GreenCine Daily: Fests and events, 6/11.

June 11, 2007

Fests and events, 6/11.

"A deranged man escapes from prison to seek revenge on the woman who put him there in A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)," writes David Jeffers at the Siffblog. "Revealed in flashbacks and punctuated with rapid montage, this late silent era film displays the mastery of visual narrative achieved just prior to 'the talkies' using lurid metaphor and a minimal number of intertitles." Screens Wednesday at the Seattle International Film Festival and Sunday, July 15, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

"Luke DuBois's Academy takes each Oscar winner for Best Picture of the past 75 years and compresses it into a single minute," writes Matt Riviera. "The result, 75 feature films in 75 minutes, is a mind-bending assault on the senses and an accelerated journey through American cinema history." Example: Titanic. More reviews from the Sydney Film Festival: How Is Your Fish Today? and La Vie en Rose.

"Frameline's SF International LGBT Film Festival arrives in June every year with a surplus of films to please and displease its extremely involved San Francisco audiences, and that's the way the festival likes it." At SF360, Susan Gerhard talks with programming directors Michael Lumpkin and Jennifer Morris. Thursday through June 24.

In the New York Times:

The Blob

"On July 13 - a Friday, no less - the Blob makes a homecoming of sorts at BlobFest, a two-day rolling carnival of horror in downtown Phoenixville [PA], where part of the movie was filmed," writes Franz Lidz. "With about 5,000 people expected this year, attendance keeps swelling, much as the Blob once did."
Stuart Klawans previews the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, running Friday through June 28 at the Walter Reade: "A verifiable theme — a highly appropriate one too — has come together at this festival's core, in films that both praise and challenge the role of photography in human rights."
Jason Zinoman previews It's Only a Movie: Horror Films From the 1970s and Today, a series running at the Museum of the Moving Image from Saturday through July 22: "The retrospective is based on the idea that the renaissance of scary movies, sometimes called torture porn, has been inspired by the golden age of horror, when mainstream directors like Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick made some of their finest work and genre masters like Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and [Wes] Craven (all of whom are represented in the festival) got their start."

Annaliese Griffin listened in on the Four Independents That Turned the Tide panel at BAM - Albert Maysles, Barbara Kopple, Nick Broomfield and Raoul Peck - and reports back to the Reeler. And the Film Panel Notetaker has, well, notes on an evening with Maysles.

"I wish I could provide an objective perspective on Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, but the experience of seeing it on the big screen at the Egyptian, with the orchestral accompaniment, the foley artists and Barbara Steel's magnificent narration was such an ecstatic one that you probably should take it at face value when I say that the film may well be Maddin's masterpiece (Heart of the World aside, of course)," writes David Lowery. "At the same time, I don't think there's even been a more perfect presentation of the man's work; the pure theatricality, the showmanship of the live performance elevates Maddin's style to delirious new heights."