Neuigkeiten

News.

The highly celebrated Russian director Alexey Balabanov has passed away at the age of 54. James Gray–whose newest film The Immigrant premieres in Cannes this Friday–has announced his next project: a sci-fi film produced by Rt Features. Variety has the details. Laurent Cantet, director of The Class, also has a new project: "Vuelta a Itaca is a Cuban set drama about Amadeo, who returns to the Havana after a 16-year exile. Over one night, he and his childhood friends retrace their lives." via Dark Horizons. At Cannes this weekend, Claude Lanzmann presented The Last of the Unjust, a companion piece to Shoah that focuses on one man whose interviews were left out of that masterwork. Check out this wonderful piece on Lanzmann and the new film in The Guardian. Above: Concept art and a frame from Hayao Miyazaki's new film, Kaze Tachinu (The Wind is Rising). Further details,...

"Benning's titles are 'Snakes on a Plane' direct," wrote Michael Sicinski in dispatch to Cargo from Toronto, "and this one consists, as you'd expect, of 20 shots of individuals smoking a single cigarette. The shot lasts however long it takes the given participant to mow down that cancer stick. As Benning explained (although the piece makes it fairly obvious), the ciggie is but an excuse for sustained time-based portraiture; each shot is a close-up, and the action, much more so than the smoking, is the subject forgetting his or her self-consciousness and existing as a face."

"Last year's festival brought his debut on digital, Ruhr, a massively beautiful meditation on duration," writes R Emmet Sweeney at Movie Morlocks. "Twenty Cigarettes is more of a lark, a way for him to work and hang out with his friends at the same time, kind of an avant-garde Ocean's 11."

"There's a...

Above: filmmaker Sharon Lockhart at Parker Pass in shot #11 of James Benning's Twenty Cigarettes.

James Benning largely eschews music in his films, but if there's one track which should have been used to accompany the latest work by the USA's leading avant-garde director—Twenty Cigarettes, comprising twenty shots of solo individuals each smoking a single cigarette—then (passing over The Platters' too-obvious Smoke Gets In Your Eyes) it's perhaps The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Take Five.

This is because the instrumental jazz classic—written by Paul Desmond in 1959 for the Quartet (whose magnificent drummer Joe Morello passed away March 11th)—gets its name partly from unusual 5/4 time-signature, and partly from the idea of "taking five" as in "taking a break." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, such usage dates back to 1929, and refers to "the approximate time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

The pace of modern life has...

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.

It’s been a big week — and not quite in a good way — for Richard Wolstencroft of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, whose home was raided by Australian police looking for banned film L.A. Zombie. It’s a situation that sucks because it’s happening at all, but good because it’s bringing attention to archaic Australian censorship. The story was written up everywhere from the New York Times to The Advocate. Nicest of all, though, was a personal letter of support from Noah Cowan of the Toronto International Film Festival, which screened the film earlier this year. Jay Hollinsworth created a simply amazing poster mashup of one of the most hackneyed visual cliché’s of all time: Looking down a foreshortened gun barrel. Great job, Jay! Oscars.org has video highlights from the Governor’s Awards, including tributes to Jean-Luc Godard from Haskell Wexler, Vincent Cassel, Phil Robinson and more.

0424 Look, Stranger (Arielle Javitch, USA/Serbia/Slovenia)

Audacity isn’t a term that comes to mind when thinking of contemporary American independent film, a culture that often seems adverse to the kind of maverick, idiosyncratic risk-taking cinema that made its name in the 1980s. As such, plunges into the abyss are well worth noting. For her feature film debut, American filmmaker Arielle Javitch has gone to Serbia to make a movie in English with a handful of lines of dialog, no clear setting, and very few plot points. Serbia is where it is shot but it takes place nowhere, a sketch of evacuated urban outskirts and craggy landscapes punctuated by mine fields, random roadblocks, and sniper traps. No war seems to be going on, but the film evokes a place somewhere between the ashen pastoral and the war torn—for me it immediately called to mind Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker...

Wavelengths 1: Soul of the City

As the pace of the contemporary urban experience grows faster and the world becomes increasingly fractured, artists are documenting the vestiges and layers revealed in flux; global updates on the city symphony.

Tomonari Nishikawa’s Tokyo-Ebisu (Japan) is a 16mm in-camera patchwork constructed from multiple viewpoints from the platforms of Tokyo’s busiest railway line, Yamanote, and a masking technique which exposes 1/30th of a frame 30 times in order to capture an image of spectral apparitions. The Soul of Things (U.S.A) from Dominic Angerame presents luscious chiaroscuro images of the construction and destruction of modern structures exposing their inner soul. From Thom Andersen, director of Los Angeles Plays Itself, Get Out of the Car (U.S.A.) is a city symphony exploring Los Angeles’ gentrification through a thoughtful montage of façades and a playful excursus through its musical history. Callum Cooper’s Victoria,...

Flamethrower Magazine conducted an impressive and extensive interview with underground film raconteur Mike Z about his hoax filmmaking career and his Charles Manson inspired stage show, The Strip Cult, which may become a major musical. The Chicago Underground Film Festival is this week and Hollywood Chicago passionately recommended seeing the opening night film, The Wild Hunt. Chicago Journal ran an overview of the fest. Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips — whom I thoroughly enjoy on At the Movies — wrote a brief preview focusing on Jonas Mekas. Newcity Film liked the Chicago-produced documentary Scrappers. True/Slant also raved about Scrappers. Also in Chicago, the Reader named The Nightingale as the 2010 Best Alternative Film Venue in the city. On Cinema Scope, Michael Sicinski profiles and interviews British experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers, which prompts Making Light of It to offer its own assessment of Rivers’ work. Blake Williams looks at the evolution of the long,...

Difficulty with the early stages of formulating an idea, a plan or your goals. The confusion of too many ideas or the indecision of too few - creating trouble with completion. Your mental talents must fit the situation - see if you are too strong or too weak for the situation at hand. Sometimes, experiencing a negative is necessary in order to achieve something better - triggering the strength of your mind into action.

—Ace of Swords (Reversed)

Berlin, 8.48am Friday

Films seen (feature length) so far: 4

Notably worthwhile: 0

Walkouts: 1

A grey and snowy post-dawn here in Berlin on the second day of the 60th Berlinale. "Where joy should reign / These skies restrain" as a-Ha put it in Stay On These Roads 22 years ago. Those lines, and also that song in general, popped into my mind on Wednesday night at the Akademie der Künste as I sat on the floor...

David Cairns:

The Forgotten: Slow Poison

The Forgotten: Death by Light

The Forgotten: The Phantom of Puberty

The Forgotten: The New Medium

Adam Cook

Abandoned Spaces: An Interview with Jeon Soo-il

Adrian Curry:

Movie Posters of the Year

Movie Poster of the Week: "Teorema"

Movie Poster of the Week: An Interview with "Funny Games" Poster Designer Akiko Stehrenberger

Movie Poster of the Week: "Robocop"

Movie Poster of the Week: "Shutter Island"

Daniel Kasman:

The Notebook's 2nd Annual Writers' Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2009, Part III

Avatarcraft

Video Sundays: The Rhythm of the Night

The Art of the Trailer: "From Paris with Love"

Rotterdam 2010: Asian Excitement

Rotterdam 2010: Textures of the Morning

Glenn Kenny:

Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Boom!" (Joseph Losey, 1968)

Topics/Questions/Exercises Of The Week—8 January 2010

Tuesday Morning Foreign Blu-ray disc Report: "The Iron Petticoat" (Ralph Thomas, 1956)

Topics/Questions/Exercises Of The Week—15 January...

9:30am may seem to early to watch James Benning’s first digital feature, Ruhr, but no amount of jet-lag or early morning grogginess can dispel the immediate, intuitively pleasurable sensory assault of the ones-and-zeros that open the film, an image of infinite mysteries between its curves and its lines, its modulation of greys, and the question of where the magic wind comes from. It's the image that is quoted at the beginning of Matthew Flanagan’s terrific piece on Ruhr from last week, and immediately introduces the key themes of Benning’s documentary on the industrial Ruhr valley: absent workers and populace; barren industrial landscape; flux and flow of anonymous mechanized movement into and out of the frame; digital flatness that makes that movement and its relationship to real space and recorded time tenuous; and a great deal beyond this than the morning can register (read Matthew’s article...

All images captured from the (compressed) 3sat television broadcast of Ruhr, 3 November 2009.

I

1. The Matenastraße Tunnel. A subterranean passageway of soft and hard whitewashed lines, 0.5km long, cutting under a steel mill in Duisburg. The roof weighs dark and heavy, its stains run down the walls. Plastic detritus crawls along the concrete, four vehicles clatter through, a cyclist disrupts a dry leaf. Sirens sound, a machinic drone reverberating from overhead. “When you walk through, it’s like living in your eardrum” —James Benning. An unbroken shot lasts seven and a half minutes, a composite culled from two continuous hours of footage: cars pass in a sequence of blue, turquoise, red and white, ordered by half a dozen invisible edits. When no pro-filmic movement is visible, the frame is eerily still—no grain dances, no light dashes through a flickering strip at the back of the theatre.

Ruhr is Benning’s...