Films of J. J. Murphy at Anthology Film Archives
THE FILMS OF J. J. MURPHY, Saturday and Sunday, March 1 and 2 at 7:30 PM at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. FILMMAKER IN PERSON! Though he’s perhaps best-known for PRINT GENERATION, in which the imagery of a one-minute piece of film, re-photographed fifty times over, becomes entirely abstract, J. J. Murphy’s body of […]
Police Beat
One of the best as well as most underappreciated independent films of the past several years is Robinson Devor’s Police Beat, which played at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, received a modest theatrical release, and finally came out on DVD only this past summer. The script was written by Devor and Charles Mudede, who writes about […]
A Family Finds Entertainment
Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) initially came to the attention of the art world in an article by Dennis Cooper as one of the emerging artist picks in Artforum complete with the backstory of how video artist Sue de Beer discovered the work while on tour when someone showed her an excerpt on […]
Quiet City
Aaron Katz’s Quiet City and Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland represent a vivid study in contrasts. Frownland, with its cramped apartments and cast of social misfits, presents a hellish vision of urban life in Brooklyn. Aaron Katz’s Quiet City, on the other hand, somehow manages to turn Brooklyn into a semi-pastoral landscape by interspersing shots of nature – from changing autumn […]
Frownland
Of the spate of recent mumblecore films, Ronald Bronstein’s debut feature Frownland is easily the most idiosyncratic and distinctive. The film received the Gotham Award for "Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You" and Bronstein was nominated for the Independent Spirit "Someone to Watch" Award. In addition, Chrissie Iles, the film and video curator at […]
I'm Not There
Todd Haynes’s new feature I’m Not There is not the first film to have its protagonist played by multiple actors. Christopher Maclaine did it out of necessity in his early beat classic The Man Who Invented Gold (1957) when he had to take over the main role after two other performers quit. Todd Solondz also […]
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 […]
Andy Warhol Screen Tests
This is my contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at The House Next Door. In thinking of the closeup, I almost invariably gravitate to the films of Andy Warhol, largely because so many of his films privilege this particular framing. In his extended screen test, Henry Geldzahler (1964), the then twenty-nine-year-old Metropolitan Museum of Art curator, […]