Goings On: Boxers, Innocents, and Others

New York.Boxing on Film: Part 1, a series opening at Anthology Film Archives on Friday and running through August 27, focuses “on the barbarity of pugilism while also exalting the elemental spectacle of two men trying to knock each other unconscious,” writes Melissa Anderson in her overview for the Village Voice. “The savage pageantry of boxing was made for the movies, which has documented, glorified, and tutted over the sport since the medium’s birth.” Anderson concentrates on Robert Wise’s “noir-inflected” The Set-Up (1949), Fat City (1972), “a comeback for director John Huston, a lion in winter reinvigorated by the looseness of New American Cinema” (image above), and Frederick Wiseman’s “trance-inducing documentary” Boxing Gym (2010).

Also in the Voice,Bilge Ebiri: “Moving from atmospheric mystery to political allegory, with pit stops into slapstick comedy along the way, Memories of Murder, Bong Joon-ho’s second film, remains impossible to categorize. Newly restored and re-released, the director’s breakthrough feature (he would go on to direct The Host,Snowpiercer, and this year’s Okja, among other films) has lost none of its power to unsettle, and today it feels even stranger than ever.” Opening Friday at the IFC Center.

Screen Slate Presents: This Is MiniDV (on 35mm), the series running at Anthology Film Archives through Tuesday, is built around “a brief moment in the late 1990s and early aughts when the digital revolution was only partially complete,” writes Nick Pinkerton for Artforum. “With 35 mm still the standard for theatrical projection, this meant that even films shot on the wave of consumer-grade standard-definition DV cameras would have to be printed on celluloid if they were to reach a wide audience.” For Pinkerton, these films are “a Proustian madeleine of murky palette and digital artifacting. It was a moment where one might still be taught editing by cutting 16-mm stock of a Gunsmoke fistfight on a flatbed Steenbeck while being told in class that the future of the medium was a movie shot by a young Dane on a Sony DCR-PC3 Handycam: Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998).”

At Screen Slate itself, Dylan Pasture recommends catching David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), arguing that “this is without a doubt the best way to witness Lynch’s goodbye to feature filmmaking: big, loud, nasty, and overwhelming. Aside from the work which this director is now inflicting upon premium cable, there is truly nothing quite like Inland Empire—and while it is an open question whether or not this is the best David Lynch film, there is little doubt that it is his ultimate.” Tomorrow and Sunday.

More from Pasture: “Supported by an A.I.-based installation piece—still maintained on the internet—[Lynn] Hershman Leeson’s 2002 feature-length video Teknolust is a brain-jacking bit of sci-fi both definitely of its time and prophetically ahead of the net art curve.” Featuring Tilda Swinton in four roles, plus Karen Black and Jeremy Davies, Teknolust screens this evening and again on August 26 as part of the ongoing MoMA series Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction.

An Old School Kung Fu Fest is on at the Metrograph from Friday through Sunday, and Chris Shields, zeroing in on King Hu’s The Fate of Lee Kahn (1973) at Screen Slate, notes that the films “in this year’s fest in the spirit of pussy not only grabbing back, but delivering a brutal roundhouse kick to the face, focus on the women of Chinese martial arts cinema—global superstar and ‘Bond Girl’ Michelle Yeoh, ‘Lady Kung Fu’ turned Queens restaurateur Angela Mao, and more.”

“Nearly one century later, Friedrich W. Murnau’s silent vampire movie Nosferatu continues to scare and inspire,” writes Elisa Wouk Almino for Hyperallergic. “Premiering this week, Andrea Mastrovito’s NYsferatu reimagines the 1922 film set in present-day New York City, whose monuments and landmarks are rendered into haunting, black-and-white rotoscope animations made from 35,000 drawings in collaboration with twelve artists.”

Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay previews a few events lined up for IFP Week (September 17 through 21) that’ll involve Barry Jenkins, Josh and Benny Safdie, Dee Rees, and more.

The New York Television Festival, whose thirteenth edition runs from October 23 through 28, has announced fifty-two Official Selections for its 2017 Independent Pilot Competition, “with 56% of selected pilots with persons of color above the line (and 23 projects with POC on the core creative teams). 71% of the projects have a woman in a core creative role. 50% of selected pilots have female creators, and 38% of projects have female directors.”

Los Angeles. “Next Monday, a total solar eclipse will cast a dark shadow over a thin strip of land from coast to coast, the first time that phenomenon has been visible throughout the contiguous U.S. in almost a century,” writes Matt Stromberg for Hyperallergic. “Inspired by this event, artist Rick Silva, in conjunction with experimental video platform Ghosting TV and creative agency WOAH, has organized Eclipsecore, an evening of video art and animation produced in response to the eclipse.” Tomorrow evening.

London. The BFI has announced that the European premiere of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s Battle of the Sexes with Emma Stone as Billie Jean King and Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs will be the American Express Gala during the sixty-first BFI London Film Festival, running from October 4 through 15.

Reviewing Dana Spiotta’s novel Innocents and Others for the New York Times last year, Joshua Cohen called it “a brilliant, riddling clip-montage of the friendship between two very different filmmakers.” Tomorrow evening, Spiotta will be at the London Review Bookshop to read from and talk about her work with journalist and critic Alex Clark.

Paris. At ScreenAnarchy, Jérémie Pottier has the lineup for L’Étrange Festival, running from September 6 through 17.

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