Fests and events, 5/9.

Universal Language & the Avant-Garde, an exhibition featuring works by Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter and Jonas Mekas, opens tomorrow at the Maya Stendhal Gallery and runs through July 28.

The series Radical Scavenger: The Films of Emile De Antonio runs at the Anthology through Sunday and Reverse Shot is running an interview with the filmmaker conducted by Sam Szurek in 1987 in which "Antonio opens up about film, politics, and his past in the New York art scene of the 60s and 70s."

"With little or no market for experimental filmmaking, the scene consists of only the most devoted individuals, with nothing to lose from saying whatever they wish. The art they create can thereby be rough or polished, face-slappingly blunt or poetically subtle, stridently collectivist or stewed in lonely isolation," writes Ed Halter. "For Life Against the War... Again, a recent omnibus produced in response to Iraq, includes all these extremes, but nevertheless coalesces into a potent time capsule of how today's war has churned our inner lives." At the Anthology Friday through Sunday.

Also in the Voice:

• Nathan Lee: "A revolutionary romantic, the poet of rough trade and rhapsodic annihilation, Genet incubates a transgressive, hallucinatory tradition: Pasolini, Fassbinder, João Pedro Rodrigues." Jean Genet on Film runs at BAM May 14 through 22.

• Charles Petersen on Looking for an Icon, screening with The Day You'll Love Me at the Film Forum through May 22: "Made to honor the 50th anniversary of the 'World Press Photo of the Year,' this documentary fails as both birthday present and theoretical inquiry." More from Matt Zoller Seitz in the NYT.

• And starting with the Museum of the Moving Image's four-weekend retro (May 12 through June 10), J Hoberman, surveys another rich week in NYC.

Harold Pinter is "the wordsmith who taught culture that dramatic arenas are by definition built out of presumption, questionable faith, and the bottomless mystery of language," writes Michael Atkinson in the Boston Phoenix. "The nailbiting bridge between Beckett and Mamet in his plays, Pinter has at the same time been happy to subsume his stylizations to the service of other visions. It's unlikely that any other screenwriter has adapted as many eminent authors: Kafka, Fitzgerald, Bowen, Hartley, Fowles, Atwood, McEwan, etc, though sometimes the results have resembled the work of any dozen other hyper-literate British writers. As laid bare in the Harvard Film Archive retrospective that starts this Sunday, Pinter's career in movies is spotty."

Isabella Rossellini has come to London to open the retrospective of her father's work at BFI Southbank; Geoff Andrew has a long talk with her for the Guardian. Richard Gibson has a couple of pix.

At Twitch, Jon Pais sees Werner Herzog retros heading to New York (May 18 through June 7) and Munich (June 22 through 30).

Matt Riviera previews the Sydney Film Festival (June 8 through 24).

At indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks look over the lineup for the LA Film Festival (June 21 through July 1).

Posted by dwhudson at May 9, 2007 2:36 PM