sometimes thought-missing work by auteurs established and upcoming alike. Their current program concerns recent documentaries—starting today is French filmmaker Clément Cogitore’s Braguino, which surveys two rival families in images merging you-are-there immediacy with stunning high-definition clarity. At 49 minutes the experience is ideal for your dense quarantine lineup. – Nick N.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Columbia Noir
To celebrate their one-year anniversary, The...
- 4/10/2020
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Today through April 30, the website This Long Century, which describes itself as “an ever-evolving collection of personal insights from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and cultural icons the world over,” is hosting two programs of experimental short work, with 30 shorts in total. The Outside program includes Lucile Hadžihalilović’s 2017 De Natura, Carlos Reygadas’s 2011 Este es mi Reino, and Deborah Stratman’s 1997 medium-length From Hetty to Nancy. The equally strong Inside program includes Jodie Mack’s 2012 Blanket Statement #1: Home is Where the Heart is, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2018 Blue, Peter Tscherkassky’s legendary 1999 Outer Space and David Lowery’s 2011 Pioneer. Streaming is free, though This Long […]...
- 4/9/2020
- by Filmmaker Staff
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
Today through April 30, the website This Long Century, which describes itself as “an ever-evolving collection of personal insights from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and cultural icons the world over,” is hosting two programs of experimental short work, with 30 shorts in total. The Outside program includes Lucile Hadžihalilović’s 2017 De Natura, Carlos Reygadas’s 2011 Este es mi Reino, and Deborah Stratman’s 1997 medium-length From Hetty to Nancy. The equally strong Inside program includes Jodie Mack’s 2012 Blanket Statement #1: Home is Where the Heart is, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2018 Blue, Peter Tscherkassky’s legendary 1999 Outer Space and David Lowery’s 2011 Pioneer. Streaming is free, though This Long […]...
- 4/9/2020
- by Filmmaker Staff
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre is exclusively playing on Mubi from April 9 - May 8, 2020 in Mubi's Undiscovered series.It is a great pleasure to share The Grand Bizarre with you on Mubi this month. This gesture signals a goodbye kiss to something on which I’ve spent a lot of time in the past seven years (both making it and representing it in Q+A). We had already scheduled this date before the pandemic. But, now that we are here, the film has an almost entirely new meaning for me. It’s always been about motion, spread, and mutation. But, of course, in recent weeks, the functionality of the textile has foregrounded itself as we fight over materials with which to clean up messes and examine fabrics for their density, absorbency, and filtration potential to make masks. In fact, I had to ask myself this morning, “Omg, is The Grand Bizarre about coronavirus?...
- 4/9/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSChanges continue to ripple throughout the film industry: Following the cancellation of this year's SXSW, the festival has paired up with Amazon Prime and invited filmmakers of their lineup to take part in a 10-day "online festival," streaming on Prime for users in the U.S. Both Cannes and the Venice Film Festival have announced that neither will be moving forward with a digital festival, committing to plans for physical events for later this year. Recommended Viewingnhk World is offering its four part documentary, 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki, on its website for free. The series offers an exclusive look at the animation auteur's production of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.A new short film by Jean-Marie Straub, France Against Robots, has premiered on the Kino Slang blog. The film's title is...
- 4/8/2020
- MUBI
Experimental artist-animator Jodie Mack’s film is a strange, colourful, kaleidoscopic odyssey around the world but with no apparent destination
Here’s a 60-minute cine-essay from the American experimental artist-animator Jodie Mack, a distinctively trippy travelogue about … well, what? The film might have something to say about globalisation and homogeneity. Or our 21st-century addiction to consuming stuff. Maybe there’s an observation here on cultural appropriation. But with no words or narrative, this hypnotic kaleidoscope of repeated patterns and animation featuring brightly coloured fabrics is all but unclassifiable. Mack is known for working with textiles; and this film, shot on 16mm, is perhaps best described as Koyaanisqatsi with rugs.
The footage has a grabbed-on-the hoof feel, filmed around the world. In a stop-motion scene at the start, a mutinous wheelie case, broken free from a display in a shopping mall, spluts out scraps of fabric. Again in stop-motion, a rug...
Here’s a 60-minute cine-essay from the American experimental artist-animator Jodie Mack, a distinctively trippy travelogue about … well, what? The film might have something to say about globalisation and homogeneity. Or our 21st-century addiction to consuming stuff. Maybe there’s an observation here on cultural appropriation. But with no words or narrative, this hypnotic kaleidoscope of repeated patterns and animation featuring brightly coloured fabrics is all but unclassifiable. Mack is known for working with textiles; and this film, shot on 16mm, is perhaps best described as Koyaanisqatsi with rugs.
The footage has a grabbed-on-the hoof feel, filmed around the world. In a stop-motion scene at the start, a mutinous wheelie case, broken free from a display in a shopping mall, spluts out scraps of fabric. Again in stop-motion, a rug...
- 4/8/2020
- by Cath Clarke
- The Guardian - Film News
At least once a decade since, I don't know, the 1960s, someone has declared the End of Cinema, sometimes with an air of triumph, occasionally a sense of relief, but usually a general tone of defeat. As we should have learned by now, cinema is resilient, not unlike the flu. It mutates, but it doesn't ever really go away. And as a specific subset of Cinema writ large, experimental film (and video? Do we still need to stipulate that?) has had its basic DNA rewritten dozens of times since the supposed heyday of the genre, the sixties-into-seventies sweet spot where autobiographical expressionism evolved into formalist rigor. The avant-garde, with its battered but still pulsating community ethos, and its inherent since of opposition (be it latent / aesthetic or blatant / political), has managed to keep on keeping on, even through the dim years of 1985–1993. Someone's always cooking up something good.Reviewing a...
- 12/16/2019
- MUBI
“I believe in a cinema which gives more possibilities and more time to its viewer—a half-fabricated cinema, an unfinished cinema that is completed by the creative spirit of the viewer, [so that] all of a sudden, we have a hundred films.” —Abbas Kiarostami, 1995That the filmmaking practice of Abbas Kiarostami can be described as pedagogical is, in some sense, self-evident—at least for the early portion of his directorial career. In 1969, as the Iranian New Wave was cresting, he joined the filmmaking department of Kanun (or the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), and would, for the subsequent two decades, produce a set of films that laid the groundwork for one of the most original and varied of filmmaking careers. “We were supposed to make films that dealt with childhood problems,” said Kiarostami of his work during that period. “At the beginning it was just a job, but...
- 7/24/2019
- MUBI
The organizers of the True/False Film Fest, taking place in Columbia, Missouri, on February 28 to March 3, are announcing their lineup exclusively to IndieWire. The 36 feature films and 18 short films (full list below) were culled from “roughly” 1,100 submissions.
Among the 36 new features, four of the films announced are world premieres. “The Hottest August,” is from director Brett Story and explores the anxieties of a “sweltering” New York City. “Midnight in Paris,” the directorial feature debut from Roni Moore and James Blagden, follows the Flint Northern High School’s senior class of 2012 as the Michigan students prepare for prom. Brazil-based filmmaker Maíra Bühler will screen “Let it Burn,” described as a tender portrait of addicts housed in a converted hotel in São Paulo’s notorious Cracolândia neighborhood. And the fourth T/F world premiere is director Jeffrey Peixoto’s exploration into what attracts members to the Church of Scientology in “Over the Rainbow.
Among the 36 new features, four of the films announced are world premieres. “The Hottest August,” is from director Brett Story and explores the anxieties of a “sweltering” New York City. “Midnight in Paris,” the directorial feature debut from Roni Moore and James Blagden, follows the Flint Northern High School’s senior class of 2012 as the Michigan students prepare for prom. Brazil-based filmmaker Maíra Bühler will screen “Let it Burn,” described as a tender portrait of addicts housed in a converted hotel in São Paulo’s notorious Cracolândia neighborhood. And the fourth T/F world premiere is director Jeffrey Peixoto’s exploration into what attracts members to the Church of Scientology in “Over the Rainbow.
- 2/6/2019
- by Chris O'Falt
- Indiewire
Binary StarsWhen I was in college, I learned a particular story about the concept of the aesthetic. It was a drama that featured a lot of now-familiar players: Kant, Hegel, and Marx; Nietzsche and Heidegger; Benjamin and Adorno; Jameson and Eagleton; Kristeva and Derrida. Despite the myriad ups and downs of the very concept of art, its relative or absolute autonomy, or its capacity or incapacity for social critique, there remained a general set of constants. One of them was the idea that art, as a space somewhat set apart from the needful things of daily life and especially the instrumentalist thinking of the marketplace, might offer, if not a possible glimpse of a future utopia, at least a clearing for contemplation. Today, an aesthetician is not necessarily a theorist. He or she is also someone who specializes in the treatment of skin. This may seem somehow frivolous, but the connection is real,...
- 1/5/2019
- MUBI
In 2018 we've published 70 interviews whose subjects have ranged from old masters to emerging new voices, and including some unexpected conversations, including those with curators (Dave Kehr of the Museum of Modern Art), as well as archival finds (a 1971 talk with Jerry Lewis).Below you will find an index of our conversations throughout the year, listed in order of publication date.Blake Williams (Prototype)Samira Elagoz (Craigslist Allstars)F.J. Ossang (9 Fingers)Jerry LewisAndré Gil Mata (The Tree)Christian Petzold (Transit)Raoul Peck (Young Karl Marx)Ashley McKenzie (Werewolf)Penelope SpheerisTed Fendt (Classical Period)Dominik Graf (The Red Shadow)Blake Williams ("Stereo Visions")Arnaud Desplechin (Ismael's Ghosts)Ruth Beckermann (The Waldheim Waltz)Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias (Cocote)Esther GarrelPhilippe Garrel (Lover for a Day)Jonas MekasJohann Lurf (★)Karim Aïnouz (Central Airport Thf)Juliana Antunes (Baronesa)Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra (Birds of Passage)Wang Bing (Dead Souls)Donal Foreman...
- 12/27/2018
- MUBI
For 11 years running, our end-of-the-year tradition on the Notebook has been to poll our roster of contributors to create fantasy double features of new and old films. But what about the curators behind Mubi itself? This year we begin what we hope to be a new tradition: publishing the favorite films of the year as chosen by our programming team: Daniel Kasman in the U.S., Anaïs Lebrun and Chiara Marañón in the U.K. We each have two lists: our top new films that premiered in 2018, and then a selection of revivals screened in cinemas.PREMIERESDaniel Kasman1. Blue (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)2. The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland)3. Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski, USA)4. The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, USA)5. The Waldheim Waltz (Ruth Beckermann, Austria)6. Unsane (Steven Soderbergh, USA)7. The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack, USA)8. The Red Shadow [director's cut]9. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?...
- 12/24/2018
- MUBI
Year-end buzz is often hijacked by noisy awards campaigns, but sometimes, it syncs up with critical consensus. That seems to be the case with “Roma,” Alfonso Cuarón’s nuanced ode to the domestic worker in his Mexican household in the 1970s. After winning multiple prizes from critics groups and topping numerous top 10 lists, “Roma” has received the most definitive endorsement from critics yet, by topping IndieWire’s year-end critics poll in the Best Film, Best Director, Best Foreign Film, and Best Cinematography categories.
The thirteenth edition of the survey presents an exhaustive overview of critical favorites, with a record-high of 232 critics voting from 32 countries, making it the largest survey of its kind. The outcome illustrates the sheer range of films celebrated by critics in 2018. While Cuarón dominated the film and director categories, Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” received significant support that landed it in the second-place slot, while Lee Chang-dong...
The thirteenth edition of the survey presents an exhaustive overview of critical favorites, with a record-high of 232 critics voting from 32 countries, making it the largest survey of its kind. The outcome illustrates the sheer range of films celebrated by critics in 2018. While Cuarón dominated the film and director categories, Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” received significant support that landed it in the second-place slot, while Lee Chang-dong...
- 12/17/2018
- by Christian Blauvelt and Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAmy Heckerling on the set of the Off Broadway musical of her film Clueless.We are delighted by the news shared by the New York Times that American auteur Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) is producing an Off-Broadway musical of her pop culture landmark film (and so much more!), Clueless. For more on the director, read our 2016 interview.Recommended VIEWINGMarcelo Martinessi's lovely debut film The Heiresses, a delicate drama focusing on the self-discovery of a wealthy, middle-aged queer women in Paraguay, gets an English trailer. We reviewed the film at the 68th Berlinale held earlier this year.The Criterion Collection produced this lovely video exploring the birth and programming vision of New York's Walter Reade cinema. Recommended READINGIt's that time of the year again: Year-end lists of the best films of 2018 have...
- 12/12/2018
- MUBI
One of the best-curated year-end lists every year comes from the long-running Film Comment magazine and their poll featuring around 100 of their contributors. This year’s list is no different, topped by Lucrecia Martel’s astounding Zama (now on Amazon Prime!) and also featuring Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, Valeska Grisebach’s Western, Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In, Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls, and more.
Along with their top 20, they also give a list of the best undistributed films of the year, from Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour epic La Flor to Jodie Mack’s gorgeous feature debut The Grand Bizarre to new films from Carlos Reygadas, Tsai Ming-liang, Lav Diaz, Roberto Minervini, and more. So, distributors take note, and check out both lists below.
Film Comment’s Top 20 Films Released in 2018:
1. Zama Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Brazil/Spain
2. Burning Lee Chang-dong, South Korea
3. First Reformed Paul Schrader,...
Along with their top 20, they also give a list of the best undistributed films of the year, from Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour epic La Flor to Jodie Mack’s gorgeous feature debut The Grand Bizarre to new films from Carlos Reygadas, Tsai Ming-liang, Lav Diaz, Roberto Minervini, and more. So, distributors take note, and check out both lists below.
Film Comment’s Top 20 Films Released in 2018:
1. Zama Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Brazil/Spain
2. Burning Lee Chang-dong, South Korea
3. First Reformed Paul Schrader,...
- 12/12/2018
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Atomic Garden“What’s good,” as you probably know, is urban slang. It means “what’s up?” Like a lot of slang, however, it can have very different meanings. One must be aware of the subtleties of context. But in the context of a festival report, it could have an entirely different meaning. It could be a way of asking for recommendations. “Hey, you saw those films? Well, what’s good?” In that respect, the films I discuss below might be taken (erroneously) as my picks for the absolute best films screened at the 2018 Media City Film Festival in Windsor, Ontario. This would imply that I saw all the films screened (I didn’t), or that any film not mentioned below somehow didn’t merit a mention.This is simply not true. For one thing, several of the best films screened at Media City this year are films I have...
- 12/10/2018
- MUBI
In June, a mere five months before the American Film Institute’s 32nd annual film festival, Michael Lumpkin took over the reins from fest director Jacqueline Lyanga, who exited after eight years at the helm.
Despite the short turnaround time, Lumpkin, already head of the AFI Docs festival in Washington, D.C., was determined to make this year’s Los Angeles-based fest a diverse mix of cinema with a focus on new auteurs, international filmmakers, the best work from 2018’s earlier festivals and, of course, potential Oscar players. He didn’t disappoint.
From 4,000-plus submissions, the fest will screen 83 features, four episodic shows and 47 shorts for a grand total of 134 titles from 45 countries. Selected films are dispersed into eight categories that include galas, world cinema and cinema legacy.
The festival — which kicks off Nov. 8 at Tcl Chinese Theatre — boasts five world premieres: Susanne Bier’s “Bird Box,” Mimi Leder’s...
Despite the short turnaround time, Lumpkin, already head of the AFI Docs festival in Washington, D.C., was determined to make this year’s Los Angeles-based fest a diverse mix of cinema with a focus on new auteurs, international filmmakers, the best work from 2018’s earlier festivals and, of course, potential Oscar players. He didn’t disappoint.
From 4,000-plus submissions, the fest will screen 83 features, four episodic shows and 47 shorts for a grand total of 134 titles from 45 countries. Selected films are dispersed into eight categories that include galas, world cinema and cinema legacy.
The festival — which kicks off Nov. 8 at Tcl Chinese Theatre — boasts five world premieres: Susanne Bier’s “Bird Box,” Mimi Leder’s...
- 11/8/2018
- by Addie Morfoot
- Variety Film + TV
Infinite Fest is a monthly column by festival programmer and film critic Eric Allen Hatch, author of the recent “Why I Am Hopeful” article for Filmmaker Magazine, tackling the state of cinema as expressed by North American film festivals.DiamantinoCinephilia is a subculture, and we need to represent it that way. I’m not asking you to wear tattered garments held together by safety pins, or accessorize clocks as necklaces. We don’t even need to stop trusting anyone over 30. But we do need to more aggressively filter cynical corporate product marketed to us—and more effectively proselytize for the authentic experiences that make film an art form rather than merely an industry. This cultural moment offers an abundance of that authenticity. Returning home from a week at Toronto International Film Festival, an annual pilgrimage for two decades, followed directly by another week in Maine for Camden International Film Festival,...
- 11/5/2018
- MUBI
M/M (Drew Lint).Nestled within the multifarious Canadian offerings of the 37th Vancouver International Film Festival—officially the “True North” stream—is Future//Present, the brainchild of critic and programmer Adam Cook, now in its third year. Consistently comprising eight features and a number of shorts, the program has since its inception been positioned as something of a haven for emerging Canadian filmmakers, directors working on the fringes of—or in some cases completely untethered from—state funding. (That five of this year's selections have at least one other listed country of origin is telling.) In other words, it offers a set of films that, without undue extrapolation, one could surmise would have previously been passed over, not necessarily for deficiencies in accomplishment or sensibility, but for their lack of adherence to established norms. This third edition offers as good a time as any to take stock of the...
- 11/1/2018
- MUBI
Eye of the NeedleThe 2018 Nyff Projections series included six features, four featurettes, and 22 short films. That’s a grand total of 1,051 minutes of programming, or just over 17 and ½ hours of experimental cinema. Obviously, in that amount of time, one could watch a Lav Diaz film. But Projections offered considerably more variety, with highlights that included a sexually ambiguous footballer given to hallucinations of giant Pekingese puppies (Abrantes and Schmidt’s Diamantino); a corpulent French monarch writhing on the floor (Albert Serra’s Roi Soleil); two restored feminist classics from the 1980s that borrowed liberally from the aesthetics of children’s TV and classic game shows (Ericka Beckman’s Cinderella and You the Better); and an unconventional documentary about the legacy of radical psychoanalysis in Argentina (Dora García’s Segunda Vez). As one might expect, certain thematic similarities began to emerge among the various films, but those are probably as much...
- 10/23/2018
- MUBI
Jodie Mack’s work is vital, both in the sense that it is an essential cornerstone of modern film practice but also–and more significantly–alive. With a stop-motion style of animation that returns the genre to its oft-forgotten root definition of literally bringing inanimate objects to life, her experimentation with form is refreshingly playful and unpretentious, liberating materials from their settings and placing them in conversation with less colorful aspects of the world at large. Her first feature The Grand Bizarre has been a long time coming, disrupting a loaded filmography of significant, acclaimed short films. With an hour run-time that abstractly chronicles the travels of a group of vibrantly colored, escaped textiles and fabrics, Mack escalates breathtaking aesthetic revery into a stimulating discourse on the global economy.
She does not confine herself to a single thesis, but rather explores alongside her subjects, aloofly undertaking insightful and creative tangents.
She does not confine herself to a single thesis, but rather explores alongside her subjects, aloofly undertaking insightful and creative tangents.
- 10/12/2018
- by Jason Ooi
- The Film Stage
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSIdo Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker (1953).The United States Library of Congress has announced a significant update to their free screening platform, National Screening Room, with hundreds of films—ranging from historic documents of turn-of-century American life to Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker. At this point we're well documented admirers of Paul W.S. Anderson's cinema, which is why we were thrilled to hear that Tony Jaa, Ron Perlman, and T.I. have joined Milla Jovovich in the cast for his latest video game adaptation: Capcom's Monster Hunter. The Chinese-Taiwanese annual Golden Horse awards have announced this year's nominations, which include Zhang Yimou's Shadow, Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still, Bi Gan's A Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Pema Tseden's Jinpa, amongst many others.Recommended VIEWINGOne of the longest running, most compelling American film...
- 10/3/2018
- MUBI
A Faithful Man director Louis Garrel and Alex Ross Perry, Jodie Mack and Albert Serra have a Film Comment: Filmmakers Talk with Nicolas Rapold Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced their daily free talk series during the 56th New York Film Festival. Conversations with Morgan Neville, the director of the documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead on Orson Welles’s The Other Side Of The Wind, which are both screening as Special Events; Monrovia, Indiana director Frederick Wiseman (Main Slate selection), moderated by Kent Jones; cinematographer/photographer Ed Lachman, who also designed this year's festival poster with Jr, Agnès Varda's co-director on Faces Places; Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan (Wildlife) with Mary Harron and John Walsh on being writing partners, moderated by Karen Han, and a Film Comment: Filmmakers Talk with directors Louis Garrel (A Faithful Man), Jodie Mack (The Grand...
The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced their daily free talk series during the 56th New York Film Festival. Conversations with Morgan Neville, the director of the documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead on Orson Welles’s The Other Side Of The Wind, which are both screening as Special Events; Monrovia, Indiana director Frederick Wiseman (Main Slate selection), moderated by Kent Jones; cinematographer/photographer Ed Lachman, who also designed this year's festival poster with Jr, Agnès Varda's co-director on Faces Places; Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan (Wildlife) with Mary Harron and John Walsh on being writing partners, moderated by Karen Han, and a Film Comment: Filmmakers Talk with directors Louis Garrel (A Faithful Man), Jodie Mack (The Grand...
- 9/26/2018
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Below you will find an index of our coverage from the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) in 2018, as well as our favorite films.Top Picksdaniel KASMANFeatures:1. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? (Roberto Minervini)2. High Life (Claire Denis)3. Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman)4. Green Book (Peter Farrelly)5. aKasha (hajooj kuka)6. Rojo (Benjamin Naishtat)7. Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)8. Belmonte (Federico Veiroj)9. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)10. Hidden Man (Jiang Wen)Shorts:1. Blue (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)2. Arena (Björn Kämmerer)3. Polly One (Kevin Jerome Everson)4. Colophon (Nathaniel Dorsky)5. Please step out of the frame. (Karissa Hahn)6. Wall Unwalled (Lawrence Abu Hamdan)7. Ada Kaleh (Helena Wittmann)8. Alitplano (Malena Szlam)9. Norman Norman (Sophy Romvari)10. Hoarders without Borders, 1.0 (Jodie Mack)Kelley DONG1. "I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians" (Radu Jude)2. High Life (Claire Denis)3. Our Time (Carlos Reygadas)4. Our Body (Han Ka-Ram)5. A Star is Born (Bradley Cooper...
- 9/25/2018
- MUBI
With the Toronto International Film Festival beginning today, Vadim Rizov — who is on the ground and filing his Critics Notebooks — and I offer you this humble list of films that we are more than reasonably sure are worth your viewing time. The Grand Bizarre. In her previous Dusty Stacks of Mom, animator and experimental filmmaker Jodie Mack turned a familial tale of Pink Floyd merch into a formal treatise on the demise of physical media. Mack’s focus in this new short feature (61 minutes) is similarly material: she looks at the semiotic uses of fabric and textiles as […]...
- 9/6/2018
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
With the Toronto International Film Festival beginning today, Vadim Rizov — who is on the ground and filing his Critics Notebooks — and I offer you this humble list of films that we are more than reasonably sure are worth your viewing time. The Grand Bizarre. In her previous Dusty Stacks of Mom, animator and experimental filmmaker Jodie Mack turned a familial tale of Pink Floyd merch into a formal treatise on the demise of physical media. Mack’s focus in this new short feature (61 minutes) is similarly material: she looks at the semiotic uses of fabric and textiles as […]...
- 9/6/2018
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
A Land Imagined director Yeo Siew Hua Below you will find the awards for the 71st Locarno Festival, as well as an index of our coverage.AWARDSInternational CompetitionGolden Leopard: A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua) Special Jury Prize: M (Yolande Zauberman) Special Mention: Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham) Best Direction: Dominga Sotomayor (Too Late to Die Young) Best Actress: Andra Guti (Alice T.) Best Actor: Ki Joobong (Hotel By the River)Filmmakers of the Present Golden Leopard: Chaos (Sara Fattahi) Special Jury Prize: Closing Time (Nicole Vögele) Prize for Best Emerging Director: Tarik Aktas (Dead Horse Nebula) Special Mention: Fausto (Andrea Bussmann)Rose in Matthieu Bareyre's L'EpoqueSigns of Life Best Film: The Fragile House (Lin Zi) Mantarraya Award: The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (Benjamin Crotty)First Feature Best First Feature: Alles Ist Gut (Eva Trobisch)Art Peace Hotel Award: Acid Forest (Rugile Barzdziukaite)Special Mention: Erased, Ascent of the...
- 8/24/2018
- MUBI
The following essay was produced as part of the 2018 Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that took place during the Locarno Film Festival.
Film festivals give one a very particular perspective on world geography. Attendants of this year’s Locarno Film Festival, for instance, have access to delicately rendered portraits of communities in Chile, Lebanon, and Turkey that are remote even to most inhabitants of their native countries. The festival circuit can feel like a microcosmic society unto itself, a loose alliance of city states – Venice, Berlin, Toronto being a few leading names – wholly detached from any particular sense of place. Accordingly, it’s easy to see the passion for the local communities in an increasingly globalized world.
International film culture enacts a tension between the global and the local – one by no means unique to cinema. The punning title of London-born, U.S.-raised experimental filmmaker...
Film festivals give one a very particular perspective on world geography. Attendants of this year’s Locarno Film Festival, for instance, have access to delicately rendered portraits of communities in Chile, Lebanon, and Turkey that are remote even to most inhabitants of their native countries. The festival circuit can feel like a microcosmic society unto itself, a loose alliance of city states – Venice, Berlin, Toronto being a few leading names – wholly detached from any particular sense of place. Accordingly, it’s easy to see the passion for the local communities in an increasingly globalized world.
International film culture enacts a tension between the global and the local – one by no means unique to cinema. The punning title of London-born, U.S.-raised experimental filmmaker...
- 8/18/2018
- by Daniel Witkin
- Indiewire
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSApichatpong Weerasethakul's Blue.The Toronto International Film Festival is continuing to roll out an impressive (and massive) lineup of films, this time for its Masters and Wavelengths sections, including a mysterious 12-minute "portrait of feverish slumber" by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, entitled Blue, the international premiere of Naomi Kawase's Vision, about a woman's search for a Japanese medicinal plant in a strange forest, and the North American premiere of Jia Zhangke's gangster film Ash is Purest White.Recommended VIEWINGWith fall festival season upon us, a slew of new trailers has arrived: Firstly, Gaspar Noé is back with what is destined, based on reviews from Cannes, to be yet another contentious film. Lawrence Garcia wrote about the "virtuosic, infernal" film for Notebook. Here's the U.S. trailer. A sublime, oneiric first trailer for Naomi Kawase's aforementioned Tiff-bound Vision,...
- 8/15/2018
- MUBI
A Room with a Coconut ViewThe so-called ‘desktop movie,’ a film visually told predominantly or entirely through the setup of a computer screen, has had a couple of high-profile examples over the last few years. Among these are Nacho Vigalondo’s Open Windows (2014), Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman’s short Noah (2013), and, most notably in terms of mainstream success, Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended (2014). 2018 would seem to be a major year for the genre, if you can call it a genre just yet, with the wide release of sequel Unfriended: Dark Web, Timur Bekmambetov’s Profile playing festivals, and now the release, through Sony, of Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching. It is worth noting that Bekmambetov also produced the two of those 2018 titles he didn’t direct, so there’s at least one benefactor devoted to making the form catch on. With the exception of something like Kevin B. Lee’s essay...
- 8/15/2018
- MUBI
“All this yellow and black makes me think of bumble bees,” says Jodie Mack as she clambers up onto a chair in the Piazza Grande in Locarno. “Not leopards.” At the premiere of her new movie, The Grand Bizarre, Mack coaxed a world-weary festival audience into singing happy birthday to her mother as she stood, conductor-like, in front of the screen recording us on her cell phone. No small feat to wheedle that response out of such a tired group of people. What’s great about Jodie Mack movies—not simply Jodie Mack herself—is an all-encompassing exuberance and an overwhelming generosity of spirit. Moment to moment, her movies contain more bombastic pleasure than just about anybody currently working in American cinema. Her art, for the most part, is a breathless reconfiguration of tablecloths, towels, dresses, and other everyday fabrics, into abstracted intersections of colliding colors and patterns. Meanwhile, what...
- 8/14/2018
- MUBI
56th New York Film Festival Projections line-up announced by Anne-Katrin Titze - 2018-08-13 21:31:25
Albert Serra, the director of The Death Of Louis Xiv (La Mort De Louis Xiv), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, has Roi Soleil, featuring Lluís Serrat in the 56th New York Film Festival Projections line-up Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the 56th New York Film Festival Projections line-up which runs from October 4 through October 7.The program will screen seven feature films: Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt's Diamantino; Albert Serra's Roi Soleil; Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre; James Benning's 11 x 14; Ted Fendt's Classical Period; Tsai Ming-liang's Your Face, and Dora García's Second Time Around (Segunda Vez).
There will also be five programs of shorts, an Ericka Beckman Program and a Quantification Trilogy by Jeremy Shaw.
Projections is curated by Dennis Lim (Fslc Director of Programming) and Aily Nash (independent curator). Shelby Shaw and Dan Sullivan are Program Assistants.
“This year’s Projections lineup brings together established artists,...
The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the 56th New York Film Festival Projections line-up which runs from October 4 through October 7.The program will screen seven feature films: Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt's Diamantino; Albert Serra's Roi Soleil; Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre; James Benning's 11 x 14; Ted Fendt's Classical Period; Tsai Ming-liang's Your Face, and Dora García's Second Time Around (Segunda Vez).
There will also be five programs of shorts, an Ericka Beckman Program and a Quantification Trilogy by Jeremy Shaw.
Projections is curated by Dennis Lim (Fslc Director of Programming) and Aily Nash (independent curator). Shelby Shaw and Dan Sullivan are Program Assistants.
“This year’s Projections lineup brings together established artists,...
- 8/13/2018
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
While I’ve been reveling in many of the old films presented at the Locarno Festival, so far the new ones mainly seem to think making movies is merely the choice of film references and personal re-interpretation of favorite tropes. This approach nearly sidesteps two of the most essential qualities of the cinema: a hunger or need to film something, to reveal something to the audience that one is excited about, eager and driven to communicate; and an acute perspective on the world, a strong stance taken, one which places something at stake in the making and watching of a picture, rather than the respectful regurgitation of techniques and themes.Thankfully, the festival also has Jodie Mack, an exuberant sprite of cinema whose frame-by-frame animations of object patterns like wallpaper catalogs or lacework into giddy, materialist flicker films are some of the most delightful of short filmmaking. She has brought to Locarno her first feature,...
- 8/10/2018
- MUBI
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