Fests and events, 5/1.

"For nearly four decades Peter Hutton has been taking the measure of the cinematic image to delimit its powers of fascination and absorption," writes P Adams Sitney in Artforum. "The full span of Peter Hutton's cinema, from 1971 until 2007, will be represented in a retrospective series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York beginning May 5." (For more on the latest issue of Artforum, by the way, see the entry on May 68.)

"It's fitting that the immaculate new restoration of Sergio Leone's 1968 magnum opus Once Upon a Time in the West, which made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, will be on display in screenings at the Museum of Modern Art for the next five days," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Leone's film is perhaps the single most shameless modernist movie collage of tropes, scenes, themes, shots, and plot points from other films that was not intended to be satire."

The Black Lily Film & Music Festival opens today and runs through Sunday; Mary Wilson has info in the Philadelphia City Paper.

In the Austin Chronicle, Kimberley Jones sends Matt Dentler off to New York in style, looking back, with the help of SXSW co-founder Louis Black and filmmaker Joe Swanberg, on the mark he's left on the festival. Also, a note on Saturday's Asia Fest.

"Apparently the Milwaukee International Film Festival, although successful as a cultural event, now faces financial problems that threaten its future." Michael Z Newman has details.

"Start-and-stop (most explicitly in Happy Together) has been Wong [Kar-Wai]'s signature rhythm as chronicler of the impassioned not-quite lovers who are always too hesitant to consummate their desires in fear their love might die: movement starts and stops, slows down and speeds up, and characters start and stop their well-worn games with each other in hopes of regenerating their power. The exceptions might be Wong's recent films, which are nearly suffocating in their catatonia and blanket lighting, or, for that matter, As Tears Go By, which, quite the reverse, is so reckless that once it starts it never stops to breathe." David Pratt-Robson in the Auteurs' Notebook. Tears screens at BAM through Thursday. Related: the Wong Kar-Wai calendar for May 08 at Lossless.

Josef Braun in Vue Weekly: "Though it was as diverse as ever in its programming of movies from everywhere and about, seemingly, everything, this year's well-attended Hot Docs International Documentary Festival, which wrapped on Sunday night, was for me something of a primer on the shape of docs to come - that shape being defined by the wild proliferation of consumer-level audiovisual technology over the last half-century and our impulse to record our lives as a method of either verifying or coping with it."

From Boston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: Victoria Large on American Teen and Katherine Follett on Vexille.

Posted by dwhudson at May 1, 2008 4:09 PM