Film Comment. Sept/Oct 07.

I'm Not There has now screened at Telluride and Venice and it's on its way to Toronto before heading to the New York Film Festival, so it's hardly a surprise that there's a piece on it in the new issue of Film Comment. The surprise, and a pleasant one it is, too, is that it's online.

And as he's mentioned at Thompson on Hollywood, Larry Gross has written it, calling the film "a Finnegans Wake-like meditation on Sixties film culture.... I'm Not There says, among other things, that the presence of politics in works of art, like the presence of the artist's personality, is at once unavoidable and virtually inexpressible. The audacity, beauty, and complexity of Haynes's ironic celebration-and-critique are, quite literally, unlike anything you've ever seen before."

Another film high on the list of this season's must-sees drawn up, pruned and perpetually tended by most like you and me is Eastern Promises. Amy Taubin talks with David Cronenberg about it, but also brings up the short he contributed to Chacun son cinéma, which in turn, leads him another thought: "The current biggest provider of snuff pornography is the Muslim extremist movement. Remember when Al Goldstein from Screw magazine offered $50,000 if someone could bring him a real snuff film, and no one could? Now they're everywhere, and most involve beheadings and throat slitting, and once again, as in Eastern Promises, it's very sexual, very intimate. And needless to say, very disturbing."

Amy Taubin also calls out for a distributor for Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi's Actresses.

"The five features and nine shorts made by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade constitute one of the major oeuvres of Brazil's Cinema Novo," writes Olaf Möller. "Their poetics are a shock to the system: playful, lewd, spontaneous, courting controversy, juggling contradictions, panegyrical even in their condemnations, and entirely political."

In Guy Maddin's "Jolly Corner" this month is Felix E Feist's 1933 Deluge: "[B]y picture's end its hordes of devolved savages are inundating the screen with depictions of lawlessness every bit as sleepy and deliciously zombified as Max Ernst's clunky bandits in Buñuel's L'Age d'or."

Posted by dwhudson at September 4, 2007 4:05 PM