Senses of Cinema. 44.

"As many of the articles that comprise this issue slowing unfurled over the past few months, in one way or another, they kept invoking [Jonas] Mekas [site] and his inestimable legacy," write Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray, introducing Senses of Cinema 44. "That in itself is not surprising given that the bulk of this issue is dedicated to what is variously referred to as avant-garde, experimental, underground, alternate or, as the French filmmaker and writer Raphaël Bassan puts it, 'different' cinema. As the interview that kicks off this edition of the journal justly testifies, Mekas is a living witness to that cinema in all its myriad history."

That interview is conducted by Brian L Frye, who, in his introduction, explains why Mekas is widely known as "the godfather of the American avant-garde cinema."

"Like Mekas before him, Bassan was instrumental, with others, in the establishment of the French filmmakers' co-operative movement in the early 1970s, which, as he freely admits, was based on Mekas' New York model," write Caputo and Murray. "As to Christian Lebrat, he is not only a filmmaker of considerable stature but also an active disseminator of critical writing on the avant-garde through his publishing house, Paris Expérimental....

In a different vein, Lebrat is also responsible for the recent publication of Sally Shafto's Zanzibar: The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968 [more], a volume that sheds light on one of the true blind spots in film history (certainly for those outside France). Though many may be familiar with individual careers - those of Philippe Garrel, Pierre Clémenti and Zouzou, for example - Shafto provides the invaluable work of bringing them together around the constellation of activity known as the Zanzibar collective and the cultural and political backdrop that defined them." And the book is reviewed by Keith Reader.

SoC 44 documents this network of influence in part by including Viviane Vagh's conversations with Bassan and Lebrat as well as her translations of Bassan's "Identity of Cinema: Experimental and Different" and Lebrat's "'I Have Always Been Attracted to Painting': Handwritten Notes Taken to Answer a Friend's Questions, Written in 1984."

"In the films of Stan Brakhage, we find a sympathetic and compatible cinematic analogue to [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty." Alex Cobb explains.

"Who is Michael Betancourt?" asks Rey Parla, introducing an interview. "For most artists, this is a simple question readily answered by looking at their artwork, but in the case of Betancourt it is complicated by the coexistence of a large, seemingly independent body of historical and theoretical writing that complicates any attempt to answer this question only by looking at his movies and other art." See also: Betancourt's avant-garde film and video blog, cinegraphic.net.

"Aside from a brief involvement with Bonnie and Clyde (eventually directed by Arthur Penn, 1967 [see, for example, Philip French's piece in today's Observer]), there is no area of Jean-Luc Godard's North American career in which Tom Luddy does not figure." Brad Stevens talks with Luddy about "a collaboration stretching back almost 40 years... fascinating, not just in terms of the films actually realised, but also of those that were never made, or left incomplete."

Tina Wasserman reviews Abigail Child's This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film: "Using film as a privileged site of theory and praxis, it is through the complexity of cinema - its ability to move through time and space as well as its capacity to incorporate sound and language -that gives Child an entry point from which to engage in an ongoing discourse on art, language and ideas."

"[W]e must piece together Artaud's revolutionary film theory from a number of unproduced film scenarios, a handful of essays and scarce interviews." Lee Jamieson does his part here and in his new book, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice.

JM Magrini has one of the few rather longish pieces in the issue. He aims to "clarify the Surrealists' position on cinema as the supreme aesthetic means by which to experience and know the world as it really is, in all of its mysterious and inexplicable sublimity, and to subsequently communicate this fragile, intuitive understanding through a 'new mode of pure expression.'"

It's an easy segue then to Sebastian Manley's consideration of Jan Svankmajer's Lunacy, "the director's finest and most penetrating foray yet into the forest of contradictions and cruelties that constitutes Western society today," and to Amir Mogharabi's essay on the Brothers Quay, whose puppetry "represents a reverse form of hysteria, in which the anatomical body affectively constructs and animates the fragmented body. Cinema is the medium through which the Brothers work. Simultaneously, cinema is the medium through which an impossibility inherent in psychoanalysis is surmounted."

Matthew Clayfield emails Ben Hackworth: "Perhaps one of my favourite things about Corroboree is the way you shot the interiors, creating a labyrinth out of the house and never allowing us to get our bearings within it. The choreography of entries into and exits out of the frame at different planes within the image - the rhythmic nature of which is realised best in the opening scene of the film, in the bus depot - is particularly impressive. In this, I was reminded - and I know I’m clutching at straws here! - of films as varied and diverse as those of Jacques Tati and James Benning."

SoC 44 also includes seven festival reports and six book reviews. There's one new addition to the Great Directors critical database this time around, Sandra Koponen on Tony Richardson.

Posted by dwhudson at August 26, 2007 9:32 AM