July 12, 2004

Rouge. 3.

In 1970, Simon Hartog brought together Pierre Clémenti, Miklos Janscó, Glauber Rocha and Jean-Marie Straub for a conversation later translated by John Mathews and published in Cinematics. Now, the invaluable online journal Rouge kicks off its third issue with the discussion that has definitely yellowed in some of its corners, but in others... well, here's this, for example, from Rocha:

The Surrealists

The principle of the art-house circuit is reactionary today, because it imposes a certain type of film and tends to create its own closed market. Right from the script to its projection, a film is earmarked 'art-house', and this is very bourgeois, very reactionary, very elitist.... And the public coming to see the film does so with a very snobbish attitude.

Paul Hammond examines "the most obscure and pivotal - nay, cataclysmic - period of Buñuel’s life: the 1930s." That's Buñuel, by the way, second from the right on the top row over there, among his fellow Surrealists of the day.

Last year (or thereabouts), the a_film_by list saw a rambunctious thread on William Friedkin's Cruising; Bill Krohn's essay on the film, in part a reaction to another he quite likes by Robin Wood, seems informed by that discussion.

Raymond Bellour's essay on Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) is followed by Moinak Biswas's on the filmmaker: "Ghatak never made the political films a sworn Marxist like him would be expected to make."

Meaghan Morris contextualizes Tracey Moffatt's Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy.

Shortish, relatively speaking:

And then a pictorial juxtaposition from Darren McDonald.



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Posted by dwhudson at July 12, 2004 1:25 PM