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Watching this, I couldn't help but recall the late French writer/director Chris Marker's 1953 French film essay (which he co-directed with Alain Resnais) titled "Les Statues meurent aussi," or "Statues Also Die" - an award-winning 30-minute work on African art from years past, and the effects colonialism has had on how that art is perceived. And because the film was considered by some to be a critique of colonialism, the second half of it (in which the film argues that colonial presence has compelled African art to lose much of its idiosyncratic expression, in order to appeal to Western consumers, with a mention of how African...

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...

Today’s film is the 1953 short Les statues meurent aussi, also known as Statues also Die. The film is a documentary, written by Chris Marker, who also co-directed the short with Alain Resnais. Resnais is a legend on the world cinema stage, with a directing career that spanned over 70 years, and a filmography that includes classics such as Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. He died yesterday in Paris at 91 years old, and his last film will be the 2014 feature Life of Riley.

Note: This film has english subtitles which can be activated by clicking on the “cc” button at the bottom right of the video.

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The post Sunday Shorts: ‘Les statues meurent aussi’, co-directed by Alain Resnais appeared first on Sound On Sight.

By my first afternoon in Rotterdam I had found an image that positively vibrated out of the screen at me. A dark doorway, seen obliquely in an empty frame, contained by stolid, lifeless rural architecture, cloaked in a miasma conjured from a combination of haze, a fogged lens, old film stock, and blown out whites from an open aperture. It is from Letter, a short work, not so much a documentary but a fragment drawn carefully and gently into immanence by Sergei Loznitsa, conjured from footage he shot, the program notes tell me, over ten years ago “at a psychiatric institution in a forgotten corner of Russia.” But even with no text or voice over to place and set this artifact resurrected (or projected), and a soundtrack achingly follied and sneakily dubbed, the sense of lostness, malady and asynchronicity is prevalent. Some persons, mostly old and bumbling, pursue the frame...