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Class Relations

Film review

DaniËle Huillet passed away last year and although her filmmaking partner Jean-Marie Straub announced he won’t continue making films, their legacy lives on through not-fast-enough New Yorker DVD releases (last year’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach and this June’s Moses and Aaron) and implicitly through the work of contemporary filmmakers like Pedro Costa and Harun Farocki. Fans of Costa’s static but lush images, nonprofessional actors, social concerns, and elliptical narration are witnessing the spirit of Straub-Huillet firsthand. As Costa tells Thom Andersen in a recent issue of Cinema Scope: “They were the fastest, the most furious, the …

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Tekkon Kinkreet

Film review

Though they’ve been around since the mid-’80s, Studio 4°C is emerging as a pretty exciting Japanese animation house. Their 2004 genre-bending adventure Mind Game has already achieved cult status here, and Tekkon Kinkreet (screened Sunday at the VC film festival) could easily do the same: a lavish urban fantasy based on the acclaimed Black & White manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, it’s a work of rare technical ambition that also manages compelling drama.

Both films combine epic detail with psychedelic flourishes–their stories shift fluidly between real worlds and dream worlds, just as the animation is fixed between hand-drawn sketches and …

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Goethe-Institut and “Starring Berlin”

Commentary, Film festival, Film review

One of the cultural institutions here in Los Angeles that screens movies on a regular basis is the Goethe-Institut; currently, it’s showcasing “Starring Berlin,” a series featuring the capitol in 40 films, from Paul Leni’s Backstairs (1921) to Detlev Buck’s Tough Enough (2006). The series continues throughout the year.

I’ve known about the Goethe-Institut for a while, but never visited their facility until this week–and what a treasure it is. Just east of Wilshire and Fairfax, their Media Lounge alone contains hundreds of books, VHS tapes, and DVDs–largely arranged by filmmaker–with rarities like Wenders’ Kings of the Road, Fassbinder’s …

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Criticism: Food and Film

Commentary

The Pulitzer Prize for criticism was announced this week, and personally, I couldn’t be more delighted that for the first time in its history, it went to a restaurant critic: Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly, whose “Counter Intelligence” column has served as my homing beacon for food exploration and discovery ever since I moved to Los Angeles about six years ago.

This is one of the world’s great culinary cities, not necessarily because of indigenous cuisines, but because of its authentic and multifaceted ethnic imports; my stomping grounds in the San Gabriel Valley, for example, are widely regarded …

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Unknown Forces

Film review, Uncategorized

Last night at the REDCAT, Thai filmmaker (and graduate of Chicago’s School of the Art Institute) Apichatpong Weerasethakul opened his first solo exhibition in the US, entitled Unknown Forces (2007). A filmmaker who often blends narrative and experimental techniques (particularly structural innovation) in his feature films, I learned he also produces and distributes avant garde works through his company Kick the Machine, and has created several video installations for gallery spaces over the years.

Unknown Forces is set up in a bare, roughly 40-foot-square, darkened room, with four large, looping video images projected on three walls, and a …

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BAFICI, Wrap-up

Film festival


In Between Days

By Robert Koehler

Good, smart festivals–and BAFICI is one of them–can dole out terrible awards. The Saturday awards capping the final days (which I’ll be reflecting upon in postings to come) were no exception. I’ll be breaking down some of the results later, but the happiest result was unquestionably my international jury’s wise selection of So Yong Kim’s In Between Days for best film (with the nifty bonus of an acting award for the film’s beautifully instinctive lead actor, Jiseon Kim). Despite being a popular title on the festival circuit since Sundance ’06, Days had yet to …

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