frieze. 106.

"In a contemporary art world characterized by exploration of the documentary, the archival impulse, the resurgent interest in the video essay, collective collaboration and the possibilities for alternative pedagogy, the cine-cultural practice of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) could not be more timely," write Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar in the new issue of frieze. "The title of their current retrospective, The Ghosts of Songs, which we curated, hints at the temporal hypothesis of the exhibition. Can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?"

Runa Islam has a series of lovely notes on Warhol and Dreyer; Raúl Ruiz's Tres tristes tigres (Very Sad Tigers); Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her); Antonioni's L'Avventura; Tarkovsky's Solaris; Tati's Playtime; Marco Ferreri's Ciao maschio (Bye Bye Monkey); three by Polanski, Hitchcock's Rope and Michael Haneke's Benny's Video; Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing; Buñuel's Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie; Dennis Hopper's "incredible, underrated" The Last Movie; Welles's F for Fake; Kiarostami's Close-Up; and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

"After 30 years, the Anthology Film Archives in New York will publish the second volume of a vast bibliographical project, The Legend of Maya Deren. Melissa Gronlund celebrates:

Deren's films of the 1940s were a bridge between the tightly controlled exercises of early European avant-garde film, whose production had mostly stopped during World War II, and the improvisatory, personal cinema of the New York and San Francisco avant-garde of the 1960s. The work was serious and ambitious: Deren aimed for the measured rhythm of myth and ritual, and her remit was the expression of universal truths. Although links can be made between, particularly, her enactment of the "trance" film, which depicts a psycho-sexual quest, and later filmmakers, for whom this model was seminal, Deren is above all a Modernist filmmaker, concerned with the integrity of form and medium.

Catrin Lorch reviews the video work of Mathilde ter Heijne, who "has twice chosen to devote pages from her own catalogues to conduct interviews with various women: she talked to theorist Elizabeth Bronfen about life, love, death and the female corpse, Margarethe von Trotta on what it means to be a feminist filmmaker, and various other women about natural disasters, fatal love, the Bronze Age, contemporary terror, and the representation of domestic violence in interactive theater."

"Probably the most burning question on everyone's mind is: why did you decide to organize a show on Feminism at this particular moment in time?" Amelia Jones asks Connie Butler about WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Through July 16. Similarly, Polly Staple, Kristin M Jones, Belinda Bowring, Jenni Sorkin and Roland Kapferer's interview with Saskia Sassen.

Jörg Heiser reviews the Dreamgirls soundtrack, oddly enough, but primarily as a defense of Beyoncé Knowles and her "critically under-acclaimed album B-Day": "There is a spoken-word interlude on her record in which she explains how it came about 'effortlessly' after finishing the film, 'because I was so inspired by Deena, I wrote songs that were saying all the things I wish she would've said in the film.' A little voice inside my head translates this as: 'The behavior assigned to Deena pissed me off so much that I had to set the record straight immediately.' Exactly."

"'This body is the city/this city is my body' ran the tag line, which, as tag lines go, was pretty effective. (Although, since when does a new art work have a tag line? Or, for that matter, a citywide advertising campaign?)" wonders Steven Stern. "As it happened, Sleepwalkers opened on the first brutally cold night of a previously balmy, global-warming-era winter - the kind of night when all sane residents try to keep their bodies as distinct from the city as humanly possible."

"What film has most influenced you?" frieze asks Mark Wallinger. "I like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton - artists creating the form - and the early Bruce Nauman studio videos."

Hardly film-related, but still: "On being an American in Europe by Robert Storr."

Posted by dwhudson at April 5, 2007 7:05 AM