Brooklyn Rail. March 08.

Genevieve Yue introduces what cinephiles will certainly consider to be the centerpiece of the new issue of the Brooklyn Rail: "In February 2003, I had the opportunity to transcribe the audio recordings that Pip Chodorov had taped for his film, A Visit to Stan Brakhage, a brief, 15-minute portrait film of the great American avant-garde filmmaker, commissioned for French television. The interview was to be Brakhage's last.... Brakhage made the case for cinema he'd been making in over 400 films for the past 52 years: the case for a personal cinema, visual poems of pure light, the reaches of vision itself."

Williams Cole on War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death: "The main idea is that, ever since Spiro Agnew declared his disdain for the 'nattering nabobs of negativism' otherwise known as the media, politicians (especially those in the GOP) have taken an aggressive and dismissive tone towards the media while also working to manipulate news coverage. Even so, it's still shocking to see a concentrated dose of pandering and sycophant-laden journalism that arises in the build-up to war."

"Perhaps [Zeitgeist] is successful in opening viewers' eyes to the world around them, and the possibility of systemic oppression, but it attacks a loosely concocted and vague group of elites, using obviously false information and doing logical acrobatics to construct its theory, while ignoring the reality of forms of systemic oppression like racism and sexism," writes Owen Roberts. "Like all conspiracy theories, it taps into the powerlessness felt by the masses. But in the end, it seems that Zeitgeist exists more as a way for Peter Joseph, and whoever else was involved in the film, to break into the entertainment industry than as a call to real political action."

"Jar City shares with Insomnia and the Pusher trilogy a believable, tragic sense of ever-present doom and an atmosphere in which every action - except those that stave off existential nausea by way of degraded kicks - is demonstrably meaningless," writes David N Meyer.

"No discussion of contemporary Japanese cinema is complete without the mention of maverick movie star Tadanobu Asano." And David Wilentz talks with him. Also, an overview of Gamblers, Gangsters and other Anti-Heros: The Japanese Yakuza Movie, a series running through April 17 at the Asia Society.

"Based on the Chinese hit, Gin Gwai, The Eye provides alarming insight into Western death anxiety," writes Sophie Gilbert.

"Discussing his art, [Goran] Paskaljević once said, 'The beauty of film for me is its closeness to life. And if it is going to reflect life faithfully, it has to draw on metaphor, just like poetry.'" Lu Chen looks back on January's retrospective at MoMA.

Br Cleve revisits Payday, "a great little character study film that found a niche audience in the early 70s, before the age of the blockbuster."

"In Moolaadé, Africa's patriarchal culture shows its tragic flaw in the violence it inflicts upon its women and young girls through the mutilation of their bodies," writes Makenna Goodman. "And as [Ousmane] Sembene said, 'The development of Africa will not happen without the effective participation of women. Our forefathers' image of women must be buried once for all.'"

Posted by dwhudson at March 16, 2008 6:35 PM