Actualités

Spring EquinoxOn November 10, James Benning premiered five of his latest works (thinking of red, wavelength, measuring change, Spring Equinox and Fall Equinox) at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, accompanied by a short response film by Michael Snow. Benning was also present for a Q&A before and between the screenings. Prompted by the pleasure as well as the discontent of the encounter with these films, we decided to engage in a dialogue that would offer us the time to interweave thoughts with as little space in between as possible.Dear Ivana,Writing to you about the new films of James Benning we have seen together at the Austrian Film Museum, I have the urge to begin with the end. It seems fitting, bearing in mind how Benning proceeds in his Spring Equinox, which I found to be the most vibrating film of the evening. Shot on a road passing...

I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.

To the extent that there can be a household name in contemporary avant-garde cinema, James Benning would be that guy right now. On paper, his work can sound harrowingly vapid; the worst case scenario for anyone who’s ever accused art house cinema of being ‘slow’ and ‘boring’. The thing is, they’re not. At all. In the same way that spending an hour at the beach, visiting the Grand Canyon, or having a meditation session could never be anything close to a ‘tedious’ experience, Benning’s films present patient viewers with all the grandeur, sublimity, and exhilaration of a first-hand encounter with the natural and material world. They also happen to be extremely complex and intelligent with regards to phenomenology, cinema history, and American ethnography.

In Edition Filmmuseum’s new 2-disc set – the second of a thorough project that will see the release of many of Benning’s key...

This Week’s Must Read: The guys at Stag Films have been maintaining a blog about their “green filmmaking” philosophy and, more importantly, about their latest upcoming epic, President Wolfman. Some great articles on their working process that you need to check out.The Glen Park Association has a gallery report and pictures from a new show of the late Bruce Conner’s work at the at the Gallery Paule Anglim. The show is made up of photographs that Conner took about the San Francisco punk scene.Cineflyer gives props to Winnipeg animator Leslie Supnet, whose praises need to be sung about more frequently all over the ‘net.Landscape Suicide points out a few highlights of Newcastle’s Av Festival, including work by Bela Tarr and James Benning.Luke Black posts some highlights from this year’s $100 Film Festival that was just held in Calgary. He’s got a bunch...

The average length of shot in The Bourne Ultimatum is two seconds. But a new festival argues for 'slow cinema' – an act of cultural resistance, but also a gateway to beauty and delight

"I think that what a person normally goes to cinema for is time," claimed the film director Andrei Tarkovsky. He felt this so deeply he entitled his 1987 memoir Sculpting In Time. According to Geoff Dyer, author of the recently published Zona, a meditation on the Russian director's best-known work Stalker (1979), it's a statement that needs tweaking: "What people go to the cinema for is a good time, not to sit there waiting for something to happen."

Time is the subject – the essence, as it were – of one of the most imaginative festivals to be staged in the UK for many years. Av Festival 12, taking place throughout March in venues across Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesborough, is the anti-Olympics.

"The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than in lone bedrooms where there's a mirror. People's faces are in naked repose down in the subway." —Walker Evans

"So, have you ever smoked?" I laughed when James Benning asked me this question at the end of our conversation. "Honestly, I've probably smoked about twenty cigarettes," I told him. "I'm a child of the 70s and 80s. Nancy Reagan told me to say ‘no.'" That was almost the full extent of our discussion of smoking, despite the fact that Benning's feature-length video, Twenty Cigarettes, is constructed solely of portraits of smokers. The duration of each of the twenty shots is determined by the length of time it takes each subject to light, smoke, and discard a cigarette. Benning composed each shot, staged the person in front of a flat backdrop, and then walked away from the camera.

Here’s the full Underground Film Links post for today, 22 links in total:

According to Cineflyer, filmmaker Deco Dawson has issued a Cease and Desist Order to the The Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art for screening a film entitled The Lotus Eaters credited to artist Marcel Dzama, to which the museum has complied. At the heart of the matter is that Dzama’s film is really Dawson’s own Film(dzama), but with the proper credits cut off that attribute the film to Dawson. A strange and sad case.The Brooklyn Downtown Star newspaper profiled underground film couple Penny Lane and Brian Frye about their work-in-progress documentary Our Nixon, which is put together out of home movies made by the original Watergate gang.Rodney Perkins reprints his review of the return of Coffin Joe in José Marica Marins’ Embodiment of Evil, which will be released on DVD/Blu-Ray this week.

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,...