11/04/2012, nearing death
9.1.13
26.12.12
18.10.12
Realism(s) #21
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Just noticed that Lee Ann Schmitt's California Company Town (2008), one of the best American (and political) films of the last few years, is available to watch in full here. Highly recommended.
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Other links: A Very Special Generation, After the Riots, The Equator of Alienation [pdf], Concrete and Longing, the trailer for Thom Andersen's Reconversão, and Laida Lertxundi at the ICA (next week).
8.9.12
At sea #12
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Links: a couple of interviews about Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan ("a heavy metal film"), which looks very impressive. This year's Experimenta line-up is strong: Dorsky & Hiler, complete Kubelka, Luke Fowler's The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott, etc). Afterwards, in November: an extensive retrospective of Peter Nestler's work at the Goethe-Institut and Tate Modern, including Die Nordkalotte, From Greece & Being Gipsy, and Straub-Huillet's Itinéraire de Jean Bricard. Also: a trip to Greece (forget exit); how to starve the beast; China in Revolt; on the missing variable and abundance; a Bill Kouligas mixtape; and last words ("only stupid spaces") to László Krasznahorkai.
26.8.12
An aside, or: canon formation
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For the sake of posterity, my list for the Sight & Sound poll (republished without errors):
À nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)
Dalla nube alla resistenza (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1979)
Hours for Jerome I & II (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1980-82)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
Kodomo no shiki (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1939)
La région centrale (Michael Snow, 1971)
Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2003)
Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)
La vallée close (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 1995)
It never occurred to me to worry about what the greatest films ever might be, so I picked a few that I like. As others have pointed out about the overall poll, it's nice to see Jeanne Dielman and Sátántangó entering the canon next to film studies fixtures such as Metropolis and Psycho, but the measure by which Vertigo is to be considered a more important film than, say, Hours for Jerome is still somewhat unfathomable to me. The filmmakers' lists have now been posted too (featuring some LS favourites: Keiller, Apichatpong, Raya M, Allan Sekula, and so on), as has this very good piece on Ozu by Thom Andersen.
31.7.12
Realism(s) #20
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Images from Sharon Lockhart's installation Anna Schwinger: Installation of Artifacts from Repolust Cave, Archaeology Museum, Schloss Eggenberg, Graz 2011 (2011). Can't find much about this work online, but it appears to be a continuation of the choreography of work and gesture in Lockhart's excellent Double Tide (2009), projected horizontally onto a table. Also just noticed, and worth reading: a 2009 conversation between Lockhart and James Benning, mostly about the Lunch Break project.
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I've been finding Blogger's incremental changes to formatting and its new interface exasperating, which depletes inspiration for putting things up here. So, some recent-ish articles of interest that I've been meaning to excerpt or link to: Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations [full pdf]; Chantal Akerman: The Pajama Interview; A Morals of Perception; What is the Rational Response? (h/t Patrick Keiller); Antigone & LONDON; Mysterious Object from Thailand; The Exigencies of Mystery; The After-Image & Forest Roads; an interview with Ben Rivers; The Politics of Getting a Life; US 80s-90s; Against Community; Owen Hatherley talks about his new book, which I enjoyed; Sicinski on TDKR; and, last and not least, R.I.P. Stephen Dwoskin & Chris Marker.
29.6.12
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