Mitteleuropa, West.

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't the only Austrian on Californian minds these days. In the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas reviews Ulrich Seidl's Dog Days, then touches on Ruth Mader's Struggle...

Ruth Mader's Struggle

Brushes the work of Michael Haneke, Barbara Albert and Nikolaus Geyrhalter and writes:

The push-and-pull between heightened realism (what Herzog calls "ecstatic truth") and exploitation is at the heart of an entire wave of recent Austrian films that have taken, as their whole or partial subject, this essential dilemma: how to survive in a culture where we are constantly consuming images that tell us how we should live our lives, or becoming the images ourselves. (There is also a certain predilection for using shopping malls as the locations for sex orgies, but that's a discussion best held for another time.)... Collectively, these films are cause for excitement."

A bit further up the coast, Mark Nichol blurbs the Berlin & Beyond fest in San Francisco; amazingly, it's the ninth: "Also, nearly one-third of the films deal with immigrants and interracial relationships, eloquently demonstrating that Germans are striving to come to terms with the ever-growing presence of foreign residents in their nation."

There is, oddly enough, a German connection to Sandi Tan's piece in the LA Weekly on UCLA's Anna May Wong retrospective as well. The path is not direct, but follow closely: You go to the Archive's calendar, find the words "Rediscovering Anna May Wong" and click: "Like many of her African American colleagues, she sought greater opportunities in Europe, where she made three remarkable silent pictures, including the glorious and newly restored Piccadilly, which opens our program, and two German films, Song and Pavement Butterfly, with director Richard Eichberg. Wong's collaboration with Eichberg recalls Louise Brooks' films with GW Pabst (also included in this Calendar)." Hm.

"At 75, Yacef doesn't look much different from the handsome, charismatic figure preserved in the grainy black and white film. It's tough to reconcile the fact that this man, dressed in a black sports coat and turtleneck, armed with a warm smile and quick laugh, once helped kill French civilians on a daily basis." Salon's Christopher Farah meets and interviews Saadi Yacef, who wrote the book The Battle of Algiers would be based on - and starred in the film as well. See also: Ella Taylor's review, and before we leave the LA Weekly altogether: Christsine Pelisek on Jason Roe, co-editor and designer of "an edgy national DVD zine, Remote, which features music videos, video art and short documentaries."

"After an hour I went in, and said to Kiarostami, 'I like this story. I think I want to do a film about it.' Abbas said, 'In that case, I will do the script for you.'" Jafar Panahi has a fine long talk with Nick Dawson in indieWIRE.

Siddharth Srivastava in Planet Bollywood on the very idea that Aishwaria Rai might kiss Pierce Brosnan in the next Bond film: "A kiss in this country is big deal. It has affected relations between India and Pakistan, although at most times it takes much less."

In the New York Times:

Caryn James: "Splitting. Screens. For Minds. Divided." is the title; 5-alarm sentence: "Television and movies are echoing the cluttered screens of the Internet."

If you thought Tanner '88 was just the beginning, Jim Rutenberg confirms your worst fears and giddiest projections.

Jennifer Dunning previews the Dance on Camera Festival 2004.

In the Spectator, Rob White reviews Emily King's Movie Poster, a book that reproduces, along with hundreds of others, the original poster for Sergei Eisenstein's October, featuring the face of Trotsky before Stalin began revising history (and Trotsky's destiny) and the poster was ditched for another. James Goodwin in Screening the Past: When fifty years later [Eisenstein collaborator Grigori] Alexandrov published his memoirs, whose reliability is in many respects questionable, he claimed that Stalin personally intervened and censored the film in the course of a 4 am visit to the editing room on the anniversary day of the Revolution."

Anyway. Some purges are more momentous than others. Like Eugene Hernandez in indieWIRE, Jeffrey Wells sees foreshadowing of Bingham Ray's departure from the MGM fold as president of United Artists in the final pages of Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures:

Friction had been especially heated between Ray and MGM CEO Yemenidjian, who was so angry about Ray's militant anti-MPAA position that he told Ray during a late October phone conference he had "a choice between shutting up and getting out." There was a pause after Yemenidjian delivered the ultimatum. He said to Ray, "Are you still there?" Ray replied a la Jack Benny, "I'm thinking."

Wells's current column in Movie Poop Shoot also offers another opportunity segue into the lists again, though this one's not a year-ender. "The Top 100 MVP's - Most Valuable Players" runs in the February issue of Empire and "since my original copy ran a bit longer than what was published I'm running a 'writer's cut' version, just for inclusion's sake." Halves 1 and 2.

How could we have forgotten to point Harry Knowles's 2003 list? Especially when he reminds us what makes Harry Harry and why we're glad he's around. Bits and CAPS like this:

Personal Favorite Film Experience of 2003:

Watching TEENAGE MOTHER happen to the BNAT 5 audience. It was bliss. I have been told that I resembled a mad scientist whose creation was killing all the right people while this film played. As I have stated, this is the single greatest work of cinematic terrorism that I have ever seen. That PARAMOUNT PICTURES ever released it is astonishing. Must be seen with a packed unsuspecting audience to truly get the desired effect. To have picked this film out of the list of the 60 some odd obscure exploitation titles that Tim League had recently acquired... then see it play out the way it did... BLISS.

Kung Fu Cinema will be announcing their awards at the end of the month, but their nominations are already up.

Meanwhile, the not-to-be-confused-with Kung Fu Cult Cinema is being updated again. News items galore to read about over there: Five Deadly Venoms remastered; a second volume on Takashi Miike from Tom Mes; an update on Clean, reuniting (well, professionally, anyway) Maggie Cheung and Oliver Assayas; the next John Woo; Jackie Chan possibly leaving Hollywood for good, forever, amen. Would be a terrific trend to start, wouldn't it.

Latest Guardian quiz: "How well do you know the Coppolas?" I have to admit that cinetrix did slightly (but only slightly!) better than I did. Also:

Molly Haskell introduces the Dorothy Arzner retro at the National Film Theatre in London.

J Hoberman on the 60s, "a period in America when movies were political events and political events were experienced as movies." (And we can look forward to David Edelstein and AO Scott discussing Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties in a future "Book Club" at Slate).

Jonathan Jones: "Vermeer painted more than two centuries before the invention of cinema, but he anticipated the way films make a world and fill it with light."

"Is there an inherent flaw in a socio-economic system whereby everything gets bigger and bigger until it collapses under its own weight?" John Boorman argues in the Age that the blockbuster will kill Hollywood. To hear his arguments, you'd think he's right, but you know, we've been hearing similar arguments for decades now. Via Movie City News, which also points to a Saul Landau's take on The Fog of War and the not-so-surprising news that, for all the other positive signals coming out of Turkey recently, a screening of Atom Egoyan's Ararat there has been indefinitely postponed.

The FLOW Foundation will unveil its first annual Black History Month Film & Discussion series in Washington DC, highlighting, among a zillion other things, Steven Torriano Berry's 50 Most Influential Films in Black History.

Posted by dwhudson at January 9, 2004 4:32 PM