Archive for February, 2004
Sunday, February 29th, 2004
The biggest surprise at the 2004 IFP/Los Angeles Independent Spirit Awards occurred during John Waters’s opening monologue. As Waters spun out an outlandish, increasingly hilarious story involving him being imprisoned in an MPAA cell for participating in screener bootlegging, none other than MPAA topper Jack Valenti appeared to grab the microphone away from Waters, handcuffing and dragging the mustachioed director offstage.
Indeed, the tale of the screener battle — recounted by IFP/Los Angeles (a co-plaintiff) Executive Director Dawn Hudson — was, more or less, the afternoon’s sole political topic of discussion. There was no Michael Moore rant and, perhaps remembering last year’s Britney Murphy on-stage meltdown, all of the celebrity presenters were polished and on-point, smoothly executing their comedic intros or satirical musical pieces. (I’m sure every agent and manager endlessly played the Murphy clip as a cautinary tale to their presenting clients.)
A high point amongst the presenter bits occurred when the announcer intro’d, “You love them, you want to be them… Jennifer Aniston and Mike White!” The Chuck & Buck and School of Rock scripter hilariously grilled Aniston as to why she failed to win a Spirit for The Good Girl.)
Among acceptance speeches, Bill Murray’s was the favorite at my table. After declining to thank the film’s director or producers — “because their heads are getting too big… and that’s not independent! — he then humbly wished the success Lost in Translation has had in attracting an audience to every filmmaker member of the crowd. (I’m paraphrasing here, but trust me, it worked.)
Another personal moment was Jim Sheridan, accepting for Best Cinematography winner Declan Quinn, telling young In America star Sarah Bolger that the event wasn’t actually the 2004 Spirit Awards but really her 13th birthday party and then leading the audience in a “Happy Birthday” singalong. (This impromptu highlight was not televised on Bravo, as they presumably had not cleared the rights to the song.)
The big winners? Lost in Translation (Picture, Director, Screenplay and Actor), The Station Agent (First Screenplay and John Cassavetes Award for Features under $500,000), and Monster (First Feature and … Read the rest
Friday, February 27th, 2004
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.
… Read the rest
Thursday, February 26th, 2004
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, … Read the rest
Thursday, February 26th, 2004
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 … Read the rest
Tuesday, February 24th, 2004
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 … Read the rest
Monday, February 23rd, 2004
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.… Read the rest
Monday, February 23rd, 2004
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.… Read the rest
Monday, February 23rd, 2004
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… Read the rest
Thursday, February 19th, 2004
“Art is definitely not my profession, but it has become an integral part of my life. It’s like going to sleep every night and dreaming. It’s something that is always going to happen, something that ends and then begins again. It’s like when you wake up in the morning knowing that you had a dream last night, but you cannot recall what it was that you dreamed. Still, a feeling lingers in the back of your mind that you had a strange or even frightening dream last night. You know if you try to tell the dream to someone else, they just won’t be able to relate. So you can only keep it inside you. You live in a big city, hiding in your little corner, and it’s doubtful that even a few people know of your existence. Yet you are a part of the city. It’s you and a lot of other such people that make up this city. The feeling of the city depends on all of these people living in their own dreams. My relationship with society to a large degree is a kind of metabolic relationship. Society needs ever-changing relationships, just like those that are occurring today. I too am ever-changing. I was unable to choose which generation I was born into, yet I have to learn to adapt to the times.” — Yang Fudong
32-year-old Yang Fudong, whose work is currently on display at TRANSarea Gallery in New York, January 29-March 27, and was recently featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s China Now survey, February 12-16, is among a new generation of Chinese filmmakers currently making a splash in the art world.
“Part of the fascination surrounding Mr. Yang,” wrote Jane Perlez in a New York Times profile of the artist from December 3, 2003, “is founded on his place at the center of a digital whirlwind in China, where a new generation of artists have spurned the canvases of Mao-like heads that the West considered so avant-garde in the 1990s. Instead, he and his friends are creating videos about personal feelings … Read the rest
Thursday, February 19th, 2004
Jim McKay’s Everyday People, which had its world premiere in Sundance’s American Spectrum program, will open the 33rd New Directors/New Films series.
The line-up, which was announced this morning, includes two more U.S. selections, both documentaries: Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room and Ondi Timoner’s DIG!, which took home Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for nonfiction.
Other films in the 22-film program, which is co-presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs March 24-April 4, includes several hits from the world festival circuit, including Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring and Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni’s The Story Of The Weeping Camel.
The complete lineup is as follows:
Opening Night: Everyday People, Jim McKay, USA, 2003, 91 min. HBO Films.
Raskin’s is the kind of neighborhood Brooklyn restaurant where young and old, black and white, artists and professionals have mingled for generations. But now everything is about to change. Faced with a business slump, Ira, the stressed-out Jewish owner (Jordan Gelber) decides to shut down — or rather, sell out to a corporate gentrification plan implemented by Ron (Ron Butler), an ambitious young black real estate developer. Smack in the middle of the controversy is Arthur (Stephen Henderson), the loyal maitre-d’ and the restaurant’s oldest employee. The story follows these three, as well as waiters and kitchen staff, over the course of a single tense day as all face an uncertain future with very mixed emotions and from diverse ethnic and cultural perspectives. Writer/director McKay (Our Song ND/NF 2000) is our populist poet of everyday life and he weaves together many diverse characters who, in their complexity, make up the fabric of a beautiful, multi-cultural New York.
B-Happy, Gonzalo Justiniano, Chile/Spain/Venezuela, 2003, 90 min.
Kathy is fourteen-years old and lives with the hope that her life’s about to get better; her father will get out of jail, and things at home will be normal. Gradually, though, she realizes that this is not meant to be: her family life, already fragile, will disintegrate, and she’ll be on her own. Yet with that realization … Read the rest
