Frieze. April 08.

The "Life in Film" column in this new issue of frieze is a particularly good one. Hito Steyerl looks back to her days at what's now called the Japan Academy of Moving Images: "Though its educational standards were lousy, Imamura [Shohei]'s school was one of the very few places in the world where the works of Japanese avant-garde documentary filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s could be seen. Inspired by sources as varied as Oshima Nagisa's Nihon No Yoru To Kiri (Night and Fog in Japan, 1960), Ogawa Shinsuke's Seishun No Umi (Sea of Youth, 1966) or Terayama Shuji's Tomato Ketcchappu Kôtei (Emperor Tomato Ketchup, 1971), and rooted in the massive and often militant political movements of the time, the films of the New Left mixed the personal and the political in vital, sometimes also wildly inappropriate and explosive, combinations."

Alexander Kluge "has become one of the most productive protagonists of New German Cinema, alongside Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, outpaced only by Fassbinder," argues Bert Rebhandl. "Since the release of a comprehensive 16-disc DVD box set, which contains all of Kluge's feature films and abundant bonus material, it is possible to observe the unique evolution of an artist who started out as a lawyer (seemingly remembering the judicial aspects of his trade when the time came to pounce on a loophole in broadcasting law) and went on to become a filmmaker, philosopher, author and media mogul."

"To understand America one must understand its Western Dreaming," writes Mark Mordue. "Why, now, of all times, has the genre staged a return? The way that the Western frontier moved on into films relating to Vietnam and the shock of defeat, and how that same sense of the frontier and some final moment of historical trauma continues to this day in Afghanistan and Iraq, may well suggest the reason."

"Dutch artist Guido van der Werve makes the kind of films Caspar David Friedrich might have dreamt up if he had had a sense of humour and access to a camera," proposes Jennifer Higgie:

Saturated in an atmosphere of melancholy, loss and loneliness, preoccupied with dead composers and centuries-old dance forms, yet fired by a love of both the piano and slapstick, Van der Werve's beautifully shot vignettes include: the hapless artist narrating the history of Steinway pianos while sitting mournfully on a piano stool; trudging slowly before an icebreaker in the Gulf of Finland; standing for 24 hours at the geographic North Pole, refusing to turn with the world, surrounded by stately dancing ballerinas after being knocked down by a car on a depressing suburban street; and meditating on meteorites while building a space rocket in his living-room. The films are usually accompanied by Romantic piano music played by Van der Werve, who trained as a classical musician.

"Taking inspiration from L'Eclisse, German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer's Silberhöhe (Silver Heights, 2003) is, in fact, a remake of sorts," writes Polly Staple. "Von Wedemeyer returns time and again to multiple filmic genres and a range of aesthetic strategies to explore multiple viewpoints within the same project.... The Utopian/dystopian dichotomy explored in Silberhöhe and Die Siedlung - or how we create architectural spaces that in turn define our social behaviour - is a constant theme in Von Wedemeyer's work."

Also, a report on the two-day event Film as a Critical Practice, a series of discussions and screenings at the Office for Contemporary Art in Oslo:

In contrast to the often intellectually self-reflexive level of debate was the presentation by Zhang Xian Min, Professor of Film at the Beijing Film Academy, who presented a selection of contemporary Chinese film- and documentary-makers who employed traditional methods - narrative films following a distribution network and aping commercial film networks and traditional point-and-shoot documentaries. However, Xian Min unwittingly provided the most acutely "political" moment of the conference when he politely declined to answer questions on censorship in relation to Chinese border conflicts and trade. Here the politics of the production and distribution of critical filmmaking suddenly had very real implications.

"The two-channel video work Ramallah/New York (2004 - 5) is a good place to start discussing the work of Emily Jacir, given that she calls both these cities home," writes Kirsty Bell.

"The primary subject of politics is the body; it is through the power to discipline the body that structures of domination are engrained in society," writes Jan Verwoert. "So if there is resistance, it must come from bodies that are different and articulate themselves differently: this intuition could be seen to lie at the heart of Artur Zmijewski's practice."

"The real depth of The City of the Future," the recent show from Patrick Keiller at the BFI Southbank Gallery, could "be unearthed in exploring 68 short films that span the turn of the 20th century, between 1896 and 1909," writes Richard Unwin.

"The Sydney-based artist Shaun Gladwell has become known for his videos (usually in slow motion) depicting various subcultural stylings and street stunts such as skateboarding, BMX biking, break-dancing and other anti-gravitational manoeuvres," writes Daniel Palmer. "In a Station of the Metro, the largest grouping of Gladwell's work to date, presented the full impact of his video practice and confirmed the reasons for his international visibility."

Isaac Julien, who's curated Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty, on view at the Serpentine Gallery through April 13, and whose film, Derek has been screened at Sundance and Berlin, is asked a few quick questions. For example, "What do you like the look of?" Answer: "Tilda Swinton's unique Prada bag."

"Might the critic's appreciation of the film be different had they been able to observe the shoot itself?" asks Dan Fox. "If the critic had been present, would the old man have agreed to be filmed toiling in the fields rather than punching the sound recordist?"

"Much has been written, some of it by me, on the 'documentary turn' in contemporary art," writes Mark Nash, author of Screen Theory Culture. "Current shows such as Come and Go: Fiction and Reality at the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, and The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, Part 1: Dreams; Part 2: Realisms, at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, are evidence of the continuing resonance of these issues. This issue of frieze seeks to explore artists' increasing involvement with documentary by invoking the notion of artistic agency as one in which the artist, in one way or another, crosses back and forth between the domains of reality and fiction."

Posted by dwhudson at March 31, 2008 7:59 AM