Category: Special event

AFI FEST 2010

Site news, Special event

AFI FEST starts up today in Hollywood, and this year, I’m the Editor of the Festival blog, AFI FEST NOW, as well as an Associate Programmer. I’ll be introducing the screenings of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, A Screaming Man, Free Radicals, Kubrick’s Lolita, and the double feature of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 classic The Housemaid (which can be viewed for free in its entirety at MUBI, here) and Im Sang-soo’s new remake. I’ll also introduce the Hong Sang-soo double feature, HaHaHa and Oki’s Movie, and I’ll facilitate the Q/A …

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The Reel Thing XXV

Special event

I was invited to attend this past weekend’s 25th edition of “The Reel Thing,” the annual technical symposium for the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). The event offered an impressive line-up of some of the top film restorationists and preservationists working today, who presented their work and discussed problems and solutions they encountered. It provided a potent mix of film history, technology, and genuine concern for the past and future of the art form that was positively infectious.

One of the best aspects of the symposium was its cinematic egalitarianism, with attendees offering equally rapt attention to the finer …

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Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Film review, Special event

LACMA is halfway through its series devoted to cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, one of RKO’s prime cameramen in the 1940s and ’50s, and thus one of the key strategists behind the shadowy “noir” look in films such as Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943), Out of the Past (1947), and Clash by Night (1952). But for me, the big discovery has been Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a movie that has managed to completely escape my notice over the years despite the fact that it’s sometimes credited as being the first American film noir.

I write “American,” because …

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Jafar Panahi is Released

Special event

Jafar Panahi, happy to be home. (Photo courtesy of the Twitter group FreeJafarPanahi.)

“I think Panahi’s refusal to cooperate with [the authorities] prolonged the case,” Jamsheed Akrami says in Godfrey Cheshire’s summary of events. “They just realized they couldn’t intimidate Panahi. I consider that to be a great moral victory for Panahi and people like him. We have a lot of them in Iran. But they are not as well known as Panahi, and are sadly paying much heavier prices.”…

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Ross Lipman article in the LA Weekly

Film review, Special event


10-17-88 (1989)

I’ve got an article in this week’s LA Weekly about the films of Ross Lipman, whom many readers will recognize as the UCLA restorationist behind classic films by independent luminaries such as Kenneth Anger, John Cassavetes, John Sayles, and Charles Burnett. However, his upcoming show at REDCAT on March 30 (a Tuesday event rather than the Theater’s typical Monday night film schedule) should expose more people to his own film, video, and performance work, and shouldn’t be missed.…

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Yuri Norstein in Los Angeles

Commentary, Special event

Word is quickly spreading that the man whom many regard as the world’s greatest living animator–Yuri Norstein–is making a brief US tour, with visits to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Olympia. My 23-month-old daughter routinely requests viewings of Hedgehog in the Fog, but I’ve been an admirer of Norstein’s work for years (and wrote about Clare Kitson’s biography in 2005).

Norstein is renowned for his attachment to his Russian homeland and his refusal to work abroad, so I was shocked several days ago to stumble upon the announcement of his visit to the University of …

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