Shorts, 10/27.

David Bordwell's Poetics of Cinema is out, and he's got all sorts of news about book sales and thoughts on whether or not he'll publish the next one as a book. As for this one, though:

I argue that we ought to study how films are constructed architecturally, as revealed for instance in plot structure or narration.... I want to know how filmmakers have confronted problems set by others, or created problems for themselves to solve. I want to know how they draw on the past to borrow or modify or reject creative strategies. I want to know filmmakers' secrets, including the ones they don't know they know. And I want to know how all this creative activity is shaped to the uptake of spectators in different times and places.

"Thousands of passers-by watched Doug Aitken's monumental video Sleepwalkers last winter when it was projected nightly across the facade of the Museum of Modern Art for nearly a month," writes Carol Vogel in the New York Times. "Now Mr Aitken is adapting Sleepwalkers for the Miami Art Museum's new building, designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron and scheduled to open in 2011."

"The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music." Reviewing Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, Geoff Dyer finds the point at which "the debate at the conceptual heart of Ross's undertaking is thrown into sharpest focus: is the history of music self-contained or can a larger, extramusical history be distilled from it? Actually, as Ross makes clear, the alternatives are mutually implicated and imbricated: 'precisely because of its inarticulate nature,' music is 'all too easily imprinted with ideologies and deployed to political ends.'" And here's another parallel with the history of film: "Who could have imagined that, as a 'surreal' consequence of the rise of fascism, many of the giants of European classical music - Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov and Otto Klemperer (to say nothing of Mann and Adorno) - would end up living on each others' doorsteps in Los Angeles?" The parallels, in fact, converge: "[S]coring music for films became one of the principal ways in which new orchestral music maintained a viable position in the cultural marketplace."

And this leads off a special music issue of the Book Review with all sorts of good stuff.

"Beautiful Sunday has encouraged me to watch out for Jin Kwang-kyo in the future," writes Adam Hartzell at Koreanfilm.org.

"Three women from Germany unexpectedly end up in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam over the holidays in Angelina Maccarone's assured drama Vivere," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"The similarities to Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her are striking." At chained to the cinémathèque, Dave McDougall offers a few thoughts on Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room.

For the Financial Times, Emily Stokes talks with François Ozon about Angel - and about why he became a filmmaker in the first place.

Monica Ali, who wrote the novel, Brick Lane, and Sarah Gavron, who directed the adaptation, "are responding to a public hunger for some insights into British-Bangladeshi life," editorializes the Guardian. "They are providing reportage from an under-reported community. There is a price for that, and it comes in treating one's subjects with greater care than if they were made up."

Also, Holly Griggs on Machinima.

Indiewood's faring far better this year than the Los Angeles Times tells it, argues David Poland at Movie City News.

Online urban adventure. Ray Pride's "Impact of the Cities."

Online viewing tip #1. That conversation between Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson.

Online viewing tip #2. Via Wiley Wiggins, the Zellner Bros's video for The Octopus Project.

Posted by dwhudson at October 27, 2007 3:04 PM