Los Angeles, March 2011 – As part of the series Between Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales from the New Chinese Cinema, curated by Cheng-Sim Lim and Bérénice Reynaud, Filmforum will host the United States premiere of the Chinese film “Treating” (Zhi Liao) by Wu Wenguang. It will be playing with the new animated film by Sun Xun: “Beyond-ism.”In recent years, independent Chinese cinema has experienced a virtual explosion. Digital media have allowed filmmakers to be bolder, more daring and to explore hybrid forms of documentary and fiction, or mix found and live footage while playing with novel formal strategies. Independent…
Author: Robin Menken
Robin Menken
Robin Menken Robin Menken lives in Los Angeles. She was the Artistic Director of the Second City Workshops, taught at UC Berkeley, USC, Barcelona\'s Ateneu and the Esalin Institute. She was Roberto Rossellini\'s assistant, and worked with Yevgeny Vevteshenku, Glauber Rocha and Eugene Ionesco. She sold numerous screenplays and wrote the OBIE winning The FTA SHow (touring with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and Ben Vereen.) She was a programming consultant and Special Events co-ordinator for numerous film festivals, including the SF, Rio, Havana and N.Y Film Festivals. Her first news outlet was the historic East Village Other.
If you like your thrills straight up, your men hardboiled and your frails classy, jump in your short and make the smooth scene at The American Cinematheque’s annual Noir feast. They’re in cahoots with the Noir Foundation to put on the whole shebang. Don’t be a piker. This 28-film edition is well worth the Mazola.The NOIR CITY film festival returns for its 13th year, presenting an array of rarities mostly available ONLY on the big screen. We’ve scoured studio archives to assemble a feast of film noir that can only be consumed in its original 35mm format, in the glorious…
Since 2005, Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International have teamed up to tour the Oscar nominated short films (Live Action, Documentary and Animation) to over 150 theaters across the U.S. and Canada, allowing audiences to see the nominated films before the Oscar Awards are announced. This year they also offered the films for purchase on ITunes, where, for $1.99 per short, you can purchase this year’s crop of shorts as well as prior years’ nominees and winners. The release will also be available via cable’s Movies On Demand (MOD), distributed by leading MOD distributor, IN DEMAND L.L.C.Typically, and this year is…
Filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane visits from Ithaca NY with the first North American survey of her work. The four films span a decade of the filmmaker’s preoccupation with telling lyrical stories in dialogue with their European predecessors. More than mere adaptations, these films combine both staged and archival material which simultaneously provoke and elide the friction between present and past. A self-avowed formalist, Crane’s conceptual concerns, rooted in the non-linear nature of history, are explored through the dynamic system of the frame and the cut. Through shooting on locations rife with historical, literary, or biographical valence, narrative density collides with…
Here are some highlights of FilmForum’s recent six-part series “Radical Light” a companion piece, celebrating the newly published “Radical Light: Alternative Film And Video In The San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000.” The landmark mixed media book edited by Steve Anker, Co-Curator of Film at REDCAT, and Pacific Film Archive curators Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid, is the first publication of Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive. Bay Area film enthusiasts have had the pleasure of 30 screenings (ongoing) and a national tour has been announced.Highlights of “Landscape As Expression: UCLA Film and Television Archives”:”A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire”-Archivist Rick…
With Bertrand Tavernier’s impressive 1974 debut feature, “The Clockmaker Of St. Paul” the director’s already assured filmmaking made apparent themes and tones that he would refine throughout his prolific career. The meditative World War I portrait “Life And Nothing But” and the 1950s jazz portrait “‘Round Midnight” both display Tavernier’s elegant fascination with the historical, while such films as the documentary-like “L.267” and the ethical sci-fi drama “Death Watch” proved the nimble director also could be rooted in the modern. Tavernier’s latest film, “The Princess Of Montpensier” set in 16th-century France during the Catholic-Protestant wars, received critical praise in 2010…
Martin Koolhoven’s exquisite “Winter In Wartime,” (The Netherland’s Oscar entry, 2009) is based on the popular children’s book by Jan Terlouw. Artfully bridging a boy’s adventure story, with the harsh truths of World War II, tracks the wartime loss of innocence of 14-year-old Michiel, an unlikely hero. Michiel (Martijn Lakemeie), son of the mayor of a small town near Zwolle, hungers for adventure. From his bedroom window, Michiel spies an RAF plane going down in flames. Michiel and neighbor Theo search the wreckage, recovering a stopped watch. Spotted by a Nazi patrol, they escape, but everyone recognizes the Mayor’s son.…
While much of the world will be focusing on the creative talents up for Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2010 will be presented on Sunday, February 27, 2011, the technical geniuses behind the cameras were honored for their contributions at the Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation on February 12, at the Beverly Wilshire. Oscar-winning actress Marisa Tomei hosted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Scientific and Technical Awards, presenting 11 awards to 23 individual recipients during the evening. . The event is not televised, although portions will be included in the Oscar presentation at the Kodak…
Personal Ethnographies is an assembly of up-close depictions of friends and colleagues, both homemade and collected. Many of the subjects happen to be figures from the world of independent cinema, including portraits of or by Wendy and Shirley Clarke, Andy Lampert, Jonas Mekas, Sid Laverents, and the cast of Killer of Sheep. Also peppered in are informal glimpses and rare documents of LA’s cultural landscape, including the subCacophony Society, Nora Keyes, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Listing Ship, and Monotrona.Pending the results of a nefarious postal theft, Filmforum’s Adam Hyman will join the night’s festivities in presenting his own recent…
A conference with Anne Saint Dreux from la “Maison de la Pub” followed by two screenings. On Thursday March 3, 2011 at 7:30 PM, writer-filmmaker Anne Saint Dreux will take us to a wonderful journey in time and space on the wings of the Ad. Both screenings in French with English subtitles and the conference will be conducted in English.From the first film produced by the Lumière Brothers to the most sophisticated special effects, from French advertisements to the most distant creations, the “Nuit de la Pub” (“The Night of the Ad”) offers a journey in time and space. Speaker…