Frieze. May 08.

"Can we still imagine the uncanny pleasure of seeing pictures in motion for the first time?" asks David Campany in a compelling piece on the work of Mark Lewis in the new issue of Frieze. "If that pleasure lives on anywhere, it is in contemporary art, which seems compelled to spiral back to the beginnings of cinema. Indeed the theorist and curator Raymond Bellour has spoken of a 'Lumière drive' in much recent film and video art, with its preference for the long take, simple apparatus and almost forensic attention to duration and movement."

Mark Leckey opens this issue's "Life in Film" column with an appreciation of Blade Runner: "I love this film for the same reasons I love Roxy Music: they share a sense of yearning for the past and the future, for another place and another time, but it's flattened out, so everything seems to occur at the same time in the same space." The rest of his list is a fine mix; one I hadn't known about intrigues me - and it's on DVD, too: "A Bigger Splash (1974) is a strange, fake documentary made by Jack Hazan, a portrait of David Hockney... Hazan gets Hockney and his friends to act out real situations as well as recording events as they occur. It makes for such uncomfortable viewing I don't know why anyone agreed to appear in it."

Rosalind Nashashibi's films are "concerned with how selfhood mingles with or is dissolved into performance and codification," writes Martin Herbert. "Nashashibi points to the formative influence of watching groups of actors rehearse, seeing how fluently they slip from role-play to being relatively 'themselves,' and she's also confessed to artistic crushes on Pier Paolo Pasolini and Robert Bresson - who famously used non-actors in their films - but she proceeds from the opposite direction, locating the latently fictional in the factual."

Lars Bang Larsen: "Marine Hugonnier deliberates subjectivities and technologies of seeing with a film trilogy that she characterizes as an anthropology of images: Ariana (2003), The Last Tour (2004) and Travelling Amazonia (2006)." Honorably mentioned: Georges Perec, Jean Rouch and JM Coetzee.

Back in the late 90s, David Batchelor wrote a book called Chromophobia about "the fear of contamination or corruption through colour. It is found in the tendency to treat colour as somehow at odds with the higher workings of the Western mind, as feminine, primitive, oriental or infantile; as superficial, inessential or cosmetic. Somewhere between a meditation and a rant, I looked at the use and suppression of colour in art, architecture, movies, literature and philosophy." Four years after the book's publication, he heard about Martha Fiennes's film, Chromophobia, starring the likes of Kristin Scott Thomas, Penélope Cruz, Ian Holm, Rhys Ifan and, of course, Ralph Fiennes. An amusing story of his relationship with a movie that, really, has next to nothing to do him or the book follows. And then, of course, along comes Gui Boratto.

"Despite its limitations..., Is That All There Is? did succeed in providing an accurate dual picture of [Lindsay] Anderson as both a progressive maverick and, at the same time, a very British character," writes Richard Unwin.

George Pendle reviews Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, the movie and the recent show at the Deitch gallery, which is "problematic. After all, is such a show necessary when a quick trip to YouTube will reveal countless films made in exactly the guerrilla spirit Gondry seems to be trying to foster? The revolution has already been televised."

Online extras: Dan Kidner on If: people and places in recent film and video, Natasha Degen on John Currin and Chris Sharp on Owen Land: Logical Facades:

What makes this show special is its context: up until now, for various logistical and financial reasons, Land's films have only been shown in the context of the cinema, either individually or as part of a screening programme. Inserted into a white cube, they become both less and more themselves. Less in that, bereft of the big screen, they tend to shed some of their once radical, non-narrative recalcitrance. However, projected in easel-painting size proportions in close proximity to their projectors, they almost become objects, and their stunning celluloid presence and original concerns (illusionism, borders, materiality) are made all the more manifest through this intimacy.

And while the whole of this new issue is of at least tangential interest to cinephiles, let me put an extra word in for Kristin M Jones's piece on Barbara Bloom's show at the International Center of Photography.

Posted by dwhudson at April 28, 2008 12:21 PM