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AIDA RUILOVA
Aida Ruilova, a video artist and musician whose work will be featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, creates short video loops out of discrete sounds -- a breath, the screeching sound of a vinyl record being scratched, a muttered phrase -- which are edited in counterpoint to images of characters performing mysterious, often uncomfortable acts. Her "gothic aesthetic" is inspired, in part, by camp and B-movie horror and vampire flicks of the 1970s."Ruilova's looping video in six parts shows people crawling, drooling, laying in bed, gasping orgasmically, scraping records against floors and stone walls," writes Michael Waxman in his review of the exhibition Strange Days. "The videos, admittedly influenced by the vampire films of French horror auteur Jean Rollin, signal a descent into discontinuity that manages to eke out an often heartening caprice that are the films' sole consistency."
"If Kafka were alive, he'd be a fan," adds Regina Hackett about Ruilova's 1999 video You're Pretty, which features "a stringy male hugging a sound box in an empty loft and muttering the title into his ragged beard, over and over. As a diversion, he scraps LP's against a wall, savoring the sound of destroying them."
"The rapid jump-cuts in her short videos either combine music or allude to musical sounds, creating narratives that are strangely familiar yet steeped in obscure symbolism," writes Sylvia Chivaratanond about Ruilova's exhibition at the Prague Bienniale. "Her interest in music lies in the gap between the audio and the visual, at times forcing the viewer to 'visualize' sound."Originally from Wheeling, West Virginia, New York-based Ruilova studied at the School of Visual Arts and at the University of South Florida. In the early '90s, she formed the alternative music group Alva with Liza Wakeman and Michelle Anderson.
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/27/2004 02:58:35 PM
INAUGURAL COOLIDGE AWARD TO ZHANG YIMOU
The Coolidge Corner Theatre, an award-winning original Art Deco moviehouse and cultural landmark in Brookline, Massachusetts, will launch a newly established annual award honoring a selected film artist whose work advances the spirit of original and challenging filmmaking. The first Coolidge Award will be given to Zhang Yimou, the internationally acclaimed Chinese director. Zhang is scheduled to arrive in Boston this coming May to accept the award and to participate in a ceremony and festivities at the Coolidge on May 26-27, 2004. The Coolidge Award presented to Zhang includes a specially commissioned inscribed memento and an unrestricted cash award of $10,000. Preceding the ceremony will be month-long programming at the theater of related classes and panel discussions, and a selected retrospective of Zhang's work.
The focus of the award will rotate annually to highlight the many categories of films that the Coolidge has championed over the years in its mission to showcase high quality and diverse programming. Initial funding to support the Award was secured early on through a grant from the Patricia Larsen Foundation, which has bestowed $100,000 to be given in $10,000 increments yearly over the next 10 years.
Born in 1951 in Xi'an, The People's Republic of China, Zhang Yimou was first brought to the attention of worldwide audiences in 1987 with the release of his first feature, Red Sorghum. The film, which starred rising actress Gong Li, won several international awards including the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Zhang went on to make two subsequent films, Ju Dou (1990) and Raise The Red Lantern (1991), also starring Gong Li and forming a trilogy which catapulted them both into the international spotlight.The director made further headlines when Ju Dou and Raise The Red Lantern were banned from his homeland China, but enjoyed huge box office success in the U.S. and abroad. Zhang's background as a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, also secured him as a pivotal member of the significant film movement in China known as the "Fifth Generation."
Along with other graduates of the Academy, such as Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, work from Fifth Generation filmmakers ventured into more realistic and human portraits of the Chinese way of life, its people and history. With the releases of such films as The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), To Live (1994), Shanghai Triad (1995), Not One Less (1999), and the most recent, Hero (2003), due for U.S. theatrical release this summer by Miramax Films, Zhang continues to challenge restricted notions of Chinese culture and creates a stunning revisionist cinematic aesthetic.
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/26/2004 02:40:21 PM
Lions Gate Intl. has picked up international sales rights to Roger Spottiswoode's Ripley's Return, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley Under Ground. The cast includes Barry Pepper, Alan Cumming, Jacina Barrett, Claire Forlani, Tom Wilkinson, Ian Hart and Willem Dafoe.
Previously called White on White, the film, currently in postproduction, was acquired from German media funder Cinerenta GmbH.
Cinerenta has produced 31 films since 1997, including Omar Naim's The Final Cut with Robin Williams and Jim Caviezel, which debuted at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this month.
According to Variety, Spottiswoode's film "tells the story of the infamous Ripley (Pepper) who conceals the death of a trendy young artist in order to profit from the value of his works, and in the midst of the scam, falls under the spell of a Parisian heiress (Barrett)."
Born in Canada but raised in the U.K., Spottiswoode, is perhaps best known as a director for his work on the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). He began his career as an editor on TV commercials and, after moving to Hollywood in the 1970s, on films such as Straw Dogs, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Getaway. He made his directing debut with Terror Train (1980), starring Jamie Lee Curtis.
The most recent Highsmith adaptation, Ripley's Game (2002), directed by Liliana Cavani (The Night Porter), stars John Malkovich as the notorious sociopath. The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival, where it was acquired by Fine Line Features from Malkovich's production company Mr. Mudd. (Malkovich reportedly directed the final scenes of the 30-million-dollar thriller after Cavani -- who has primarily been directing opera over the past decade -- departed to oversee a previously scheduled production of Verdi at Milan's La Scala.)Fine Line subsequently decided not to release the film -- insiders say the P&A costs were simply too high to warrant a theatrical release of Highsmith's revenge-fueled caper -- and returned the film to the producers. The film has since been acquired by the Independent Film Channel.
Ripley's Game is currently being screened in the series Film Comment Selects at The Film Society of Lincoln Center, where it has received glowing reviews.
"If anyone was born to play Tom Ripley, it's John Malkovich," writes David Rooney in Variety. "The aloofness, erudite manner, cool charisma and chilly superciliousness of his screen person make the actor a perfect fit for the cultured killer."
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/26/2004 11:57:14 AM
NAZI PORN
At the Berlinale earlier this month, some of the most sensational film discoveries were not in the festival itself but were featured in the headlines of the country's daily tabloids. A week prior to the festival, news of the discovery of a cache of erotic home movies shot secretly by Nazi officers in 1941 broke when publication of novelist Thor Kunkel's Final Stage (Endstufe) was abruptly cancelled by Rowohlt, one of Germany's leading publishers.
Rowohlt's managing director, Alexander Fest, stated that the novel was shelved because the company was not able to resolve "aesthetic" and "content" differences with the author -- whose previous novel, The Black Light Terrarium (Das Schwarlicht Terrarium) won the Ernst-Willner, one of Germany's top literary prizes.
The book details "the morbid leisure society of the Third Reich," says Kunkel, but the Nazi officers portrayed are blissfully unaware of the existence of the concentration camps. "My novel takes place in 1941 when not a single bomb was falling on Germany. It's not that I'm trying to ignore the Holocaust," he explains, "it's merely that it's totally passe as a theme."
Kunkel reportedly came across the topic for Final Stage after watching a TV documentary in 1991 that looked into the then unknown porn industry during the Third Reich. He eventually located copies of the so-called Sachsenwald films.
According to The Guardian, "Officially, pornography was forbidden under the Nazis; in reality, however, the films were not only screened privately for the amusement of senior Nazi figures, but were also traded in north Africa for insect repellent and other commodities.
"Kunkel discovered two of the black and white films -- the pastoral Desire in the Woods and The Trapper. In one of them, a man ties a naked woman to a tree. Incredibly, Kunkel tracked down the actress some 60 years after her woodland nude scene, living in an old people's home outside Hamburg. 'I found her via a photographer who had known her since she was 14, when she posed for nude photographs,' Kunkel says. "The 83-year-old was slightly taken aback by the novelist's visit, but agreed to help. She could recall only two 'polite, charming men' who approached her outside a tobacconist's kiosk in Berlin. The men had driven her and her sister in a black Opel Admiral -- the saloon car favoured by the Gestapo -- to the woods outside Hamburg. There she had disrobed.
" 'She told me she and her sister had had a threesome with a man. I found this a bit surprising,' Kunkel says. The novelist never did discover who the director of the film was, but he used the movies as the framework for his 622-page manuscript, which his publisher, Rowohlt, had originally lauded as a 'packed, minutely researched portrait of morbid Nazi society ... and the demise of the Third Reich.'
"Kunkel also interviewed 57 elderly German soldiers who had served with Erwin Rommel in north Africa, where much of the novel is set. They confirmed what he already suspected -- that during the second world war, the German military traded Nazi pornography with the locals. The Sachsenwald films even ended up in the hands of the Bey of Tunis, a regent with a legendary collection of pornography. 'It was the thing the locals were most interested in. In return, the soldiers got food, water and supplies,' Kunkel says."
Kunkel's novel has already been scooped up by a new publisher, Eichborn Berlin, which plans to release it this spring.
In a related story: Rosa von Praunheim, the aging enfant terrible of New German Cinema, is set to direct a documentary entitled Homosexuality and Fascism for North German Television, and a feature film with the same theme called Even Gay Nazis Like to Kiss. (von Praunheim told me he is also racing to develop a film based on another story ripped from the headlines of recent German news, about Armin Meiwes, the gay cannibal recently convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight-and-a-half years for killing and eating Bernd-Juergen Brandes, a man he met on the Internet. The working title is Your Heart in My Brain.)
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/24/2004 04:59:34 PM
CRACKERS
Brooklyn, NY-based Cory Arcangel and his accomplices -- who call themselves the BEIGE programming ensemble -- "crack" Nintendo game chips and alter their contents. By traveling backward to the nascent technology of "interactive" video, Arcangel and company (Joe Beuckman, Joseph Bonn and Paul B. Davis) rewrite science in reverse, chucking "advancement" out the window.
In I Shot Andy Warhol (2002), for instance, they reprogrammed a 1980s Nintendo videogame, Hogan's Alley, and populated the game with mass-culture icons (chosen because they are recognizable even at the extremely small pixel size in which they are rendered). Players gain points by shooting Andy Warhol, but lose points if they accidentally shoot Colonel Sanders, the Pope or Flavor Flav. 
Another work, Super Mario Clouds (2003), a large wall projection of wondrous blue with white digital clouds, is simply a Super Mario Bros. game chip with all of the human figures removed. Arcangel's Data Diaries is a series of Quicktime video renderings of the raw memory lurking in his computer; the collective's 8-Bit Construction Set (2001) -- a conceptual DJ battle record with one Atari and one Commodore side -- has been called "a testament to nerdiness" by The New York Times, and "genius" by XLR8R magazine.
BEIGE and Radical Software Group recently collaborated on a DVD entitled Low Level All-Stars, a reseach project about early computer video grafitti, for the exhibition Kingdom of Piracy. The project showcases the best "cracker" tags selected from over 1000 games available for the Commodore 64 computer. ("Crackers," the feareless geeks who remove a game's copy protection through brute force, often leave behind modified start-up screens as evidence of their trade.)
Cory Arcangel/BEIGE's work will be featured as part of the 2004 Biennial at The Whitney Museum of American Art, March 11-May 30.
They will also show pieces in Team Gallery's booth at the upcoming Armory Show 2004, March 11-15.
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/23/2004 01:38:03 PM
Richard Kern: Portraits of Power and Eros
On Thursday, February 26, 4:30 - 6:00, Room 006, Lower Level, Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, NYC, filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern will discuss his role as a central figure in the Cinema of Transgression, as well as his recent photographic work.Screenings will include X is Y, Submit to Me, The Evil Cameraman, and others.
Kern received a BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1977. Relocating to New York City in 1979, he became involved in the punk and performance art counter-cultures associated with the East Village during that period. Beginning in the mid-'80s, Kern began to produce a number of short, underground films now recognized as central works in the Cinema of Transgression, a movement founded by Nick Zedd.
Influenced by the aesthetics of 42nd Street "trash cinema" and S&M fetish culture, Kern's kinetic and controversial filmwork continued through the early-'90s, when he began to devote himself primarily to still photography. His photographs have since become the subject of numerous exhibitions and monographs, and Kern continues to contribute regularly to a wide range of publications, including Filmmaker.
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/23/2004 10:46:41 AM
The IFP Market, September 19-24, New York City, is the only selective market in the U.S. where filmmakers present new film and TV work in development directly to the industry. If you seek financing, completion funding or sales for your work-in-progress or script, IFP Market is the place to begin.
Hundreds of financiers, distributors, buyers, development execs, fest programmers, and agents from the U.S. and abroad attend the IFP Market. Market filmmakers receive access to these industry executives via targeted networking meetings, pitch sessions, screenings, and more.
More than $150,000 in awards -- including two $10,000 awards for African-American filmmakers -- are awarded across all three sections (Emerging Narrative; No Borders International Co-Production Market; and Spotlight on Documentaries.)
Early Deadline: May 10 -- Narrative scripts, works-in progress, shorts & documentary features, works-in-progress, shorts.
Late Deadline: May 28 - Same categories as early deadline except for narrative scripts which have no late deadline.
Entry Fee: $50 application fee; Registration fees (paid on acceptance): $200 - $450. Students attend free.
Contact: Wendy Sax, IFP Market, 104 West 29 St., 12 floor, New York, NY 10001; (212) 465-8200 x. 203 (Market), x. 206 (No Borders); fax: 465-8525; marketinfo@ifp.org; www.ifp.org
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/23/2004 10:33:13 AM
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© 2004 Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film