Brooklyn Rail. 10/06.

"Now, you know the title of the book is The Impulse to Preserve," filmmaker Robert Gardner tells Brooklyn Rail interviewer Brian L Frye. "And the rest of Philip Larkin's line there is 'lies at the bottom of all art.'... And we can never share exactly our experiences. You can't have my experience, I can't have your experience. I may be able to experience you having an experience, but what good is that? I can't get inside your skull. And this is the dilemma of all filmmaking."

From October 26 through 29, Film Forum presents Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund: A Tenth-Anniversary Film Festival, and Williams Cole, for one, is celebrating: "Since it began, the Fund has supported films like the Academy Award-nominated Long Night's Journey Into Day, about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee; Calling the Ghosts, which considers the plight of Bosnian women who were victims of rape during the war in Yugoslavia; and Life and Debt, an examination of the IMF's negative impact on Jamaica."

Thomas Micchelli: "Only after cinema has freed itself from linear narrative can it do justice to the multifaceted, fluid and metacritical phenomenon we define as reality. Or so goes the premise of the alternately frustrating and fascinating book, Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative: 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken."

Erin Durant traces the lines between Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" and Old Joy.

Sarahjane Blum: "The Black Dahlia isn't about The Black Dahlia, and it isn't about sex."

Nora Griffin on Andy Warhol: A Documentary: "Critical analysis has never resembled a cheerleading squad quite so distinctly as in [Ric] Burns's film."

Sara Mayeux: "The hard-boiled, creepy Capote of Capote deserved whatever he got. The Capote of Infamous is harder to fault. Barely hiding his insecurities beneath a caviar-and-scotch veneer, this Capote doesn't stand a chance in negotiation with the devil."

"The Protector seems content with recycled ideas," writes David Wilentz of Panna Rittikrai's actioner with Tony Jaa, "often informed by Jackie Chan's later, less inspired films."

Posted by dwhudson at October 19, 2006 1:41 AM