Other fests, other events, 9/1.

Bumbershoot, Seattle's Music & Arts Festival, launches today and carries on through the Labor Day Weekend. The Stranger's got a big guide and a short piece by Annie Wagner on the film program, which "includes a good deal of experimental work" this year.

Then, besides Annie Wagner on Pierrot le Fou and Jen Graves on Manhattan, the Stranger's string-'em-up film page this week features Charles Mudede on A Day at the Beach. You've got to read that one. As he says, "Few films are as genuinely strange as Beach."

As noted earlier, the Chicago Cinema Forum is screening Roberto Rossellini's India Matri Bhumi this weekend. In the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the film "a sublime symbiosis of fable and nonfiction that poetically interrelates humans and animals, city and village, society and nature.... India can be regarded as the pinnacle of Rossellini's richest period, his crowning masterpiece. Jean-Luc Godard once referred to it as 'the creation of the world,' and unlike many other films about India made by Westerners - Jean Renoir's The River (1951) is prototypical - it can't be accused of either presumption or pretension."

Meanwhile, Chicagoans, take note: "Béla Tarr at Facets!" Sunday, September 16.

"The story of the British documentary film movement is crammed with odd details: it is a story of herrings and cocoa, fairies and telephones, Christmas puddings and killer rats," writes Kevin Jackson in the Guardian:

It is also the story of how a handful of scruffy, brainy, workaholic young malcontents somehow managed - by intention, accident, improvisation and sheer inventiveness - to create some new types of film and new ways of film-making. Though they have never been remotely as famous as, say, Hitchcock or Chaplin or David Lean, their influence has been incalculably deep and lasting. For decades, film historians all around the world have been contending that the movement's members made Britain's most significant contribution to cinema. This month they are celebrated in a welcome season at the BFI.

Documentary centenaries runs throughout September.

"Between September 5 and 9, Films at the Gate will be showing free Chinese-language films in the open air in the heart of Boston's Chinatown," notes Cinema Strikes Back.

In the Los Angeles Times, Agustin Gurza reports on a 14-minute short you watch in a planetarium: "Gronk's BrainFlame visualizes the creative process at a cellular level by entering the mind of the artist at the moment ideas are born. Gronk, known for his dramatic installations and performance pieces, took two years to develop the digital project, considered a cutting-edge experiment in the melding of art, science and technology."

Also, Susan King talks with the Alloy Orchestra about their accompaniment of a screening of Lonesome, "one of the few American films directed by Hungarian Paul Fejos, [which] had languished in obscurity for years until Telluride resurrected it." September 14.

The UK is about to get a full-on wallop of Matthew Barney, with the DVD release of Matthew Barney: No Restraint on September 24, the limited theatrical release of Drawing Restraint 9 four days later and an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery running September 20 to November 11. Kaleem Aftab offers a primer in the Independent. Somewhat related: the September issue of Art Review.

The Austinist has what Matt Dentler describes as a "hefty update" (it is) on the 20th edition of the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival. September 28 through October 6.

At Twitch, Mack's got the first seven titles lined up for the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. October 19 through 25.

"While attending my one day at the first American Cinematic Experience Film Festival I saw signs that the two runners of the festival, Tom O'Malley and Luke Szczygielski, got a lot right with their first run," reports William Speruzzi.

In the New Statesman, Alyssa McDonald looks back to Edinburgh - especially the shorts.

Posted by dwhudson at September 1, 2007 12:30 PM