York Film Research Articles

Changing Times

Changing Times

Gotham Book Mart's Spring 1938 Film File Catalog

ABSTRACT: This essay introduces the Gotham Book Mart Film File , a bibliographic catalog of film literature published in 1938. The Film File is placed in dialogue with contemporaneous efforts at cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art to develop film studies as a field of research. The Gotham Book Mart's catalog functions in numerous ways: generally, it reflects the state of film studies as a developing discipline in 1938; it broadens our understanding of how cultural institutions shape fields of knowledge; and it illustrates how these institutions, large and small, converged in New York's film culture. The essay suggests that bookshops and publishing were as important in the history of the city's cultural life—and in the development of new disciplines like film studies—as libraries, museums, and archives.

Telluride and After

FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich reports from the 48th edition of the Telluride Film Festival. Unlike most of its peer festivals, Telluride opted not to hold a virtual edition in 2020, a decision entirely in keeping with its emphasis on the tactile and experiential aspects of cinema, and which made its return in 2021 all the more giddy for first-time attendees and long-term devotees alike. Rich reviews the many festival highlights, from Jane Campion’s reinvention of the Western in The Power of the Dog to Todd Haynes’ archival documentary The Velvet Underground. Childhood takes center stage in new films from Céline Sciamma and Kenneth Branagh while misunderstood masculinity emerges as a theme in Michael Pearce’s Encounter, Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, and Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon. Including a coda on the New York Film Festival, Rich concludes that the masterful riches of the two festivals augur well for the fall 2021 season.

New York: Gateway to the East

Abstract After a number of aborted attempts to secure distribution and exhibition in the West in the 1950s and 60s, producers of the Chinese cinema came to understand that film festival prizes, which had been the Japanese model, were not going to work for them. Instead, early attempts were made to break into the US market via an exhibition in New York. The commercial distribution of Hong Kong’s commercially-oriented martial arts movies in the 1970’s satisfied the long-standing desire of producer Run Run Shaw for success in the West, but hardly provided a similar opportunity for the more specialized auteur-cinema of the Mainland and Taiwan in the 1980s. Instead, the New York Film Festival emerged as the premier showcase for Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers and the New Cinema of Taiwan, along with the Art cinema of Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai.

Geoblocking Fall 2020

FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich presents her take on festival-going in the time of COVID. While noting the challenges posed by geoblocking and navigating festival schedules across multiple time zones, along with the absence of the excitement and comradeship that provide live festivals with their momentum, she observes that virtual festivals—liberated from geography—offer advantages in terms of access. Surveying the offerings at the Toronto Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and DOK Leipzig, Rich highlights feature films and documentaries that offered a welcome escape from her COVID-demarcated existence, from critical favorites such as Nomadland (dir. Chloe Zhao, 2020 ) and Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology series, to discoveries such as Hong Sang-soo’s Domangchin yeoja (The Woman Who Ran, 2020) and En route pour le milliard (Downstream to Kinshasa, 2020), by the young Congolese documentarian Dieudo Hamadi.

‘What is a mouth’: Joyce Wieland’s Pierre Vallières (1972) and the politics of the film portrait

Focusing on Joyce Wieland’s film portrait Pierre Vallières (1972), this article follows the Canadian artist and filmmaker’s practice as it evolved through her engagement with the New York film avant-garde of the 1960s. Through an analysis of Wieland’s collaboration with Shirley Clarke, I will also discuss Pierre Vallières in relation to US-American documentary practices from the same period. Referring to Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) with its focus on the spoken word as well as Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, I will place Wieland’s film within this line of film portraits engaging with identity and a performative notion of subjectivity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, this article concludes with a close reading of Wieland’s film, discussing her use of the close-up as a means of thwarting the linear narrative and logic of its subject’s political speech. Pierre Vallières’ politics thus emerges within an aesthetics that crosses the boundaries of documentary and avant-garde, communicating with audiences beyond the film’s original context of French-Canadian emancipation.

History Calling: Decolonizing Cinema at New York's Film Forum

Beginning in late May and unfolding over the course of nearly three weeks, New York's Film Forum's series, “The Hour of Liberation: Decolonizing Cinema, 1966-1981,” provided a stunningly expansive program of Third Cinema titles. In this review, Jamie Berthe addresses the historical and contemporary relevance of the films while focusing in particular on the often overlooked role that women played during these years, both as filmmakers and historical actors, as well as on the importance of the issue of indigenous land rights within the anticolonial film archive.

Editors’ Introduction

> “Through this book, I imagine the possibility that later generations of media feminists might not have to do this work again: putting a stop, for a while at least, to this particular feminist ‘re’-cycle.” > > —Alexandra Juhasz, Women of Vision , 20011 > “Theories and concepts help order history, but critically informed production practice, an orientation of learning, thinking, and doing might move us out of these painful historical reveries.” > > —Angela J. Aguayo, Documentary Resistance , 20192 alexandra juhasz: In October 2017 I received …

Neoliberal cartographies: the grid in independent New York film

ABSTRACTCity Island (De Felita, 2009) and Shortbus (Mitchell, 2006), independent films produced around the 2008 economic crisis, characterize their titular New York locations as ‘off-the-grid,’ exclusive bastions of authentic individual and communal life exempted from the norms and pressures of neoliberal urban culture. At the same time, however, they extend this status to New York City as a whole by valorizing its rectilinear grid as a monumental structure that allows citizens to master their environment. In doing so, while these films advance provocative visions of counterpublics, they also reinscribe the neoliberal idealization of consumption as freedom, here producing the city itself, both periphery and center, built environment and residents, as an image to be consumed rather than a space to be remade as its residents choose.

Sigmar Polke: Films

Sigmar PolkeFilms Thomas Elsaesser The richness and variety of Sigmar Polke's film work is overwhelming: extensive exposure to it makes one dizzy—with astonishment and anticipation. It is a treasure trove and a major discovery, but it certainly will take more than this short essay to begin to make sense of it and to value it accordingly. Faced with Polke's extensive film output, in addition to his stupendous work as a painter and graphic artist, one's initial impulse is to try and classify the unclassifiable, taking up the challenge in the full knowledge that this is an impossible task and may even be counter to the spirit of Polke's mercurial personality, his indifference to media specificity, and his active attempt to "flatten" and deconstruct aesthetic hierarchies. Nonetheless, we must start somewhere. A first attempt is to contextualize the films biographically and then to situate them historically. But situate them in which history? Is it that of post-Conceptual, post-Minimal, post-Pop contemporary art (Polke, another of Marcel Duchamp's and Salvador Dali's disloyal disciples, and the German contemporary of Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol)? Or does his film work belong to the history of the German film avant-garde, with affinities to the abstract Gebrauchsfilme (utility films) of the 1920s (e.g., the advertising films of Walter Ruttmann), or Hans Richter's Dada films (Vormittagsspuk/Ghosts Before Breakfast [1928] especially comes to mind), the American avant-garde (Maya Deren's 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon, Jonas Mekas's 1976 diary film Lost Lost Lost, or Jack Smith's 1963 Flaming Creatures), the expanded film group in Vienna (especially Valie Export and Peter Weibel's street films), the structuralist-materialist filmmakers of the London Film-Makers' Co-op (Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice), or [End Page 53] the homegrown avant-garde in Cologne and Düsseldorf (Lutz Mommartz, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein)? Polke's films have demonstrable links to all of them, but the biographically most obvious connections are, evidently, with the Rhineland avant-garde around XSCREEN. My task is more to look at Polke's films from the perspective of a film historian and film theorist, partly with an eye to Polke's contemporaries among the filmmakers of the New German Cinema of the 1970s and 80s (the films of Kluge, Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, Syberberg). While little has been written about Sigmar Polke's films, some very important pioneering work has already been done, notably by Barbara Engelbach in the Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010 catalogue and a long review by the noted New York film critic Jim Hoberman in Artforum. Hoberman—extensively quoting from Engelbach—is quite informed about placing in a historical context the few Polke films that have previously been publicly screened, such as Der ganze Körper fühlt sich leicht und möchte fliegen …/The Whole Body Feels Light and Wants to Fly … (1969), How Long We Are Hesst/Looser (ca. 1973–76), Quetta's blauer dunstiger Himmel/Afghanistan-Pakistan/Quetta's Hazy Blue Sky/Afghanistan-Pakistan (ca. 1974–76), Auf der Suche nach Bohr-mann Brasilien und seine Folgen/Brasilien Sao Paulo/In Search of Bohr-mann Brazil and Its Consequences/Sao Paulo (ca. 1975–76), and HFBK II/Hamburg Lerchenfeld (ca. 1975–89/2009).1 Yet, artistically, he does not rate these works very highly within the above-mentioned avant-garde traditions. Instead, he much prefers Polke's uncut material and singles out one film in particular—Farbe/Color (ca. 1986–92)—as a masterpiece, writing: Although the mode is impressionistic rather than structural, Color is a work of great purity. The outside world is referenced only when Polke cuts from a pile of green pigment to a shot of pine trees and then to a close-up of lichen in the rain. What is the nature of paint? Or the power of creation? Every canvas comes to seem a landscape, dotted with tiny stones and pools of water. Here Polke's sole desire is to see what certain things look like on film. Self-contained and truly indifferent, this non-product film piece is successful as installation and as motion picture...

Sardegna tra leggenda e realtà: ‘Sa femmina accabadora’, colei che dà la buona morte, nelle immagini e nelle parole di alcuni autori sardi

The term accabadora refers to a woman entrusted with the task of facilitating the passing of the dying people. She killed for pity, called by the families of the patients to relieve their sufferings on their own deathbed. Basically, she practiced a sort of ante litteram euthanasia. But that carried out by the woman was also a necessary action for the survival of relatives who, most of the time, did not have the necessary resources to alleviate the sufferings of the kinsmen. Furthermore, in small towns, the doctor was often several days away on horseback. While the accabadora took life away, on the other hand, she gave it back, helping the women of her community to give birth. Everyone in the village knew the activity of these women but all of them were silent. They were convinced that the work of the accabadora was a meritorious work because it took the burden of putting an end to the sufferings of the patient. They implicitly recognized in it a social utility. After outlining the figure of 'sa fèmmina practica', this report analyses some works by Sardinian authors who are interested in it. Above all, we will mention the novel by Michela Murgia, Accabadora (Campiello prize 2010); the film by Enrico Pau, L'accabadora; the novels L’ultima agabbadòra by Sebastiano Depperu and L'agabbadora. La morte invocata by Giovanni Murineddu; the short film Deu ci sia by Gianluca Tarditi, winner of the 2011 Golden Globe at 48th New York Film Festival; Ho visto agire s’accabadora by Dolores Turchi; Eutanasia ante litteram in Sardegna. Sa femmina accabadora by Alessandro Bucarelli and Carlo Lubrano and S’accabadora e la sacralità del femminino of Maria Antonella Arras.

Raw data videos offer a glimpse into laboratory research

In one video, a pair of detached butterfly wings slowly change colors from pale yellow to dark spots with splashes of orange. In another, a mouse explores a raised circular platform, peering at a checkerboard pattern on the floor below. A third clip shows a worm undulating in a funnel-shaped enclosure, bending tiny “pillars” with its body. An example of raw laboratory footage with aesthetic appeal, this image was taken from a time-lapse sequence of squid development documented by developmental biologist Nipam Patel and his students. It won runner-up for the Scientific Merit Award at ISF’s New York film festival last year. Image courtesy of Nipam Patel (University of California, Berkeley, CA). These videos are part of a collection of laboratory footage gathered by filmmaker Alexis Gambis and colleagues. Gambis, executive director of the nonprofit Imagine Science Films (ISF) and founder of the online science film platform Labocine , both in Brooklyn, NY, has long been fascinated by the visual appeal of raw data clips. His organizations have showcased videos ranging from microscopic observations to computer simulations posted online and shown at science film festivals and exhibits. In July, Labocine , which first started in 2016 as a subscription-based video magazine and online database of science cinema, launched a collection called “Scenes” on its website to highlight raw laboratory footage. Gambis, a former geneticist, says the videos offer an intimate glimpse into a world that is often obscured from the general public. “They get a palpable view of what’s happening in research today,” he says. And the raw footage is a departure from traditional science documentaries, which are heavily edited and typically use voice-over to describe scenes. “It’s oftentimes so chewed-up and explained to you,” Gambis says. The laboratory videos he and his team gather come with minimal information and …

Aura Satz in conversation with Christoph Cox, April/May 2017

Abstract

The New York Film Festival 55: Agnes Varda's Toes and Other Cinematic Delights

The New York Film Festival 55: Agnes Varda's Toes and Other Cinematic Delights

Trips of Death and Alienation in Beckett's All That Fall

Samuel Beckett, besides writing for the stage, has during his long career written for both radio and TV. He has also written one script entitled Film which was filmed for the New York Film Festival in 1956. All That Fall was written in 1956 and it is the longest Radio play of Beckett. Suffering, a fundamental attribute of existence, constitutes the centre of Beckett's plays and the plays demonstrate, in turn, different kind or human responses to suffering. Maddy's deep sorrow and anguish at the loss of her daughter Minnie arouses her desire for an end, what she calls to be" in atoms''. Dan, Like Hamm, overcomes the Absurd by exiling himself to suffering and refusing to be intimidated or beguiled. Unlike Hamm's insistent attempts to exterminate all life, Dan understands the futility of such effort and restrains himself from giving in to that kind of impulse. But the irony is that death is all around him underscoring the fact that death and alienation are no solution to the problems of life.

Student alleges he failed courses due to lack of adjustments

Case name: Letter to: New York Film Academy, No. 09‐15‐2017 (OCR 04/03/15).

Failure to self‐identify dooms student's complaint

Case name: Letter to: New York Film Academy, No. 09‐15‐2017 (OCR 04/03/15).

Cinema of Enduring Connection in a Brutal World: The 54th New York Film Festival (2016)

Cinema of Enduring Connection in a Brutal World: The 54th New York Film Festival (2016)

A Harsh Game: Ericka Beckman's (Virtual) Reality

Research Article| November 01 2016 A Harsh Game: Ericka Beckman's (Virtual) Reality Robert Grand Robert Grand ROBERT GRAND is a writer and curator living in Queens, New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2016) 44 (3): 12–15. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2016.44.3.12 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert Grand; A Harsh Game: Ericka Beckman's (Virtual) Reality. Afterimage 1 November 2016; 44 (3): 12–15. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2016.44.3.12 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Google Hangout with Annie Baker, Playwright 1/25/16, 2:33 PM

Genevieve Yue interviews playwright Annie Baker, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Flick focuses on the young employees of a single-screen New England movie house. Baker is one of the most critically lauded playwrights to emerge on the New York theater scene in the past ten years, in part due to her uncompromising commitment to experimentation and disruption. Baker intrinsically understands that arriving at something meaningful means taking a new way. Accordingly, Baker did not want to conduct a traditional interview for Film Quarterly. After running into each other at a New York Film Festival screening of Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie (2015)—both overwhelmed by the film—Yue and Baker agreed to begin their conversation by choosing a film neither of them had seen before and watching it together. The selection process itself led to a long discussion, which led to another, and then finally, to the Gmail hangout that forms the basis of the interview.