Goings On: Collins, Fassbinder, and More
New York. “It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the Museum of Modern Art would screen a film series called Black Intimacy mere months after the Academy Awards had three films in its Best Picture category—Fences, Hidden Figures, and eventual winner Moonlight—that mostly focused on intimate moments between African Americans,” writes Craig Lindsey for the Village Voice. “But this series, curated by MoMA/Studio Museum in Harlem fellow Adeze Wilford, is here to remind people that black love has been seen in movies here and there throughout much of film history, with titles dating back to 1961.”
On Friday, the series features Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1982), which “spends a summer in upstate New York with philosophy professor Sara (Seret Scott) at the urging of her husband of ten years, Victor (Bill Gunn, the playwright and filmmaker behind Ganja and Hess), who proposes a summer retreat to celebrate the recent sale of one of his paintings to a museum,” as Chloe Lizotte writes at Screen Slate. “The screenplay’s investigations into race, class, and sexuality live and breathe through the depth with which Collins renders multifaceted inner desires, harkening back to the deft characterizations of her posthumously published short story collection, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?”
Turn It On: China On Film, 2000–2017 is a program curated by Ai Weiwei and Wang Fen to accompany the Guggenheim exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World. Ted Loos talks with Ai for the New York Times.
Back to Screen Slate, to Caroline Golum: “The subject of a near-complete retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, [Paul] Bartel’s filmography is riddled stem-to-stern with tongue-in-cheek genre pictures that lampoon the most hallowed institutions of American life: from muscle car culture (Death Race 2000) to swaggering cowboy machismo (Lust in the Dust), and weepy soap operas (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills). In Eating Raoul—foolishly, his only title in the Criterion Collection—Bartel sets his sights on a subject at once topical and timeless: the ever-troublesome soixante-neuf between Sex and Money.” The series runs from Friday through October 19.
“Michel Levesque’s 1971 Werewolves on Wheels really doesn’t need to be half as good as it is,” writes Chris Shields at Screen Slate. “The idea of werewolves riding motorcycles is worth the price of admission alone.” Tomorrow at the Alamo Drafthouse.
The tenth annual Bushwick Film Festival runs from Thursday through Sunday.
Los Angeles. “We’ve put together two very underrated science fiction outings which placed [Klaus] Kinski with budding genre specialists, to give you out-of-this-world adventure with the out-of-this-world personality,” writes Marc Edward Heuck. Tonight, the New Beverly presents Aaron Lipstadt’s Android (1982) and William Malone’s Creature (1985).
And tomorrow, it’s Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London (1935) and George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941), which, “in the end, is not really a terrifying movie,” writes Kim Morgan, “it’s a family tragedy, superbly acted by [Lon] Chaney Jr. and [Claude] Rains, and a movie that is, in the end, terribly sad.”
Bay Area. Sparks on Celluloid: Haynes + Vachon runs from Thursday through October 29 as part of SFMOMA and SFFILM’s ongoing series Modern Cinema.
The Pacific Film Archive’s series of films marking the fiftieth anniversary of Canyon Cinema rolls on tomorrow with Romance and Rage, a program to be introduced by Jeffrey Skoller.
Chicago. “UCLA’s 35mm restoration of one of American cinema’s greatest bits of perfection, innuendo-rich, delirious yet exact, elegant yet amoral, a sensational comic collaboration between [Ernst] Lubitsch, screenwriter Samson Raphaelson and actors Miriam Hopkins, Herbert Marshall and Kay Francis,” Trouble in Paradise (1932), screens tomorrow night at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Ray Pride recommends it in Newcity.
Jean-Luc Godard’s La chinoise (1967) screens through Thursday, but Le gai savoir (1969) only once more tonight at the Gene Siskel Film Center. “Both are informed by the revolutionary fervor that had energized the French left in the late 1960s—this spirit is so central to the films, in fact, that today they feel like time capsules of a particular moment in political history,” writes Ben Sachs in the Reader.
Austin. The Film Society’s series Buster Keaton’s Golden Era opens Friday and runs through October 22.
Cambridge. On Friday, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler will introduce a program of three films by Stan Brakhage at the Harvard Film Archive on the occasion of the publication of Metaphors on Vision, the collection of Brakhage’s writing that originally ran as a special issue of Film Culture in 1963 and now reissued by Light Industry and Anthology Film Archives. Dorsky’s posted his program notes. And Hiler will present “Cinema Before 1300”at the HFA on Saturday.
Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) screens on Thursday at the Brattle; Tyler Pattersonrevisits this “timeless film.”
Toronto. “Despite the dictatorship’s demands for a ‘disciplined’ populace, the Manila that most Filipinos/as traversed during the Marcos period was a place filled with subversive intimacies, desires, and pleasures,” writes Robert Diaz for the TIFF Review. “These forbidden fruits emerged most viscerally in contemporary artistic and cultural imaginings of life under martial law—and nowhere more so than in the films of the Philippine New Cinema, a movement between the 1970s and 1990s exemplified by such filmmakers as Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Marilou Diaz-Abaya, Mike De Leon, and Joel Lamangan.” People Have the Power: Resistance in Filipino Cinema is on at the TIFF Cinematheque through November 4.
London. The Incredible Simultaneity Console, “a season of twenty-eight artists’ film and videos to celebrate ten years of the artists-run DVD publication project Filmarmalade,” is on at Close-Up through October 26.
Paris. The Cinémathèque française’s Luchino Visconti retrospective opens tomorrow and runs through November 9.
Ghent. Film Fest Gent 2017 opens today and runs through October 20. On Sunday, Sabzian will host a roundtable discussion on film criticism with Raymond Bellour (Trafic), Joachim Lepastier (Cahiers du Cinéma), and Isabel Stevens (Sight & Sound), followed by a screening of Claire Denis and Serge Daney’s Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (1989).
Berlin. The Harun Farocki Retrospective is on at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and the Arsenal through January 28 and, for frieze, Arne Schmitt writes about a few short films Farocki made with Hartmut Bitomsky for Sesamstrasse, the German version of Sesame Street. They chose “their subjects from the fields of transportation and logistics, manual labor, automation, and small- and large-scale economics: themes which dovetailed not only with children’s interests—tools, big machines, ships—but also with the Marxist context of the filmmakers’ other work.”
Stuttgart. Alexander Kluge: Gardens of Cooperation is an exhibition on view at the Württembergischer Kunstverein from Saturday through January 14.
Salzburg. “Set in Trinidad and Tobago, ATOM SPIRIT is a large-scale film installation which acts as a nexus where race, gender, postcolonialism and technology intersect.” The work by Ursula Mayer, winner of the Derek Jarman Award for Radical Film-Making in 2014, is on view from Friday through November 26 at the Salzburger Kunstverein.
Prato, Italy. Nearer – Farther is a retrospective and exhibition of work by “one of the biggest representatives of Polish art and experimental cinema, Józef Robakowski,” on at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art from Saturday through January 28.
Brisbane, Australia. The first part of the the Australian Cinémathèque’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective opens at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art on Saturday and runs November 15. Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin have created a two-part audiovisual essay, “A Dream of the Dream of Rainer Werner Fassbinder,” and the first part (10’06”) can be viewed here.
Bendigo, Australia. The Costume Designer: Edith Head and Hollywood is an exhibition on view at the Bendigo Art Gallery through January 21. For the Guardian, Alexandra Spring’s put together a collection of photographs paired with tidbits of advice Head offered in her 1967 book, How to Dress for Success.
Yamagata, Japan. The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival is on through Thursday. “Launched in 1989 and held biannually, the festival was not the most obvious candidate to become Asia’s most important documentary event,” writes Mark Schilling in the Japan Times. “Located on the Sea of Japan side of the northern Tohoku region, Yamagata is hardly a filmmaking hub. But a core of dedicated professionals has made YIDFF not only a showcase for the latest documentaries from Japan, Asia and around the world, but also a venue for fans, scholars and filmmakers that generates discussions, publications—and new films.”
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