Publishers Weekly has what seems to be the first review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day.

From the conclusion:

Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book’s jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding.

According to the blog Pynchonoid, the new book reads like a cross between the author's Mason and Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow. And as the book looks to be a typically dense 1,000 pages plus, readers might need this Pynchon wiki designed to enable navigation through the novel's themes and storylines.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/30/2006 11:14:00 PM

Comments (28)

Indie films aren't often noted for their ancillary rights potential, but over ten years after it first premiered at Sundance, there's a video game based on Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.

Here's Game Trailers:

Reservoir Dogs is a bit of a chicken and egg debacle. Fans of the movie are going to be put off by an extended story and characters that don’t live up to the original. People who never experienced this dog’s tale before will be wondering “What’s the big deal?”

Regardless of whether you’ve seen the movie or not, it’s not hard to realize that Reservoir Dogs is an average action game. It’s got a couple unique elements, but your mileage will vary based upon how much you love the source material.

And yes, "Stuck in the Middle with You" is on the soundtrack.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/30/2006 12:33:00 AM

Comments (0)

Paul Harrill has a good find over at his Self-Reliant Filmmaking blog. It's a site that is figuring out a way to raise production funding for web-distributed short-form work.

From Paul's post:

A few weeks ago, in an effort to show my students some of the more interesting film and video work being created for the web I discovered Have Money Will Vlog. It’s an ingenious site that helps media artists raise funds to produce their web-distributed videos and films. The project budgets are in the $2000 - $3000 range, and the donations are usually small — $10, $20, and so on. Of course, that money adds up when you consider all the people online....

Anyway, if you’ve not yet run across Have Money Will Vlog, now is a particularly good time to check out the site (and to dig in your pocket for some loose change) because funds are currently being raised for a project by Jennifer Proctor and Aaron Valdez, two Iowa City filmmakers. The project is called Lost in Light and, in Jennifer’s words (via email) the project is “devoted to preserving, archiving, and making available 8mm and Super 8 films that are otherwise being lost to time.”

In fact, as they state on the Lost in Light websites (HMWV site, official site), “we will provide free Super 8 and 8mm to video transfers to anyone who asks, in exchange for posting their video to the Lost in Light site and on the Internet Archive with their choice of Creative Commons licenses. In addition, Lost in Light will include articles and features by members of the filmmaking and film preservation communities, video tutorials for making 8mm films, as well as creative work, all with the goal of preserving and championing this important film format.”

So, send them your Super-8 and 8mm films. And send them some $ while you’re at it.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/30/2006 12:00:00 AM

Comments (0)

Here' s someone -- typically, not a narrative feature filmmaker -- who has figured out how to build a big audience on YouTube with a series of entertaining no-budget films designed especially for the web. Marco Tempest is a magician who has created a fresh persona quite different from David Blaine and Cris Angel. He presents his tricks as entertaining puzzles which he'll occasionally let you in on, and his YouTube channel contains dozens of clips made for international television and the Microsoft Network in Japan. In his most popular creations, the PhoneCan Magic series (also available as free videopodcasts on iTunes), Tempest creates short, 90 second or so visual illusions which are filmed entirely on his cell phone and which do not feature any camera tricks or editing. He occasionally posts "exposed" clips which detail how the effects are done. Below is one entitled "The Kiss."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/29/2006 11:47:00 PM

Comments (1)

Over at Ain't it Cool News Moriaty has up a detailed review of David Lynch's Inland Empire, which the filmmaker is reportedly self-distributing later this year. I missed it at the New York Film Festival and while I heard mixed, Moriaty's review really got me psyched. But before the review, he relates this anecdote of Lynch using his apartment as an impromptu location a couple of years ago, an evening that yielded about 15 seconds of footage in the finished film:

"They told me that they’d be shooting something for Lynch’s website, a short film. I was shocked to see that all they had with them was DV equipment. One of my favorite things about Lynch has traditionally been the lush cinematography of his films. Altogether, Lynch had about four people with him, along with Dern and a young Polish actress who seemed to speak very little English. My roommate, Henchman Mongo, had just moved out, and Mrs. Moriarty and I were in the process of changing everything in the apartment, so one of the bedrooms was empty. That allowed Lynch to set it up any way he wanted. He had the Polish actress lay on the floor of the room, smoking, while Dern sat with her back against the wall. Altogether, they probably took two hours to work a scene, and at the end of it, Lynch carried his own equipment back out to the car. Jeremy told me that he had no idea if the footage would be used in anything, or if it would just be an experiment in the format for Lynch, but either way, they thanked me. A few weeks later, signed DVD copies of THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH and ERASERHEAD showed up at my door as a thank you."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/29/2006 10:22:00 PM

Comments (0)

I don't know why I'm mentioning this now -- we meant to run a blurb in the Summer issue but forgot -- but those little numbers that sit next to the different people in our 25 New Faces feature each year... they're just graphic elements. They don't mean anything. They let you know we know how to count. We love all of our 25 equally. So filmmakers, enough with the "#7 on Filmmaker's 25 New Faces!" on your C.V.'s!

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/29/2006 10:03:00 PM

Comments (0)

While out at the Film Independent Filmmaker Conference, which I'll write more about hopefully later today, I sat down with filmmaker Lance Weiler and learned more about his very impressive model for self-distributing and marketing his independent films. One of his achievements is to simply get as an indie the kind of attention from the big box retailers that studios are used to getting when their videos street.

Today, for example Best Buy offers a $5 discount on a package of Weiler's two films, The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma.

Here's a short piece from Indie Features 06 that gives more detail:

HEAD TRAUMA is now available on netflix for rent. Over the next few weeks HT will be rolling out to more stores and rental outlets.
Starting Oct. 29th through Nov. 11th, Best Buy will be offering an exclusive promotion. Customers who purchase both HEAD TRAUMA and my first feature THE LAST BROADCAST will receive $5 off the final purchase price.

With brick and mortar retail stores forced to limit the amount of indie DVDs they can carry, this promotion shows a confidence in the films by a major chain. If sales of The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma live up to expectations, they could pave the way to more DVDs from independent filmmakers sharing shelf-space with leading studio releases.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/29/2006 12:41:00 PM

Comments (2)

While SAW 3 slays at the box office this weekend, check out this excellent dialogue between Scott Tobias and Noel Murray over at The Onion's A.V. Club on contemporary horror. Here's an excerpt from Tobias's comments:

So where is horror going? It seems to me that the genre has hit a crisis point creatively: J-horror is dying off, Hollywood is running out of '70s and '80s horror staples to remake, and surely at some point, the Saw and Final Destination franchises will lose their novelty. (Though maybe I'm giving audiences too much credit on that last one.) At the same time, the genre feels more liberated than ever to go in any direction it pleases. With a studio like Lions Gate willing to throw its weight behind The Devil's Rejects, Hostel, and other unsavory fare, there really doesn't seem to be any limits on the dark, subversive places a horror film can take us. It worries me when thoughtless splatter films open to great success, while a witty crowd-pleaser like Slither gathers respectful reviews but no audience. If studios feel that regurgitating the same formulas is the surest and easiest route to success, there's nothing to stop them from churning those films out. I worry, too, that there are no great horror auteurs emerging from the pack; outside of Zombie, who I believe is a major (though dangerous) talent, there are no Romeros, Carpenters, or Argentos that we can count on to put their distinctive stamps on cinema and carry their genre to new places. And yet I remain optimistic, because good, thoughtful horror films keep getting turned out one way or another, whether they slip through the studio system, find backing from the rogues at a major-mini like Lions Gate, or get imported from overseas like Shaun Of The Dead or The Descent.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/28/2006 01:13:00 PM

Comments (2)

A colleague who programs for a regional film festival forwarded this link to screenwriter William Martell's blog in which he launches a lengthy broadside against the purity of film festivals.

An excerpt:

You probably think of film festivals as some sort of important institution - a cultural event designed to select the very best motion pictures and give them the rewards they so rightly deserve. A place where commerce doesn't matter, and artistic expression is worshiped. A place where people only care about the quality of the film, and only the best films are screened.

Bullshit.

Film festivals are about money and fame. The idea that it's all about the art is as much of a scam as the idea that the Best Picture Oscar always goes to the very best picture... and trade adverts or backroom deals or DVDs sent to every member of the Academy have nothing to do with what film wins.

My friend said that if the reading is uncomfortable that's because many of Martell's observations are true. I don't know about this. I think his formulation of the Sanctified Film Festival is a bit of a straw man, but his comments about Raindance, Ft. Lauderdale, and a certain festival in Colorado are certainly entertaining.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/28/2006 02:28:00 AM

Comments (0)

I came across journalism student Clementine Gallot's blog Franco American after noticing a comment she posted to one of my postings on Gaspar Noe, below. Gallot posts in French and in English and here she is, excerpted, on Noe's screening of his short We Fuck Alone to a group of NYU students:

...Noe's 23-minute piece features a couple having sex on television and a young girl masturbating to a teddy bear while a punk jerks off to an inflatable doll. Shot with a small DV camera between Los Angeles and New York, it employs strobes and the soundtrack of a heartbeat and a crying baby -- a few of his regular features. Student reaction was divided; some called it boring, but Noe explained that he enjoys working with non-professional actors and was basically performing an experiment.

"I tried to see how much people can take -- what their physical reaction to the screen will be," he said. "Strangely," he noted, "there is no pornographic masterpiece." A few other students, encouraged by the film, showed a bizarre interest for the director's sex life. "I masturbated a lot as a teenager, sometimes smoking joints and watching films," he confessed, shrugging....

With his shaved head and teenage manners, the filmmaker seems to not care about the visceral impact of his films on the audience. When The Reeler asked him about the way he depicts violence, he simply said: "It exists, so why not show it?"

So, is it black humor? "Some people think I'm doing something wrong, but they should try not to take my films so seriously," Noe said.

Like Larry Clark, Noe is a skilled technician who manipulates explosive material without carrying a real discourse but, rather, by having an intuitive relation to cinema. Inspired mostly by his life and obsessions, he predicted, "I won't make that many movies in my life. ... I want to carry on by doing a documentary at some point, and now I'm focusing on my Tokyo project," a "tripping" movie which will be seen from the point of view of a hallucinating mind.

A student who observed that Noe's films tend to show a male dominant world suggested his next feature should include "a man getting his dick cut off." The filmmaker didn't agree.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/22/2006 11:28:00 PM

Comments (2)

Ted Hope was honored tonight out at the Hamptons International Film Festival with its annual Hamptons/Indiewire Industry Toast. The producer of over 50 movies (and an old and good friend), Hope was given this mid-career honor for producing a body of work that, so far, includes films by, among many others, Ang Lee, Nicole Holofcener, Michel Gondry, Ed Burns, Hal Hartley, and Todd Solondz; the creation of pioneering production companies (Good Machine and now This is That); leading several industry initiatives, including the indie battle against the MPAA screener ban; and, as James Schamus quite eloquently summarized at the evening’s end, years spent mentoring, developing the careers of and bringing together so many of us in the independent community.

But before James’s moving tribute there was plenty of good humor as the various speakers tried to figure out on what side of the “toast/”roast” divide to place themselves. Rosie Perez emcee’d and opened with a tale of first hearing Ted (his nasal twang was much parodied this evening) before meeting him on a set one day. Producer Ross Katz, who began his career at Good Machine, remembered boss Ted “taking him out for a slice” after a grueling day at the office. Todd Solondz had some great one-liners, John Waters, Anne Carey, Anthony Bregman and Diana Victor also spoke, and Ang Lee and Hal Hartley sent their respects in the form of a video message from the set in China and a short film made in Berlin, respectively. And before he got to the heartfelt stuff (“I owe more to Ted than anyone else here does,” he began), James brought the house down by reading a very, very funny set of fictitious emails that my paraphrasing couldn’t begin to do justice to.

It was great to hear Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez cite Ted’s lacerating 1995 essay “Indie Film is Dead… Long Live Indie Film,” (along with James’s bemused counterpoint) which both appeared in Filmmaker as providing the impetus for him to start Indiewire. I owe Ted much thanks too for not only launching me in the producing business but also for all the passionate advice and inspiration he’s given to Filmmaker over the years.

I wish Ted another 20 years of great producing, and I hope he comes up with a much-needed sequel to that brutally honest essay before too much more time passes. I’ll end with Ted himself, quoted here in Indiewire:

"I really believed I would never get to make movies," Hope said, his voice crackling during a speech that was filled with emotion at the end of the night. "I thought it was some club you had to get admitted to," he said, adding later, "I am thankful I got to make movies, I hope it keeps on happening."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/20/2006 11:54:00 AM

Comments (0)

Thought I'd congratulate Brady Hall who won the Best Feature at the Northwest Film Forum's Local Sightings festival last week for his feature June and July. I was a judge along with John Vanco of the IFC Center, Charlie Humphrey of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Lane Kneedler of the AFI Festival.

The film is a somewhat unclassifiable drama about a pair of fraternal twins living in the Pacific Northwest as it mixes science fiction elements with what might otherwise be a small-scale indie relationship movie. Here's the NWFF's catalog on the film:

Written and directed by Seattle filmmaker Brady Hall (POLERCHRIST, JERKBEAST), JUNE & JULY turns the 20-something indie film formula on its ear. Lifelong residents of a depressed small town, fraternal twins June (Bernadette Culvo) and July Shauer (Nathan Williams) are inseparable. Sprung into action by the death of their mother, June hatches a plan to leave her brother and the dull rural life, in search of adventure and excitement in the big city. July, unaware of June's plans, continues to enjoy the simplicity his quaint town has to offer. Before announcing her departure, a house party fight exposes June�s mysterious supernatural physiology. While searching for the link between her powers and her past, June discovers an old photograph that leads the pair on a road trip that unravels the secrets of their family and its genetic history. Injecting drama with humor and even a bit of science fiction, JUNE & JULY is a bittersweet portrait of an unusual pair of siblings and the story of their divergent paths. Great music supports this beautifully lensed exploration of an enigmatic family history, in what can only be called a unique vision from our region.

We also gave the short film prize to What's in the Barn,, by Mike Corrigan, Travis Hibbner, Derrick King and Gary McLeod for their striking and deliberate gothic tale.

At the event the NWFF also announced its next "Start to Finish" grant, a prize of production support that last went to Rob Devor's Police Beat. This year the prize is going to David Russo for his #2, which the NWFF plans to go into production in the Spring. The whole event, which focuses on films local to the Pacific Northwest, was sponsored by Altoids.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/19/2006 12:11:00 AM

Comments (0)

Film scholar David Bordwell has a blog and it's always worth checking out for his investigations into the art and industry of moviemaking. Here's an excerpt from a piece on the Scorsese's The Departed. After winding through a very interesting comparison of this film's narrative resolution and the Hong Kong original's, he discusses Scorsese's editing style:

The Departed has calmed Scorsese’s urge to track a bit, but that’s balanced by its over 3200 cuts. The result is an average shot length (ASL) of about 2.7 seconds. Not unusual for an action picture nowadays, but consider where Scorsese started by conning these ASLs:

Mean Streets 7.7 seconds
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 8.0 seconds
Taxi Driver 7.3 seconds
King of Comedy 7.7 seconds
Gangs of New York 6.7 seconds
The Aviator 3.6 seconds

Like his contemporaries, Scorsese has succumbed to the fast-cut, hyper-close style that has made our movies so pictorially routine, however well-suited they may be for display on TV monitors and computer screens and iPods. In 1990 he seems to have realized that he needed to pick up the pace. Of GoodFellas (ASL 6.7 seconds) he remarked: “I guess the main thing that’s happened in the past ten years is that the scenes [shots] have to be quicker and shorter. [GoodFellas is sort of my version of MTV. . . but even that’s old-fashioned” (The Way Hollywood Tells It, p. 152). (For more on measuring ASLs, see the Cinemetrics site.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/18/2006 10:15:00 PM

Comments (1)

Ben Fritz and Phil Gallo have an article in Variety this week titled "Biz's share scares" that details the games the major entertainment congolomerates are beginning to enter into with the various media-sharing companies. In short, Universal Music has launched a copyright infringment lawsuit against Grouper Networks, which runs the media-sharing site Bolt.com. The two twists in the article are that Grouper is owned by Universal-rival Sony, which bought the network this summer, and that Universal Music recently signed a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube, the largest of the video-sharing sites.

Here's the key passage in the article:

The two suits were filed just a week after UMG signed a deal with YouTube to share revenue from advertising that appears on a Web page when U Music works are being played on the No. 1 video site. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion the same day that several major labels announced their deals with Google Video and YouTube.

Grouper and Bolt are both relatively small video sites with significantly less traffic and content than players such as MySpace Videos, Yahoo Video and Break.com. Nonetheless, UMG said both sites had significant copyright infringement and encouraged users to further violate copyright laws. UMG may hope to use them as examples to pressure bigger Netcos into signing deals.

The question then becomes, what mechanism or accounting system exists to reward individual copyright holders from the revenue "shared" with Universal by YouTube? Do artists signed to Universal see (or do their balance statements reflect) this income? And what about all the other artists whose video is being shared on YouTube and other sites? If there's no way of accounting for the traffic generated by a Universal artist, is Universal then sharing in the revenue generated by the material produced by non-Universal artists on YouTube who lack a threatening corporate giant in their corner?

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/18/2006 09:36:00 PM

Comments (0)

Doug Block's doc 51 Birch Street opens this week at the Cinema Village in New York.

Here's what Paul Harrill at Self-Reliant Film had to say about it:

The film is being billed, not incorrectly, as a documentary mystery: Just a few months after Doug’s mother dies, Doug’s father suddenly announces that he’s engaged to his former secretary. It’s not long before Doug finds himself at their wedding, awkwardly toasting the new couple. At the reception his father, the groom, is a different man. What’s the story?

Was his father unfaithful? Was his parents’ seemingly happy marriage a sham? Doug starts asking questions and the more the detective digs, the more uncertain he is he wants to know the truth.

On one level, 51 Birch Street is a well-made, if somewhat conventional, autobiographical documentary. Block’s conflicts with his father reminded me of Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business and, though it’s unfair to compare the two, I do wish that 51 Birch Street had some more stylistic flair. The visuals rarely transcend the plain, home-movie look so common to video, and Block’s voice-over sometimes explains more than is necessary.

But the movie is about looking beneath the surface, and on that meaningful score 51 Birch Street succeeds. Block shows us a seemingly stable marriage, then peels back layer after layer until he discovers the heartbreaking truths of two unfulfilled lives and the relationship they both outlived. Implicit throughout is a critique of blind allegiance to “family values”: What good is a golden-anniversary marriage, if it’s stale, maybe even dead, at its core? The comparison to Updike (as at least one reviewer has made) is apt: This couple could have lived at 51 Birch Street. Or in your suburban neighborhood. Or maybe in your own home.

51 Birch Street makes an impact. I’ve thought about it every day since I saw it well over a week ago.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/18/2006 01:25:00 AM

Comments (0)

An Andy Warhol Braniff Airlines commericial from the 1970s:

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/18/2006 12:31:00 AM

Comments (0)

The latest configuration of the Cleveland rock band Pere Ubu has a new album out, Why I Hate Women, and here's frontman David Thomas in this month's The Wire on the real avant garde:

"In the early 70s," he says, "the evolution of rock was very, very, very obvious. Analogue synthesizers and concrete sound was entering into the music. Various people had various strategies, and it wasn't one thing. It was stuido techniques and other things. All of it, to us, was coming to this juncture. And it was very obvious to us that this was what rock music was supposed to be, to make use of this powefull, relatively new narrative voice. That's why I've always said that we are in the mainstream. It's people like Eminem or Britney Spears who are the weird experimentalists. They are avant garde. They are dealing with weird alternative worlds. If you put our view of the human condition alongside Britney Spears's, one of them is extremely experimental and weird, and it's Ms Spears'."

Thanks to The Existence Machine for the quote.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/18/2006 12:22:00 AM

Comments (9)

Over at his blog Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy,, Owen Hatherley writes about Todd Haynes's Safe and recognizes its foreshadowing of our contemporary urban situation:

From it's opening sex scene onwards- the grim treadmill behind the neon-lit Southern California cityscape of the generic erotic thriller- Todd Haynes' Safe is a depiction of the most important city of the early 1990s. The edge of apocalypse you can hear in the synth whines of Dr Dre's The Chronic, the fire and brimstone of Amerikkka's Most Wanted, Mike Davis' City of Quartz and of course the LA Riots: in all this the dream and the nightmare coalesces so that one is indistinguishable from the other.

Safe is the edge of hysteria in Joan Didion's neurasthenic LA teased out and emphasised to the point of total psychosis, which shouldn't obscure the fact of how prevalent its mysterious 'environmental illness' has become. A wave of allergies seems to be sweeping through the US and Europe, their indiscriminate gluttony is overdiscussed compared to the fetish for the inorganic, the 'homemakers' with intolerances (what a wonderful phrase!) to lactose, wheat, dairy, pesticides, carpets...on one level one shouldn't complain about this (seeing as my own immune system is not enturely functional, it's nice to be able to get food in Sainsbury's that won't have unpleasant consequences) as it represents perhaps some sort of protest. Such as for the inmate in the self-help camp of Safe who declares she'd like to 'shoot in the head all the people that made me like this'. Hence, for all his didain for 'girly men', the Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has to make the right gestures towards environmentalism and organic farming...

The angels of Los Angeles
Are tired out with smiling. Desperately
Behind the fruit stalls of an evening
They buy little bottles
Containing sex odours.

Brecht, Hollywood Elegies

A subtext is that as the car becomes more and more dominant, as the out of town shopping centres proliferate, and as the service industry and the office take up an ever greater share of employment, we are all Californians now. Christopher Isherwood, who gleefully retreated there mid-century, declared that California was sneered at because 'we've decided to live in our advertisments'. And in an unintentionally politically apposite moment, that 'California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land'.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/18/2006 12:02:00 AM

Comments (0)

Nick Knight's fantastic art/fashion/culture website SHOWstudio launched a new project today: a video diary by Asia Argento, updated three times daily. Titled "Don't Bother to Knock," the series is running with five entries so far in which the director and actress talks about travel (she is promoting a film), freaks (Todd Browning's and others), burn care and more.

From the site:

As one of the Bal Masqué’s twelve muses –chosen by Maison Martin Margiela to model their silver flower dress at the grand event on the 24th October- controversial actress/director Asia Argento has kindly agreed to also lend her cinematic skills to SHOWstudio for a diary project that she has named ‘Don’t Bother To Knock’. Over ten days, from tomorrrow, 17 October, until the 25th of this month, Asia will document her daily life whilst she is over here promoting her new film via series of intimate video entries. Starting from 12:00hrs (UK time) tomorrow, these will be published three times per day: at noon, 6pm and midnight, so log on thrice daily to keep up!

The videos are candid, intimate and quite hypnotic. Check them out through the 25th.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/17/2006 11:09:00 PM

Comments (0)

There's a film festival this weekend taking place at a decadent playground where the idle rich enact scenes of ritual perversion. And for those who won't be heading out to the Hamptons Film Festival, there's Cinekink, which bills itself as the "true alternative film festival." The fest opens tonight at Bacchus with a live performance by the Wet Spots and then bases itself at the Anthology Film Archives for its screenings and panels.

Highlights include a panel discussion on Saturday, October 21st at 4:30pm entitled "The State of Smut," which features NYC filmmakers Audacia Ray/Waking Vixen Productions, Tony Comstock/Comstock Films, Tony DiMarco/Lucas Entertainment, Joe Gallant/Black Mirror Productions and Candida Royalle/Femme Productions.

From the press release:

No longer the hub of porn production it was in the 1970s, New York City has become a haven for filmmakers who are forging new paths in adult entertainment. A panel of NYC-based directors will discuss what it is like working in this sector of the film business, also considering whether the city itself inspires a unique approach to the subject matter and whether the movies made locally are all that different from those produced in "Porn Valley." Questions from the audience will be encouraged and film clips will be included in the presentation.

And then there's work by husband and wife filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Kristie Alshaibi. Usama, whose doc Nice Bombs won the Best Documentary Prize at the Chicago Underground Film Festival this year, screens The Amateurs, a doc about a trio of struggling amateur pornographers, as well as a couple of shorts. Kristie, who also goes under the performance name of Echo Transgression, will be showing Other People's Mirrors (pictured), in which she stars with filmmaker Nick Zedd. Cinekink founder Lisa Vandever tells me that both are "insightful in their transgressions." And on Saturday night there's O: The Power of Submission, veteran hardcore director Ernest Greene's take on Pauline Reage's classic book featuring Nina Hartley.

Over at The Reeler, Stu VanAirsdale has more of a preview. Here he talks with Vandever about the challenges of running the fest:

Though Vandever, like many an independent, perpetually fights for funding and continues to seek out sponsorship for the unique fest, she acknowledged that her payback comes in ways that can't always be measured in dollars and sex. "The highlight for me is always that moment when a film really connects with our audience," she said. "Watching a film in a theater filled with kink-minded sorts can be a very heady experience; there's a definite 'community' feel to it. I love to stand in the back and soak that up." For filmmakers considering CineKink, Vandever added, "We welcome all types of works, all genres and lengths, explicit or not. And our definition of kink tends be fairly loose; your film might well be kinky -- you just don't know it yet."

As a teaser, here's the trailer for Torture Garden TGX, a doc by Mark Blackman on London's legendary fetish and body art club. It premieres tomorrow night. Check the Cinekink site for schedules and showtimes.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/17/2006 05:56:00 PM

Comments (0)

Over at The Mutiny Company, Jamie Stuart has posted the fourth installement of his video diary/short film/online reports covering the New York Film Festival. David Lynch makes an appearance on this one discussing his Inland Empire, which, reportedly, he will be self-releasing in the near future.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/15/2006 01:06:00 PM

Comments (0)

I wrote a little bit about Jamie Stuart's New York Film Festival video diaries at The Daily Reel. Now, Stuart emails to say that Episode Three is available.

Apted. Almodovar. Beatty. Cruz. Check it out.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/06/2006 12:29:00 AM

Comments (0)

In an email charmingly entitled "Movie Night with Gaspar Noe," the IFC Center announces that the "French cinematic provocateur" will be hosting a double feature for the brave: Noe's own I Stand Alone and Pier Paolo Pasolini's infrequently screened Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. (Salo, by the way, is not available on U.S. region DVD. Asealed copy of Criterion's old disk goes for $566 on eBay, and there's a brisk business going in Salo bootlegs.)

Of I Stand Alone, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has written: "Movies don't get much darker than this, because few of them have as much to say about what movies coax us into doing to ourselves. Put more simply, I Stand Alone is a movie that removes your head, [screws] with it for a while, and then hands it back to you.”

There has been much discussion and debate about Salo, which transposes the Marquis de Sade's novel from 18th century France to Fascist Italy in the 1940s, over the years.

The British Film Institute has a series of articles posted online about Salo. There's an essay by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith on the film's relationship to censorship and pornography that concludes like this:

Viewing of Salò was not intended by the makers to be a pleasant experience and in practice most spectators do find it positively unpleasant - not because it is unequivocally repulsive (though it sometimes is), but because the repulsion is balanced against elements of attraction, whether normal or perverse. The fact that the film is disturbing in a deliberately unpleasant way does not seem to me an argument for not allowing it to be shown. Art - and film is no exception - has always contained elements that disturb rather than console, that frustrate rather than satisfy. If the subject matter of Salò is to be allowed to be spoken of at all, it must necessarily be disturbing. For it not to be so is indeed to pander to pornography.

There are also excerpts from Gary Indiana's BFI monograph on the film:

Salò is one of those rare works of art that really achieves shock value. Aesthetic shock does have a salutary value, and it's always amusing to read the outpourings of some cultural wastebasket decrying an artist who deploys shock 'for the sake of shock', as if to qualify as a work of art, a work of art has to be something other than a work of art - a tutorial in cherished homilies, an affirmation of quotidian values, and so on. I don't think art has anything to do with morality and it shouldn't: I should be able to kill everybody I don't like in a novel and get away with it, rape a twelve-year-old and piss on my father's grave. It's not my job to tell anybody that these things are 'wrong'. It's my job to show that these things happen, period.

Certain works yank the rug from under the meticulously planted furniture of middle-class morality and the aesthetic torpor that decorates it. John Waters's Pink Flamingos, Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres fous, Georges Franju's Le Sang des Betês, Andy Warhol's Blue Movie, anything by Hershel Gordon Lewis, scattered moments in the films of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas - well, you can make your own list of things that lifted the top of your head off. I'm not sure that anyone is obliged to 'like' works of art that fall into this category, or that 'liking' them is ever entirely the point, though critics, quite often, mistake the celebration of the ghastly as an 'indictment of contemporary malaise', etc. - in other words, they can only like something if it can be bent to reflect their own moral certainties.

One way that Salò differs from the unabashedly perverse epiphanies of the cinema of shock is in its pedantic moralism, which might have ruined it if the 'shock' part didn't so thoroughly overwhelm the moralism. There is something absurdly winning about Pasolini's explanation of the shit-eating in Salò as a commentary on processed foods, and the fact that Pasolini was being sincere when he said it. And if you think about it, his interpretation is essentially reasonable, though it's hardly the first thing a viewer thinks when watching a roomful of people gobbling their own turds.

Indiana talks more about the film in an interview on the site. The interviewer asks Indiana about the effect that Pasolini's murder following the completion of this film has had on its reputation:

The problem is only there in the sense that Pasolini's murder and this particular film were so readily linked, and eclipsed the rest of Pasolini's work, in a certain journalistic kind of discussion. Salò is a satire of consumer society and perfectly consistent with Pasolini's other films and his polemical writings. What he saw as an extreme spiritual crisis in modern society demanded this particular form, and these extremely unnerving images.

And although it's not often shown, Salo does pop up in the news. Several commentators, in fact, evoked the film when discussing the torture photos that leaked out of Abu Ghraib. Here are excerpts from Susan Sontag's "The Pieces are Us":

An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted....

What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings -- as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, Salo', depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era -- is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To ''stack naked men'' is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's response: ''Exactly!'' he exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: ''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?''

The event will be held next Tuesday, October 10, at 7pm at the IFC Center. Both films will be shown and Noe will be present to discuss the influences of Pasolini's work on his own.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/04/2006 12:50:00 AM

Comments (3)

New York magazine is streaming five shorts screening at the New York Film Festival.

Go to the above link to see Benoit Forgeard's absurdist comedy, The Naked Race; Ariana Gerstein's experimental documentary Alice Sees the Light; Tom Harper's comedy about British hooliganism, Cubs (pictured); Faye Jackson's female-centric horror film, Lump; and Elisabeth Subrin's tale of intimate encounters, The Caretakers (the latter of which, I'll admit in a full-disclosure moment, I exec-produced.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/04/2006 12:40:00 AM

Comments (0)

Indiewire is reporting that Arianna Bocco is moving to IFC. The former acquisitions exec at both Miramax and New Line has, for the last couple of years, been an agent at the Gersh Agency. She's now been named IFC Entertainment's New VP of Acquisitions and Production.

From Brian Brooks's report:

In her newly appointed role, Bocco is charged with "identifying and pursuing finished feature films that support the company's overall motion picture acquisition strategy of aggressively growing its theatrical release slate with larger, commercial films," in addition to "new projects that contribute to a diverse new production slate." Bocco will also spearhead the acquisition of twenty-four films a year for the IFC First Take banner, IFC Entertainment's day-and-date division.

Bocco has always had great taste and straight-shooting style, so I'll look forward to seeing what projects she launches at IFC.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/03/2006 11:02:00 AM

Comments (0)

Over at The Mutiny Company Jamie Stuart has posted the second episode of his hardboiled take on the 44th Annual New York Film Festival. With appearances by Helen Mirren, Stephen Frears and others... Don't miss it.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/02/2006 02:30:00 AM

Comments (0)