Award-winning nonfiction filmmaker and writer Brett Story has signed with CAA ahead of the world premiere of her latest documentary, “Union.”
Story co-directed the feature with Stephen Maing about the Amazon Labor Union (Alu), a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island, as they take on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in a fight to unionize.
“Union” will make its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 21 in the U.S. Documentary competition.
The Toronto-based filmmaker and writer’s breakout film, 2016’s “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” was awarded the special jury prize at Hot Docs Documentary Festival and garnered a best feature documentary nomination at the Canadian Screen Awards, while her 2019 documentary “The Hottest August” was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Also in 2019, Story authored the book “Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal...
Story co-directed the feature with Stephen Maing about the Amazon Labor Union (Alu), a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island, as they take on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in a fight to unionize.
“Union” will make its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 21 in the U.S. Documentary competition.
The Toronto-based filmmaker and writer’s breakout film, 2016’s “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” was awarded the special jury prize at Hot Docs Documentary Festival and garnered a best feature documentary nomination at the Canadian Screen Awards, while her 2019 documentary “The Hottest August” was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Also in 2019, Story authored the book “Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal...
- 1/17/2024
- by Angelique Jackson
- Variety Film + TV
Set within the glossy, vapid and veneered world of a car advert, The Talent from Thomas May Bailey plays out an uncomfortable blurring of reality and fantasy. Bailey fell upon the central premise of the film after having experienced the very same desires as his protagonist while working on sets and seeing where he wanted to get to but not quite knowing how to get there – a chronic affliction all too relatable for anyone toiling in the creative industries. A virtual production stage with all of the false promises of an eternal perfect sunset and the vacuous but enticing world of flashy cars plays the perfect host to his satirical look into the film industry and the aspirational desires of those within. With The Talent nominated for Best British Short at next week’s BIFA awards and currently available to stream on All4 we took some time to speak to...
- 11/24/2023
- by Sarah Smith
- Directors Notes
CinemaIn ‘Natchathiram Nagargiradhu’, Pa Ranjith has shredded the plot and characters of ‘Minsara Kanavu’ to derive a more assertive narrative about love.It has been one year since Natchathiram Nagargiradhu released in cinemas worldwide. While some have enthusiastically appreciated Pa Ranjith’s attempt at addressing a range of contemporary socio-political topics, others have called it an experiment gone sour. Most commentators, however, agree that this movie saw the filmmaker flexing a novel story-telling muscle to communicate abstract yet progressive ideas. There is one fine detail that most reviewers and critics seem to have missed. Natchathiram Nagargiradhu has not emerged from a blank canvas. Instead, it artfully continues a conversation that was set in motion long ago. In the groundbreaking BBC docu series Ways of Seeing (1972), Marxist art critic John Berger says, “Remember that I am controlling and using for my own purposes the means of reproduction needed for these programmes … As with all programmes,...
- 8/31/2023
- by AjayR
- The News Minute
At the height of Umberto Eco’s popularity, it may have been tempting to dismiss the Italian scholar and novelist as too representative of his own time, a purveyor of entertainments for hip intellectuals with a poststructuralist bent. His obsessions with semiotics and fakes, conspiracy theories and heretical Christian sects of the late Middle Ages, seemed quirky, meta, and all in good fun. But in the years since his death in 2016, they’ve turned out to be uncannily prescient, as Davide Ferrario’s Umberto Eco: A Library of the World aims to prove.
This biographical documentary isn’t a peek behind the curtain into a public intellectual’s private life. Rather, it’s a reframing of the preoccupations of a thinker who’s no longer very fashionable. In the process, it becomes a timely epistemological rumination on the difference between knowledge and information, the relationship between memory and technology.
In...
This biographical documentary isn’t a peek behind the curtain into a public intellectual’s private life. Rather, it’s a reframing of the preoccupations of a thinker who’s no longer very fashionable. In the process, it becomes a timely epistemological rumination on the difference between knowledge and information, the relationship between memory and technology.
In...
- 6/25/2023
- by William Repass
- Slant Magazine
Directed by Australian film-maker Amiel Courtin-Wilson, this compelling work follows Bob Rosenzweig’s decision to end his life through assisted dying
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There are lots of literal grey areas in the Australian film-maker Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s very compelling and heart-rending documentary about the final week of Bob Rosenzweig, a 65-year-old Jewish man living in Washington who has Parkinson’s disease and decides to end his life through assisted dying. From the opening shot Courtin-Wilson draws a stony overcast aesthetic, beginning with an ambiguous image of what seems to resemble a foggy, ashen skyline before a vague human outline emerges. Later there are shots of misty skylines and bodies of water more cement-coloured than blue; it’s as if the world around Rosenzweig is greying before his eyes, easing him through his last days.
Courtin-Wilson and the cinematographer, Jac Fitzgerald, impressively texture the film in...
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There are lots of literal grey areas in the Australian film-maker Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s very compelling and heart-rending documentary about the final week of Bob Rosenzweig, a 65-year-old Jewish man living in Washington who has Parkinson’s disease and decides to end his life through assisted dying. From the opening shot Courtin-Wilson draws a stony overcast aesthetic, beginning with an ambiguous image of what seems to resemble a foggy, ashen skyline before a vague human outline emerges. Later there are shots of misty skylines and bodies of water more cement-coloured than blue; it’s as if the world around Rosenzweig is greying before his eyes, easing him through his last days.
Courtin-Wilson and the cinematographer, Jac Fitzgerald, impressively texture the film in...
- 6/14/2023
- by Luke Buckmaster
- The Guardian - Film News
Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb.Some old classification anxieties up front: what is cinema? Is it just a cultural object that moves twice, first in narrative operation and then as technology, a montage of the photographic or pixelated? Is it the truth at 24 frames/franchises per second, or is there a cinematic something that differentiates “film” from its cousin, “new media”? And (how) does that matter anyway? Maybe the idea of “film” is related to what’s loggable on Letterboxd: movies, sure, but also some TV shows. No to music videos, yes to (some) porn. Yes to lots of Taylor Swift live shows; John Berger’s 1972 series of video essays, Ways of Seeing; and the boring-delirious, 28-minute film made for closed-circuit Vegas televisions, Caesar’s Guide to Gaming With Orson Welles. Sporting events aren't included, but there are sports documentaries and documentations, lots of sports “content”—like something...
- 10/28/2022
- MUBI
Park Chan-wook sees himself first and foremost as a storyteller, and as such his films masterfully marry striking visuals with twisty narratives that befuddle audience expectations. But, understanding character at the center of all he does, he admits a preference for the influence of detective and spy novels over certain genres that he feels might place too much of an emphasis on plot machinations.
With Decision to Leave, Park leaves behind the ultra-violence interwoven into his Vengeance trilogy along with the sex that accompanied 2016’s The Handmaiden. Instead, Park offers up an intoxicating romance between Detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) and widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei). Key to their dynamic is Hae-jun’s incessant surveillance of Seo-rae, which continues even after she’s been cleared as an official suspect in the death of her husband. A lover of Hitchcock and particularly Vertigo, Park takes great joy in setting up all of the...
With Decision to Leave, Park leaves behind the ultra-violence interwoven into his Vengeance trilogy along with the sex that accompanied 2016’s The Handmaiden. Instead, Park offers up an intoxicating romance between Detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) and widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei). Key to their dynamic is Hae-jun’s incessant surveillance of Seo-rae, which continues even after she’s been cleared as an official suspect in the death of her husband. A lover of Hitchcock and particularly Vertigo, Park takes great joy in setting up all of the...
- 10/18/2022
- by Caleb Hammond
- The Film Stage
Rushes: Bruno Dumont's "The Empire," John Carpenter Interviewed, Hito Steyerl x Film Comment Podcast
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSHaunted Hotel.The British Film Institute has begun unveiling the program for the London Film Festival, which runs from October 5-16. So far, they have announced the official competition, featuring films from Alice Diop, Mark Jenkin, and Hlynur Pálmason, and the VR- and Ar-oriented "Extended Realities" strand, including a new work from Guy Maddin, Haunted Hotel.Production has begun on Bruno Dumont's The Empire. Cineuropa reports that the science-fiction film depicts the "epic parallel life of knights from interplanetary kingdoms"; the cast includes Lyna Khoudri (César-winner for Papicha) and the gendarmerie duo from Li'l Quinquin, Bernard Pruvost and Philippe Jore.The international film critics association Fipresci have chosen the winner of their 2022 Grand Prix for Film of the Year: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car.Recommended VIEWINGAndrew Mau and Alan Mak's seminal...
- 8/30/2022
- MUBI
Former Palm Springs artistic director Helen du Toit has been set as executive and artistic director of new Canadian film festival Blue Mountain Film Festival.
The event in Southern Ontario’s scenic Blue Mountain resort is set to take place June 1-5, 2022, at the Blue Mountain Village Conference Centre.
Inspired and curated by du Toit, who served as Palm Springs head for more than a decade, the plan is to showcase around 25 features from across the globe, with a spotlight on Ontario productions. There will also be an industry platform called the Creative Forum which will take place from June 1 to 3.
Du Toit said: “When I first stepped foot in Blue Mountain my immediate thought was what an incredible location it would be to host an intimate film festival. Such a unique place calls for a unique experience. I am honoured to be part of the team launching Bmff and...
The event in Southern Ontario’s scenic Blue Mountain resort is set to take place June 1-5, 2022, at the Blue Mountain Village Conference Centre.
Inspired and curated by du Toit, who served as Palm Springs head for more than a decade, the plan is to showcase around 25 features from across the globe, with a spotlight on Ontario productions. There will also be an industry platform called the Creative Forum which will take place from June 1 to 3.
Du Toit said: “When I first stepped foot in Blue Mountain my immediate thought was what an incredible location it would be to host an intimate film festival. Such a unique place calls for a unique experience. I am honoured to be part of the team launching Bmff and...
- 12/9/2021
- by Andreas Wiseman
- Deadline Film + TV
He’s revered for shooting Ways of Seeing with John Berger, but Mike Dibb has made films about all the giants of culture – as well as Wimbledon tennis balls. He looks back on a dazzling career
This morning, like most mornings, Mike Dibb is sitting in his conservatory. “It’s where I spend many, many, many hours,” he says. “And it’s very nice, because I look out into a little garden.” There is a desk, a painting by an old friend, and a vine that twists up the back wall. He’s speaking via Zoom from west London and it feels strange to see this documentary-maker on screen. Over the course of more than five decades, Dibb has rarely ventured in front of the camera. Instead, he’s the voice off-screen, the steady hand steering the story.
A retrospective of Dibb’s work is about to begin online, courtesy...
This morning, like most mornings, Mike Dibb is sitting in his conservatory. “It’s where I spend many, many, many hours,” he says. “And it’s very nice, because I look out into a little garden.” There is a desk, a painting by an old friend, and a vine that twists up the back wall. He’s speaking via Zoom from west London and it feels strange to see this documentary-maker on screen. Over the course of more than five decades, Dibb has rarely ventured in front of the camera. Instead, he’s the voice off-screen, the steady hand steering the story.
A retrospective of Dibb’s work is about to begin online, courtesy...
- 1/8/2021
- by Laura Barton
- The Guardian - Film News
“At the end of the small hours these countries whose past is uninscribed on any stone, these roads without memory, these winds without a log. Does that matter? We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout. Full voice, great voice, you shall be our good and guide.”Aimé Césaire conveys the colonialists' need to keep African history from their canon in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. This is Négritude’s provenance, the philosophical, cultural and political revolution of Black consciousness that Césaire co-founded. Black history resounds and survives internally, verbally, before it is accurately accounted for from the outside. A protégé of Césaire, filmmaker Euzhan Palcy unearths suppressed Black voices and logs them to film canon. For A Dry White Season (1989), she interviewed the victims and combatants of the Special Branch (the unit of the South African police that lethally destabilized anti-apartheid groups) while undercover in Soweto and...
- 7/27/2020
- MUBI
Emily Mortimer star of Isabel Coixet's The Bookshop dedicated to John Berger Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Isabel Coixet's The Bookshop, loosely based on the novel by Penelope Fitzgerald and starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson (who starred in Learning To Drive with Ben Kingsley) is dedicated to John Berger. Isabel also dedicated her 2005 film The Secret Life of Words, starring Sarah Polley and Tim Robbins, to Berger. In 2010, Isabel created From I to J an audio-installation of Berger's letters in From A to X at Casa Encendida in Madrid with readings from Tilda Swinton, Penélope Cruz, Isabelle Huppert, Monica Bellucci, Sophie Calle, Maria de Medeiros, Clarkson, and Polley.
Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) at Violet Gamart's (Patricia Clarkson) fête Photo: Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment
Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and she won for her novel Offshore in 1979. John Berger won in 1972 for his novel G.
Isabel Coixet's The Bookshop, loosely based on the novel by Penelope Fitzgerald and starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson (who starred in Learning To Drive with Ben Kingsley) is dedicated to John Berger. Isabel also dedicated her 2005 film The Secret Life of Words, starring Sarah Polley and Tim Robbins, to Berger. In 2010, Isabel created From I to J an audio-installation of Berger's letters in From A to X at Casa Encendida in Madrid with readings from Tilda Swinton, Penélope Cruz, Isabelle Huppert, Monica Bellucci, Sophie Calle, Maria de Medeiros, Clarkson, and Polley.
Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) at Violet Gamart's (Patricia Clarkson) fête Photo: Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment
Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and she won for her novel Offshore in 1979. John Berger won in 1972 for his novel G.
- 8/22/2018
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
We live in remarkable times, us film aficionados. Across the country it seems as though repertory theaters and art houses are opening at a never-before-seen rate and streaming services are seemingly even more prevalent. And with this comes the great honor of being part of a generation of rediscovery. Maybe you’re in middle America just now discovering Jean Renoir, or happen to be living in The Big Apple, and now have the chance to discover the work of an underrated titan of world cinema.
Starting earlier this week (and ending on 7/23), The Metrograph in New York City is introducing a new generation of film fans to the work of Geneva-born auteur Alain Tanner. Launching his career with 1969’s Charles, Dead or Alive, Tanner would go on to create an oeuvre full of outsiders, leftist politics and some of the most singular works of the golden age of world cinema.
Starting earlier this week (and ending on 7/23), The Metrograph in New York City is introducing a new generation of film fans to the work of Geneva-born auteur Alain Tanner. Launching his career with 1969’s Charles, Dead or Alive, Tanner would go on to create an oeuvre full of outsiders, leftist politics and some of the most singular works of the golden age of world cinema.
- 7/13/2017
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
The Okja actor joins a refreshing celebration of the late Ways of Seeing writer – plus a hilarious lesson in how to ride a motorbike
One year before he died at the age of 90, art critic and author John Berger was the subject of this musingly celebratory quartet of documentary essay-portraits, now on UK release – almost the cinematic equivalent of a Festschrift.
Its writers, directors and contributors feature Berger’s circle of friends, prominent among them the writer and producer Colin MacCabe and the actor Tilda Swinton. Intimate interviews and conversations are interspersed with clips of Berger in his handsome prime, the dazzling broadcaster and creator of the television series and critical work Ways of Seeing; MacCabe contrives some Godardian flourishes.
Continue reading...
One year before he died at the age of 90, art critic and author John Berger was the subject of this musingly celebratory quartet of documentary essay-portraits, now on UK release – almost the cinematic equivalent of a Festschrift.
Its writers, directors and contributors feature Berger’s circle of friends, prominent among them the writer and producer Colin MacCabe and the actor Tilda Swinton. Intimate interviews and conversations are interspersed with clips of Berger in his handsome prime, the dazzling broadcaster and creator of the television series and critical work Ways of Seeing; MacCabe contrives some Godardian flourishes.
Continue reading...
- 6/21/2017
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Exclusive: Films focus on production designer Kristi Zea and artist John Berger.
Kino Lorber has acquired all North American rights from UK outfit Taskovski Films to documentary Everybody Knows… Elizabeth Murray, directed by acclaimed production designer Kristi Zea known for her work on The Silence Of The Lambs and The Departed.
The film follows painter Murray’s struggle to break through establishment art world barriers.
Meryl Streep and art world luminaries Roberta Smith, Paula Cooper, Jennifer Bartlett and Vija Celmins read journal entries from single mother Murray. Philip Glass composed the score.
Taskovski Films has finalised a deal with Curzon Artificial Eye for UK rights to Berlinale 2016 selection The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger, directed by Tilda Swinton.
Swinton, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth and Bartek Dziadosz worked more than five years on the profile of the late art critic, writer and painter Berger.
Meanwhile, the company is closing a deal for North America on [link...
Kino Lorber has acquired all North American rights from UK outfit Taskovski Films to documentary Everybody Knows… Elizabeth Murray, directed by acclaimed production designer Kristi Zea known for her work on The Silence Of The Lambs and The Departed.
The film follows painter Murray’s struggle to break through establishment art world barriers.
Meryl Streep and art world luminaries Roberta Smith, Paula Cooper, Jennifer Bartlett and Vija Celmins read journal entries from single mother Murray. Philip Glass composed the score.
Taskovski Films has finalised a deal with Curzon Artificial Eye for UK rights to Berlinale 2016 selection The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger, directed by Tilda Swinton.
Swinton, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth and Bartek Dziadosz worked more than five years on the profile of the late art critic, writer and painter Berger.
Meanwhile, the company is closing a deal for North America on [link...
- 5/23/2017
- by andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com (Andreas Wiseman)
- ScreenDaily
Reel-Important People is a monthly column that highlights those individuals in or related to the movies that have left us in recent weeks. Below you'll find names big and small and from all areas of the industry, though each was significant to the movies in his or her own way. Tommy Allsup (1931-2017) Guitarist. Best known for playing for Buddy Holly and not being on the plane that crashed and killed the singer and others. He appears in Honkytonk Man and the upcoming documentary The Man from the Rio Grande. He is portrayed by Stephen F. Schmidt in La Bamba. He died on January 11. (THR) John Berger (1926-2017) - Art Critic, Novelist. His BBC docu-series of Ways of Seeing films (see below) and subsequent book are essentials for media...
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- 2/3/2017
- by Christopher Campbell
- Movies.com
Tilda Swinton with John Berger in The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger
Colin MacCabe is the co-director of The Derek Jarman Lab-produced documentary The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger with Tilda Swinton, Christopher Roth and Bartek Dziadosz. When I spoke with Colin last year at Film Forum my first question to him was concerning John's health. I first met John Berger in 1991 in Munich at a workshop he was giving at the Kammerspiele theater. We had a conversation about rhubarb and I asked him to sign his book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. The book had been a gift from a friend in Paris who inscribed it to me with the words "My heart as long as forever."
Colin MacCabe on John Berger: "He was the best and most reliable of friends ..." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Although I opened the book...
Colin MacCabe is the co-director of The Derek Jarman Lab-produced documentary The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger with Tilda Swinton, Christopher Roth and Bartek Dziadosz. When I spoke with Colin last year at Film Forum my first question to him was concerning John's health. I first met John Berger in 1991 in Munich at a workshop he was giving at the Kammerspiele theater. We had a conversation about rhubarb and I asked him to sign his book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. The book had been a gift from a friend in Paris who inscribed it to me with the words "My heart as long as forever."
Colin MacCabe on John Berger: "He was the best and most reliable of friends ..." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Although I opened the book...
- 1/9/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze and Colin MacCabe
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
In 1972, while a student at the London Film School, I directed, with a team of other students, a film based on John Berger’s book A Fortunate Man, for the British Film Institute. Being young and inexperienced, I was extremely nervous about asking John if we could use his book as a basis for a film, knowing how publishers and agents guard their intellectual property. But with just one phone call to John everything was agreed. He maintained that the ideas contained within the book were, in his words, “open to all”.
That was typical of Berger, a generous and open-minded man who encouraged young people to make the most of their opportunities.
Continue reading...
That was typical of Berger, a generous and open-minded man who encouraged young people to make the most of their opportunities.
Continue reading...
- 1/6/2017
- by Jeff Perks
- The Guardian - Film News
Colin MacCabe on shooting Berger: "John absolutely refused to plan things." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Author, artist, self-declared storyteller John Berger is the focus of the intricately woven strands that make up The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger. Produced by The Derek Jarman Lab as a quartet of individual film essays, directed by Tilda Swinton, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz and Colin MacCabe, the combination allows for fascinating interplay of concerns.
On the opening day in New York, Colin MacCabe and I had a conversation that led from Berger's kitchen to Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake, The Spectre Of Hope on Sebastião Salgado, Chris Marker, Neil Jordan collaborator Patrick McCabe, Isaac Julien, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, the editing by Christopher Roth and the cinematography of Bartek Dziadosz, apples, raspberries and cows, Brexit and Northern Ireland.
Tilda Swinton: "As soon as we finished the first one,...
Author, artist, self-declared storyteller John Berger is the focus of the intricately woven strands that make up The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger. Produced by The Derek Jarman Lab as a quartet of individual film essays, directed by Tilda Swinton, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz and Colin MacCabe, the combination allows for fascinating interplay of concerns.
On the opening day in New York, Colin MacCabe and I had a conversation that led from Berger's kitchen to Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake, The Spectre Of Hope on Sebastião Salgado, Chris Marker, Neil Jordan collaborator Patrick McCabe, Isaac Julien, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, the editing by Christopher Roth and the cinematography of Bartek Dziadosz, apples, raspberries and cows, Brexit and Northern Ireland.
Tilda Swinton: "As soon as we finished the first one,...
- 9/2/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
★★★★☆ In Ways of Seeing, art critic John Berger speaks about the evolution of how we understand images and the point at which "the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognised as part of the vision. An image became a record of how X had seen Y." Such a consideration lies at the very heart of Kirsten Johnson's exceptional new documentary Cameraperson, a reflection on more than two decades spent shooting non-fiction cinema. Her work with luminaries of the medium including the likes of Kirby Dick, Michael Moore and Laura Poitras already makes her a prominent figure in shaping modern documentary.
- 6/14/2016
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
The Ways of Seeing writer is celebrated by Swinton and her fellow admirers in an unorthodox four-part documentary that visits him at his Alpine home
Here is an impressively high-minded documentary about writer John Berger – conceived, apparently, by Tilda Swinton in the same spirit as the 2008 film Derek about film director Derek Jarman. The Seasons in Quincy does indeed come across as a reverential love letter to a mentor and father figure, though Swinton is not solely responsible for the result. Produced via Birkbeck college’s Derek Jarman Lab, Quincy comprises four films about Berger: one directed by Swinton, another by Derek producer Colin MacCabe, and the other two by Christopher Roth and Bartek Dziadosz. It’s fair to say, however, there are no strict boundaries: people cross over and pop up in their collaborators’ films, filling different roles as the need arises. But the focus, of course, is Berger – still,...
Here is an impressively high-minded documentary about writer John Berger – conceived, apparently, by Tilda Swinton in the same spirit as the 2008 film Derek about film director Derek Jarman. The Seasons in Quincy does indeed come across as a reverential love letter to a mentor and father figure, though Swinton is not solely responsible for the result. Produced via Birkbeck college’s Derek Jarman Lab, Quincy comprises four films about Berger: one directed by Swinton, another by Derek producer Colin MacCabe, and the other two by Christopher Roth and Bartek Dziadosz. It’s fair to say, however, there are no strict boundaries: people cross over and pop up in their collaborators’ films, filling different roles as the need arises. But the focus, of course, is Berger – still,...
- 2/16/2016
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
Is there any contemporary filmmaker — or any artist invested in the creation of images — who hasn’t been influenced, at least on some level, by the British writer John Berger? His Ways of Seeing, a semiotics-tinged analysis of imagery ranging from European oil painting to 20th century advertising, is a seductive and accessible introduction to critical theory, feminist film criticism and Marxist cultural commentary. Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival is the anthology film, The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger. Conceived of by Swinton and producer and literary critic Colin McCabe, the film captures the 89-year-old […]...
- 2/16/2016
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
"The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of "luxury," the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work asks for as little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is delightfully, divinely great, when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the skater's pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognise, but never surely to call it a luxury." —Henry James, from The Preface to The Wings of the Dove (1909) "[The critic’s] choice of best salami is a picture backed by studio build-up, agreement amongst his colleagues, a layout in Life mag (which makes it officially reasonable for an American award), and a list of ingredients that anyone’s unsophisticated aunt in Oakland can spot as comprising a distinguished film. This prize picture,...
- 7/27/2015
- by Greg Gerke
- MUBI
For years the essay film has been a neglected form, but now its unorthodox approach to constructing reality is winning over a younger, tech-savvy crowd
For a brief, almost unreal couple of hours last July, in amid the kittens and One Direction-mania trending on Twitter, there appeared a very surprising name – that of semi-reclusive French film-maker Chris Marker, whose innovative short feature La Jetée (1962) was remade in 1995 as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. A few months earlier, art journal e-flux staged The Desperate Edge of Now, a retrospective of Adam Curtis's TV films, to large audiences on New York's Lower East Side. The previous summer, Handsworth Songs (1986), an experimental feature by the Black Audio Film Collective Salman Rushdie had once attacked as obscurantist and politically irrelevant, attracted a huge crowd at Tate Modern when it was screened shortly after the London riots.
Marker, Curtis, Black Audio: all have...
For a brief, almost unreal couple of hours last July, in amid the kittens and One Direction-mania trending on Twitter, there appeared a very surprising name – that of semi-reclusive French film-maker Chris Marker, whose innovative short feature La Jetée (1962) was remade in 1995 as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. A few months earlier, art journal e-flux staged The Desperate Edge of Now, a retrospective of Adam Curtis's TV films, to large audiences on New York's Lower East Side. The previous summer, Handsworth Songs (1986), an experimental feature by the Black Audio Film Collective Salman Rushdie had once attacked as obscurantist and politically irrelevant, attracted a huge crowd at Tate Modern when it was screened shortly after the London riots.
Marker, Curtis, Black Audio: all have...
- 8/3/2013
- by Sukhdev Sandhu
- The Guardian - Film News
Titian created the warmth of a living body on canvas just to turn men on. These days, it would be hard to get away with that
Nudity never stops causing anxiety, because it never stops arousing awe. Sienna Miller stands naked, beautifully pregnant. Painter Jonathan Yeo claims he chose to unveil this portrait in Berlin, because Germany, he says, is less hung up about nudity. Yet somehow he let images reach all the British papers. Is it daring? It is controversial? On the contrary: pregnancy has become the modern equivalent of a fig leaf, making nude images of women acceptable to all sections of society and all divisions of the media.
From Mark Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant to Damien Hirst's pregnant nude colossus Verity, imminent motherhood has become the respectable garb for artistic representations of naked women.
The reception of Yeo's portrait is typical. "Sienna poses naked...
Nudity never stops causing anxiety, because it never stops arousing awe. Sienna Miller stands naked, beautifully pregnant. Painter Jonathan Yeo claims he chose to unveil this portrait in Berlin, because Germany, he says, is less hung up about nudity. Yet somehow he let images reach all the British papers. Is it daring? It is controversial? On the contrary: pregnancy has become the modern equivalent of a fig leaf, making nude images of women acceptable to all sections of society and all divisions of the media.
From Mark Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant to Damien Hirst's pregnant nude colossus Verity, imminent motherhood has become the respectable garb for artistic representations of naked women.
The reception of Yeo's portrait is typical. "Sienna poses naked...
- 11/7/2012
- by Jonathan Jones
- The Guardian - Film News
To profane a Botticelli with a knife is something likely to go down well even with the Windsor Knitting Club these days, less so forty years ago when John Berger literally did so on national television. Though staged for the benefit of an oblivious public, this iconoclastic gesture, accompanied by Berger’s declaration that “it is not so much the paintings themselves which I want to consider as the way we now see them,” your average prime time TV was not.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its original airing, the BFI is screening Berger’s seminal TV series Ways of Seeing, inaugurating “Broadcasting the Arts”, a new programme exploring the way(s) television has dealt with literature, music, theatre, dance and fine art. Judicious choice that of starting with this particular series—the focal point of this 1972 televisual experiment being that of investigating how the perception of images was...
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its original airing, the BFI is screening Berger’s seminal TV series Ways of Seeing, inaugurating “Broadcasting the Arts”, a new programme exploring the way(s) television has dealt with literature, music, theatre, dance and fine art. Judicious choice that of starting with this particular series—the focal point of this 1972 televisual experiment being that of investigating how the perception of images was...
- 4/11/2012
- MUBI
"First shown in 1972, John Berger's BBC television series Ways of Seeing radicalized the way an entire generation looked at art," writes Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times:
Before Berger, painterly detail, the development of a style, attributions and authentications, were the tools of an art historian's trade, and those practicing it most successfully in the 20th century — Bernard Berenson in the splendor of his Florentine villa, Kenneth Clark, who bought himself Saltwood Castle in Kent and was knighted for his stately TV series Civilisation — had always been unashamedly elitist in both their work and their lives. Then came Berger, born in Hackney, east London, in 1926, educated not at Harvard or Oxford but at London art schools, hanging out not with collectors and dealers but with the revolutionary Black Panther Party, to which he donated half the money from his 1972 Booker Prize-winning experimental novel G., about a rich Italian's journey to class consciousness.
Before Berger, painterly detail, the development of a style, attributions and authentications, were the tools of an art historian's trade, and those practicing it most successfully in the 20th century — Bernard Berenson in the splendor of his Florentine villa, Kenneth Clark, who bought himself Saltwood Castle in Kent and was knighted for his stately TV series Civilisation — had always been unashamedly elitist in both their work and their lives. Then came Berger, born in Hackney, east London, in 1926, educated not at Harvard or Oxford but at London art schools, hanging out not with collectors and dealers but with the revolutionary Black Panther Party, to which he donated half the money from his 1972 Booker Prize-winning experimental novel G., about a rich Italian's journey to class consciousness.
- 4/3/2012
- MUBI
The photograph of Gary Oldman as Smiley on page 4 of the Review (The truth about spies, 17 September) looked so like Sir William Coldstream when I taught with him in his final years at the Slade school of fine art, Ucl, 1974 to 1976. I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy last night and the film confirmed that Oldman's portrayal of Smiley is based on Coldstream: his glasses, his painting technique based on the ideas of watching he developed at the Gpo Film Unit working alongside Wh Auden, who wrote in his Letter to William Coldstream, Esq (1937): "Let me pretend I am the impersonal eye of the camera." The film even seemed to echo his various Georgian homes and studios.
Peter Wright's Spycatcher starts with his final day at work for MI5. He gets off the train at Euston Square and walks down Gower Street to the MI5 offices in a building next to an art school.
Peter Wright's Spycatcher starts with his final day at work for MI5. He gets off the train at Euston Square and walks down Gower Street to the MI5 offices in a building next to an art school.
- 9/23/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
Award-winning Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention) makes idiosyncratic films about the endless conflict between Arabs and Israelis, stitching together wryly humorous tableaux that speak to the absurdity of life under occupation. Suleiman himself is often a character in these tragicomic dramas, a mute witness quietly observing the agitations of the Middle East at ground level, with lidded eyes and a mournful face that commentators have repeatedly likened to Buster Keaton’s. As a youth infatuated with socialism, Suleiman (now 50) fled a pending arrest warrant in Nazareth (the authorities were under the impression he was a gang member) and moved to London, where he met author John Berger, an important mentor and lifelong friend whose Ways of Seeing literally opened his eyes to the world. Later, in New York City, he befriended the late critic Edward Said (Orientalism) and producer James Schamus, both of whom exerted an equally powerful influence...
- 1/9/2011
- by Damon Smith
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
What makes a great critic? As we launch our third Young Critics' Competition, Guardian reviewers offer some expert advice – and reveal the writers who first inspired them
'A critic is more than a spectator' Michael Billington, theatre critic
I started reading reviews avidly in my teens. I'm still haunted by a phrase Harold Hobson used about Waiting for Godot in the Sunday Times: "If you have only 15 shillings left in the world, go and see Waiting for Godot. If you have 30 shillings, see it twice."
But the critic who really obsessed me, and most of my generation, was Hobson's great rival, Kenneth Tynan at the Observer. What Tynan showed is that criticism is principally about writing well. Open his collected reviews on any page and you find the phrases lock perfectly into place. Here's one example, from a 1956 review of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory: "Puffing on a cheroot,...
'A critic is more than a spectator' Michael Billington, theatre critic
I started reading reviews avidly in my teens. I'm still haunted by a phrase Harold Hobson used about Waiting for Godot in the Sunday Times: "If you have only 15 shillings left in the world, go and see Waiting for Godot. If you have 30 shillings, see it twice."
But the critic who really obsessed me, and most of my generation, was Hobson's great rival, Kenneth Tynan at the Observer. What Tynan showed is that criticism is principally about writing well. Open his collected reviews on any page and you find the phrases lock perfectly into place. Here's one example, from a 1956 review of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory: "Puffing on a cheroot,...
- 5/25/2010
- The Guardian - Film News
Swiss director Alain Tanner, who turned 80 last December, is one of the forgotten men of European art cinema. Though his films were regularly distributed in the Us in the 1970s and ’80s, Tanner has not had a film released here since 1987’s A Flame in My Heart, though he's made 10 films since (his last, Paul s'en va, was made in 2004) and not a single one of his films is available on Region 1 DVD. But, in a nice piece of serendipity, Anthology Film Archives in New York is hosting a Tanner retrospective this week, the same week that his longtime distributor, New Yorker Films, is opening for business once again. A double cause for celebration.
La salamandre (which plays on Sunday evening and I urge all New York film lovers to see it) was Tanner’s breakthrough hit in 1971. Written with English art critic and novelist John Berger (the first of...
La salamandre (which plays on Sunday evening and I urge all New York film lovers to see it) was Tanner’s breakthrough hit in 1971. Written with English art critic and novelist John Berger (the first of...
- 4/16/2010
- MUBI
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