Goings On: Tsukerman, Farocki, and More
New York. A new 4K restoration of Liquid Sky opens at the Quad on Friday. “At last,” writes Alan Scherstuhl in the Village Voice, “after sitting out the DVD and streaming eras, Slava Tsukerman’s 1982 neon-fired New Wave New York alien sex-party punk-disco orgasm-as-revenge proto-electroclash feminist genderfuck is on screens in its finest form, scrubbed and crisp and gorgeous, ready to baffle, disquiet, thrill, and trigger.”
In the New York Times,J. Hoberman notes that “Mr. Tsukerman, the director and producer; his wife, Nina V. Kerova, who collaborated with him on the script; and the cinematographer, Yuri Neyman, were all recent Russian émigrés. Liquid Sky has a particularly Soviet quality. Not only is it a montage film with much parallel action, but the costumes, makeup, hair styles, production design and even the herky-jerky dances are also highly suggestive of Russia’s 1920s Constructivist avant-garde. Its true ancestor is the director Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 Soviet space opera, Aelita, which, among other things, depicts a revolution on Mars.”
Harun Farocki’s As You See (1986), screening Sunday at Anthology Film Archives, “marks the beginning of a new period for the filmmaker, though the Brechtian ethos of oeuvre continues undisturbed,” writes Michael Eby at Screen Slate. “Like Godard, Farocki’s embrace of an irresolvable dialectic, though occasionally achieving continuity, estranges the viewer from the comfort of clean signification.”
The Tribeca Film Festival, whose 2018 edition runs from April 18 through 29, “has named this year’s participants in its Artist Award Program, for which artists of all kinds give examples of their work to the filmmakers who win awards,” reports Alex Greenberger at ARTnews, and “among them are Ghada Amer, Nancy Dwyer, Joan Sndyer, and Julia Wachtel.”
Los Angeles.Stan Brakhage: Life, Death, and the Elements is a program of new restorations from the Academy Film Archive presented by Los Angeles Filmforum and Acropolis Cinema on Sunday evening.
Cambridge. Sofia Coppola will be at the Harvard Film Archive on Monday to discuss her 2017 film The Beguiled. That screening will be preceded on Sunday with a showing of Donald Siegel’s 1971 adaptation of the same novel by Thomas P. Cullinan.
Austin. Before the 10pm screening of Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975) on Friday, DJ Adult Themes, “keyboardist for Goblin-inspired prog band Dust Witch,” will, starting at 8:30, “be spinning Italo horror soundtracks and searing 70s Italian prog jams.”
Toronto. The TIFF Cinematheque series Serge Bozon: Pop-Psych Cinema opens tomorrow and runs through April 18. The TIFF Review’s posted Scott Foundas’s piece on Bozon—who’ll be there tomorrow and Friday—and his fellow Lettre du cinéma filmmakers from the March/April 2011 issue of Film Comment.
London. Pietro Marcello will be at Close-Up on Saturday to discuss his 2010 debut feature, La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf).
Cannes. The Cannes Film Festival, which will announce the lineup for its seventy-first edition, running from May 8 through 19, has unveiled this year’s poster, featuring an image of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965). In 2011, Adrian Curry surveyed the history of Cannes posters for the Notebook.
Copenhagen. The National Gallery of Denmark has worked with Ursula Reuter Christiansen to create “an immersive large-scale installation” based on her 1971 film The Executioner, on view through June 10. Writing for Artforum,Kristian Vistrup Madsen notes that “the mournful and beautiful images that the film offers were at the time of its release seen as incongruous with its political agenda.”
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