Noticias

The 52nd annual Ann Arbor Film Festival will be a jam-packed experimental feature and short film screening event running for six days and nights, this time on March 25-30.

Opening Night will feature a reception and an after-party, and stuffed between those will be a block of nine short films, including new ones by Bryan Boyce, Michael Robinson, Jennifer Reeder and Martha Colburn, as well as a never-before-released work by the legendary Bruce Baillie called Little Girl in which Baillie captured scenes of natural beauty.

Special Events scattered throughout the festival include a retrospective of indie filmmaker Penelope Spheeris that will feature her rock ‘n’ roll-based work, including the original The Decline of Western Civilization, plus The Decline of Western Civilization Part III, her influential punk film Suburbia (screening twice) and a collection of short films.

There will also be several films and presentations by filmmaking scholar Thom Andersen, such...

Above: Zoulikha Bouabdellah's Al Attlal (Ruines), left, and Pierre Léon's À la barbe d'Ivan, right.

Nicole Brenez has curated two programs of new work from the French avant-garde for this year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema 2011 in New York; below she has offered her program notes in French. Program one (on Saturday) concentrates on filmmakers reappropriating images; program two (Sunday) is the new feature by Ange Leccia, Nuit bleue. Below, I’ve translated Brenez’s extended appreciation of Leccia and Nuit bleue; as usual, I’ve tried to stay faithful to the sound and rhythm of the original where possible. Beneath the translated extract you'll find the full article by Ms. Brenez in its original French. —David Phelps

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…Although Ange Leccia has also practiced re-appropriating images (especially Jean Luc-Godard’s) in his installations and his films, Nuit bleuetakes up a different aesthetic vein, one rich with a long tradition of the French avant-garde.

Sept. 8

7:30 p.m.

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way

Berkeley, CA 94720

Hosted by: Pacific Film Archive

To mark the 10th anniversary of the release of the massive underground and obscure film DVD collection Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893-1941, curator Bruce Posner presents a night of obscure and rarely publicly screened films, including several classics of the avant-garde.

Included in the program is what is considered the first underground film produced in the U.S.: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta. Completed in 1921, Manhatta is a visual poem celebrating the architecture of NYC.

During that same time period, the early avant-garde was in full swing in Europe and tonight’s program will also include several of that era’s most famous works, such as Man Ray’s Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason), Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic cinéma, and Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique. (To...

First the history, then the list:

In 1969, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas decided to open the world’s first museum devoted to film. Of course, a typical museum hangs its collections of artwork on the wall for visitors to walk up to and study. However, a film museum needs special considerations on how — and what, of course — to present its collection to the public.

Thus, for this film museum, first a film selection committee was formed that included James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, plus, for a time, Stan Brakhage. This committee met over the course of several months to decide exactly what films would be collected and how they would be shown. The final selection of films would come to be called the The Essential Cinema Repertory.

The Essential Cinema Collection that the committee came up with consisted of about 330 films.