Noticias

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

“The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” brings films directed and curated by the Thai master (who we talked to about the retrospective), among them work from Chantal Akerman, Imamura, and perhaps greatest of all, an ultra-rare 35mm screening of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster.

Museum of Modern Art

A Rialto Pictures retrospective offers a smorgasbord of classic films, including The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and 35mm prints of Ran and Rififi on 35mm.

Japan Society

One of Japan’s greatest directors, Shinji Somai, is subject of a retrospective that continues with Sailor Suit and Machine Gun playing alongside Luminous Woman this Friday. Read our piece on Somai here.

Bam

A series on actor-director jobs includes Fox and His Friends, Love Streams, King Lear, and The Bridges of Madison County on 35mm.

Anthology Film Archives

Alexandr Dovzhenko films screen in Essential Cinema.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival celebrates its epic 53rd annual edition on March 24-29 with a colossal selection of experimental short films and features.

Feature film highlights include the documentary Speculation Nation by regular collaborators Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat, which examines the recent Spanish housing crisis; a new ethnographic doc by Ben Russell, Greetings to the Ancestors, which plunges deep into the culture of South Africa; and Jenni Olson’s grand California study The Royal Road.

Short film highlights include the much anticipated new film by Jennifer Reeder, Blood Below the Skin, a narrative following a week in the dramatic and romantic lives of three teenage girls; a new music video by Mike Olenick called Beautiful Things with music by The Wet Things; new animations by Don Hertzfeldt, World of Tomorrow, and Lewis Klahr, Mars Garden; plus new experimental work by Vanessa Renwick, Peggy Ahwesh and Zachary Epcar.

Special...

At the end of a nearly three-kilometer cable car journey in Nepal is the temple of the Goddess Bhagwati. The journey takes approximately ten minutes to complete. Each year, thousands of Hindus participate in the Manakamana Darshan, a pilgrimage to the temple to worship the Goddess and to have their wishes granted. On the surface, a film documenting this expedition could be rather tedious. But Manakamana filmmakers Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez have crafted a fascinating, observational film that far exceeds expectations (shot on the same 16mm camera that Robert Gardner used for his remarkable Forest of Bliss). >> - Jonathan Marlow...

At the end of a nearly three-kilometer cable car journey in Nepal is the temple of the Goddess Bhagwati. The journey takes approximately ten minutes to complete. Each year, thousands of Hindus participate in the Manakamana Darshan, a pilgrimage to the temple to worship the Goddess and to have their wishes granted. On the surface, a film documenting this expedition could be rather tedious. But Manakamana filmmakers Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez have crafted a fascinating, observational film that far exceeds expectations (shot on the same 16mm camera that Robert Gardner used for his remarkable Forest of Bliss). >> - Jonathan Marlow...

The great ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner has died at the age of 88. "Gardner’s films, including early and later masterworks like Dead Birds (1964) and Forest of Bliss (1986), are about people whose realities and stories belong to them," wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times in 2011. "He shares in those realities rather than trying to possess them." We survey Gardner's ideas and impact. » - David Hudson...

The great ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner has died at the age of 88. "Gardner’s films, including early and later masterworks like Dead Birds (1964) and Forest of Bliss (1986), are about people whose realities and stories belong to them," wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times in 2011. "He shares in those realities rather than trying to possess them." We survey Gardner's ideas and impact. » - David Hudson...

We at Mubi think that celebrating the films of 2011 should be a celebration of film viewing in 2011. Since all film and video is "old" one way or another, we present Out of a Past, a small (re-) collection of some of our favorite retrospective viewings from 2011.

These six movies are not necessarily the best old movies I saw for the first time this year, but the movies that most challenged my existing ideas of film and film history.

***

Tokyo Twilight (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1957)

April 21, Film Forum, New York, NY

Tokyo Twilight may be Ozu’s darkest film. Like a lot of his movies, it develops slowly as an accretion of small moments. It built so slowly, in fact, that I was surprised about 3/4 of the way through the film to realize how horribly ugly it had become. The received notion that Ozu makes quiet miniatures about everyday family life has...

Looking back at 2011 on what films moved and impressed us it becomes more and more clear—to me at least—that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, our end of year poll, now an annual tradition, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2011—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2011 to create a unique double feature. Many contributors chose their favorites of 2011, some picked out-of-the-way gems, others made some pretty strange connections—and some frankly just want to create a kerfuffle. All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2011 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative...

"It seems curious that as little biographical information exists in the recent books about the ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner as in his movies featured in the partial retrospective of his work starting today at Film Forum," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "For much of a career that has spanned more than a half-century and circumnavigated the globe, Mr Gardner has trained the camera on people whose lives, rituals, beliefs and bodily ornamentation can seem so far from early-21st-century Western life as to be from another galaxy. Yet despite Mr Gardner's seeming reluctance to share personal details, the work in Robert Gardner: Artist/Ethnographer makes it clear that he's been telling his own story all along."

J Hoberman in the Voice: "A man of many worlds, Robert Gardner is a descendent of Boston aristocrat Isabella Stewart Gardner (as in the Museum), the founder (and funder) of Harvard's Film Study Center,...

The re-released cinematic head-trip Forest of Bliss adheres firmly to the purer school of documentary-making

The lowest form of documentary involves a presenter setting off on a journey to discover why he or she didn't yet know something about which we, the audience, were already adequately informed. Near the opposite end of the documentary spectrum are those quiet, almost anonymous films such as Être et Avoir or Sleep Furiously, in which a community is observed and recorded with minimum fuss and no overt manipulation. Beyond those are films – so seldom seen that one could be forgiven for thinking them extinct – with no presenter, no commentary, no characters, no specific setting and no narrative or story. Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance"), made in 1982, is the classic of its kind: a compilation of ravishing footage of cities and natural wonders, seen at night and in the blaze of day,...