Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?May is an interesting time for a film festival. In a sense, the calendar year for cinema is starting over in May, since that’s when two major international festivals occur—Cannes and Oberhausen. Where Cannes showcases the latest work from global arthouse auteurs—your Almodóvars and von Triers and Hanekes and the like—Oberhausen specifically focuses on short films, some of them by the world’s most prominent avant-garde filmmakers. A significant portion of what screens at both Cannes and Oberhausen will set the agenda for other film festivals in the coming year, in terms of which films and filmmakers ought to be shown.San Francisco’s Crossroads happens during May as well, and this puts it in a unique position with respect to other, larger festivals. Artistic director Steve Polta is able to assemble an experimental film festival comprised of older,...
- 5/19/2017
- MUBI
I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.
- 10/11/2016
- MUBI
Peter Whitehead, via Occupy Cinema
"One of last year's best films, Ken Jacobs's Seeking the Monkey King is showing Saturday at Anthology as part of a program presented in support of Occupy Wall Street," writes J Hoberman in one of the last pieces he'll turn in at the Voice. "Covering 500 years of American history, this furious beatnik analysis makes a people's historian like Howard Zinn seem like a Chamber of Commerce booster, particularly as delivered amid [Jg] Thirlwell's industrial-strength rhapsodic noise drone, against the seething apocalypse of melting glaciers and crystallized lava that soon becomes an ongoing Rorschach test." See, too, David Phelps's essay. Seeking the Monkey King is "showing with several of Jacobs's short works (19th-century stereopticon slides treated as material for a cyclotron) and excerpts from his 3D footage of Zuccotti Park. Other films showing in the series are An Injury to One (2002), Travis Wilkerson's lucid,...
"One of last year's best films, Ken Jacobs's Seeking the Monkey King is showing Saturday at Anthology as part of a program presented in support of Occupy Wall Street," writes J Hoberman in one of the last pieces he'll turn in at the Voice. "Covering 500 years of American history, this furious beatnik analysis makes a people's historian like Howard Zinn seem like a Chamber of Commerce booster, particularly as delivered amid [Jg] Thirlwell's industrial-strength rhapsodic noise drone, against the seething apocalypse of melting glaciers and crystallized lava that soon becomes an ongoing Rorschach test." See, too, David Phelps's essay. Seeking the Monkey King is "showing with several of Jacobs's short works (19th-century stereopticon slides treated as material for a cyclotron) and excerpts from his 3D footage of Zuccotti Park. Other films showing in the series are An Injury to One (2002), Travis Wilkerson's lucid,...
- 1/7/2012
- MUBI
Even as I carry on updating the entry on Doc NYC, there's quite a lot besides going on in the field of nonfiction filmmaking. Last week, both the International Documentary Association and Cinema Eye Honors announced the nominations for their respective awards, and yesterday, Cinema Eye unveiled "a new, periodic award called the Hell Yeah Prize, to be given to filmmakers who have created works of incredible craft and artistry that also have significant, real-world impact. The inaugural Hell Yeah Prize will be presented to Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky for their HBO Documentary Films trilogy Paradise Lost, which played a critical role in securing the release from prison of the wrongly prosecuted and convicted West Memphis Three."
And the other day, when I pointed to Dennis Lim's review of Travis Wilkerson's An Injury to One (2002), "one of American independent cinema's great achievements of the past decade, just issued on DVD by Icarus Films,...
And the other day, when I pointed to Dennis Lim's review of Travis Wilkerson's An Injury to One (2002), "one of American independent cinema's great achievements of the past decade, just issued on DVD by Icarus Films,...
- 11/4/2011
- MUBI
The weekend's must-read is Michael Idov's report in GQ from the set of Ilya Khrzhanovsky's (4) latest project, Dau, which "has been in production since 2006 and won't wrap until 2012, if ever." I first came across it via a tweet from Vince Keenan: "It's Synecdoche, New York. Only it's real. And Russian." Very. Ostensibly a biopic based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau, Dau has become "an entire city, built to scale" in eastern Ukraine and populated by 300 cast and crew members who literally live, day in and day out, inside a simulacrum of Moscow, circa 1952. It is also an Institute, of which Khrzhanovsky is the Head "or simply the Boss." There's a narrative arc to Idov's piece: "A day into my stay at the Institute, I begin to feel its pull." By the third day, "I have been reduced… to a sniveling Soviet stukach, a snitch." By the way,...
- 10/30/2011
- MUBI
Music legend David Byrne was tapped last year to score an upcoming film starring Sean Penn, but it now seems that he will be joined on the project by Will Oldham, the bearded songwriter perhaps best known as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Both talents have had their share of experiences with composing for the screen in the past. Byrne has produced work for the HBO-series Big Love, the David Mackenzie film, Young Adam, as well as both Wall Street films. Songs by Oldham have been featured in films such as An Injury to One, The Broken Giant and Palermo Shooting....
- 1/26/2011
- Pastemagazine.com
The 49th annual Ann Arbor Film Festival has announced their three-member jury panel who will be selecting award winners out of the over one hundred films that will be screening in competition this year. The awards, in total, add up to approximately $20,000 given out to competing filmmakers.
That jury consists of filmmakers Stephen Connolly, Rebecca Meyers and Travis Wilkerson. In addition to giving out the awards, each filmmaker will host a free public program of his and her work during the festival.
None of the jury members are strangers to Aaff. All have screened films at previous editions of the fest. Connolly’s non-fiction films have screened at three previous Aaff fests and this year he will screen the North American premiere of his latest film, Two Coronations, at his free public program.
Rebecca Meyers will screen her 2010 film blue mantle, which made its world premiere at the last Toronto International Film Festival.
That jury consists of filmmakers Stephen Connolly, Rebecca Meyers and Travis Wilkerson. In addition to giving out the awards, each filmmaker will host a free public program of his and her work during the festival.
None of the jury members are strangers to Aaff. All have screened films at previous editions of the fest. Connolly’s non-fiction films have screened at three previous Aaff fests and this year he will screen the North American premiere of his latest film, Two Coronations, at his free public program.
Rebecca Meyers will screen her 2010 film blue mantle, which made its world premiere at the last Toronto International Film Festival.
- 1/13/2011
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
With 2010 only a week over, it already feels like best-of and top-ten lists have been pouring in for months, and we’re already tired of them: the ranking, the exclusions (and inclusions), the rules and the qualifiers. Some people got to see films at festivals, others only catch movies on video; and the ability for us, or any publication, to come up with a system to fairly determine who saw what when and what they thought was the best seems an impossible feat. That doesn’t stop most people from doing it, but we liked the fantasy double features we did last year and for our 3rd Writers Poll we thought we'd do it again.
I asked our contributors to pick a single new film they saw in 2010—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they saw in 2010 to create a unique double feature.
I asked our contributors to pick a single new film they saw in 2010—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they saw in 2010 to create a unique double feature.
- 1/10/2011
- MUBI
Movies are made up of images, even the bad ones. But the bad movies rarely leave any images lingering in your brain. The great films are the ones making great images. A great image is many things, by nature diffuse, and we might agree that any great image moves even when stopped still, opening its own cinematic world. Thus, The Notebook's decision to celebrate our recent decade not with a list but with this stream. Each contributor was asked to pick 1 film he or she wants to remember from the 2000s, select 1 image from that film to remember it by, and write one sentence to supplement their selection. We've done our best to craft not simply a grab bag but a cogent flow of the indelible, one image speaking to the next on a variety of registers: from film to film, between color and compositional rhymes, and, as you'll read,...
- 1/16/2010
- MUBI
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.