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..."like Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, it’s post-cinema, and not created for the purpose of traditional entertainment, let alone edification. It’s onslaught filmmaking, the new form that’s self-defeating in its cacophony and nearly religious in its zealotry for its own form and mythos."

Read more +

YouTube tip: Fassinder's second short film, Das Kleine Chaos

Via Expanded Cinema: "Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second 16mm short--made while still a theatre director in Munich---shows the young filmmaker clearly under the influence of the French nouvelle vague [complete with a poster of Juliette Greco], yet already hinting at the recurring themes of his mature work. Theo (played by Christoph Roser, who financed the film in return for a staring role), Marite (Marite Greiselis), and Franz (played by Fassbinder) turn their love of American noir into a crime spree, even if one reflecting on the moral nature of violence and crime, and in typically Fassbinder fashion, the chaos of postwar culture [after breaking into a woman's house to rob her and putting a Wagner record on the phonograph, Fassbinder's character asks his hostage: "Do you love the Fuhrer?"]. Fassbinder himself appears under his frequent character alias of 'Franz'---inspired by his love of Alfred Doblin's novel 'Berlin Alexanderplatz.'

Sci-Fi London opens bookings

Our friends from the Sci-Fi London have written to say booking for the sixth edition of the festival is now available online (see link below). The festival takes place between 2 and 6 May at the Apollo West End in London.

Sci-Fi London +

Berlin Alexanderplatz on a loop

Those lucky enough to be holidaying in Berlin should pay a visit to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art at the famous Auguststraße 69 to see the exhibition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, the monumental film he made for television and based on Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel. The film consists of thirteen episodes and an epilogue, and runs to fifteen hours and thirty-nine minutes. When it was first screened in Germany in 1980, it triggered heated debates and gained international recognition as one of the film masterpieces of the past decades. The show is a follow-up to the screening at the last Berlinale.

The episodes and the epilogue of Berlin Alexanderplatz will be screened in permanent loop in fourteen separate rooms. In addition, all the episodes are shown in chronological order and full length on a central big screen. Visitors can thus decide how they approach Berlin Alexanderplatz: they can divide its unusual length up into pieces, watch episodes several times, or return to the exhibition whenever they like, as the entrance ticket entitles holders to repeated visits. The exhibition also presents stills from the film’s 224 scenes. A further, highly personal document are the tapes on which Fassbinder himself recorded his script for the film and which have never previously been made accessible to the public.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (in German; English edition planned; approx. 600 pages), edited by Klaus Biesenbach, with essays by Susan Sontag and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The show runs until 13 May 13.

KW +

Jan Nemec and the Party Poopers

It's taken 41 years but Jan Nemec's landmark Czech New Wave film The Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech) has finally got a DVD release courtesy of Second Run DVD.


Extremely controversial upon its release, Jan Němec's second feature, after Diamonds of the Night, was completed in 1966 and had a belated release during the short-lived Prague Spring in early 1968. The Party and the Guests was formally "banned forever" in 1973 and this ban remained (at least in Czechoslovakia) until the Velvet Revolution of 1989. It was widely considered at the time that the film was a direct attack on the Communist government and therefore too dangerous to screen. This opinion (or fear) was one that was shared by Antonín Novotný, the Czechoslovak President at the time.

However, this ban was only to enhance Nemec's (now legendary) status as a maverick and enfant terrible in a generation of Czechoslovak directors who were all making films that were on the periphery between acceptable or in breach of the Communist Party line. After living and working in exile from the end of the 1960's, Jan Nemec was to return to his homeland after the Velvet Revolution.

Click here for more on Jan Nemec and Czechoslovak New Wave Directors.

Saint Etienne at the South Bank Centre

In association with Agnès B, Saint Etienne present tomorrow an evening called Paris in the Spring, whose flyer alone makes the visit to the often un-spring-y South Bank worthwhile.




South Bank +

Call for papers

Film & History, the Historians Film Committee's journal of interdisciplinary analysis of film, is accepting submissions on the topic, 'The Documentary Tradition'.

"The first volume will focus on a spectrum of documentaries in chronological order ­of both international and US vintage. Classic documentaries will be examined and placed in their cultural contexts. Papers on films from Nanook and March of Time to The War Room and An Inconvenient Truth are welcomed", said the editor Dr. Loren PQ Baybrook.

She added: "The second volume will examine a variety of topics and issues for documentaries across cultures and borders. The possibilities here are broad, but we welcome papers that stress the role of the documentary in interpreting, reflecting, or attempting to change history. Race, class, policy, and the impact of media are likely topics."


Further info +

Curzon launches magazine

Curzon cinemas has launched a bimonthly magazine and issue one is available for free from Chelsea, Renoir, Richmond, Mayfair or Soho. The issue puts the focus on the German film The Lives of Others, soon to be reviewed on Kamera. You can listen to a podcast featuring an interview with the film's director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck +

A Rendez-vous with French Cinema

Our friends from A Rendez-vous with French Cinema, which started yesterday and goes until Sunday, 1 April, have rung in to say that they will take time on Friday March 30 (that will be today!) to celebrate up and coming acting talent with a special on stage presentation at the Curzon Mayfair prior to the 6.00 pm screening of Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne).

Actor/director Jean-Marc Barr and director/screenwriter Pascal Arnold will introduce the following actors on stage :

Amira Casar: a César nominee as Best Newcomer, her credits incluide Breilllat’s Anatomy of Hell and Thomas Gilou’s Would I Lie to You ?
Sara Forestier: has worked with Blier and Lelouch, having made her début in Abdellatif Kechiche’s much admired L’Esquive, winning a Best Newcomer César
Georges Babluani: best known for his work with his brother Géla Babluani in 13 Tzameti and Legacy

Emilie Dequenne: made her début in the Dardennes’ Rosetta, winning the 1999 Best Actress prize ex aequo in Cannes, and worked with Claude Berri in Une femme de ménage.

Louis Garrel: worked with Huppert in Ma Mère, was in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, and won the Best Newcomer César for his part in his father Philippe’s Les amants réguliers
Joana Preiss: in Assayas’ section of Paris je t’aime and Clean, as well as Honoré’s Ma Mère

Tom Riley: English born star of the recently released I Want Candy, seen opposite Juliette Binoche in A Few Days in September.

Luke Treadaway: made his début in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Brothers of the Head.


In addition to screenings of the best of the new French films, A Rendez-vous with French Cinema will have diverse programme of masterclasses, meetings, and screenings of short films. This event is organised by Unifrance, the organisation dedicated to promoting French cinema abroad, in association with the French Embassy and the French Institute in London and the Curzon Mayfair cinema.

Rendez-vous with French Cinema +

Runa Islam

British film artist Runa Islam has told Frieze magazine which films have influenced her most. Carl Dreyer's Joan of Arc (1928) has a place of prominence in Islam's film catechism book.

Full article +

YouTube awards

The title says it all...


YOUTUBE AWARDS +

London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival kicks off on Wednesday

The 21st London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the UK's third largest film festival, starts this Wednesday, 21 March. Among the feature film highlights this year are Beyond Hatred, a documentary that charts the aftermath of a homophobic murder, the Danish drama A Soap, about the relationship between a beautiful girl and her transsexual neighbour, and the Argentinian production Glue (pictured), which won top jury and audience awards at the 2006 Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film.



FESTIVAL SITE +

Brazilian video at the Tate

A short post to let you all know that I have curated a season of Brazilian video art for the Tate Modern in London and which will be shown at the Starr Auditorium between Friday 23 March and Sunday 25. The videos cover a period of 25 years (1981-2005). The event, called Video Links Brazil kicks off on Friday with a programme of videos from the 1980s, the decade when video art took root in the country. Saturday will focus on works produced from the 1990s onwards and brings together an ecclectic selection of videos by fine artists as well as by those working exclusively with video. Sunday is devoted to documentaries, including one video about Brazil's famous Serial Kisser and a film from the Video in the Villages project, which works with aboriginal peoples in Brazil to help them produce their own images and represent themselves.

Hope to see there.

(Image credit: Heróis 2, TVDO, 1987-2003)


VIDEO LINKS BRAZIL

New on Kamera

Edward Lamberti has written an in-depth review of Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima. We also have a news article about the cult cinema conference in London called Cine Exces, which will be attended by no one less than Roger Corman.

A tube ride will never be the same...

Watch this +

Woody Allen to make film in Barcelona

"For some cities and countries, having Woody Allen making a film there is like a papal visit," Adam Dawtrey, the European editor of Variety magazine, said.


Full article +

Time Out New York

Time Out New York has compiled a sequence of YouTube videos with "25 memorable moments in Gotham music". Although music-focused, the list also contains excerpts from films.
Fun.

Gotham music +

Charles Atlas at London's Optronica

Video pioneer and now VJ extraordinaire Charles Atlas brings his collaboration with musician/ electronic composer Christian Fennesz, to London, between 14 and 18 March, during the second biannual Optronica festival. Charles mixes video live using film footage, prepared clips and improvised collage. The recipient of the 2006 John Cage Award, Atlas is perhaps best known for his work with choreographers such as Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, and Merce Cunningham, which have won him three Bessie (New York Dance and Performance) Awards. Optronica is a 'visual music' festival taking place at the British Film Institute's Southbank and Imax spaces, as well as the Institute for Contemporary Art. The line-up also includes the UK premiere of Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper VJ performance, among many other attractions.

Speaking of Greenaway, the fallen angel of post-modern baroque cinema, has a Myspace page. His tagline is bafflingly amusing: "Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone." Poor Sharon, what has she done to him? Now, why is it that cinema can be a playground for Helen Mirren, but not for the France-loving Stone? He also says, with no hint of modesty: "Film is dead, I tried to save it, didn't work out...enjoy your psycho-dramatic linear narrative you bloody philistines. "

Optronica +

Peter Greenaway on Myspace +

It's not a colour but a quality issue

I was reading my favourite newspaper over the weekend, the International Herald Tribune (inspired, of course, by Godard's insertion of the title in À bout de souffle), when an article about international distribution of Hollywood films with black stars caught my attention. The gist of the article was that such films don't do well abroad and used the case of Dreamgirls (pictured left) which has grossed $100 million and has sold 'only' $28 million worth of tickets in foreign lands, as a case in point. One industry insider interviewed went as far as to name 'international' (as in 'international markets') 'the new South' because in the old days black films didn't travel down South within the US. The article does mention some success stories, such as Bad Boys (with Will Smith) and Déjà Vu (with Denzel Washington), but underlines flops like Hustle & Flow, Are We There Yet? and Last Holiday as examples of the failure cases where racism may have been the causal factor.

But this is clearly a case of crying wolf. The article in premised in the assumption, or America's utter conviction, that any national artifact is apt for global consumption, even in the case of films heavily coded with regional signs as the ones mentioned. Secondly, and most importantly, is the sheer awfulness of such films - doesn't it occur to them that some films don't do well abroad because they are not sound for consumption as a consequence of their excessive mediocrity? To me, the article seemed like a case of the empire playing the underdog card and such posturing doesn't strike convincing at all.

Read full article +

Kenneth Anger article

Tom Gunning has written an insightful article about Kenneth Anger for ArtForum magazine.