Views from the Avant-Garde

My published Flavorpill post:
Views from the Avant-Garde takes spectators on a sojourn to film's farthest-flung lunar landscape. The 12th edition of this NYFF showcase features a panoply of classics and recently completed experiments, ranging from the celebrated entropy of Bruce Conner and Craig Baldwin to the latest names to reach Next Brakhage swooning. The three-day program's acme (or nadir, depending on your tastes) is Guy Debord's knotty Situationist tract, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, a palindrome that unscrambles as "We spin around the night consumed by fire." Afterward, French filmmakers Olivier Assayas and Jean-Pierre Gorin team with cultural critic Greil Marcus for some debate and — thankfully — deciphering.

Women's Experimental Screening Series

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Although Maya Deren was the face that launched a thousand clips, her oft-overlooked contemporary Sara-Kathryn Arledge was just as pivotal in the development of a women's avant-garde. Arledge's wondrous cine-dance, Introspection, takes center stage during the Women's Experimental Screening Series, a '40s-to-present survey of rare and new works by female filmmakers. For three nights, the XX-chromosome curators (MM Serra, Rebecca Cleman, and Marie Losier) steep spectators in mind-expanding visuals that question the male-made flatness of filmdom. Besides Arledge's rara avis, Shannon Plumb and Martha Colburn contribute fresh reels, while Peggy Ahwesh's acclaimed Star Eaters closes shop with its "narrative-like" descent into a somber, memory-laced Atlantic City.

A Whole New World

At the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Dutch architects NL showcased their Virtual Realities. Behold the beauty of a wonderfully-imagined future!

Tropfest NY 2008

My published Flavorpill post:
Last year, Australia's premier short-film festival — and the world's largest gathering in the name of abbreviated cinema — occurred stateside as a popular adjunct to NYC's Tribeca fest. Tonight, Tropfest gets its own billing. After Aussie pop duo Tamarama kick things off with breezy, beach-inflected ballads, the program screens 16 original films that seamlessly incorporate this year's signature item: the sunflower. Beneath the starry night and amid the airy architecture of WFC Plaza, jurists including actor Billy Crudup and The Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell appraise these additions to the heliotrope's artistic history, which already includes Vincent van Gogh's iconic still-life series. Bring a picnic and don't be scared to hobnob with celebrity attendees.

Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939

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1914 marked the beginning of the long-running, deeply influential First World War, as well as the start of the short-lived — but also deeply influential — Vorticist movement. During this dogma-eat-dogma stretch of art history, Wyndham Lewis and his cohorts (including the ever-declamatory Ezra Pound) issued their bold typographic manifesto, famous for its blast-or-bless dialectic on everything from London and mild-mannered people to hairdressers and James Joyce. Starting today, the Met's Rhythms of Modern Life showcases 14 artists who embraced this -ism's vim and vigor. The etched statements include Edward Wadsworth's hieroglyphic woodcuts and Cyril Power's angular, dreamlike linocuts of the London tube.

Salesman

My published Flavorpill post:
For many, a reference to the Maysles brothers conjures visions of inimitable fashions and two stir-crazy dames. But beyond the loony splendor of Grey Gardens, the duo’s famed documentaries study their subjects—from Marlon Brando to the Beatles—with an every-mask-must-go focus. Salesman, the Maysles’ foray into the bailiwicks of Bible hawkers, may be their finest, most truthful hour-and-a-half. Vérité camerawork tracks Paul “the Badger” Brennan, a middle-aged door-to-door salesman who attempts to spread the written Word (“still the best seller in the world”). A born raconteur, Brennan parlays personal charm into revenue, but not without adding a Millerian scuff to the phrase “in their shoes.”

Rudy Burckhardt New York, N. Why?

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While Weegee always set his aperture for shocking front-page shots, fellow émigré photographer Rudy Burckhardt captured Gotham’s more quotidian spectacles. Equipped with the outsider’s eye for unseen angles, the Swiss-born lensman documented our city’s mid-century street scene with an omnivorous appetite—everything within the viewfinder was snapped up. New York, N. Why? consists of 67 beautiful black-and-white documents of a megacity’s holding trinity: fleet-footed pedestrians, barrages of ads, and groups of huddled buildings. Burckhardt’s images set most subjects in a glossy light, so that both art deco high-rises and two-bit storefronts are imbued with a lovely, ruminative quality.

Elementary Beauty

My favorites of the A-to-Z bunch:

Man With a Movie Camera

My published Flavorpill post:
Dziga Vertov, the wizard of agitprop, once proclaimed, “I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you.” The director’s landmark “documentary,” Man With a Movie Camera, is celluloid proof of his methods. An index of experimental film techniques, MWAMC employs canted angles, double exposures, split screens, and varied film speeds (among other hit-and-run manipulations) to record a frenetic day in a society that mints the futurist phrase, In Machines We Trust. Shot without title cards, sets, or actors to approximate “life as is,” Vertov’s on-the-fly masterpiece remains an exhilarating and dizzying achievement for a Russian maverick whose pseudonym translates to “spinning top.”

His Girl Friday

My published Flavorpill post:
His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks’ supreme screwball comedy, is not unlike a neo-impressionist’s version of conversation: the more colorful the bits, the better. By one count, the Cary Grant-to-Rosalind Russell repartee tallies 240 words per minute—or nearly double the average American’s clip. The debonair Grant plays a no-nonsense newspaper editor who, still smitten, postpones his ex-wife/ace reporter’s remarried retirement by tempting her with one last headline-snagging scoop. Russell, who wasn’t even the go-to gal for the role, exudes an on-her-toes sophistication and poise while balancing on the métier-or-marriage fence. Throughout the hysterics, Hawks choreographs the overlapping he-said-she-said with the intoxicating strategy — he just lets it flow.

Random Prettiness

or
Quilted Quasars

or
Beautiful Bricolage

Unessential Cinema: A Fortuitous Foray

My published Flavorpill post:
Last month, there was the convergent hoopla of 08/08/08. Tonight, Anthology splits the integer for an evening of four-play featuring cinematic arcana and other offbeat reels from the vaults. After a four-minute movie, a 35mm film with four perforations per frame, and an exercise wherein four different formats are projected at the same time, the visual adventure culminates with a delirious clincher: a quad-projector version of Dziga Vertov's hurtling agitprop "documentary," Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Like the argot-spouting loon on the A train who takes the pole without a vote, the program unspools with a shock-and-awe design. So step in and stand clear.

A Sudden Gust of Whimsy (After Hokusai and Disney)

The street artist Jaybo further enhanced the breathtaking facade of the Berliner Dom with his Disney- and Hokusai- inspired sea of cartoon hands. The resplendent work was thrown upon the tourist site using high-powered projectors.

Hollywood on the Hudson: Filmmaking in New York, 1920-39

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As the House that Ruth Built (in 1923) hosts its final game this weekend, the MoMA transports spectators to New York's movie scene in the Roaring '20s. The sepia-toned film series shifts the historic spotlight from the Dream Factory onto our naked city, where directors championed an independent, art-first message during the medium's formative years. Filmed on location and on lots (like Paramount's Astoria Studios and Biograph's Bronx branch), the highlights include: D.W. Griffith's icy melodrama Way Down East (1920), starring wide-eyed doyenne Lillian Gish; John Barrymore in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920); and Louise Brooks' bob cut in Love 'Em and Leave 'Em (1926).

Chuck Klosterman: Downtown Owl

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In the foreword of his name-making debut Fargo Rock City, Chuck Klosterman showed real moxie by printing his phone number for censorious readers to ring. Since then, he's been called everything from hack to rural hipster — even the "next Hunter S. Thompson." Through all the name-calling, Klosterman's preoccupation has remained the same: to analyze pop culture's larger-than-life and marginal players in an assured, relateable voice. Tonight, the love-him-or-hate-him essayist reroutes and reads from his first work of fiction, Downtown Owl, which tracks three strangers who contemplate normalcy in their pop-culture-free podunk town of Owl, North Dakota.

Festival of New Trumpet Music

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In feudal times, the shrill sound of the trumpet heralded noteworthy arrivals — recently crowned royalty or new seasons, for instance. Starting today, the high notes honor the oblong instrument's latest virtuosos and their ahead-of-the-valve innovations during the Festival of New Trumpet Music. For two weeks, the sixth annual confab issues a clarion call for trumpeters (and trumpeting pundits) to unite and celebrate the horn's exhilarating contributions to jazz, hip-hop, classical music, and rock 'n roll. While it may lack all-time names like Satchmo and Dizzy, the international lineup nonetheless promises relief from the city's honky-honk cacophony.

Earshot Reading Series

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Tonight, the coffeehouse-cum-lounge Lucky Cat sets up the lectern for another installment of EARSHOT, a boffo Williamsburg reading series. Since 2005, the prose-and-poetry program has hewn to host/curator/founder Nicole Steinberg's mix-and-match custom: three MFA-ers and two at-large slots that are filled by scribes in their salad days or those with their bona fides. Flavorpill's poet laureate Jess Sauer graces this evening's session with her precise, samsaric verse. As in Pound's sculpted translations, her primordial and incantatory images fuse into loosely formal and impressionistic poems, ones that radiate the aura of being from the desolate ends of our known world.

The Godfather Part I & II

My published Flavorpill post:
Paramount has done cinephiles a favor by restoring the one-two punch that is Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather I and II. Coppola and cinematographer Gordon Willis oversaw the frame-by-frame process, and now the sprawling, six-hour Aristotelian tragedy — which chronicles the rise (in cash and clout) and fall (in morals) of the mafia's first famiglia, the Corleones — is handsomer than ever. Although women receive short shrift in the boys-will-butcher-boys storyline, everyone can appreciate the beautiful sets and legend-stacked cast, which contains method acting's Mount Rushmore: Brando, De Niro, Pacino, and Lee Strasberg. Drifting above the back-room dealings, Nino Rota's indelible theme tints the American dream with a romantic, funereal glow.

Green Guerrillas

Via TreeHugger.

Underwater Wonder

Back in the 30s, there were no waterproof cameras. While Jean Painleve was making his psuedo-scientific, surreal shorts over in France, Bruce Mozert was creating underwater Americana using his then one-of-a-kind camera, for which he built a giant waterproof housing. These photos were shot in Silver Springs, Florida and are as bewildering as those old daguerreotypes you find in shoeboxes.

Via Boing Boing.

Tuesday's Cultural Tantrum

I love this deconstructed piece by Jean Degottex.

Holy U-R-L

A band of Buddhist monks in Japan have created a virtual temple. While spirituality doesn’t transmit through bandwidth, the online shrine offers an open and peaceful forum for the curious and the committed. For starters, there is the Buddhist’s Guide to Tokyo as well as recommended books on the religion. The site’s navigator is Seigaku, a young monk who blogs about subjects as varied as Hayao Miyazaki and sutras with a serene and becalming wonder.

Via TreeHugger.