Notícias

We’ve always loved setting trends at The Film Stage and are accordingly chuffed that, nine months after we screened a 35mm print at the Roxy, Roman Polanski’s late-career triumph The Ghost Writer comes to the Criterion Channel in next month’s Coastal Thrillers, a series that does what it says on the tin: The Lady from Shanghai, Key Largo, The Long Goodbye, The Fog, and the other best film of 2010, Scorsese’s Shutter Island. It pairs well with Noir and the Blacklist featuring films by Joseph Losey, Fritz Lang, Jules Dassin, and so on. Retrospectives are held for Terry Southern, Kathryn Bigelow, Jem Cohen, and (just in time for Caught By the Tides) Jia Zhangke, while Spike Lee gets his own Adventures In Moviegoing.

For recent restorations, Antonioni’s Il Grido and Anthony Harvey’s Dutchman appear. Criterion Editions include The Runner, Touchez pas au grisbi, Godzilla vs.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Museum of Modern Art

A major highlight of any filmgoing year, To Save and Project returns.

IFC Center

A Donald Sutherland retrospective includes Klute, Fellini’s Casanova, Don’t Look Now, and Mash; Crash, Battle Royale, and The Lost Boys show late.

Anthology Film Archives

Blackout 1973 features films by Sembène, Bill Gunn, Mambéty and more; Essential Cinema runs the gamut from Laurel and Hardy to Jonas Mekas’ Walden.

Roxy Cinema

Emma Roberts has curated Thirteen on 35mm and Mysterious Skin; Amadeus shows on Saturday and Sunday.

Film Forum

AI: From Metropolis to Ex Machina continues, featuring Terminator 2, Blade Runner, Videodrome, and Ghost in the Shell; Wall-e screens on Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

See It Big! Let It Snow brings The Gold Rush on 35mm, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, The Shining, and more.

Metrograph

Trash Humpers, The Bling Ring,...

Cocksucker Blues.In 1957, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank was on the road. He was finishing two years of cross-country journeys, his wife and two young children in tow, snapping the 28,000 grainy black-and-white pictures that he would distill into the 83 images in his book The Americans. A culture-shifting landmark, with its deglamorized, deeply ambivalent view of the country, The Americans was a bracing and poetic antidote to the clarity and sentimentality of the images in magazines like Life, Vogue, and Fortune, where Frank worked as a freelancer after coming to the United States in 1947. “If you dig out-of-focus pictures, intense and unnecessary grain, converging verticals, a total absence of normal composition, and a relaxed, snapshot quality,” noted Popular Photographer editor James Zanutto, “then Robert Frank is for you.” The same year, Jack Kerouac published his own American odyssey, On the Road, a jazz-like literary improvisation quickly acclaimed by the New York Times...

Ahhh, fall. It’s finally here. The leaves are dropping, pumpkin spice is in the air (and everyone’s coffee), and the holidays are close enough where we’re all either rushing to get our work done before the end of the year or starting to wind down in hopes that people will soon stop bothering us. It’s a magical time, especially with new awards contenders like “Anora” and “Conclave” finally releasing to wide audiences, but let’s not forget that older films deserve some love too. Especially around Thanksgiving, a holiday specifically designed for reflection. What better way to celebrate than looking back on some classics of cinema, both the widely seen and the obscure.

While October may have provided the spooks in New York and Los Angeles repertory theaters, November aims to calm things down with light offerings for youngsters like “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,...

British-Argentine filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland has always been interested in hands and touch, but in her new film, “Collective Monologue,” she expands her focus beyond human appendages. Her focus on instances of touch between caretaker Maca and the animals at the Buenos Aires Eco-Park, which are frequently framed by the park’s enclosures, reveals a tension between the radical acts of care and the politics of captivity inherent to institutions such as zoos.

“My interest in hands has to do with process, it has to do with labor, it has to do with tools,” Rinland tells Variety following a press screening before the film’s world premiere at Locarno. Her multi-disciplinary career as an artist, which also encompasses book-making and installation work, has always focused on alternative modes of perception. The films she makes and the tools she uses come to her organically. In her own words: “They are things...

Spanish director Jonás Trueba wants you to celebrate the endings, not just the beginnings.

That includes the demise of a serious relationship, because Ale and Alex (Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz) have been together for 15 years. Now, they want only two things: to go their separate ways and to have a proper fiesta.

“The idea of a ‘separation party’ can be scary, but I just kept hearing about it. I even suggested it to a friend of mine, but every time, people’s faces just drop. You can see fear creeping in. It’s crazy and silly, and at the same time, it could be something beautiful. It’s a great idea for a film, if not for real-life.”

In “The Other Way Around,” premiering at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, the couple in question still has a lot of affection for each other.

“It’s a love story, but another kind of love story,...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Anthology Film Archives

“Essential Cinema” brings films by Mekas’ Walden and Journey to Lithuania, Man Ray, Duchamp, René Clair and more; a Quebec cinema retrospective is underway.

Museum of the Moving Image

Hal Hartley’s masterpiece Henry Fool plays on 35mm this Sunday; a Jim Henson program shows on Saturday and Sunday; a Warner Bros. cartoon collection screens Friday and Sunday.

Metrograph

A complete retrospective of Lee Chang-dong has begun.

Film Forum

Le Samouraï and the Belmondo-led Classe tous risques continue playing in new 4K restorations; It Came from Outer Space plays in 3D this Sunday.

Paris Theater

A dual retrospective of Steven Zaillian and Patricia Highsmith brings films by Hitchcock, Fincher, Scorsese, Haynes, Wenders, and more.

IFC Center

The End of Evangelion continues its run, while Paprika, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, and Repo! The Genetic Opera show late.

The...

Documentary festival IDFA, which runs Nov. 8 to 19 in Amsterdam, has revealed its first 50 titles, including the top 10 Chinese films selected by Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing, IDFA’s Guest of Honor.

The festival has also revealed the films playing in two of the three Focus programs: Fabrications, which probes the difference between reality and realism, and 16 Worlds on 16, an homage to 16mm film.

Wang’s selection will take the viewer “on a contemplative journey into contemporary Chinese cinema,” according to the festival. “The films and their politics are subtle in their film language, representing a wave of filmmaking rarely shown internationally.”

The selection (see below), which covers films produced since 1999, includes Lixin Fan’s 2009 film “Last Train Home,” which was supported by IDFA’s Bertha Fund. The film documents the millions of migrant factory workers that travel home for Spring Festival each year.

Fabrications explores the relationship of trust between documentary film and audiences,...

A few days before the third and final season of “How To with John Wilson” premiered on HBO, its creator and star received an unexpected call. New York City mayor Eric Adams was planning to hold a press conference to discuss the problem of scaffolding looming over sidewalks around town, and Wilson was invited to speak at it. Fans of the Wilson’s droll, unassuming approach, which takes the form of discursive audiovisual essays about the idiosyncracies of New York life, will recall that the second episode of Season 1 from 2020, “How To Put Up Scaffolding,” tackles just that subject, before it catapults into deeper ideas about the personal toll of protective measures on daily life.

The call was proof of the acute way that Wilson’s show has mined profound and poetic truths from seemingly ordinary objects and people lost in their routines. His reaction, however, goes to show how...

Chamber pieces are a strange cinematic genre. As is often the case with one-location films, it might be tempting to say that the genre belongs more in theatre than it does cinema, but when you begin to measure the challenge of making a setting as interesting as the characters inhabiting it, a rather high bar is set. The filmmakers behind “Spaces Underlined” have grappled with that challenge three times over in an anthology of short stories, each a two-hander confined to different types of bedroom: first, a place of childhood tranquility, then a filthy college dormroom, and finally, a luxury hotel room. Does each tale meet the intimate challenge ahead of them? Despite some varying degrees of success, the answer is fortunately yes.

“Spaces Underlined” review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative

The first short (Vania Qanita Damayanti's “The Room Was Shaken By an Earthquake”) sees two...

Kd Davison’s hagiography of the ‘godfather of American avant garde cinema’ says much about his profound influence, but glosses over uncomfortable details about his early life

Hailed as “the godfather of American avant garde cinema”, Jonas Mekas led an extraordinary, multi-hyphenated career whose wide-ranging influence must have proved a challenge for a documentary to encompass. When Mekas arrived in New York as a Lithuanian exile in 1949, the first thing he bought was a Bolex camera. For the displaced immigrant, when language faltered images became a means of communication.

As Fragments of Paradise charts Mekas’s professional milestones – a critic, a film-maker, a curator, and so on – what emerges most movingly is his philosophy of creative togetherness. In founding Film Culture magazine, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and later on the Anthology Film Archives, Mekas succeeded in building a nurturing space for those forgotten by the mainstream. It’s the kind of...

Anger ignited the gossip industry with the squalid tales in his book Hollywood Babylon, while his daringly erotic films fuelled the counterculture

• Kenneth Anger dies aged 96 – news

Kenneth Anger was the dark and brilliant magus of Hollywood lore; a reclusive figure who had in his own lifetime assumed the status of myth or pop-culture rumour. He was virtually the Aleister Crowley of movie legend. He was the master of underground cinema and creator of avant-gardist short films treasured by connoisseurs as equivalent in importance to those of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas.

But unusually for a film-maker, his masterpiece was in the medium of the written word: his outrageous, scabrous and scurrilous supposed history of Tinseltown scandals: Hollywood Babylon, first published in French in 1959 as Hollywood Babylone, banned for years and only fully available in English in 1975. The book was virtually radioactive in its sheer lack of respectability: a livre...

Kenneth Anger, the avant-garde filmmaker whose surrealistic queer compositions Fireworks and Scorpio Rising made him a pioneer of underground cinema and a target for censorship, has died. He was 96.

Anger’s death was announced Wednesday by the Sprüeth Magers art gallery. “Kenneth was a trailblazer,” it said in a statement. “His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”

No details of his death were immediately available.

In 1959, Anger authored the smutty exploitative book Hollywood Babylon — banned after its U.S release in 1965 — and followed it up with a sequel in 1984.

Anger’s work spanned the years 1941 to 2013 yet totaled just eight hours, a kaleidoscope of symbolism, homoeroticism and the occult found in his 36 dialogue-free short films (some complete, others fragmented) by THR‘s count.

His collage Scorpio Rising (1963), a pastiche of pop songs plastered over homoerotic biker imagery,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

All These Sons

With his first documentary Minding the Gap, Bing Liu turned the lens on himself and his friends to examine the domestic violence around them. One of the more human documentaries of the last decade, Liu’s film looked at Rockford, Illinois, and the racial and social elements that affect young men and women in this decent-sized city. With his newest effort, All These Sons, Liu and collaborator Joshua Altman focus on Chicago’s South and West Sides, following young Black men at Iman and Maafa, two community organizations aiming to keep these men away from the gun violence that surrounds them. Once again the resulting film bursts with empathy, built-in trauma, and forgiveness. – John F. (full review)

Where to...

There’s a documentary aspect to every film, whether it’s a home movie, a commercial or even the glossiest tentpole: The images and sounds capture transient moments that memorialize people, animals, places. They give permanence to the impermanent. But imagine a world in which those films have disappeared — as an estimated 80 percent of silent films and half of sound films already have. In the robust and incisive Film: The Living Record of Our Memory, Inés Toharia, a documentarian specializing in film preservation, invites us to consider the ways movies have become essential to the human experience.

The director spends quality time with a few well-known filmmakers and many of the “backstage people,” as one interviewee puts it, who devote their energies to safeguarding a vast array of moving images from the ravages of time, neglect and climate, not to mention obsolescence in the wake of ever-evolving formats and technology.

“I use technology in order to hate it properly,” pioneering video artist and self-identified cultural terrorist Nam June Paik says while explaining his playful, boundary-breaking work. A Ph.D. holder who speaks 20 languages––almost all quite badly––Paik is known as the father of video art, fantasizing early on about converting the medium of television into something other than passive work. It often broke the rules, incorporating onstage nudity, politics (including the satirization of John F. Kennedy shortly after his assassination), and the embrace of the future. For Paik, a student who lived history––he escaped Seoul at the beginning of the Korean War to study music in West Germany in the late 1950s––it’s the artist’s role to think about the future.

Lovingly constructed by Amanda Kim, Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV is a seminal biography of an artist often dangling on the edge...

I remember the first time I became conscious of Nam June Paik’s existence. I was still a high school student, starting to figure out my interest in art history. My teacher had assigned us to particular sculptures in the Samsung Leeum Museum to write about. Then there I was, at the tender age of sixteen, face-to-face with “My Faust-Communication, 1989-1991” – a Gothic portal enshrining a gridded stack of videos. Little did I know that this encounter would mark the first of many to come.

Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance’s US Documentary Competition. Its distribution is now handled by Dogwoof and Greenwich Entertainment, and the film will begin its US theatrical release on 24 March 2023.

It seemed like I found him in every art-related corner of my world. I ran into him in other exhibitions at...

Every so often, you’ll see a portrait-of-the-artist documentary that’s so beautifully made, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is so perfectly showcased by the documentary format, that when it’s over you can’t believe the film hadn’t existed until now. It feels, in its way, essential. “Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV” is like that. Directed by Amanda Kim, it’s a tantalizing portrait of Nam June Paik, the revolutionary Korean-born video artist who, in the late ’60s and ’70s, did nothing less than invent an art form.

When he was first becoming famous, about 50 years ago, you’d go to see a Nam June Paik installation at someplace like the Museum of Modern Art, and it would seem quirky and exotic — a tower of stacked TV screens, all flashing what looked like the squiggly visual equivalent of feedback. It was weird and kind of gripping,...

The documentary Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, which explores the groundbreaking video artist’s life and work, is like nothing Paik ever would have made himself. It’s far too straightforward and chronological, far too concerned with presenting things in a clear and comprehensive fashion — whereas Paik spent most of his career seriously messing things up, whether he was doing it with musical instruments, television sets or live TV broadcasts distorted through time and space.

But that doesn’t mean director Amanda Kim’s first feature isn’t worth a look. For anyone interested in the origins of what we now call video art, not to mention mass media and the internet, it’s essential viewing. Paik was a true visionary who foresaw the virtual world we now live in, and Kim’s film chronicles how he channeled that vision through madcap sculptures and installations that took...

Since the creation of the camera and the dawn of cinema, film has been one long experiment. Experimental film has often been defined through its rejection of traditional storytelling and structure, its defiance of logic or reason while creating mesmerizing scenes through dreamlike abstraction and subjective narrative.

A key figure in the early history of experimental film was the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Méliès was one of the first filmmakers to use special effects and trick photography to create fantastical and surreal images on the screen. His films, such as A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage, were some of the first examples of what would later be called experimental film. Another important trailblazer during the silent era was female director Lois Weber who is credited in creating an estimated 200 to 400 films. She was credited with pioneering the use of the...

Dogwoof has picked up Amanda Kim’s documentary on the contemporary artist Nam June Paik for world sales, excluding North America and South Korea.

“Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV” is set to world premiere on Jan. 22 at Sundance as part of the U.S. Documentary Competition.

Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and invented the video synthesizer. He is credited with coining the term “electronic super highway,” which was the title of one of his most famous works that involved more than 300 TV sets.

The film will trace Paik’s life from childhood as he traveled across the world. He fled to Japan from his native Korea at the outbreak of the Korean War, before moving to Germany and subsequently to New York City where he settled in 1964.

The film will include...

Peter Greenaway in The Greenaway Alphabet.On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, Peter Greenaway’s second feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) has received a handsome 4K restoration courtesy of the British Film Institute. The film established the Welsh filmmaker’s penchants for carefully staged tableaus, fearless eroticism, baroque violence, and a devilish sense of humor. All of these preoccupations would carry his work over the subsequent decades, evinced in films like A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), The Pillow Book (1996), and his best-known title The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). In more recent years, he’s embraced the infinite canvas of digital filmmaking with more vivaciousness than most filmmakers a fraction of his age. In works like Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015) and Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), he thrusts his characters into gleeful unreality—impossibly deep backdrops and overlaid projections, pictures within pictures, surreal montage, and much more.

The Torino Film Festival, Italy’s pre-eminent event for young directors and indie cinema where Matteo Garrone and Paolo Sorrentino screened their first works, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year with film critic Steve Della Casa – who previously served as the fest’s artistic director from 1999-2002 – back at the helm.

Della Casa, who is also a national radio personality and documentary director, has chosen to open the Nov. 25-Dec. 3 fest with a musical and visual extravaganza focusing on a specially made montage centered around the Beatles and The Rolling Stones and their love for cinema that led them to work with the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese. The fest’s eclectic opener is a 70-minute patchwork of film clips, interviews, and rare archive materials celebrating the vibrant ties between pop and rock music and movies.

Della Casa spoke to Variety about his...

The Torino Film Festival, which celebrates its 40th edition this year, will open with a special musical and visual event focusing on two of the most iconic British bands – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones – and their love for cinema, which led them to work with the likes of Richard Lester, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese.

The 70-minute event, set to be held at the prestigious Teatro Regio on Nov. 25 and broadcast by Rai Radio3, will feature “both rare and never-before-seen archive footage.”

Film critic Steve Della Casa, who served as the gathering’s artistic director from 1999-2002, is back at the helm. In his introductory remarks, he described Torino as “a true urban festival,” which places great importance on the theatrical experience, and set to attract both industry reps as well as a large young, cinephile audience. Moreover, this year’s edition will see the inauguration of Casa Festival,...

A meditation on growing old, growing wiser, and all of life’s transitions, Ralph Arlyck’s personal documentary I Like It Here is a warm, witty, loose, discursive essay film that jumps between past and present, old and new friends, lover, colleagues, neighbors, and family. And a portrait of a life well-lived: Arlyck meditates on growing old while still having the capacity to care for others, including his sons, grandchildren, wife, friends, and Ernie, a self-sufficient neighbor who lives in a remote cabin into his 90s.

A pioneer of experimental documentary, Arlyck draws upon an obsessive archive of life’s moments and material captured by others. Opening with drone footage shot by a filmmaker friend—presumably who dropped by to show off his technology—Arlyck finds simple poetry in everyday surroundings. It of course doesn’t hurt that he lives on a gorgeous upstate New York farm, not far from...

Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness,” Ali Abbasi’s “Holy Spider,” and tributes to the French New Wave are among the most common programming choices for this year’s Month of European Film, a variegated showcase for continental cinema that will run across the continent from Nov. 13 – Dec. 10.

Piloted by the European Film Academy, the month-long initiative will extend across 35 partner cinemas in as many countries, with each theater hosting a unique program tailored to that specific market. Like three-dozen complementary programs rallying around the same banner, this year’s Month of European Film will feature screenings of recent festival standouts, retrospectives to directors Jonas Mekas and Lars von Trier, and country focuses on contemporary German, Portuguese and Nordic cinema – among many other moving parts.

“With the Month of European Film, the Academy is launching a new network,” says European Film Academy CEO Matthijs Wouter Knol. “A large part of...

Initiative aimed at strengthening the visibility of European films.

The European Film Academy (Efa) is launching a month-long initiative at cinemas across Europe that aims to strengthen and protect the future of European film.

The inaugural Month of European Film will begin on November 13 and will see cinemas in 35 countries present special programmes, events and dedicated retrospectives for four weeks. Mubi will concurrently stream a special focus on European films, taking the initiative global.

It will all lead up to the European Film Awards, set to take place in Iceland on December 10.

Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO and director of Efa,...

The European Film Academy has unveiled a new public-facing event called the Month of European Film.

The initiative consists of a showcase of European cinema taking place in arthouse theatres and other venues in 35 countries across Europe.

It will kick off on November 13 and run across the four weeks leading up to the European Film Awards in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik on December 10.

At the same time, streaming platform Mubi will present a special focus on European films, allowing viewers around the world to participate.

“With the Month of European Film, the Academy is launching a new network. A large part of this network consists of movie theatres curating smart programmes with handpicked films that cater for the curiosity and tastes of their local audiences, programs that help to rediscover European film culture,” said Efa CEO and director says Matthijs Wouter Knol.

“For the very first time, all these...

After talking about the compelling array of short films available to watch at London Film Festival last week, I now find myself in the same position talking about the impressive selection of feature films that were on display this year. The features on show at Lff ran across a huge variety of strands and programmes from the genre-specific fare of the ‘Cult’ strand to the Headline Galas which attracted some of the world’s biggest stars to the red carpet in London. Here at Dn, however, we’re interested in those hidden gems, the films that won’t be arriving on Netflix in a month’s time that push the artistic boundaries of the form and deserve to be championed. So, with that in mind, we offer below a recommended selection of ten features to add to your watch list from a collection of international auteurs and innovative debut filmmakers.

Kd Davison’s profile of avant garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas has its UK premiere today at London Film Festival.

Documentary sales outfit Dogwoof has acquired Kd Davison’s Fragments Of Paradise for world sales, excluding North America.

A portrait of the ‘godfather’ of avant garde cinema Jonas Mekas, Fragments Of Paradise won the best documentary prize last month in the Venice Film Festival’s Classics section. It recently had its North American premiere at Telluride and has its UK premiere today (October 7) at the BFI London Film Festival, where it will screen as part of the Documentary Competition

Fragments Of...

Above: French grande for Love in the Afternoon (aka Chloé in the Afternoon) which was the opening night film of the 10th New York Film Festival. Designer tbd.In the catalogue for the 10th New York Film Festival in 1972, festival director Richard Roud looked back on the first decade of the NYFF, musing on the changes in cinema of the previous 10 years: “a greater freedom of subject matter,” “an accompanying new freedom of form,” the obsolescence of “the tightly plotted film,” the rise of personal filmmaking and the inroads of political cinema and documentary techniques into narrative film. He also muses on international movements: the snuffing out of the Czech Renaissance (there were no Czech films in the 1972 festival), the rise of New Hollywood and American independent cinema, and the ebbing of the movement that had in many ways defined the festival to that point, the French New Wave:Some of...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Lincoln Center

As the 60th New York Film Festival launches, so does Revivals—having a banner year with Canyon Passage, Drylongso, Le Damier, The Long Farewell, and (my most-anticipated) Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil.

Roxy Cinema

Mishima and Light Sleeper screen on 35mm throughout the weekend; a print of Godard’s King Lear continues, while 1 p.m. screens on 16mm this Sunday.

Bam

Wayne Wang’s Life is Cheap…But Toilet Paper is Expensive debuts a restored director’s cut. Along with seeing it this weekend, watch a clip below.

Museum of the Moving Image

A packed weekend for The Caan Film Festival is headlined by Thief and a print of Bottle Rocket.

Film Forum

The 4K restorations of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series continue, as does Breathless on 35mm; Princess Mononoke screens this Sunday.

IFC Center

“World of Wong Kar-wai” returns; Videodrome,...

Click here to read the full article.

Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed has won the 2022 Golden Lion for best film at the 79th Venice International Film Festival.

The documentary follows the life of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty that was greatly responsible for the opioid epidemic.

Poitras, an Oscar-winner for her Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, dedicated the prize to Goldin.

“This is for Nan. I love you Nan. Monday is her birthday, so we’ll bring this to Nan,” she said.

Produced by Participant and Poitras’ Praxis Films, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed will go out domestically via Neon and HBO.

Cate Blanchett won Venice’s best actress honors for her bracing turn as a classical conductor in Todd Field’s Tár. The award kicks off the Oscar campaign for the film, and for Blanchett, who...

“Some called him the godfather of underground film.” “My guest tonight is Jonas Mekas, who was first of all a poet before he was a filmmaker.” “His name is Jonas Mekas, a man who I think more than almost anybody in the world epitomizes the meaning and significance of independent filmmaking.”

Those are some of the TV news voiceover soundbites that open Kd Davison’s documentary about the great ringleader of American avant-garde cinema. It’s not an auspicious beginning. How can a doc about someone who championed pushing the boundaries of filmmaking to their limit get such a prosaic and obvious introduction for a film about his life? Certainly his 96 years were more than a sum of media reports from broadcasters who barely grasped his work. Not to mention, if you’re devoting the time to watch a documentary about the Lithuanian-born curator, poet, and filmmaker, you probably already know the basics about him,...

For a certain type of cinephile versed in the avant-garde, the name Jonas Mekas brings to mind a particular type of autobiographical filmmaking — one that prioritized the immediacy of a given moment over context or sometimes even narrative coherence. He was an Immensely prolific filmmaker, critic, archivist, and poet who, in his own words, immigrated to the US in the late ’40s “hungry, thirsty for art,” taking in everything he could.

While not exactly forgotten, Mekas’ work as the “Film Culture” founder, Village Voice critic, historian, and champion of such directors as Kenneth Anger and Ken Jacobs, has often overshadowed his prolific film work.

Continue reading ‘Fragments Of Paradise’ Review: An Conventional, But Captivating Documentary About Unconventional Filmmaker Jonas Mekas [Venice] at The Playlist.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Before Trilogy (Richard Linklater)

Earning its status amongst the likes of Three Colors, Apu, Human Condition, Antonioni’s ’Decadence’ trilogy, and Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke’s exploration of romance both fledgling and tested is one of the great film trilogies of all time. Though there’s Before Movie, Says Julie Delpy”>no plans for a fourth film in sight, one can enjoy all three films, now available to stream on The Criterion

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Blue Bayou (Justin Chon)

After Antonio (Justin Chon) is wrongfully arrested in front of his wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander) and step-daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske), he’s surprised to learn he’s been flagged for deportation. Due...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSEl Conde (Pablo Larraín).Natalie Portman will star opposite Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes's next film, May December, which begins filming later this year. In the film, an actress (Portman) meets with the woman she is due to portray (Moore) in a film that dramatizes her tabloid scandal.After Spencer, Pablo Larraín's next project with Netflix will be El Conde, a pitch-black comedy that will portray Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire.Pedro Almodóvar has announced a new 30-minute Western, Strange Way of Life, which he will shoot in August. The short stars Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as two gunslingers, long separated, who must cross the Spanish desert to reunite. Almodóvar's next feature—an adaptation of Lucia Berlin's A Manual for Cleaning Women led by Cate Blanchett—begins filming early next year.

Celluloid film prints will now soon be coming back to a theater near you.

The Film Exhibition Fund, a new grants-giving 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the continued screening of celluloid film prints, has officially announced the first two recipients of grants. IndieWire can exclusively share that New York’s Anthology Film Archives and Microscope Gallery are the inaugural grantees.

The Anthology Film Archives are using the 2,500 grant for upcoming screenings of Andy Warhol’s “Sleep” (1963), “Empire” (1964), and “Chelsea Girls” (1966). The first two films run over five and eight hours long, respectively, while “Chelsea Girls” involves over three hours of dual-screen projection. The series is set to screen in August.

“Preserving the experience of theatrical projection — and especially the projection of 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm film prints — is at the core of Anthology’s mission,” Anthology Film Archives Film Programmer Jed Rapfogel said. “We’re motivated by the conviction...

Trixi (1971).“When I first saw Steve’s films, I actually very often had to leave the cinema,” Laura Mulvey once recalled. Dwoskin’s shorts and early features, shown in alternative venues around London in the late 1960s and early ’70s, tended to show a woman alone in a room, often naked, responding to the camera, sometimes seducing it: Alone (1964), Soliloquy (1964/7), Take Me (1969), Moment (1969), and Girl (1971)... At the time she saw them, Mulvey was working on what became her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published in 1975. Having been repelled at first, she began to find that Dwoskin’s films “opened a completely new perspective for me on cinematic voyeurism.” The first draft included a section discussing them, particularly the half-hour Trixi (1971), an “overtly ‘voyeuristic’ film” in which the seduction is consummated. In Mulvey’s words, Dwoskin’s handheld camera facilitated his “intimate involvement as an equal participant in the erotic drama,...

Martin Scorsese’s nonprofit The Film Foundation is launching a free virtual screening room to showcase restored films starting May 9 with I Know Where I’m Going!.

The 1945 film directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and restored by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive, in association with ITV and Park Circus, will be available for a 24 -hour window. Subsequent features will debut on the second Monday of each month. Events will start at a set time with introductions and conversations with filmmakers and archivists providing an inside look at the restoration process.

The lineup from co-curators Scorsese and Kent Jones includes Federico Fellini’s 1954 La Strada; G. Aravindan’s 1979 Indian film Kummatty; a film noir double feature of Detour and The Chase; Sambizanga; One-Eyed Jacks; Moulin Rouge; Lost Lost Lost and others Tba.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSDore O.'s Alaska (1968)The German avant-garde artist Dore O., whose poetic films were at once vast and intimate explorations of dreams, has died at 75. O. was a founder of the Hamburg Filmmakers Co-op (1968-1974), a participant in the famous German exhibit documenta 5 in 1972, and a prolific painter. The DVD label Re:voir Video had recently released a collection of six restored films by O. In 1988, the critic Dietrich Kuhlbrodt wrote: "Dore O. has become classic, and suddenly it turns out that her work has passed the various currents of time unharmed: the time of the cooperative union, the women's film, the structuralists and grammarians, the teachers of new ways of seeing."Subscriptions are now open for Notebook magazine, our print-only publication devoted to the art and culture of cinema. Subscribe now and you’ll...

Jacqueline Lentzou's Moon, 66 Questions is showing exclusively on Mubi in many countries starting February 19, 2022 in the series Debuts.Snippets Of My Mood BOARD1. The Death of Leopold (1910), Leon Spilliaert I saw this painting—or more precisely a digital copy of the painting—before working on the script, although I had in mind the idea. I wanted to see it again and again. I did not care about the narrative elements. I was not intrigued by who Leopold is, or if the other person is his daughter, sister, or wife. I was deeply excited about the antithesis I observed: a death scene dressed in “alive” colors, playful brush strokes, taking place in the skies, kissed by a star. This image was constantly in my head while shooting and editing. 2. Moonscapes (Lichtenstein and Magritte) The script took its final “turn” on the 15 August 2015, when I discovered something personal that changed not only me,...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

A retrospective of the invaluable Jonas Mekas has begun.

Film Forum

The massive Toshiro Mifune conitnues with emphasis on his Akira Kurosawa collaborations, while Sidewalk Stories plays Sunday.

IFC Center

Solaris continues screening for its 50th anniversary, while Eraserhead, House, and Nausicaä have showings.

Roxy Cinema

Swept Away and a 35mm print of The Insider screen on Saturday, the latter repeating on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives

“Homecoming Films” offers work by Hitchcock, Lang, Renoir, Verhoeven and more.

Metrograph

Films by Chantal Akerman and Angès Varda lead the pack of “Lowlands ’70s and ’80s.”

Museum of the Moving Image

A tribute to the great Woody Strode continues with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Pork Chop Hill.

Museum of Modern Art

The pre-code series continues.

Paris Theater

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre plays on Friday while A Hidden Life,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Casting board Polaroids from Heat (1995). (Courtesy of Michael Mann)Michael Mann's debut novel is titled Heat 2, which is both a prequel and sequel to his 1995 classic crime thriller. Co-written with novelist Meg Gardiner, Heat 2 will be published on August 9 through the HarperCollins-based Michael Mann Books imprint. Jonas Mekas 100! is a program dedicated to honoring the influential critic, writer, and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. The events of the program are currently underway and are taking place worldwide, from Sweden to Taiwan, with a focus on "[expanding] global recognition of his work." Bong Joon-ho is moving forward with his next English-language film, an adaptation of Edward Ashton's upcoming science fiction novel Mickey7, with Robert Pattinson set to star. The book is about a "disposable employee" on a space colony base who refuses to be replaced by a clone.

Jonas Mekas (1922 – 2019) accomplished much in his long life. And that’s not just in the realm of underground film! Mekas practically lived a lifetime under Nazi rule before reluctantly coming to the United States in 1949.

At the Underground Film Journal, we love our timelines, so we’ve decided to maintain this list of important events in Mekas’s life whether it relates to his passion for the cinema or his personal achievements not related to film.

The plan is to update this timeline using multiple reference sources. Currently, we are using four.

One is a profile of Jonas written by Calvin Tomkins that was first printed in the January 6, 1973 issue of the New Yorker magazine; and reprinted in the book collection The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern Art.

Another source is the “Introduction” to the book of essays To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & The New York Underground. The “Introduction” is written by David E.

Maverick artist Nam June Paik will be the subject of a new feature-length documentary that will highlight unseen footage and archival materials. The currently untitled production will be completed in 2022. Oscar nominee and “Minari” star Steven Yeun and hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy have joined the project as executive producers.

Paik is often referred to as the “Father of Video Art” and was a prophet of the internet, as well as a visionary and futurist. Adopting technology to transform the way we see the world, he was one of the first to use television as an artist’s canvas and invented the video synthesizer. In the 1970s, he coined the term “Electronic Superhighway” and predicted the future of communication in the digital age. He launched a series of the world’s first global satellite art events, bridging the gap between East and West, pop and avant-garde and all genres of art...

The Oscar-contending documentary The Velvet Underground, about the influential 1960s avant-garde rock band fronted by Lou Reed, has been praised as a “superb testament to a lost world that helped make our own.”

Those words come from New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, who listed The Velvet Underground as number three among her choice of the year’s best films—fiction or nonfiction (her colleague A.O. Scott also put it on his top 10 list).

The praise not only recognizes the work of director Todd Haynes—the longtime filmmaker who makes his documentary debut with The Velvet Underground—but his collaborators, including editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz, and cinematographer Ed Lachman.

Over the course of his long career, Lachman has shot documentaries and scripted films, and earned Oscar nominations for two of Haynes’ dramatic features, Carol (2015), and Far From Heaven (2002). He says he doesn’t alter his approach to photography...

By Elise Shick

The artistic zeitgeist of the Japanese New Wave from the late 1950s through the early 1970s was formed by the proliferation of avant-garde and experimental Japanese films that pursued radical inquests into political, social and cultural changes[1] as one can study via the philosophical and aesthetic presentations, particularly in the works of Nagisa Oshima, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Shuji Terayama and Toshio Matsumoto. The emergence of Japanese ‘I-films’ (personal documentaries) in the early 1970s as the out-turn of the Japanese New Wave marked a historical turning point from public films to the private cinema of personal expressions and individuality[2]. Inspired by Jonas Mekas’s “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” (1973), the poet and independent filmmaker Shirouyasu Suzuki’s amateur home movie “Impression of Sunset” (1975) and his later distinctive work “15 Days” (1980) are amongst the personal documentaries that divert from conventional documentary filmmaking and turn the fascination of ‘self’ into...

The November 12, 1958 edition of The Village Voice featured the first installment of the column “Movie Journal” by Jonas Mekas.

“Movie Journal” would become what the Underground Film Journal would argue was the most significant organizing tool of avant-garde cinema created by Jonas, even more so than the Film-makers’ Cooperative and the Anthology Film Archives he helped found. But what was the column like before it gained such notoriety?

Well, we don’t have to guess. The book collection Movie Journal doesn’t start reprinting Jonas’s columns until 1959, but the entire archives of the Voice are online.

As a weekly publication, the Voice only published twelve “Movie Journal” columns in 1958. The Underground Film Journal has read all twelve and extracted what films Jonas reviewed each week; as well as made notes of significant avant-garde film happenings.

Jonas reviewed only a few avant-garde films those first two months, including Maya Deren...

Film, the Living Record of Our Memory director Inés Toharia with Anne-Katrin Titze on Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker: “We were hoping to catch up with them both, because they work together so closely and they are so crucial for Michael Powell’s work.”

Film, The Living Record Of Our Memory (a highlight of the 12th edition of Doc NYC) features insightful commentary from filmmakers Ken Loach, Jonas Mekas (Todd Haynes dedicated The Velvet Underground to Jonas), Kevin Brownlow, Fernando Trueba, Costa-Gavras, Patricio Guzmán, Ahmad Kiarostami (producer for Abbas Kiarostami), Idrissa Ouédraogo, Martin Scorsese, Bill Morrison, Ridley Scott, Nicolas Rey, Wim Wenders (on music rights and restoration), and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.

Inés Toharia on Martin Scorsese speaking on film preservation at the Cineteca di Bologna: “I think Langlois and him are the two people - they’re very different, but they opened everyone to understand why.”

In the first instalment with Inés Toharia,...