Goings On: Farocki, Tsai, and More

New York. Tomorrow, Light Industry presents A Straighter Kind of Hip, a lecture by Felicity D. Scott.

From Friday through September 24, the Museum of the Moving Image presents Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies.

On Thursday, “ISSUE and BOMB present an evening of screenings, talks, and discussion with storied film activist Jonas Mekas and writer and BOMB Magazine contributor Charity Coleman, as a part of the Brooklyn Book Festival.”

One Film, One New York presents Crooklyn for free in all five boroughs tomorrow and, for Vulture, Ashley Clark gets Spike Lee looking back on his 1994 film.

“If the crime procedural is the most propagandistic art form, both for its favorable dramatization of law enforcement and its attendant delivery of swift and moral justice, Jane Campion is an unlikely adaptor of the genre,” proposes Jack Gross at 4Columns. “Her most famous film, The Piano (1993), which earned her the only Palme d’Or ever awarded to a woman, was a spare and calmly surreal gothic romance that exemplified a kind of storytelling that shies away from plot—‘I’ve never really had an easy time with narrative,’ she said in an interview about the film. She favors iconic imagery, richly opaque characters, and moral messiness.” The occasion for the piece is Top of the Lake: China Girl, the six-parter currently out on Sundance—which, in turn, occasions Lindsay Zoladz’s interview with Campion for the Ringer. Meantime, the Film Society of Lincoln Center series Jane Campion’s Own Stories rolls on through Sunday. At Screen Slate, Caroline Golum spotlights In the Cut (2003), which “has its share of cat-and-mouse clichés, but Campion’s penchant for gauzy close-ups and frenetic coverage exercise their own kind of alchemy, transforming the film from titillating late night cable staple into a claustrophobic meditation on power and sexuality.”

Chloe Lizotte for Screen Slate: “Kelly Reichardt’s knack for shot compositions runs deeper than her technical training in still photography—through an intuitive balance of geometric weight with negative space, she viscerally and succinctly evokes mood, character, and place. In her debut River of Grass, screening tonight at MoMA on the opening night of her career retrospective, she turns her camera on a pair of criss-crossing overpasses that swoop over an earth-bound car, forming a loop around a patch of sky. The enclosed swatch of blue isn’t quite a void, but some sort of unfillable, unquantifiable expanse.”

The French Institute Alliance Français will present Classics of French Cinema with Olivier Barrot tonight, and then on October 10 and December 5.

Los Angeles. The New Beverly presents Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) tomorrow, and Kim Morgan, “after multiple viewings,” wonders: “What will happen to Lars Thorwald?”

San Francisco. “New Beginnings inaugurates a recurring curatorial endeavor oriented to the presentation of historic works of international artist-made cinema in the contemporary context.” At the Center for New Music, the Cinematheque presents a program of work by Su Friedrich, Larry Gottheim, and Rei Hayama on Thursday.

Austin. The Film Society presents Shun'ya Itô’s Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972) on Friday and Saturday.

Cambridge. “Sally Potter’s 1992 gender-bending fantasia, Orlando, was way ahead of its time,” writes Leo Racicot. “Based on the novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf, it broke ground, as did Woolf’s story, that had remained pretty much untilled. As viewed now, in our modern age of pansexual, polymorphous relationships, a strong case can be made for how influential a film it was on world society and socio-cultural mores.” Thursday at the Brattle.

London. “In Maurice Pialat’s 1983 masterpiece, À nos amours, the family is a cauldron of high-concentrate froideur,” writes David Jenkins. “The film pinpoints the instant where a child suddenly realizes the lustrous bounty that lays ahead, just as her malcontent father discovers that he’s coming close to life’s final terminus.” Little White Lies, Mubi, and A Nos Amours present the film on Sunday at the Rio Cinema.

The directors of All This Can Happen, choreographer Siobhan Davies and dance filmmaker David Hinton, will be at the London Review Bookshop on Friday to discuss their work with Whitechapel Gallery film curator Gareth Evans. “Based on Robert Walser’s novella The Walk, written a century ago this year, the film follows the footsteps of the protagonist as series of small adventures and chance encounters take the walker from idiosyncratic observations of ordinary events towards a deeper pondering on the comedy, heartbreak and ceaseless variety of life.”

Leicester. The nineteenth British Silent Film Festival is on from Wednesday through September 17.

Berlin. “Year by Year / Side by Side is the most comprehensive retrospective of Harun Farocki's work to date,” announces the Arsenal. “Alongside the exhibition Harun Farocki: Mit anderen Mitteln – By Other Means (curated by Antje Ehmann and Carlos Guerra) at the neuer berliner kunstverein, the temporary Farocki Now academy organized by the Harun Farocki Institut at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the silent green Kulturquartier and the publication of his incomplete autobiography, the program will give audiences a chance to become acquainted, or reacquainted, with Farocki's oeuvre and all its nuances. This program will continue in October and November.” The exhibition opens tomorrow and the screenings begin this weekend; and yes, that’s Farocki at the top of this page.

“Tsai Ming-liang is one of the great charters of human loneliness,” writes Travis Jeppesen for Artforum. “This month’s retrospective at the Kino Arsenal in Berlin allows you to consider Tsai’s cinema in its entirety (excluding his shorts and television features). You can watch the city of Taipei through the final decade of the twentieth century and to the present, as it begins to resemble the scripted expectations of a twenty-first century metropolis, or the development of his small ensemble of players, notably Lee Kang-sheng, the handsome and mysterious leading man Tsai discovered working in a video-game arcade, and has cast in every one of his features.”

Essen. From Friday through January 7, Museum Folkwang presents Alexander Kluge: Pluriverse, “an exhaustive exhibition destined to visualize the core of his multimedia oeuvre.”

Vienna.Valeska Grisebach will be giving a masterclass on Thursday at the Austrian Film Museum, which is presenting her films Longing (2006) and Be My Star (2001).

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