Other fests, other events, 5/19.

Excavations of the Recordable World, a program screening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tomorrow evening in San Francisco, highlights the work of Brook Hinton and Katherin McInnis. Michael Guillén asks Hinton, "Why experimental cinema?"

Morgan Falconer relates "the story of how Warhol chanced upon the idea for his first film, Sleep, the five-and-a-half-hour epic that Tate Modern is screening this weekend in an extended 18-hour loop, along with a continuous live performance of Eric Satie's Vexations. It's a film that might be about many things - time in art, captured stillness and movement, the proximity of sleep to death - but the story of its inspiration seems, like a lot of the official explanations of Warhol's artworks, rather too neatly anecdotal."

Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent on the Maysles Brothers season at BFI Southbank: "The reason the Maysleses' films about celebrities seem so fresh is that the brothers treat Capote, Ali, John F Kennedy, Brando et al the same way as they do Edie Beale or the salesmen. They are like benign anthropologists." Through May 31.

The Little Rock Film Festival is on through tomorrow and Derek Jenkins, who guest-edited the excellent "Southern Movie Issue" of the Oxford American, blogging the fest for the Arkansas Times.

AJ Schnack has the lineup for the Newport International Film Festival (June 5 through 10).

Silverdocs is lined up. June 12 through 17.

The full lineup for the New York Asian Film Festival (June 22 through July 5) is in place. Canfield has the annotated list at Twitch.

At Cinema Strikes Back, Jeff points to a list of titles that'll be screening at the Japan Society's Japan Cuts festival in New York (July 5 through 15).

Fernando F Croce looks back on the San Francisco International Film Festival for Slant; David Walsh files the WSWS's third report.

Jake Meany does much the same for the Independent Film Festival of Boston and PopMatters.

In anticipation of the reopening of the Jeff Wall exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago on June 29 (through September 23), Arthur C Danto takes a good look at the first photograph, The Destroyed Room, and quotes Wall from the interview with James Rondeau included in the exhibition catalogue:

I had the feeling that it was possible to bring much of what I'd liked in the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s together with what I'd always liked about painting in a form of photography that, whatever faults it might have, would not start out accepting the existing canon. That was an intuition born out of seven or eight years of struggle, intellectual, emotional, artistic struggle, when I couldn't find my own way and went through periods of real desperation.

So, writing for the Nation, Danto picks that up and here's where he goes with it:

I'd like to stress how decisively against the grain of Clement Greenberg's characterization of the Modernist agenda this is. Greenberg contended that each of the arts should protect the boundaries of its medium, and exclude anything that belonged by rights to a different medium. Wall violated the boundaries of several different media (painting, photography and cinema) and even went back into the early Modernist painting of the nineteenth century - in order to find what he needed to address the subjects that concerned him. It is this, in my view, that makes him, along with William Kentridge, one of the paradigmatic artists of our age.

Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2007 12:03 PM