Goings On: Jonas, Clipson, and More

New York. “Like a modern character from Crete’s ancient Minoan culture, trailblazer artist Joan Jonas weaves symbols and media to transfigure feminist and psychological themes,” writes Mónica Savirón for BOMB. “Her work juxtaposes sculpture, painting, film, video, and performance as forms not to escape, but to scale. Surfaces become screens from where to measure slim chances, and transform poetic structures into cinematic phrasings.” Tonight and tomorrow, and then again on Sunday, Anthology Film Archives and Electronic Arts Intermix will “present a screening of her 16 mm films, including two collaborations with Richard Serra, followed by a selection of her videos. Jonas will attend and introduce both shows.”

“Jonas began her artistic life as a sculptor,” notes Screen Slate’s Jon Auman, “but, under the influence of relative contemporaries like Yvonne Rainer and Robert Rauschenberg, and the tendencies that would later be called land art and minimalism, she quickly turned to performance, which at the time had no official name and no standard operating procedures. Simultaneously, she also turned to cinema, and both Wind [1968] and Songdelay [1973] are evidence of just how simultaneous those two discoveries were. To be clear: neither film is documentation of an otherwise self-contained performance. As much as they might resemble the intimate, no-budget spectacles that Jonas and her friends were staging live for an audience downtown, the films are what they are because they are films.”

Also at Screen Slate, Caroline Golum: “You’ve never seen anything like Rosa von Praunheim’s 1983 City of Lost Souls, although smart money says you’ve probably enjoyed the handful of titles that recall its candy-coated palette of highlighter, hair dye, and spicy ketchup. From To Wong Fu to The Birdcage and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Praunheim’s low-budget, high-concept drag musical is the den mother of them all: an inventive stunner with a synth-heavy soundtrack and enough spangly spandex to choke a parish priest.” Tomorrow at Anthology as part of the series The Cinema of Gender Transgression: Trans Film, on through Monday.

Also Starring Harry Dean Stanton has now become a memorial series at the Quad, starting Friday and running through October 1.

Los Angeles. Big announcement from the American Cinematheque: “Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan will join the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), The Film Foundation, and the American Cinematheque in person for select programs in a series celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Globe Awards.” Starting tomorrow at the Egyptian, and on through Sunday, the series “will showcase 35 mm prints of restored classic films, including Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd [1957], the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece The Red Shoes [1948], Robert Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean [1982], the first film version of Death of a Salesman [1951], and Indian director Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed Apu Trilogy [1955, 1956, 1958].”

We’re going to take a closer look at Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA in another entry, but for now, here’s the Academy’s trailer for its series of interviews conducted for the “collaborative effort from arts institutions across Southern California.”

Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971) screens at the New Beverly on Monday, and Kim Morgan takes another look at it “as a curious time capsule, as a movie that could not be made today, as a strange, offensive, racy youth offering from MGM in a transitional moment, as an intriguingly sinister role for a still charming Rock Hudson, and as a movie with a bizarre set of tones and messages—comic but not that funny, sexy and sick, dark and satirical, amoral and libertine but, strangely, not gleefully amoral.”

Chicago. “Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness, an exhibition currently on display at the School of the Art Institute's Sullivan Galleries, not only is a beautiful collection of video installations and still images, but provides new insight into the career of one of the most important filmmakers working today,” writes Ben Sachs in the Reader. “The exhibit covers twenty-two years of output and more than three hours of audiovisual material, yet Serenity doesn't feel overwhelming, thanks to the cool reflection the works engender.” Through December 8.

Boston. Paul Clipson kicks of a tour of the northeast tonight at MassArt Film Society. He then takes Events in Shadow, a program of 16 mm films to Keene, New Hampshire, tomorrow; Northampton, Massachusetts on Friday; Kingston, New York on Saturday; and to COMMEND in NYC on Sunday. The image at the top of this entry, by the way, is from Clipson’s Feeler (2016): “Being experiential, multi-layered, fragmenting and fusing together, a place where there’s no screen, no theatre, no darkness, only moments.”

Minneapolis. From Saturday through February 18, the Minneapolis Institute of Art presents New Pictures: Omer Fast, Appendix, an exhibition pairing Fast’s 2016 film August and portraits by the film’s subject, German photographer August Sander (1876–1964).

Toronto.TIFF has rolled out its fall season, featuring Black Star, the series Ashley Clark programmed for the British Film Institute; People Have the Power: Resistance in Filipino Cinema; The Heart of the World: Masterpieces of Soviet Silent Cinema; The Poetry of Apocalypse: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky; High Concept: The Films of Denis Villeneuve; and Johnnie To: Expect the Unexpected.

London. “As part of the global celebrations of the centenary of world-renowned Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007), we’ll be embarking on a major season of his work,” announces the British Film Institute. The series, entitled simply Ingmar Bergman, runs from January 1 through mid-March 2018.

“The BFI London Film Festival has added four titles to its lineup, including three fresh from the Venice Film Festival and one that heads to New York at the end of this month,” reports Deadline’s Nancy Tartaglione. The three are Xavier Legrand’s Custody, Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988, and John Woo’s Manhunt. The NYFF title is Alex Gibney’s No Stone Unturned. The LFF runs from October 4 through 15.

“Avant-Noir is an irregular film program curated by Greg de Cuir, Jr. that surveys recent work by African and African diaspora film and video artists, alongside those engaging with African cultures.” Tonight, the ICA presents Volume 3.

Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness “is a brilliantly dazzling, utterly uncategorizable Japanese silent from 1926, one that was thought lost for years, and now that it has been found, seems to belong to no time at all, past or future,” writes Pamela Hutchinson at Silent London. The Japanese Avant-garde and Experimental Film Festival presents a 35 mm print on Sunday.

Paris. The Cinémathèque française’s Claire Denis retrospective opens Monday and runs through October 20.

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