Long weekend fests and events.

A little (but vital) history lesson from Holly Willis, who, for the LA Weekly, meets Chick Strand, "who will be the subject of a November 27 REDCAT tribute (at which she is scheduled to appear), was born in San Francisco in 1931 and discovered filmmaking through her friend Bruce Baillie, who started making experimental films in the early 1950s. Because Baillie had nowhere to show his efforts, he and Strand screened them at his house for friends, gradually augmenting the programs with work by other avant-garde filmmakers, including Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger. This effort eventually became the seminal experimental-film venue Canyon Cinema."

Not only are the Janus films out and about in that lovely DVD set, they're on screens here and there from coast to coast, too. For, well, IFC News, R Emmet Sweeney writes, "The IFC Center begins their series on November 22 with a new 35mm print of Agnès Varda's Cléo From 5 to 7, a French New Wave wonder from 1961 - also the year of François Truffaut's Jules and Jim and Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad."

More from Ed Halter in the Voice, where Nathan Lee recommends the Rossellini and Rivette retrospectives. Also: "Running from November 22 through 29, Give Thanks for John Ford puts the emphasis on westerns, the quintessential Ford genre, with special focus on the most monumental film ever shot in Monument Valley."

André Salas has another long weekend tip for New Yorkers at Filmmaker: "'Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You' Gotham Nominee Screenings."

The New Italian Cinema series has wrapped, but Michael Guillén has notes from a Q&A with Marco Bellocchio and a review of Good Morning, Night.

Dennis Harvey previews the Hiroshi Teshigahara mini-retro (at the Castro from Monday through Thursday) for SF360: "A couple of the films are world classics that have never been too difficult to track down. But the two others are rarely seen, and all remain fascinating testament to a distinctive, unpinnable talent."

Michael Gibbons at indieWIRE: "Turning 14 years old, the Mix Brasil Film and Video Festival of Sexual Diversity has grown from a fringe showing of alternative Brazilian cinema to a popular international queer film festival. Its flagship showing was Nov 9 - 19 in Sao Paulo, but the event will also tour to Rio de Janeiro, Niteroi, and Brasilia, with the sort of ambition that seems impossible with the shockingly low budget typical of a niche film festival. Logistical pressures alone make Mix Brasil a success worth celebrating, but the creative focus of its 2006 program - an expert balance between experimental and crowd-pleasing - is surely the festival's greatest strength."

Ray Pride's been snapping pix in Thessaloniki.

For the Austin Chronicle, Sofia Resnick surveys Sublime Lines: Japanese Anime, a series running on Tuesdays through December 19.

Peter Nellhaus sends a dispatch from the EU Film Festival in Thailand.

A mixed review at the Reeler from Paddy Johnson for Christian Jankowski's Us and Them, at The Kitchen through December 9.

"Film director and all-round renaissance man David Lynch will be the subject of a major exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris next year," reports the Guardian. "Entitled The Air Is on Fire, the show will feature painting, photography, sculpture and sound installations - and, of course, film."

"Cerith Wyn Evans's artistic career goes back to the London underground scene of the late 1970s, when he worked closely with the British filmmakers Derek Jarman and John Maybury and was a protagonist in the avant-garde film movement known as the New Romantics. During the 1980s, Evans worked on a number of experimental 8mm and 16mm films, in which he broke with the ascetic language of conceptual film and introduced a new form of visual opulence, theatricality and symbolic physicality into film discourse." The exhibition Cerith Wyn Evans... in which something happens all over again for the very first time is on view in Munich through February 25.

Online listening tips. Choosing from over 50 podcasts recorded during the Denver Film Festival, SpoutBlog selects just over a dozen of the best.

Posted by dwhudson at November 23, 2006 2:40 PM