What Keeps A Writer Writing?

I've written a guest post titled "What Keeps A Writer Writing?" for the University of Pittsburgh film studies program blog Special Affects.

In the post I wonder: What drives a writer to keep writing about cinema in the long run even if she doesn't make a living by it?  My post has to do mostly with cinema students who may not find themselves employed full-time in the field after they finish their studies. But this is also a challenge for the many writers in Internet film culture who don't happen to write for a living.

If you're inclined to share your thoughts, I'd love to know: What conditions or circumstances motivate you to write? What marks those periods of your life when you've been able to write -- and what characterizes those periods when you've been less enthused to write? Thank you.

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Links to recent reading:

-- Pasquale Iannone cites several interesting precursors in his piece on the "roots of neorealism" in Sight & Sound.

-- Kent Jones on John Ford, and Quentin Tarantino's recent comments about Ford; and some thoughts by Zach Campbell.

-- The fourth issue of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, edited by Andrew Klevan and Victor Perkins, is now up.

-- "The 50 Greatest Matte Paintings of All Time".

-- From Jonathan Rosenbaum: a program notes essay on Jacques Rivette written for Cinematheque Ontario a few years ago; a piece on the Belgian filmmaker André Delvaux; and a recommendation to check out a newly discovered video on Raymond Durgnat.

-- I've just picked up a copy of a collection of essays by Elio Petri called "Writings on Cinema and Life".

-- Catherine Grant has great posts on slow cinema; and on the films of Claire Denis.

-- Catherine's post includes a link to Matthew Flanagan's PhD thesis on slow cinema in contemporary art and experimental film; Matthew's coverage of experimental film at the last London Film Festival is here.

-- Steve Rybin at Cinephile Papers on "rhythm in movies".

-- Alain Bergala on the photography of Johan van der Keuken.

-- Cléo, a new journal of film and feminism edited by Kiva Reardon.

-- The debut of Screencity Journal, which features multidisciplinary analyses of contemporary urban space.

-- Ted Fendt translates a text by Louis Seguin on Straub/Huillet's Class Relations at MUBI.

-- "From Method Acting to Method Viewing" by Fergus Daly in the latest issue of Experimental Conversations.

-- Charles Petersen on Stanley Cavell in n+1.

pic: Claire Denis, who turned 65 recently and has a new film premiering at Cannes next week.

SCMS 2013 + Reading

I spent an energizing few days at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Chicago recently. It was a great opportunity both to encounter lots of interesting work and to socialize with friends old and new.

In my memory, I will always associate this year's conference with the presence of Victor Perkins. Victor retired last year from the faculty of the University of Warwick, but you wouldn't know it from seeing him at the conference. Impeccably attired in a three-piece suit, he seemed omnipresent, delivering a paper, participating in a well-attended workshop on "close analysis", and attending various sessions at which his questions were unfailingly precise and thoughtful. [Correction: Victor writes to say that in fact he was wearing a formal jacket, not a three-piece suit, indeed one with an interesting story behind it. I must have him recount it to me some day.] If you haven't yet had a chance to read it, his recent BFI Classics book on Renoir's Rules of the Game is marvelous.

For me, the highlights of the conference included the following presentations:

-- A panel on philosophy and the films of Terrence Malick that included Dan Morgan, Richard Neer, Lee Carruthers and Marc Furstenau.

-- A popular workshop discussion (with over a hundred people in the room) on the past and future of "close analysis", with Victor, Elena Gorfinkel, Lesley Stern, and Mary Ann Doane.

-- A panel on "Style and Rhetoric in the Movies" with papers by Victor (on "pace" in film), Gilberto Perez (on movement of the camera that accompanies movement of characters), and George Wilson.

-- Gerd Gemünden on the parallels and differences between the films of Lucretia Martel and Christoph Hochhäusler.

-- A workshop discussion on the genre of the "American Smart Film" that included Jeffrey Sconce, who coined the term in an article in the journal Screen ten years ago, and the Australian scholar Claire Perkins, who has just written a book about it.

-- Burke Hilsabeck on the intersection between Jerry Lewis and abstract expressionism.

-- A workshop on "publishing on digital platforms" that included John David Rhodes, co-founder of World Picture journal.

-- Dennis Hanlon on intertextuality and hypertextuality in the work of Hindi popular cinema director Manmohan Desai.

How handy: Catherine Grant has posted full-text versions of several papers presented at the conference.

* * *

Links to recent reading:

-- "Having an Idea in Cinema" by Gilles Deleuze, a transcript of a 1987 lecture, at the blog Diagonal Thoughts.

-- The new issue of the journal Paragraph is devoted to André Bazin. One of the essays, "Bazin's Modernism" by Dan Morgan, is downloadable here.

-- This year's edition of the Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna looks great: Allan Dwan, European Cinemascope films, early Chris Marker, early Japanese sound films, a tribute to Vittorio De Sica as both actor and director, and much more.

-- The new issue of Cinema Scope includes Jonathan Rosenbaum's Global Discoveries on DVD column; Thom Andersen on Wang Bing's Three Sisters; Adam Nayman's interview with Joseph Kahn, director of the teen horror-comedy Detention; and Shelly Kraicer on Wong Kar-ai's The Grandmaster.

-- There are new issues of: Senses of Cinema (rounded up by Catherine Grant); Interiors Journal; Film Comment; Cineaste; and Desistfilm.

-- Adrian Martin at Filmkrant: "Film analysis today, in its overriding emphasis — often exciting and revealing — on details, fragments and moments, has somewhat lost sight of the total structure, the multi-levelled form of a work." Also, Adrian has a piece in Australian Design Review titled "Intimate Metamorphosis: Film and Architectural Space". Finally, via Adrian on Twitter, links to four interviews: Jean-François Chevrier on 'artistic hallucination'; Gilbert Simondon ("Is not all Creation a Transgression?"); Jean Douchet on 'constructing the gaze' from 1993 in Framework; and, at Screening the Past, Raymond Durgnat interviewing Stephen Dwoskin in 1984.

-- An interview with Steven Shaviro at Figure/Ground.

-- A conference in two weeks at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia that looks very interesting: "The End of Cinema and the Future of Film Studies", featuring Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dudley Andrew, Francesco Casetti, Mark Betz, and others. (Via Shekhar Deshpande)

-- The online Brazilian film magazine Cinética has now started publishing English-language versions of articles from its archives. (via Filipe Furtado).

-- Links to many essays written by Gilberto Perez for the London Review of Books.

-- Two great movie-image Tumblr sites: "If We Don't Remember Me" (via Veronica Fitzpatrick) and  "Visions of Light" (via Trevor Link).

-- Catherine Grant interviews Tom Brown on the subject of direct address in cinema; and has a post in tribute to the late Donald Richie.

-- Steve Rybin's "The Actor's Vision: Three Perfomances by Jessica Chastain" at The Cine-Files.

-- A recently recorded 90-minute interview with David Cronenberg.

-- "Towards a Pure Fiction: Cecil B. DeMille" by Luc Moullet, translated by Ted Fendt; and "Some Violence is Required: A Conversation with Pedro Costa" by David Jenkins. At MUBI.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Monsieur Verdoux for Criterion.

-- Danny Kasman at MUBI on a couple of moments of Ozu's cinephilia.

-- David Davidson: "Cahiers du Cinéma and M. Night Shyamalan".

-- Oren Shai on the genre of the women-in-prison film in Bright Lights Film Journal.

-- A look at Sergei Eisenstein's bookshelves (at Slate).

-- A great six-minute viral video that shows the extent of US income inequality.

-- I've just received, and I'm looking forward to reading, Jacques Aumont's 'little book', "Montage".

pic: La règle du jeu (1939).

Teen Films

I can trace my enduring fascination with teen films back to a specific moment in my personal history: when I moved to the U.S. in my early twenties to go to graduate school. When I arrived here, I had seen almost no teen movies, in any language, but as soon as I encountered my first examples of the genre (Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge, Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia, Brian De Palma’s Carrie), I was instantly captivated. As a young immigrant fashioning a new life in a land whose strangeness and otherness simultaneously attracted and disoriented me on a daily basis, I resonated deeply with the doubt, anxiety and excitement of teenage life as represented in these films.

But the factor that played the biggest role in the deep affinity I developed with teen movies had to do with my cinephilia: specifically, the continuity I felt, on multiple levels, between American teen films and the movies that gave birth to my passion for cinema in the first place—1970s Hindi popular cinema.

Two quick clarifications. I will use 1970s here to designate a period spanning the late ‘60s to the early ‘80s. Further, I will not use the word “Bollywood” — I’m with those who use this term to refer only to contemporary Hindi popular cinema, and not all Hindi popular cinema from all periods of film history.

Now, what makes the continuity between the two very different cinemas particularly interesting is that the genre of the “teen movie” is non-existent in ‘70s Hindi cinema. Nevertheless, a close look reveals that American teen movies and ‘70s Hindi popular cinema are fundamentally similar in at least three ways.

1. They deeply value the principles of energy, speed, and moment-to-moment invention. Ironically, it wasn’t until I read the critic Manny Farber, later in life, that the shared traits of the two cinemas began to emerge for me. In a wonderful tribute paid by one critic to another, Donald Phelps wrote of Farber’s writing that it “advances horizontally, in all possible directions, never seeming to exist for a simple progress from A to B […] What really, valuably alarms about his writing is […] its wildness.”

What strikes me as curious about Phelps’ essay is how similar his characterization of Farber’s writing is to Farber’s own idea of “termite art,” which prizes movement, vigor, and constant invention, but without ambitions or aspirations to ‘importance’. I’m reminded immediately of the rich and unceasing inventiveness of films as ostensibly dissimilar as Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) and Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977).

The material that forms the basis of Clueless’ constant creativity is that of pop-cultural knowledge: fashion, dating practices, music, even the construction, in one scene, of an anthropological classification of the various communities in high school. For Lesley Stern, Clueless creates an entire “fictional ethnography” that includes, among many things, an imaginative lexicon. (The Jane Austen Society of Australia maintains a page that catalogs all the slang and neologisms in the film.)

Amar Akbar Anthony, set a world away, is, if anything, even more fast and furious in its inventiveness than Clueless. This is one of the great unclassifiable films in cinema, but while it does lie at the outer limits of imagination and zaniness, it is not atypical in Hindi popular cinema. This ‘masala’ classic is many things: a family melodrama, a slapstick comedy, an action film, an ethnic farce, a gangster film — and let’s not forget its many great song and dance sequences. Philip Lutgendorf provides a packed description of it; he begins with tragedy and intrigue, and passes through decades of time to what appears to be a great climax — only to then confess to us that we have only arrived at the opening credit sequence, after a 25-minute prologue!

2. A passionate embrace of ‘low’ culture, fearlessly combining it with ‘high’ themes of social critique and commentary, but doing so without aiming for cultural prestige or respectability. Years before Slumdog Millionaire’s opportunistic and superficial portrayal of the poverty-ridden Bombay slum known as Dharavi, Yash Chopra’s Deewaar (1975), one of the canonical Hindi films, shows us great, powerful, documentary images of this site. The film is set in motion by the struggles of a workers' union against greedy and murderous capitalist factory owners. Poor people – their way of life, their folk customs, their music and dance – are everywhere in Hindi popular cinema of this period. It is extremely common for protagonists to belong to the working class in these films, so much that films with predominantly middle-class characters were tagged by critics as a separate genre, “middle cinema”.

Something similar can be seen in American teen movies. In Abel Ferrara’s modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet teen drama, China Girl (1987), the Italian boy and the Chinese girl meet while dancing in a crowded disco. But earlier, the hard-hitting opening of the film (like the fiery union demonstrations that open Deewaar) quietly lays out the terrain of bitter rivalry and ethnic hatred: a series of close-ups of Italians watching impassively as the first Chinese business hoists its sign on their street in Little Italy.

Another example: Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutch, 1986) is driven by a wonderful pop music soundtrack, but it is also very seriously a film about class difference. The vitality of ‘low’, DIY culture (Molly Ringwald's colorful clothes are self-designed and self-made) is opposed to the bloodless enervation of the rich (James Spader and Andrew McCarthy most frequently wear white, pale blue, light gray and beige). Like the opening (political, materialist) images of Deewaar and China Girl, Pretty in Pink’s first shot is of a street sweeping machine moving through Ringwald’s working class neighborhood at sunrise. The camera pans to show us train tracks, thus underlining the part of town in which she lives (the ‘wrong side of the tracks’).

3. A pervasive use of – and devotion to – popular music. I particularly love the way that music is present so powerfully in both cinemas that its use extends actively into both the diegetic and non-diegetic realms. Music is part of the story world of Pretty in Pink (the scenes in Trax, the record store; and a live performance by the Pittsburgh punk-pop group The Rave-Ups) but also comprises its extremely popular soundtrack. A different and particularly intriguing instance of this diegetic/non-diegetic mix can be found in a scene from Allan Moyle’s Times Square (1980), in which Robin Johnson is striding down the sidewalk of a busy New York street, dragging a cart behind her, with Roxy Music’s “Same Old Scene” playing on the soundtrack. She turns into a dark alley, pulls out an electric guitar and amp from the cart, and begins flailing away at the guitar … to the song on the soundtrack! She goes in and out of tune and rhythm with the song, furthering our confusion (where is that song actually coming from?), until we see, in a corner of the frame, a boom box in her cart. Times Square also boasts a marvelous double-LP soundtrack.

The ubiquity of singing and dancing in Hindi popular cinema is, of course, legendary. The reason the “musical” genre doesn’t formally exist in India is precisely because nearly all popular films of the ‘70s, de rigueur, contain song and dance sequences.

* * *

Teen films don’t get nearly as much serious attention and thought from cinephiles, critics and scholars as they should. And so I invite you all to name a few of your favorite lesser-known teen films. (Please define “lesser-known” as loosely as you like.) I would love to get acquainted with some good teen films I've not seen. Thank you!

* * *

Along with about twenty writers, I contributed a piece to a new bilingual dossier called "Teen Moments" in the Spanish film magazine Transit . The pieces appear in two sections, as marked. The dossier opens with Adrian Martin's introductory essay, "Live to Tell".

Part One:

Sergi Sánchez on Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
Girish Shambu on Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)
Daniel de Partearroyo on L’âge atomique (Hélena Klotz, 2012)
Cristina Álvarez López on The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)
Toni Junyent on Happy Campers (Daniel Waters, 2001)
Adrian Martin on Never Been Kissed (Raja Gosnell, 1999)
Albert Elduque on Love in the Afternoon (Billy Wilder, 1957)
Stephanie Van Schilt on Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)
Pablo Vázquez on Lemon Popsicle (Boaz Davidson, 1978) / The Last American Virgin (Boaz Davidson, 1982)

Part Two:

Ricardo Adalia Martín on Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)
Yusef Sayed on The Legend of Billie Jean (Matthew Robbins, 1985)
Carlos Losilla on El sur (Víctor Erice, 1983)
Óscar Navales on Wild Boys of the Road (William A. Wellman, 1933)
Sarinah Masukor on Stealing Beauty (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996)
Carles Matamoros Balasch on Back to Stay (Milagros Mumenthaler, 2011)
Covadonga G. Lahera on Confessions (Kokuhaku, Tetsuya Nakashima, 2010)
Sergio Morera on Whip It (Drew Barrymore, 2009)
Laura Ellen Joyce on Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, 2011)
Antoni Peris i Grao on The Aviator’s Wife (Éric Rohmer, 1981)

On Thickness and Thinness in Cinema

It is a long acknowledged axiom, vividly demonstrated as early as the films of the Lumières in the late nineteenth century, that the documentary element of cinema is a crucially important source of its power. “Every film,” Godard said famously, “is a documentary of its actors.” But the significance of the documentary qualities of fiction films goes beyond actors, indeed beyond human beings photographed by the camera. Places, landscapes, cities, dwellings, objects, clothes, animals – the unimaginably rich and varied non-human world – form a wonderful source and resource not only of images, but also of knowledge. Fiction films can acquire special, unique value when they draw from this resource, when they build into their images and sounds the details of the physical reality of the world at large.

When I was in India recently, I sought out a new thriller-drama that’s been getting a lot of national attention: Kahaani, directed by Sujoy Ghosh. One key reason why it has been praised as something special is that it was shot mostly on location in the streets of Kolkata, taking place in various neighborhoods of this remarkable city that have rarely been captured in a fiction film. To put it in perspective, the geographic diversities of cities like New York, Paris, London and Hong Kong have been vastly better represented in cinema, and Kolkata is undoubtedly in their league both in terms of size and its urban, architectural and human richness. So, for me, a film such as Kahaani represents a rare and wonderful opportunity. In addition to working as a genre film, it strives to give us a great variety of little-seen images of one of the world’s most vibrant cities.

But Kahaani – which does not exist in isolation but is part of a trend in filmmaking today – disappoints deeply on this count, for one reason: its maddeningly quick editing. A shot rarely lasts more than a couple of seconds, and no sooner than we get a bare sense of a fresh, intriguing urban image, the film cuts to a different shot – for no discernible rhyme or reason except the terror of allowing the audience to concentrate on the image, of giving it time to think. I’m not being hyperbolic here. An interview with the editor of the film confirms that the objective of the editing was to keep the audience from solving the narrative mystery on its own, and thus to rush it from one image to the next in order to guarantee a surprise ending.

Kahaani’s rapid editing and its close framings (especially in dialogue scenes) are very much in keeping with the practice that David Bordwell has named “intensified continuity.” But what do we lose of cinema’s documentary value – despite the extensive presence of actual locations – with the use of fast cutting?

One way to begin thinking about this question can be found in Lesley Stern’s terrific new monograph-book, Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing. The book is devoted to the depiction of dead bodies in cinema – specifically, in three films: The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949), Japanese Story (Sue Brooks, 2003) and Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985). She analyzes in detail the scenes in which a dead body appears in each film, and captures the effects that this body has upon the temporality of the film. For Stern, when life escapes from the body, a certain kind of time enters the body – and the film. Diegetically, the characters are dead, but their bodies persist, often in extended scenes. Due to their presence, and because of the films’ use of duration, these shots and scenes slowly “fill up” with time.

The problem with Kahaani is that, by using quick cuts, the film does the opposite: it thins out the profilmic reality of Kolkata. Shots are never allowed to build up a ‘documentary strength’, to fill up with time, to thicken.

The enormously successful Slumdog Millionaire (2009) suffers from a similar problem. The horrific (but complex) reality of Dharavi, the large slum that served as a key location and setting for the film, is thinned out not just by fast editing but also the use of hand-held camera, which produces an unstable image, making it impossible for the viewer to absorb its full detail in the brief instant for which the image appears. The documentary feebleness of the images that results from this fast and restless shooting style is only reinforced when accompanied by A.R. Rahman’s effervescent music. These formal qualities are absolutely of a piece with the other problems of the film, including its valorizing of individualism and chance, and its lack of interest in hinting at any larger, structural reasons for the material inequalities of the world in which it is set. (Mitu Sengupta’s pieces are essential reading for those interested in the film.)

When films such as Kahaani and Slumdog Millionaire tout their ‘realism’ of setting, it comes off as opportunism, especially when everything about the style of these films actively works against the viewer’s full registration of their onscreen reality. Such films squander the immanent power of this reality, reducing it to thin and weak documentary decoration.

Any thoughts or suggestions on fiction films in contemporary cinema that strongly capture a sense of place? I'd love to hear them.

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Some links:

-- FYI, a couple of my pieces have appeared online since my last post: Sam Roggen interviewed me on the topic of cinephilia at the Photogénie website run by the Flemish Film Culture Service; Dennis Lim invited me to contribute to the Museum of the Moving Image "moments of the year" collection (part one; and part two); and I wrote my first long-form essay for LOLA – on the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2012. All of LOLA 3 is now up.

-- Adrian Martin's essay on teen movies kicks off Teen Movie Week at the Spanish cinema magazine Transit. Pieces will be appearing throughout the week, in both Spanish and English versions.

-- (via Joe McElhaney) A 2007 Cahiers du cinéma list of the 100 essential films for an "ideal cinema library".

-- (via Ehsan Khoshbakht) A great tribute to the way the sky has been rendered in cinema, at the blog Matte Shot, which is devoted to the work of matte painters of the Classic Hollywood era.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on "workflow" in contemporary filmmaking.

-- Several new posts at Zach Campbell's blog Elusive Lucidity.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum on Michael Roemer, "the best Jewish director you've never heard of". Also: Jonathan's DVDs and Blu-rays of the year. Finally: Serge Daney's 1982 text "Too Early, Too Late," translated by him.

-- A couple of dozen critics construct their fantasy double bills at MUBI.

-- Richard Brody: "The December issue of Cahiers du Cinéma has a terrific dossier in which a group of critics sketch out “the ten pitfalls of the auteur cinema.” It’s a fun read and a trenchant—and, for the most part, well-aimed—critique." 

-- De Filmkrant's Slow Criticism 2013 dossier, including pieces by Adrian Martin, Richard Porton, Dana Linssen, and others.

-- At Photogénie, Tom Paulus' piece "Olivier Assayas: Global Cinephilia and Operational Aesthetics".

-- David Bordwell rounds up some of the books he's read recently.

LOLA 3, etc.

Adrian Martin and I have just released the third issue of LOLA. The theme of the issue is "Masks".

As we did last time, we have put up a first group of pieces, and we will roll out the rest of the issue this month. The centerpiece of LOLA 3 is a large section devoted to Leos Carax's Holy Motors. The first part of this dossier, featuring ten writers, is up now. We will close the issue in a few weeks with the final part.

Also up now are essays by film scholars Erika Balsom (on a trip to Greece to see Gregory Markopoulos' films at Temenos), Philip Brophy (on the cinema of Crispin Hellion Glover), and Yvette Bíró (on Pietro Germi's 1962 film Numbered Days).

Update: Five more articles are now up: by Cristina Álvarez López, Dana Linssen, Luc Moullet, Tom O'Regan and me (it's my first long-form piece for LOLA, and it's on the Toronto International Film Festival).

I will make sure to announce the rest of the issue here as we roll it out. Happy New Year -- and happy reading!

* * *

I'm in Madras, India, visiting my parents over the holiday break, and have had a chance to catch up on a goodly amount of recent cinema reading. Let me share links to it here:

-- A great Tony Scott tribute at MUBI with entries by a couple of dozen critics.

-- Unearthing a great two-year-old interview with Tom Gunning at Tableau: "There’s this quote that I often inflict on my students, that I heard from a Romanian scholar under Ceauşescu, the last Stalinist government that would rewrite history every morning: “The future is what we put our faith in, because the past is always changing and is so unreliable.” Although for them it was a joke about government policy, for me it’s a profound statement about history. History keeps on changing; our image of the past transforms."

-- Best-of-the-Year Lists: David Hudson's personal "best of 2012"; Desistfilm; Film Comment (released and unreleased films); BFI's "best DVDs and Blu-rays of the year"; Village Voice; Reverse Shot;  Independencia (France); Srikanth Srinivasan at The Seventh Art; Filipe Furtado, 1 and 2; Kevin Lee's "Essential Online Videos of 2012"; and Steve Erickson's "best political documentaries of the year".

-- New issues of: Screening the Past; Cinema Scope; Artforum with a special focus on Chris Marker;  NECSUS journal; Cineaste; and Vertigo (UK).

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum: A post with links to about 25 pieces available on the web that are not yet on his website; reviews of two recent film books, on Tarkovsky's Stalker and Ozu's Late Spring, at Film Comment; on Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret at the FIPRESCI website; an exchange on Citizen Kane originally published in Cinema Journal in 1987; and an essay-post on the best movies of 1996. 

-- Catherine Grant's great, new essay "Déjà-Viewing: Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies" is in the latest issue of Mediascape. Also, she has many links-filled entries at Film Studies for Free: A post collecting the online pieces of Christian Keathley; rounding up links to Frames journal issues 1 and 2 (the previous links to issue 1 are no longer valid); "A Stocking Full of eReading and Viewing"; "Chronicle of an Auteur: More Antonioni Goodness!";  and "New Senses of Cinema".  

-- An hour-long video interview with Adrian Martin on the subject of the "figural" in cinema; and his new Filmkrant column on OOO (object-oriented ontology) and cinema.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: A collection of capsule reviews he wrote in 2012 for Cine-File; and a half-dozen new pieces in the last month at MUBI.

-- Farran Smith Nehme on the French film Razzia sur la Chnouf (1955), one of the Siren's recent favorites. 

-- Roland François-Lack, aka The Cine-Tourist, meticulously identifies the locations in Holy Motors. 

-- Interviews: William Klein in Sight & Sound; Pier Paolo Pasolini interviewed by James Blue in 1965; Christian Petzold on Barbara; and Miguel Gomes, 1 and 2.

-- via Cinetrix: Mark Fisher has a tumblr page. Most recent: a post on Cronenberg's eXistenZ.

-- Dennis Lim in Artforum on the recent Rome film festival.

-- Michael Sicinski's epic TIFF reviews page.

-- Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: "Fifties Hysteria Returns: Doomsday Prepping in a Culture of Fear, Death, and Automatic Weapons".

-- Steve Rybin on Douglas Sirk.

-- Ted Fendt on Godard's 1998 short Adieu au TNS.

-- Rose McLaren: "The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr".

-- Simon Sellars: "In Defence of the Virtual: A Secret History of Ballardian Film Adaptations".

-- via Trevor Link: "A Working Guide to 1960s Japanese Cinema".

-- Electric Sheep magazine honors the late Koji Wakamatsu in a special issue.

-- From the archives of Screening the Past: Chika Kinoshita's "Choreography of desire: analysing Kinuyo Tanaka's acting in Mizoguchi's films": "The most fascinating aspect of the penultimate scene of The life of Oharu is the way in which Tanaka scurries through the palace, chasing after her son. How can we account for the fascination generated by her steps?" (Thanks, Dan Morgan.)

pic: Leos Carax in Holy Motors.

Tous les garçons et les filles

I find it curious that one of the most ambitious European film projects of the 1990s has slipped away from memory in the English-speaking world, having received scant attention and distribution here. I refer to 1994’s Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge (roughly rendered “All the Boys and Girls of Their Age”).

The project was hatched by Chantal Popaud for the television channel Arte. She commissioned films from ten directors—five women and five men—and asked them to make an autobiographical film about their teenage years. She stipulated that music must play an important role, and there must be at least one party scene.

The films in the cycle included:

— U.S. Go Home (Claire Denis)
— Cold Water (Olivier Assayas)
— Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels (Chantal Akerman)
— Wild Reeds (Andre Téchiné)
— Travolta and Me (Patricia Mazuy)
— Infiltrate (Emilie Deleuze)
— Trop de Bonheur (Cédric Kahn)
— Peace and Love (Laurence Ferreira Barbosa)
— Brothers (Olivier Dahan)

I’ve seen just three of these—Denis, Assayas and Téchiné—and they are all outstanding. Emilie Deleuze is the daughter of Gilles Deleuze, and the only film I’ve seen by her, Peau neuve, at TIFF '99, has long made me eager to see more. The only entry in the cycle that is currently in US distribution is the Téchiné.

James Quandt programmed the series in Toronto soon after the films came out. Looking at the program notes, I notice that only nine (not ten) films were screened. The Internet tells me that Jean-Claude Brisseau was the tenth director commissioned—but appears not to have turned in his film. (Does anyone know if this is true?)

* * *

I recently caught up with Claire Denis' terrific documentary Jacques Rivette, the Nightwatchman (1990). It is structured as a series of conversations between Rivette and critic Serge Daney. At one point, Daney asks Rivette: "Have you seen any films recently that gave you the feeling that we're seeing good, strong, unexpected things again?"

Rivette cites Patricia Mazuy (this was 4 years before she made her film in the Tous les garçons et les filles series) and her film Peaux de vaches. He describes what struck him about Mazuy's film:

From the start, you feel like the film is leading somewhere, and the more it goes on, the better it gets, the more the relationships become both more intense and also more mysterious. And we suddenly come to a scene which I found extraordinary, so shattering I went to see it again the following week both for the pleasure and also to check on that scene and see what happened and how it was filmed. The first time I almost had the feeling of those scenes that you dream, I often do that. I dream I'm in a cinema watching a film and seeing wonderful things but then I wake up and it's gone. But here it as on screen, I hadn't dreamed it!

It's Jean-François [Stevenin]'s final scene … I can't remember the character's name. (Like everyone else, I talk about films using the actors' names!) He sets off on the road. That's the first shot of the scene. In the next shot, we see Sandrine Bonnaire running towards him. She catches him up, tries to stop him, and they carry on walking and talking for a while until they fall into each other's arms and kiss. And he turns to her and says: "Bring the girl and come away with me." That's all one take, hand-held I think, fairly bumpy and following the movement. It looks good, the camera accompanies the characters. Suddenly there's this close-up of Jean-François which shocked me the first time I saw the film. Because it cuts into this wonderful long shot and shows him watching Sandrine Bonnaire after asking her. It's a short shot, followed by a reverse angle close-up on Sandrine Bonnaire, she doesn't answer, she just looks at him. Then her face begins to move, she begins to move and we understand by her movement that she's going to him but he's no longer there. We follow, the camera moves behind her, and we see Jean-François heading up the road, stopping a truck that's coming towards us and climbing aboard, all in this shot that started on her face.

It all happened, from his reaction to the fact that she didn't reply, and his leaving, all happened off camera, we only saw Sandrine Bonnaire's face, then her movement, and that's it, it's over, he's gone. It's virtually the last shot of the film. I thought it was a magical shot, very well filmed and at the same time it conveys emotion through the inventive use of the camera. You almost have to be a filmmaker to appreciate it. It was very simply done.

* * *

Links:

-- A big thank-you to the graduate students and faculty at the University of Pittsburgh for inviting me down to their conference on cinephilia a couple of weeks back. I had an absolutely delightful time!

-- There's a new issue of Experimental Conversations. Via Adrian Martin, whose monthly column at Filmkrant is called "The Beginning and the End". It begins: "Every film should have a good start — which means a definite start, not a meandering, weak one. And every film should have a good ending, no matter how open or mysterious it may be."

-- A great image-filled post on objects, locations, patterns and details in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville by scholar Roland-François Lack.

-- Film critic Elliott Stein has died. Here's a recollection by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Also: Jonathan on the Viennale in the new Film Comment; and Dennis Lim on the same festival in Artforum.

-- Jacques Rivette's Duelle has popped up on YouTube with English subs. (Via Jaime Christley.)

-- David Bordwell: "Make a movie about a possessed pre-adolescent girl who needs an exorcism, and soon we’ll have movies about possessed high-school girls, possessed dogs, possessed cars, and so on. Call it the variorum quality of popular culture—the tendency to explore, sometimes exhaustively, all the possibilities of a single premise."

-- Nice to discover that Richard T. Jameson's memorable Film Comment essay from 1980, "Style vs. 'Style': The good, the bad, and the whatever," is now available to read online.

-- Catherine Grant dedicates a post to the work of Tag Gallagher. She begins with this quote from him: "[T]here is no formula for movie criticism. Cinema is not the same cinema in Ford and Rossellini, so you don’t use the same tools to look at it. Frame enlargements can show a lot of Ford’s art -- composition, camera angles rhyming from one shot to the next, lighting – but almost nothing of Rossellini’s art, because Rossellini turns everything into motion. All the feelings, the motivations, the characters’ sense of self, even morality and philosophy are turned into motion. So I published a thousand pages about Rossellini, but I really couldn’t deal with his cinema, until I made my video about his Francesco, giullare di Dio."

-- Bill Krohn on Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again, at Andy Rector's Kinoslang.

-- At Frieze, Tom von Logue Newth talks to Leos Carax about Holy Motors.

-- Phillip Maciak on J. Hoberman and Siegfried Kracauer in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Also: several new blog posts by Hoberman at his present online home, ArtInfo.

-- Michael D. Dwyer: "In teaching my undergraduate Media Studies seminar, I often illustrate concepts that students find abstract or complex with examples from pop music, and especially music video. A few weeks ago, I was using a series of clips to run through some  dominant concepts in mid-twentieth century media studies, a funny thing happened in my classroom. I started to play this [Miley Cyrus] clip…and just as I reached to turn the sound down and start talking about QD Leavis, my students started singing. All of them. Loudly."

-- Great news: Philip Brophy's first in a series of columns exploring "sound, vision and contemporary culture" at RealTime Arts magazine (via Adrian). 

-- Yusef Sayed on Stephen Dwoskin at Little White Lies. Also: at his own website Insane Horizon, Yusef talks to composer and long-time Dwoskin collaborator Gavin Bryars.

-- Thom Andersen's new documentary is on architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. Andersen: "The difference between Porto and Los Angeles is that there isn't a compulsion to tear these things down immediately in Porto. In Porto, everywhere you look you see ruins of buildings. There's always a question of what can be done with these buildings. [...] The ruin is like a living thing that changes, something not necessarily to be preserved, but something that can be built upon."

-- Next year's Locarno film festival will feature a George Cukor retrospective.

-- At MUBI, an interview with actress Marie Rivière on working with Eric Rohmer on The Green Ray.

pic: U.S. Go Home (Claire Denis, 1994).

Online Program Notes

I’ve embarked on a small project: to add to my blogroll a new category of links to film screening venues like cinematheques, museums, repertory theaters, and the like. My objective is not to provide a service that informs viewers of screening times and details. Instead, I want it to be an educational and film-critical resource that collects links to program notes and capsules written to accompany screenings and retrospectives.

A few months ago I wrote a post on program notes, an ephemeral and often overlooked outlet of information and writing in film culture. Perhaps an online resource that focuses on program notes might contribute to making such writing more visible and useful for cinephiles at large.

Here are some websites I’ve gathered so far. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. For the moment, I’m collecting links only to English-language sites, but I hope to make the resource global in time.

-- TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto
-- Harvard Film Archive, Boston
-- Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York
-- Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York
-- Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
-- George Eastman House, Rochester
-- Cinema Texas Notes, Austin
-- MoMA, New York
-- BFI, London
-- Melbourne Cinematheque, Melbourne
-- Anthology Film Archives, New York
-- Block Museum, Chicago
-- Facets Cinematheque, Chicago
-- Film Forum, New York
-- IFC Center, New York
-- Museum of the Moving Image, New York

A complaint: is it just my imagination or is the TIFF Cinematheque website poorly designed? For example, from their homepage, I can't seem to get to the individual pages for the various series showing this season. There are icons for each series, but they're not clickable. And the only way to get to the series pages (which often contain good essays) is circuitously through pages for individual films.

Since I live in New York state, my starting list above is mostly NY-centric. But I'd love to learn of other screening venues with strong web content. And any comments on the user-friendliness and navigability of the websites would also be appreciated. Thank you!

* * *

Links:

-- Jim Emerson's post on all the recent "death of movie culture" talk.

-- On Bresson: Kent Jones at Film Comment; and David Bordwell's video essay on constructive editing and Pickpocket.

-- I urge you to sign Jon Jost's petition against Ray Carney on behalf of Mark Rappaport.

-- Adrian Martin's new book "Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez" (from Punctum Books) is now available for free download and for purchase.

-- The World Picture conference is in Brighton, UK, this weekend. See this page for program details. Scholars making presentations include Catherine Grant, Rosalind Galt, John David Rhodes, Elena Gorfinkel, Mark Betz, Karl Schoonover, and others. Related: a conversation between Rhodes and Schoonover on "rethinking Michelangelo Antonioni's modernism" at the University of Minnesota Press blog. Also: the new Global Queer Cinema website is led by an editorial collective made up of Galt, Schoonover and Grant.

-- At MUBI: Danny Kasman interviews Christian Petzold and Abbas Kiarostami; and Adam Cook talks to Fabrice Aragno, a cinematographer on Godard's Film Socialism.

-- A review of Cloud Atlas by Michael Sicinski at Cinema Scope.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has a piece on Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea.

-- University of Edinburgh film scholar Pasquale Iannone on the writings of Italian film critic Aldo Tassone, "a constant source of inspiration and insight".

-- Recently discovered website: scholar Kevin L. Ferguson's Typecast. The most recent post features Dario Argento on giallo. 

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum has a page at CriticWire where you can find his ratings of several films.

-- Catherine Grant collects video studies of the Western; and horror film "final girl" studies.

-- Zach Campbell puts up an appreciation of Brian De Palma's Redacted.

-- Ehsan Khoshbakht on the links between Brakhage's films and Iran's classical arts.

-- A formidable list of the best films of the '70s by Olivier Père.

-- David Davidson at Toronto Film Review has several posts on Brian De Palma and Cahiers du Cinéma: here; and here; and here.

-- Recent essays at Criterion include Graham Petrie on Paul Fejos; and Ed Park on Rosemary's Baby.

-- The new issue of Interiors focuses on the use of architecture and space in Psycho.

-- A Chris Marker obituary essay by Finn Brunton at the UK journal Radical Philosophy. (via Catherine Grant)

-- Rick Poynor at Design Observer on David Byrne's True Stories.

-- At Film Quarterly, Mark Sinker and Rob White discuss Chris Marker's A Grin Without a Cat (1976, 1993).

-- "Jean Epstein's Documentary Cinephilia": an essay by Sarah Keller in the new issue of Studies in French Cinema. (via Neil McGlone)

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum on Howard Hawks: "The main impression I had of him was that he was what my older brother in Alabama would have called a good ol’ boy — the sort of cocky, amiable jock who hung around locker rooms and spent his time recounting anecdotes of one-upmanship in which he was always right and everyone else was always wrong. The threads of desperation laced through such a pose are of course endemic to such a personality. [Todd] McCarthy reports in his introduction that Hawks “felt so insecure as a director on his first few pictures that he regularly had to pull his car over on his way to work in order to vomit.” Yet if it weren’t for such desperation, I doubt he’d be remembered as the great director he was: it’s the darker, more nihilistic side of his cockiness — his perception of the void — that gives his best work its metaphysical weight. (Is there any filmmaker who conveys a sharper sense of naked fear?)"

pic: Werner Schroeter's The Kingdom of Naples (1978). Click here and scroll down to read James Quandt's essay on Schroeter's films.

On "Room 237", Criticism and Theory

Jonathan Rosenbaum and I caught a screening of the documentary Room 237 in Toronto, but we had to dash off to separate engagements soon after, and didn’t get a chance to talk about it. I found the film fascinating but troubling. The next day I discovered that he had put up a post that spoke to some of my concerns. I highly recommend reading it.

As is now well known, the subject of Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). It gathers a half-dozen people obsessed with the film, and interweaves their analyses and commentaries. They propose many theories: The Shining is about the Holocaust; or the genocide of American Indians; or a faked moon landing engineered by Kubrick; or the “impossible architecture” of the Overlook Hotel; and so on. Ascher himself never intervenes to pass any kind of judgment on which of these theories is ingenious or plausible or unlikely or ridiculous.

Here’s what disconcerts me about the movie: It is a disturbing representation of the practice of film criticism. Not only do the commentators in Room 237 advance theories about The Shining; they use techniques of close analysis; and they offer “readings” by drawing upon evidence from the film. So, what is wrong with this detailed depiction of film criticism in action? And what is the relationship between the practice of film analysis depicted in the film and “good” film analysis, by which I mean the kind of film analysis we as critics want to convince the public is worthy?

There are at least two problems with Room 237’s depiction of criticism. First, it is an activity that often comes across as outré, freakish or crackpot. (Witness the range of theories proposed.) Second, and more important, film criticism here is a largely apolitical, hermetic activity that moves inwards, carving out a self-enclosed space, the space of a cognitive puzzle, a puzzle to be solved based on clues well hidden by a genius filmmaker. (Prominent mention is made of Kubrick’s 200 IQ and his prowess at chess.)

Spotting hidden references to the Holocaust or to the genocide of Native Americans is not in itself a critically or politically reflective activity. The Shining (while being a wonderful film, for many reasons) simply does not engage with these weighty historical traumas. It is not “about” them in any meaningful way. And neither does it have to be in order to be a great film. But when Room 237 represents film analysis in a manner that treats it as little more than a clever puzzle-solving exercise, it gives no hint as to the social value and political/aesthetic worth of this public activity. It never intuits what is truly at stake in the activity of paying close, analytical attention to films.

The movie makes one radical suggestion: viewing The Shining simultaneously on two screens, one projected forwards and the other backwards. A brief and striking commentary follows on a few uncanny correspondences and deeply evocative juxtapositions that result. I’m captivated by this experiment because, for once, it pulls The Shining away from Kubrick’s intentionality into a larger realm of accident, chance and poetry that radiates outward into the world from the sealed inner space of a game.

* * *

What is a “theory”? One could say: a theory is an account of how something works. Every field of study has its theories. For example, three important theories in physics are Newton’s gravitational law, relativity, and the “Big Bang”. This is the sense in which we are using the word when we discuss Room 237.

But there is another sense in which the word has been used in the humanities in the last few decades: let’s call it capital-T “Theory,” a large umbrella that includes feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structrualism, queer theory, post-colonialism, and more. “Theory” in this sense is a kind of speculative thinking that is broad-ranging (meaning: its effects have been felt across multiple disciplines) and, crucially, it is a political and critical activity. “Theory” in this sense is motivated by an impulse to question “common sense” and “the natural,” note inequalities and injustices, unmask relations of power, show how ideology works -- basically, to critique our world in some way.

The philosopher Richard Rorty traces the origins of this activity back to the mid-19th century (I’m quoting from Jonathan Culler’s book Literary Theory):

Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle and Emerson, a new kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophecy, but all of these mingled together in a new genre.

In Room 237, we have several “theories” to account for the film but what I miss is any whiff of “Theory,” in however casual or informal or un-academic a form.

* * *

Links:

-- I was honored to be asked to join the editorial advisory board of REFRAME, edited by the indefatigable Catherine Grant. At the blog for REFRAME, Catherine has launched a new feature, a "weekly roundup of international news and links in media, film and music research."  At Film Studies for Free, she rounds up the new issue of Jump Cut and pays tribute to recently deceased filmmaker Octavio Getino, who helped create both the theory and the practice of "Third Cinema". Also, via Catherine: Pedro Almodóvar on the Spain protests.

-- Danny Kasman interviews Brian De Palma at MUBI.

-- A 1971 interview with Jean Eustache translated by Ted Fendt at  MUBI.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum: "Nazis are fun! Jesus is fun! Arthurian legends are fun! Third world countries are fun! Caves are fun! The Holy Grail is fun! Lots of snakes and rats and skeletons are fun! Chases are fun! Narrow escapes are fun! Explosions are fun! Indiana Jones is fun! Indiana Jones’s father is fun! Put them all together and you get the third panel in Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s Indiana Jones triptych..."

-- In a few weeks I'm driving down to the University of Pittsburgh to attend the Cinephilia/Cinephobia conference.

-- New issues of La Furia Umana and Desistfilm; the latter includes a page that collects Top 50 lists from the members of the editorial board.

-- Recent additions at Hulu+ include (all in HD): Rossellini's India: Matri Bhumi, Stromboli, L'Amore and Voyage to Italy; Oshima's Boy; Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and Walk Cheerfully; and Rivette's Le Coup du Berger.

-- Why is it that films, more than other art-forms like literature, need explicit patterning, repetition of action, and restatement? See David Bordwell's interesting post, which calls upon Hong Sang-soo's In Another Country. Also: David on the long take.

-- Adrian Martin on images of "hand-holding" in movies: "The recent explosion of Internet-based film analyses — using screenshots, short clips, audio samples, gifs, image-collages, and much else — has been training us to notice what, once upon a time, we might never have noticed in movies." Also: Adrian on the best Australian film of 2012.

-- The blog Godard Montage accompanies the graduate seminar “Jean-Luc Godard: Art/Politics/Theory” taught by Sam Ishii-Gonzales at The New School.

-- Eric Rentschler at Artforum on the 50th anniversary of the Oberhausen Manifesto.

-- This recently held conference on the films of Werner Schroeter at Boston University has me looking me forward to the retrospective of his films in Toronto next month.

-- Marcel Hanoun, 1929-2012.

-- Michael Sicinski's coverage of TIFF.

-- Several tributes to the late Tom Milne are collected here.

-- This sounds fascinating: a series in Toronto called "Indian Expressionism" featuring Josef von Sternberg, V. Shantaram, Fritz Lang, Kamal Amrohi and Franz Osten, curated by Meenakshi Shedde.

-- Mark Rappaport on "the double life of Paul Henreid".

-- David Davidson translates three early Cahiers pieces by Serge Daney on Mark Donskoy, Douglas Sirk and Jerry Lewis. Laurent Kretzschmar comments at his blog Serge Daney in English.

-- Cinema Guild is releasing three good Sokurov films: Whispering Pages, Stone, and Save and Protect. Also, their Twitter page hints that the work of British artist/filmmaker Ben Rivers may finally be appearing on DVD. Here's a Dennis Lim article on Rivers in the NYT.

-- The AV Club has released its list of top 50 films of the '90s. The dominance of English-language films on this list is appalling.

TIFF 2012

I caught about 30 films at TIFF, and will be writing a piece on the festival for the next issue of LOLA. Meanwhile, here's a quick personal summary evaluation:

Best-of-Fest:

Far From Vietnam (Marker/Godard/Varda/Resnais/Ivens/Klein/Lelouch, France, 1967)
Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor/Paravel, France/UK/USA)

Excellent:

Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, Japan/France)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, USA)
Passion (Brian De Palma, France/Germany)
Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany)

Strong:

In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
Viola (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, UK)
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, UK)
The Girl from the South (José Luis Garcia, Argentina)
Nights with Theodore (Sébastien Betbeder, France)
When Night Falls (Ying Lang, China)
Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan)

Fascinating, but I had reservations:

The Last Time I Saw Macao (Rodrigues/da Mata, Portugal)
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, USA)

Still pondering:

Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz, France/Chile)
The Capsule (Athena Rachel Tsangari, Greece)

Disappointments:

Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein, Israel)
Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, USA)
Gebo and the Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
The Tortoise, An Incarnation (Girish Kasaravalli, India)
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK)
All That You Possess (Bernard Émond, Canada)

* * *

Links to recent reads:

-- For your TIFF coverage needs: Cinema Scope magazine; David Hudson's Keyframe Daily; MUBI Notebook; and Blake Williams' TIFF super-post. Also: David Bordwell's account of attending industry and filmmaker panels at the festival.

-- Great amounts of reading: new issues of Screening the Past (helpfully rounded up by Catherine Grant); Cinema Scope;  Film Comment; Senses of Cinema; Screen Machine; and World Picture.

-- Far From Vietnam (1967), the single best film I encountered at TIFF, is notoriously hard to see. I knew this going in, resolved to take notes to keep the film in my memory, then got caught up in its riveting, heterogeneous images and quick pace. And so I'm glad to discover Thomas Waugh's visual essay at Jump Cut that brings the images back to me.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum on Ray Carney in a 2001 piece for Cineaste which reviewed five books on John Cassavetes: "...no critical monopoly can ever be healthy, no matter how conscientious, thoughtful, or thorough the monopolist."

-- At Art of the Title: an interesting interview-post with video clips on the title sequences of David Fincher's films.

-- Several recent reviews by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at MUBI.

-- Mark Le Fanu on Boris Barnet at the BFI website.

-- Phil Coldiron's piece at Moving Image Source: "Shooting on 16-millimeter in a digital age".

-- Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton respond to a negative review by Warren Buckland of their film criticism essay collection. Buckland's review is unavailable to read for free online.

-- An essay on cinephilia by Sam Roggen at the Belgian website Photogénie.

-- An interview with Brian De Palma on "the art, the technology, and the ethics of watching".

-- via Matt Zoller Seitz: a blog post comparing the images of Ozu and Edward Hopper.

-- At Film International: Gwendolyn Audrey Foster on capitalism, gluttony, hoarding, waste, excess consumption and film.

-- Just discovered This Long Century, a fascinating website that collects, from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians, etc., "such intimate work as sketchbooks, personal memorabilia, annotated typescripts, short essays, home movies and near impossible to find archival work."

pic: Far from Vietnam (1967). 

Gearing up for TIFF 2012

I'm on sabbatical this semester, and will be able to spend a few more days at TIFF than usual. Here's what I'm planning to see:

Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
Penance (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan), a 4.5-hour TV mini-series
Far From Vietnam (Marker/Godard/Varda/Resnais/Ivens/Klein/Lelouch, France, 1967)
Far From Aghanistan (Gianvito/Wilkerson/Jost/Martin/Yoo, USA)
Passion (Brian De Palma, USA)
Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor/Paravel, France)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, Japan/France)
Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, USA) 
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK)
All That You Possess (Bernard Émond, Canada)
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, UK, including an extended Q&A with Zizek)
The Last Time I Saw Macao (Pedro Rodrigues/da Mata, Portugal)
Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas, France)
Student (Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazhakstan)
differently, Molussia (Nicolas Rey, France)
Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz, France/Chile)
Lines of Wellington (Valeria Sarmiento, France)
Gebo and his Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan)
The Capsule (Athena Rachel Tsangari, Greece)
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, UK)
Crimes of Mike Recket (Bruce Sweeney, Canada)
Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, USA)
The Tortoise, An Incarnation (Girish Kasaravalli, India)
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, USA)
When Night Falls (Ying Lang, China)
English Vinglish (Gauri Shinde, India)
Nights with Theodore (Sébastien Betbeder, France)
The Girl from the South (José Luis Garcia, Argentina)
The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh, Israel)
Ginger and Rosa (Sally Potter, UK)
Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein, Israel)
The Fifth Season (Peter Brosens/Jessica Woodworth, Belgium)
Viola (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)
Birds (Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal)

Most of the above are features. I'll be looking to catch a couple of avant-garde shorts programs as well. Some films I'll regret missing at the festival: Bestiaire (Denis Côté, Canada); The Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap, India); Three Sisters (Wang Bing, China); Tower (Kazik Radwanski, Canada); Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, USA); In the Fog (Sergei Loznitsa, Russia); and Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico). I'll be saving Terrence Malick's To the Wonder and Michael Haneke's Amour for their US release, which I hope will be swift.

Here is a link to all the programs at the festival. Any suggestions or recommendations? I'd love to hear them.

* * *

Recent reads:

-- The Sight & Sound poll 2012.

-- At the BFI website: Thom Andersen's wonderful explanatory piece "Yasujiro Ozu: The Master of Time".

-- At MUBI, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has a must-read essay on Tony Scott; and Catherine Grant has put up a collection of links on "'acid aesthetics' and contemporary cinematic stylistic 'excess'" in tribute to Scott. Also: David Hudson's Tony Scott post.

-- J. Hoberman: "Is Cronenberg our most original director?" in the Los Angeles Times; "Where are all the new young movie stars?" in Esquire; "The Lost Futures of Chris Marker" in the New York Review of Books; and appearing in an interview on the "post-film movie era" for the Wall Street Journal. Related: Nathan Lee on Cronenberg at AltScreen earlier this year.

-- Jason Mittell: "Thoughts on teaching theory to undergrads".

-- Essays by Kent Jones at the Criterion website: on La Promesse and Rosetta.

-- Trevor Link: "Five Texts That Have Influenced How I Think About Gender".

-- Darren Hughes has redesigned Long Pauses and put up new posts.

-- At Moving Image Source: Thomas Doherty on "piracy, property rights and the digital revolution"; and Gregory Zinman on Oskar Fischinger's Raumlichtkunst, one of the earliest multimedia projects.

-- Justin Stewart on documentarian Les Blank at Film Comment.

-- In the Guardian: "Why Marxism is on the rise again".

-- An interesting negative take by Australian scholar Simon During: "How did Susan Sontag get to be so famous?" 

-- Recent discovery: Christopher Small's blog, Cinema Over The Waters.

-- Aaron Cutler interviews Portuguese filmmaker Marcelo Felix, whose feature Eden's Ark both preserves and pays tribute to silent cinema.

-- The archives of Cinephile, University of British Columbia's film journal.

-- All the films by the Dziga Vertov Group (Godard & Gorin) are now available to watch online at ubuweb.

pic: The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata).