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The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) on Monday added a David Lynch short and an episode of his iconic series Twin Peaks to its Franz Kafka retrospective and unveiled the program of its Out of the Past section, featuring classic, cult, rare and “unfairly overlooked” films, screened in their original or restored versions.

Among the highlights are restored versions of Wim Wenders’ 1984 neo-Western drama Paris, Texas and Two English Girls, François Truffaut’s 1971 period drama about a love triangle.

The Wenders film is part of a three-film program presented by Alexandre O. Philippe, the creator of documentary essays about the history of cinema, offering perspectives on the American landscape in cinema. He will also present his 2021 documentary The Taking (2021), which explores American mythology through the socio-philosophical dimensions of the American landscape.

Also part of the Out of the Past program is Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s documentary about...

The memory of humanity for sufferings borne is astonishingly short. Its gift of imagination for coming sufferings is almost even less. It is this callousness that we must combat. For humanity is threatened by wars compared to which those past are like poor attempts and they will come, without any doubt, if the hands of those who prepare them in all openness are not broken. —Bertolt Brecht, 19521There is a story of violence hiding behind every player that leaves the frame. The stories around Antigone, Othon, and Empedokles are part of the same History of Violence as those around Karl Rossmann, Machorka-Muff, and Valino.Here, violence is confronted by leaving; quitting the frame, which does not mean giving up. Whether by anger, boredom, or disappointment, the players confidently depart. Like partisans they actively set out, taking up exile from the frame, leaving it devoid of their presence. Following the call...

A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Straub-Huillet's Class Relations (1984) is showing on Mubi from August 20 – September 18, 2019.Things that are just have a particular look, and your cause, I must admit, does not.— Dialogue from Class RelationsIn Franz Kafka's Amerika, the plot mechanics that propel the protagonist (Karl Roßmann) through the senseless and inscrutable world in which he finds himself embedded are, as in all of Kafka, withheld from both his and our view. He is only ever confronted by the outcomes of these unseen drivers, never privy to their impetus. In one scene, Roßmann, working as a junior porter in a hotel, is fired because he didn't think to salute the head porter "one hundred times a day." Like all Kafka protagonists, he watches blankly as the terms of his failure are...

This year's poster for the Vienna International Film Festival is of a flame, and while around the world in other cinema-loving cities and at other cinema-loving festivals one might that that as a cue for a celluloid immolation and a move forever to digital, here in Austria cinema and film as film aren't burning up but rather are burning brightly.

The tributes and special programs in artistic director Hans Hurch's 2014 edition make this position clear: John Ford, Harun Farocki and 16mm, with new films by Tariq Teguia, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Marie Straub accompanying older ones by the same directors. These aren't just retrospectives, they are revitalizing redoubts, inexhaustible fountains of flame, of sensitivity, of consciousness, and of intervention. With such a profound retrospective program, I hope you'll forgive me telling you very little of anything new at the festival; unless, that is, you like me count cinema revived as something always new.

On the occasion of Bam's screening of Straub-Huillet's Class Relations on May 1 for International Workers' Day, a text on the film by infrequently translated French writer-critic Louis Seguin.

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Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are afraid of nothing. To use as a title, in 1984, for an adaptation of Amerika, those “class relations” whose conception figures so prominently in The German Ideology is tantamount to either obliviousness or provocation. There’s nothing more absurd or more obsolete than being stuck in the past with these rapprochements that were already out of fashion ten years ago. Is it not understood, within the very small world of film criticism, that Marx—once more but for good, for the last time—is definitively forgotten, buried, and that any allusion, any reference to him will only provoke one of those smiles mixing the respect we owe saints of the recent past and the pitiable irony such vain perseverance calls forth?...