Fests and events, 10/24.

"There are few films one can, in all seriousness, call perfect," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "A personal list might include Sunrise, Rear Window, a few films by Fellini and Bresson, and that's about it. Except there's Russian visionary Sergei Parajanov's 1964 masterpiece Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors." And it opens on Halloween for a week-long run at BAM Rose Cinemas.

As noted in some dark obscure corner of "Books" entry days and days ago, War and Peace is haunting the zeitgeist again, primarily because two translations have just appeared (New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus is currently moderating a discussion of one), but also because Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate is back on our minds as well (it's just appeared for the first time in German, for example, and the papers over here are agog). As John Lanchester writes in the current issue of the London Review of Books, "War and Peace hangs over Grossman's book as a template and a lodestar, and the measure of Grossman's achievement is that a comparison between the two books is not grotesque." But that's not all: "Sergei Bondarchuk's seven hour epic is currently enjoying an ultra-rare theatrical run at New York's Film Forum - with a national tour certain to follow," writes Kevin Lee, introducing an entry on Part III. Naturally, this follows entries on Parts I and II.

"When will we finally see a Peter Hutton retrospective in France?" Cyril Neyrat writes a journal entry from the Viennale for Cahiers du cinéma.

For the Voice, Nick Pinkerton previews New French Films: "BAMcinématek's five-film showcase - the latest incarnation of an annual series that premieres a selection of recent French films as yet without stateside distribution - offers an alternative to the brand-name auteur output and harmless, dorky comedies that routinely make the Atlantic crossing."

"As we docu-nerds know, there exists a thriving community of documentary aficionados in our city, and [Thom] Powers saw an opening to 'build continuity from the past to the present,' conceptualizing a night at which 'film is half the experience, and the other half is the discussion.'" For the L Magazine, Danielle DiGiacomo has an overview of the Stranger Than Fiction series running Tuesdays at the IFC Center.

"Much of [William E] Jones's work has an air of intended distance - it can range in effect from the warm, generous irony of 1997's Finished to the sensual parsimony of 2004's too-tentative Is It Really So Strange? - but his new film [Tearoom], also screening this week, is so detached that he didn't even make it." Jason Shamai previews a weekend of screenings at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey previews a screening of The Silencers, starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm: "In Donald Hamilton's original books Helm is a tough customer involved in relatively realistic adventures. But the Helm movies - the prime inspiration for Austin Powers - are consummate 60s expressions of Playboy middle-class-male masturbation fodder, surrounding the leather-skinned, martini-slurred star (Martin's line readings often suggest he'd been propped up for the take) with chesty starlets half his age, clad in the loudest possible peekaboo showgirl or allegedly mod attire." At the Mechanics' Institute on Friday.

Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding "screens at the UCLA film archive this week, and it's not to be missed as a rare and important portrait of black, lower-middle class life in south central Los Angeles during the early-80s," writes Doug Cummings; "its seriocomic tragedy suggests provocative consequences to the kind of existential pressures so memorably introduced in Killer of Sheep]."

The Chicago Korean Film Festival runs from November 1 through 4.

In San Francisco, Extraordinary Cinema from Asia: Classic to Contemporary, November 8 through 18.

Beur is Beautiful: Maghrebi-French Filmmaking, November 10 and 11 in New York; via Robert Cashill.

To Die in Jerusalem opens the Paley Center for Media's documentary festival tonight before HBO broadcasts it on November 1. In the New York Times, Elizabeth Jensen tells the story behind the doc about the mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber and the mother of an Israeli victim of that bomb.

Posted by dwhudson at October 24, 2007 4:12 PM