A Few Literary Events

Let’s flag a few more ongoing and upcoming events, beginning with Larry Gottheim, a key figure in the development of the American avant-garde. Ultra Dogme is streaming five of his films through Thursday and has also posted an excerpt from Gottheim’s forthcoming book, The Red Thread. When Close-Up Film Centre in London presented a retrospective five years ago, the programmers noted that “Gottheim’s work stands alone in its intensive investigations of the paradoxes between direct, sensual experience in collision with complex structures of repetition, anticipation, and memory.”

On April 22, Genevieve Yue will be at the at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles to present a handful of films she writes about in her book Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality. Interviewing Yue for Film Comment last year, Mackenzie Lukenbill noted that she “locates and describes a common motif in laboratory, editing, and archival practices: the disappearance of the female body. Girl Head tracks this theme from the films of illusionist Georges Méliès, in which women are made to vanish ‘on camera,’ to contemporary works of both avant-garde (Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus) and popular cinema (David Fincher’s Gone Girl) where a woman’s disappearance is central to the form and function of the film.”

Last month, we pointed to an excerpt in Metrograph’s Journal from Fire Season: Selected Essays, 1984–2021 in which Gary Indiana writes about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1976). From April 23 through 28, Indiana will present four films at Metrograph, and in 4Columns, Jennifer Krasinski writes that while “he’s always lumped in with the East Village scene, Indiana’s work would be better placed alongside that of his more widely celebrated peers, many of whom, I note, are no longer among us: Joan Didion, George Trow, Serge Daney, Susan Sontag. All to say that while Indiana has always possessed his inimitable roar, he didn’t always appear as solitary as he does right now in the literary landscape.”

On Friday, we noted that on May 3, Dennis Lim, director of programming at Film at Lincoln Center, will take questions about his new book, Tale of Cinema, and the event bears mentioning again. As Lim explains on Instagram, the book is not only about Hong Sangsoo’s 2005 film but also about “Hong’s twenty-seven features to date, minor cinema, termite art, repetition, auteurism, zooms, two-shots, narrative geometry, automatic (screen)writing, autofiction, paranoid reading, films within films, social awkwardness, hotel sex, group meals, the language and time of alcohol, etc., etc.”