New York. The big event in town is, of course, the New York Film Festival, which gets going in earnest today following last night’s premiere of Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying. At the top of the NYFF 2017 Index, I’ve linked to an interview with festival director Kent Jones and overviews from Manohla Dargis in the New York Times and Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. Today, we see a different take on how the festival’s faring from Godfrey Cheshire at RogerEbert.com.
Jones, notes Cheshire, “is only the festival’s third director, having succeeded Richard Roud and Richard Peña, each of whom served twenty-five-year terms. . . . Roud’s festival was auteur-driven and unapologetically Euro-centric . . . Peña continued the auteur emphasis but purposefully broadened the geo-cultural scope . . . Not only has Jones’s festival not produced an equivalent identity of its own, it seems to me to represent a backsliding from the focus, flux and dynamism of Peña’s era at its peak.” The problem, suggests Cheshire, may have arisen from “to a change in the festival’s selection process that began with the new regime.” He explains.
In his weekly roundup of goings on in the city for the Times, Ben Kenigsberg writes, naturally, about the NYFF, but also about the retrospective Black Intimacy (October 3 through 16), in which “MoMA asks whether the personal and the political can ever be independent in screen portrayals of black relationships,” and about Imaginary Chinatown (today through October 9), a series at the Metrograph that “offers a historical look at the role that Chinatowns—real or fictional—have played in movies, a tradition that goes back at least as far as D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, from 1919.”
In the Village Voice, Danny King writes that the Quad’s “thorough current retrospective, Also Starring Harry Dean Stanton—which continues through October 5—embraces the journeyman in all his nomadic glory, checking off the rare commercial hits in which he played small roles (like Ridley Scott’s Alien, from 1979, screening September 30), but more importantly presenting a wealth of the fringe oddities that make up the Stanton canon. The series was in the works well before the performer’s passing but has since been expanded—to the great benefit of mourners and moviegoers.”
From Sunday through Tuesday, as part of the international arts festival on through October 15, Sophie Calle’s Voir la mer, a series of five video portraits, will appear on electronic billboards on Times Square.
Chicago. “One of the more miraculous discoveries in the history of film preservation came in 1978, when more than 500 cans of nitrate reels were recovered from a sealed-up swimming pool in the Klondike—the fabled Dawson City find,” writes J. R. Jones. Bill Morrison is on the cover of the Reader and he’ll be at the Logan Center for the Arts next Thursday to present Dawson City: Frozen Time, “a monumental accomplishment, part history and part fever dream. Morrison, 51, tells the story of Dawson from its gold-rush origins in 1897 through the lost films' rediscovery in the 1970s, even as he traces the growing power of cinema in our national life.”
VIDEO
Toronto. With the TIFF Cinematheque series The Heart of the World: Masterpieces of Soviet Silent Cinema running through the end of October, James Quandt talks with Guy Maddin, whose short, made for the Toronto International Film Festival in 2000, provides the series’ title. There’s quite a bit of discussion here about Lev Kuleshov, not only his famous experiment with montage, but also his concept of “biomechanical acting.” And: “When I decided to make this stupid film of mine, Sissy Boy Slap Party, I was just trying to channel the hammock sequence leading to the bad meat sequence in [Sergei Eisenstein’s] Battleship Potemkin [1925, image above]. It’s so glorious!”
London. Close-Up’s Werner Herzog season closes tonight with Heart of Glass (1976).
Marseille. From Sunday through October 7, Yannick Vallet will track the route Alain Delon took to Paris in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le cercle rouge (1970) as part of his ongoing work-in-progress, Melville, Delon & Co.
Pordenone, Italy. The thirty-sixth edition of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the festival of silent film, opens tomorrow and runs through October 7. “There’s a strong thread of exoticism running through all sections, thanks in part to [the programs] ‘Soviet Travelogues’ and ‘Silent Africa in Norway,’” writes artistic director Jay Weissberg.
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