Category Archives: Sundance

Coming to NYC’s Maysles Cinema as part of the new “Street Views” series tomorrow, Tuesday, April 10: DECASIA

Bill Morrison’s meditation on creation and destruction made its premiere at Sundance in 2002. It went on to screen at additional notable festivals, including Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, and Edinburgh, before enjoying a limited theatrical release.

Harder to describe than it is to experience, Morrison’s experimental film assembles more than an hour’s worth of damaged, decaying black and white film footage into an absorbing collage. Viewers find themselves simultaneously caught between the tension of trying to decipher and at times narrativize the footage before them, but also reflect on its impermanence and impending loss. The archival images, beautiful and haunting but also sometimes disturbing, work their spell on the audience – from whirling dervishes to carnival rides, the effect is truly hypnotic. Utilizing only existing deteriorated celluloid and a pulsating score, Morrison explores the process of making through an almost paradoxical play with images that are literally being unmade before the viewer’s eyes.

Coming to NYC’s Stranger Than Fiction next Tuesday, April 10: WE’RE NOT BROKE

Karin Hayes and Victoria Bruce premiered their economic exposé at Sundance earlier this year. The doc has gone on to be programmed at other notable festivals, with upcoming appearances at Dallas, the Independent Film Festival Boston, DocAviv, and STF heads Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen’s inaugural Montclair Film Festival.

I wrote about the film before Sundance here.

Screening as part of a retrospective of Thom Andersen’s works during the Whitney’s 2012 Biennial tomorrow Wednesday, April 4 through Saturday, April 7: LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF

Andersen premiered his essay on the cinematic Los Angeles at Toronto in 2003. The film screened extensively at other major festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Marseille, Karlovy Vary, and CPH:DOX.

Clocking in at nearly three hours, Andersen’s ambitious project is a masterful dissection of the various ways the city of Los Angeles has been depicted in film, and what these (mis)representations say about the real city and how the general public sees it. Divided into three sections, Andersen’s essay film explores the city as background, character, and subject, respectively, through clips from a remarkable number of films and a cogent narration, which, while essentially a lecture, is always engaging. By focusing on a city that is at the heart of the creation of illusions, the project holds a mirror to the undeniably influential film industry that has called it home for nearly its entire existence, and how it has been instrumental in creating and continuously reinventing a mythical version of Los Angeles – its geography, history, culture – that has been exported beyond the city limits to the rest of the world. The film is at once a piece of film criticism, an excavation of urban archaeology and anthropology, and a love letter to Andersen’s home since the age of seven.