Weekend fests and events.

Lon Chaney: Man of a Thousand Faces, a series at the Barbican in London introduced by Kevin Brownlow, is a fine occasion for a piece by Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent on the "shape shifter. Grotesques were his speciality. He could play hunchbacks, limbless gangsters, Dickensian villains, clowns, insane surgeons, old ladies and vampires. You never knew where you would see him next. 'Don't step on that spider,' director Marshall Neilan told a party guest. 'It might be Lon Chaney.'"

"Shakespeare's plays are so deeply encoded into the collective imagination that his influence on popular film-making, even if unconscious, is inescapable. Shakespeare helped perfect cinema's genre moulds 300 years before its birth." Daniel Rosenthal, author of 100 Shakespeare Films, preps Guardian readers for the Inspired by Shakespeare series (online exhibition). Through April 29.

"'What the Collective did was continue a number of the ideas that had developed in Ken Jacobs's class into a more public sphere that had to with showing more avant-garde films - and also slide shows and video in the context of all kinds of other work, Hollywood movies, ethnic movies and documentaries,' said filmmaker and critic Jim Hoberman, a former student at Binghamton and one of many Collective members taking part in this weekend's semi-retrospective On the Collective for Living Cinema at Anthology Film Archives." Karen Kramer reports for the Reeler.

"Searchers, Misfits, and Left-Handed Guns: Reinventing the Myth of the American West, a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, features 18 sagebrush sagas, produced between 1943 and 1995, that turned the genre on its ear," writes Susan King for the Los Angeles Times. April 13 through May 12.

"I was talking to a Deauville Festival official the other night, and he told me that they were keen on inviting some solid directors from India and exhibiting some serious Indian cinema," writes Gautaman Bhaskaran. "Two names that he mentioned: Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who is now shooting his 10th and 11th movie back-to-back in Kerala's Allepey district, and Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday. So, Deauville is not just about Bollywood and Krrish's out-of-this-world antics."

Also for the Lumière Reader, more coverage of New Zealand's World Cinema Showcase.

"[T]he Philippines and Malaysia are becoming homes to critical masses of young, extremely independent filmmakers," and in Robert Koehler's latest dispatch from the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival to filmjourney.org, he focuses on Filipino Raya Martin's The Island at the End of the World. Also, "Essential Argentine film of BAFICI (so far, it being only Day 4!): Rafael Filippelli's exquisite Musica Nocturna."

At the Hong Kong International Film Festival, David Bordwell catches five films by Paolo Gioli - and three more.

Posted by dwhudson at April 7, 2007 11:33 AM