The Exiles
Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) actually causes us to rethink the beginning of the modern independent film movement. The Exiles has been compared by critics to John Cassavetes’ debut feature Shadows (1957-59), but it seems even more related to Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank’s beat classic Pull My Daisy (1959), especially in terms of its […]
Killer of Sheep
Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Charles Burnett grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the scene of the 1965 Watts Riots in which thirty-four people were killed and over a thousand people were injured. Burnett was part of a group of African-American filmmakers – Haile Gerima, Julie Dash, and Billy Woodberry – who came out of […]
New York Top Ten Art Shows
1. What is Painting? (MoMA). Curator Anne Umland's feminist-inflected exhibit provides an alternate reading of the challenges to painting’s authority over the past forty years. It begins with an assassination attempt, Vija Celmin’s "Gun With a Hand" (1964), and takes us step by step into the present, as represented Wade Guyton’s Warhol-inspired "Untitled" (2006) and […]
Charles Burnett: To Sleep With Anger
In thinking about a topic for “The Ambitious Failure Blog-a-thon" on William Speruzzi’s [This Savage Art], I felt somewhat at a loss because I prefer to write about films I really like rather than films that I consider aesthetic failures. As a result, I’ve decided to interpret “ambitious failure" to include a really terrific film that […]