Shorts, 9/26.

"Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933), by Jean Vigo, had a massive impact on me," writes Steve McQueen (no, this Steve McQueen). "It's just 45 minutes long and depicts a rebellion in a French boys' boarding-school. The film says everything: it's inventive, it's magical, to some extent it is sexually ambiguous, it's political, it's bizarre and it has a great narrative at the same time. All these ingredients add up to something that's huge, almost too big." Also brought up in the "Life in Film" in this month's frieze: Andy Warhol's Couch and: "I shoot films, but I do other things; at the end of the day it's got to be about the ideas, not one particular medium."

"There are ghosts haunting Marco Williams's quietly sorrowful documentary Banished, about the forced expulsion of black Southerners from their homes in the troubled and violent decades after the Civil War," writes Manohla Dargis. "There is so much more to the story than can be told by this 87-minute movie, which only casts glances at Reconstruction, the question of reparations and the bitter, enduring, living legacy of slavery. Although Mr Williams somewhat overstates his case when he says that racial cleansing has 'remained hidden,' there's no denying that this ugly chapter deserves more than an occasional well-meaning documentary." More from Rob Humanick at Slant.

Also in the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz on Charlie, a movie with "guts and soul, and a keen appreciation of grown-up pain - qualities sorely lacking in American independent film today."

Most of us are aware of the danger in relying too heavily on photographs for a sense of final certainty as to what's actually happened. Proposing "a contest to the Times' readership," Errol Morris, in consultation with a handful of curators who've thought long and hard about a pair of photos taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War, presents two opposing views - or rather, two sets of views more or less in opposition - on the events of one day in 1855 and considers the varying implications should either side win out.

Yesterday, at the bottom of the entry on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I pointed Nick Dawson's interview with director Andrew Dominik for Filmmaker - but that entry's slipped, so I'm pointing to it again. Dominik considers the split critical reaction to his own film in light of the initial reception that met Raging Bull and Portrait of a Lady, champions Kubrick, particularly Barry Lyndon, and speculates about what he might do next.

Liv Ullmann "will star as a grandmother in the Norwegian film In a Mirror, In a Riddle, which is based on a novel by Jostein Gaarder," reports the Guardian. "Ullmann, whose most recent screen appearance was in Bergman's 2003 swansong Saraband, said she had not intended to act again, but had been swayed by the brilliance of the script." This will be her first Norwegian film in 38 years.

"Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter isn't the first global-warming horror film, and it surely won't be the last, but it's unlikely there will be a better one anytime soon - or a better horror movie this fall," writes Dennis Harvey, who also reviews Into the Wild for the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "As with the book, opinions may diverge on whether the protagonist was a tragic, noble dreamer or a chip-on-the-shoulder brat with a lot of self-mythologizing, imitative literary pretensions. Either way, this lyrical road trip - which bears the mark of heavy influence from Penn's The Thin Red Line director Terrence Malick - is compelling throughout." More on that one from Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

"It's a trifle, [The Trouble With Angels], and done on the cheap, but, oh, to have been a fly on the wall on that set," smiles the cinetrix.

"A film that is by turns shocking, observant, picturesque, and thought-provoking, The Violin is a moving expression of the tumultuous existence of countless Mexican lives," writes Doug Cummings.

Mr Shoop popped a quiz this summer; Dennis Cozzalio's got his answers now.

Not exactly film-related (though not entirely un-film-related, either; take a look at the TOC), but still: Leon Neyfakh in the New York Observer on the launch of Paper Monument:

Dushko Petrovich and Roger White did not think art was dead, but there was no question in their minds that it was seriously ill. The gallery shows they went to were dull and derivative, the writing they read in the big art magazines either thoughtless, breathless or reactionary. All anyone seemed to want to talk about was how a work blurred this or that distinction, or challenged this or that perception. "Then you'd go see the art," Mr Petrovich said last week, "and you'd think: It's not really doing that! It's actually behaving pretty conventionally."

Fed up but hopeful, the two painters decided to take action. And so, with help from their friends at n+1 - a literary journal founded in 2004 with the modest intention of broadly rehabilitating American thought - Mr Petrovich and Mr White set to work on a new magazine about contemporary art. They called it Paper Monument, and decided that it would come out twice a year.

Online browsing tip. Patrick at Creative Review on Scott King's How I'd Sink American Vogue at the Herald St gallery in London.

Online viewing tip. J'Attendrai Le Suivant at Subtitles to Cinema.

Posted by dwhudson at September 26, 2007 3:27 PM