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In partnership with New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, Mubi will be hosting four films recently shown at Art of the Real, the Film Society's annual showcase for boundary-pushing nonfiction films. Poet on a Business Trip will be showing April 24 - May 23, 2016 on Mubi in the United States.Director Ju Anqi. Photo by Ma Liang“Poet on a Business Trip”: I do not know how this title reads in Chinese, but in English its matter-of-fact anomaly, a title suggestive of silent film actualities and Luc Moullet’s drollness, serves well this curiously blasé, marvelously unusual film by Ju Anqi.Poet on a Business Trip looks and feels like the time capsule it in fact is: the director took Shu, a young Chinese poet, on a road trip to the barren western (and Uygur) province of Xinjiang back in 2002, during which Shu composed poems. For reasons discussed below in an interview with the filmmaker,...

Chis Marker's Chat écoutant la musiqueThere are dog people and there are cat people, this we know, and there are even people who claim to be of both—though latent sympathies remain unspoken, like with a parent and which child is their favorite. With the Vienna Film Festival welcoming me with a tumbling collection of dog and cat short films spanning cinema's history—the Austrian Film Museum, an essential destination each year collaborating with the Viennale, is hosting a “a brief zoology of cinema” throughout the festivities—it is clear that filmmakers, too, have their preference. Silent cinema decidedly prefers the more easily trained and exhibited canine, with 1907’s surreal favorite Les chiens savants as a certain kind of cruel pinnacle. For the cats, Chris Marker, already the presiding figure over so much in 20th century art, I think we can easily claim is the cine-laureate. One need not know...

Above: Ozualdo Ribeiro Candeias’ A margem (The Margin, 1967).

"I will never transmit sanitised ideas, eloquent discourses or plastic images before the garbage (…) Crushed and exploited, the colonized can only invent their own form of suffocation: the scream of protest comes from an abortive ‘mise en scene’ (…) I’ll continue to make an underdeveloped cinema by condition and vocation, barbarian and ours, anticulturalist (…)" —Rogério  Sganzerla, The Aesthetics of Garbage

Not even garbage escapes retrospective respectability; what was once reviled by snobby film buffs has now become their new gospel. Subcultural capital (that which is “hip” and “illicit”) is usually outsourced from our business enemies (China, Iran, etc.) or from forgotten episodes of film history. One wonders what will the subject of a retrospective be in 30 or 40 years when the whole globe will have been converted to consumer fundamentalism. Now that our visual economy is funded on total exposure and immediate consumption,...

Hot off the virtual presses: "In the Signals section's theme program The Mouth of Garbage: Sub Culture and Sex in São Paulo, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) will present a vast panorama of features and shorts from São Paulo's so-called 'Boca do Lixo' (Mouth of Garbage), the nickname for the working class neighborhood in the center of the Brazilian metropolis. These quick and dirty productions frequently highlighted the sleazy underbelly of Brazilian society using established genres such as noir, horror, the western, and pornography."

So far, the lineup ranges from Ozualdo Candeias's The Margin (1967) through Jean Garret's Fuk Fuk Brazilian Style (1986) and includes work from the years in between by João Callegaro, João S Trevisan, Jairo Ferreira, Carlos Reichenbach, Ody Fraga and Cláudio Cunha, whose Oh! Rebuceteio (1984) Fernando F Croce reviewed some time back: "A sort of mix of Bob Fosse and Wilhelm Reich, Cunha...