Fests and events, 11/25.

"At the 48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival in the north of Greece, the moderator for a 'DIY' Masterclass with Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs) and Ry Russo-Young (Orphans, in competition here) begins precisely with the dread 'M' word, which the pair ably dismiss." At Filmmaker, Ray Pride introduces a clip and then describes what all happened next.

Ben Slater is organizing and moderating a panel on film blogs for the Singapore Writers Festival, running December 1 through 9. Click his name for participants and linkage.

For the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty previews The Cinema of Max Ophuls, running at BAM from Wednesday through December 18:

The consistency of his themes and his visual motifs from the first movie in the series - the elegant romantic tragedy Liebelei, made in Germany in 1933 - to his last completed work, the elaborate picaresque called Lola Montes (1955), is striking. Echoes of Liebelei can be heard very clearly in the American Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) and then again five years later in the French Earrings of Madame de...; and Lola Montes seems, in its less felicitous moments, just a gaudier version of Ophuls's 1934 Italian melodrama La Signora di Tutti.

In all these pictures, and in La Ronde (1950) and Le Plaisir (1952) as well, love and honor are tricky, maddeningly slippery things, and the camera, you often feel, has no choice but to remain in motion, framing and reframing the intimate moral geography of the characters' constantly changing situations.

Brian Darr's got a list: "Ten reasons to come to the Silent Film Festival's winter program at the Castro Theatre this Saturday, December 1."

"The title to Douglas Gordon's exhibit currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now - could mistakenly give the impression that it's a single compression, a montage, of elements of various moving-image works by various creators from the past five years," writes Marc Weidenbaum at Disquiet. "In fact, the works in question are all Gordon's own, and they're displayed..., not as a constant stream but as an installation, a darkened and nearly silent room full of monitors of varying sizes, some equipped with headphones."

Posted by dwhudson at November 25, 2007 3:06 PM