Boys Don't Cry
When Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for her extraordinary performance in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), it guaranteed that the film would reach a much wider and more mainstream audience despite its controversial subject matter. The film’s commercial success accomplished Peirce’s goal of raising consciousness about hate-crimes in this country by dramatizing the […]
Writing the Reconciliation Scene
As a teacher of screenwriting I’m always amazed that in the scripts of my students, after setting up dramatic conflicts between characters, characters will often suddenly and abruptly reach a “new understanding," defusing whatever dramatic tension the script has been building up to. This occasionally happens in actual films as well, such as in River’s […]
Jean-Isidore Isou (1925-2007): Venom and Eternity
It is sometimes hard to remember that there was a time when Bosley Crowther routinely used to attack any novel or daring new film release, such as Cassavetes’ Shadows, or that Hilton Kramer had the final say about what passed as art in the New York Times. So it takes a certain cultural adjustment now […]
A Skeptical View of YouTube
Last week a number of folks on the "filmies" listserv tried to goad me into uploading my early films on YouTube as a way of gaining additional visibility. Karina Longworth at SpoutBlog only yesterday wrote: "Right now, YouTube is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive online archive of 20th century culture." Since virtually everyone seems […]
Ingmar Bergman RIP
When I was in college, I was already familiar with the major Bergman films – The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence – through various film society screenings. I spent a good part of one summer attending a retrospective of Bergman’s work at MoMA, which […]
Some Notes on Screenwriting
Before I had my own weblog, Mystery Man on Film commented about the brief excerpt from my book that I posted on my Web site: “Then the chapter went on to talk about how Gus Van Sant threw out the screenplay for Elephant and just improvised and shot it using an outline. I fail to […]
Film and Video at the 52nd Venice Biennale
Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine art critic, whose columns also appear on artnet, apparently boycotted the openings of Documenta and Venice this year. In his most recent column he suggests that these large international exhibitions are “outmoded," arguing that biennial culture leads to “copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking." […]
Film and Video at Documenta 12
The confluence of the Venice Biennale and Documenta – the two largest and most important international art exhibitions in the world – occurs only every ten years, making it possible to compare the two major simultaneously-held events. Having attended Francesco Bonami’s “Dreams and Conflicts" Venice Biennale four years ago and Documenta 11 five years ago, […]