Fests and events, 5/20.

It's not quite as easy to moon over the existential remarkability of the genre as it once was, when critics like Raymond Durgnat and Paul Schrader were busy specimen-boxing it as if it were a breed of black butterfly that had lived on our streets long ago and yet escaped our notice. Nowadays we're somewhere near post-retro-neo-meta-noir... But the beauty of noir has always been its cultural specificity - the genre is bound wrist and ankle to the unexpected, untamable social malaise that arose during WW2 and exploded in the post-war era. The films are modern anthropology, as wickedly expressive of its context and anxious historical moment as Goya's aquatints or Faulkner's novels or Walker Evans's photographs - but emanating from a kind of American-pulp unconscious, not from the conscientious perspective of a single artist.

The occasion for all this (and there's more) is the Unseen Noir series at Harvard Film Archive, running Friday through Monday.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil will be the centerpiece of next month's Los Angeles Film Festival and screens on May 31 as part of BAM's Sundance series. "Like the vapor trail of a rock-arena smoke machine, uncommon fellowship has followed Anvil! since its germination in a Toronto restaurant four years ago," reports John Anderson in the New York Times.

May 29 sees the opening of the DK Holm Outdoor Film Festival in Portland. It's free (though donations will be appreciated) and it's a series of early summertime outdoor screenings. Click for details.

"No film fits more neatly into MOMA's Jazz Score series than Sweet Smell of Success (1957), screening May 24 and May 25." Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

"The 10th Annual San Francisco Black Film Festival (SFBFF), scheduled to run June 4 - 8 and recommencing June 11 - 15, 2008, is primed to compete for festival audiences come June with 100 films over 10 days at 5 venues in San Francisco," writes Michael Guillén. "Anticipating the festival proper, SFBFF and the Coalition of 100 Black Women Oakland Bay Area Chapter Sistahs Getting Real About HIV/AIDS Initiative (NCBW/OBAC) are co-sponsoring a private screening of Miss HIV on Wednesday, May 28, 2008, 6:00PM at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD), 685 Mission Street, San Francisco."

Ian Fleming would turn 100 on May 28 and, for the New York Times, John F Burns visits For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, on view in London's Imperial War Museum through next March, exploring "the degree to which Bond was his 'fantasy version of himself,' as [historian and curator Terry] Charman put it. As well, it shows how the debonair Fleming drew on his experiences as a man about town and as a prewar foreign correspondent, in the world of banking and investment, in his postwar sojourns in Jamaica, and as a World War II aide to the head of Britain's directorate of naval intelligence, to give what he described as 'verisimilitude' to Bond's world of spies and villains and romance." Related: The Observer asks seven women all about James Bond.

"Debut features dominate Variety's Critics Choice selection of European films for this year's Karlovy Vary Intl Film Festival," reports Nick Holdsworth. "The 10 films, chosen by Variety's team of critics, include seven first films." The festival runs July 4 through 12.

"When The English Surgeon had its US premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival earlier this month, director Geoffrey Smith and his subject, the inimitable London-based neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, received a standing ovation from an enthusiastic and moved audience." For SF360, Jennifer Preissel talks with both.

Back to Boston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: Victoria Large on Goliath. Also, The Tracey Fragments.

Posted by dwhudson at May 20, 2008 2:57 PM