Fests and events, 10/10.

Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination is an exhibition at SFMOMA open through January 6 as well as an online environment developed by the Peabody Essex Museum, which you can experience even now. In San Francisco, though, there's also a film and video series, and that's what Matt Sussman previews for the Bay Guardian:

As with ballet, books, and music, film offered Cornell sustained aesthetic sustenance and pleasure. Though he approached filmmaking tentatively and always at a remove - his films are composed of preexisting footage, bits from films he had either collected or directed others to photograph - he had long been enraptured by the moving image, particularly in its earliest incarnations. Cornell and his invalid brother Robert had even met DW Griffith when they were young men, while America's burgeoning film industry was still largely based in New York. In a 1942 tribute to Hedy Lamarr published in View magazine, Cornell gushed unguardedly in florid prose about silent film's "profound and suggestive power... to evoke an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human countenance in its prison of silver light."

Update: More from Max Goldberg at SF360.

The Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival opens Friday and runs through October 21 and, at the Siffblog, Kathy Fennessy previews André Techiné's The Witnesses, "an elegy for lives lost in vain. And forgotten. 'Life-affirming' may be a stretch, but The Witnesses is anything but depressing."

Also, E Steven Fried: "I know very little of Michelle Johnson, but I adore her for the simple fact that she possesses a large collection of cult erotic films, has absolutely fucking impeccable taste in music and has utilized both resources to compile The Best of Lezsploitation." And: Vivere.

Big Vancouver roundups: Johnny Ray Huston at Pixel Vision (parts 1 and 2) and Josh Timmermann at PopMatters (parts 1 and 2).

"[I]t is a point of view, and if the NYFF likes to think of itself as an act of criticism, it's fair to consider what kind of critic it's trying to be." Nathan Lee assesses the final round of offerings. Also in the Voice, Ed Halter: "For the past few seasons, Anthology Film Archives has hosted the Walking Picture Palace, a roving series organized by [Views from the Avant-Garde] curator Mark McElhatten, which serves as a generous expansion pack for the uptown program, featuring additional works by Views artists, solo retrospectives, and related pieces. Since the programming at Views typically offers tight back-to-back group shows, the relatively casual format at Anthology allows more breathing room for the material, but otherwise the two events share enough of the same spirit that they've come to feel like an unofficial autumn film festival in their own right."

"Perfection is where great filmmakers eventually arrive. For Bresson it was a point of departure." Gilbert Adair urges Guardian readers to catch the Bresson retrospective at BFI Southbank, running through October 17.

Eugene Hernandez: "The first AFI Fest lineup under the programming leadership of new artistic director Rose Kuo has been announced for the upcoming AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival (November 1 - 11, 2007)." Doug Cummings has plucked a handful of titles he hopes to catch.

Back at indieWIRE, Doug Jones sends in a dispatch from Pusan, Brian Brooks sends another from Reykjavik and Susan Gerhard sends yet another from Vancouver.

In the Philadelphia Weekly, Matt Prigge talks with the founders of the Terror Film Festival (October 16 through 21); a list of other local goings on follows.

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Tom Huddleston previews a Danish entry lined up for the London Film Festival: "Proving that a reliance on cliché need never be a stumbling block as long as you have the wit, energy and intelligence to back it up, Island of Lost Souls is a superbly constructed and enormously likeable fantasy: my 12-year-old self would have eaten it up with a spoon, despite the subtitles." Also, "Garage is a bleakly comic study of a frustrated outsider living on the fringes of a small country town. But Garage is not tied to its obvious antecedents, blending the familiar with the wholly surprising, eschewing predictable sentimentality in favour of a warm, dry wit, and a steadily encroaching sense of impending, unavoidable tragedy."

Posted by dwhudson at October 10, 2007 2:17 PM