Fests and events, 6/9.

First, an online studying tip. For those who read Spanish, Tren de sombras looks awfully inviting, but they do have a chart that works in any language, one you'll likely want to spend some time with. Dozens of films that screened at Cannes 08 are given star-rankings by the likes of Scott Foundas, Jean-Michel Frodon, Christoph Hubert and Kent Jones.

Michael Guillén has a good long talk with Matthew Kennedy about his biography, Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes: Parts 1 and 2. The series Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda runs at the Pacific Film Archive from Friday through June 29.

Update, 6/11: "Kennedy's paean to Blondell is reminiscent of Roland Barthes's poetic 1957 short essay, 'The Face of Garbo,'" writes Erik Morse in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "But whereas Garbo's face represents for Barthes an eternal, unforgettable synecdoche of Hollywood, Blondell's mystique lies mostly in her erasure. What became of this celluloid icon whose image once defined an era but has since been lost in the canister?"

"In recent years [Adam] Cvijanovic, 47, has become known for his 'wallpaper' painting installations, which typically render a landscape (a 52-foot-wide meadow, say, or a 21-foot-high glacier) at a relatively monumental size," writes Carol Kino. "But this time he has tackled a more mythic monument: DW Griffith's 1916 silent epic Intolerance, in particular the portion that unfolds in the court of ancient Babylon." Adam Cvijanovic's Colossal Spectacle is on view at the Bellwether Gallery through July 3.

Also in the New York Times: Following its well-recieved premiere at Sundance, The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) screens this coming weekend at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (through June 26) before opening in November. For the New York Times, Dennis Lim talks with director Ellen Kuras (also an accomplished cinematographer) about why the documentary has taken 23 years to complete. For much of that time, "I saw it as a personal project that didn't need a definitive end," she explains. Then: "There were parallels between Laos and what was happening in El Salvador in the 80s. And now there are parallels again with Iraq. It was important to finish the film now."

The 2008 Conference of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image happens Wednesday through Sunday. David Bordwell: "In over forty sessions, researchers will be talking about how we respond to movies, TV shows, and videogames. How has digital imagery changed our experience of cinema? How does film music enhance our emotional response to the story? How do films guide our visual attention to one part of the screen, and how much do viewers differ in this? How do we respond when movie characters behave inconsistently?"

The Edinburgh International Film Festival, running June 18 through 29, will host "the most comprehensive Shirley Clarke retrospective ever, including rarely seen shorts and hard-to-trace documentary footage of the director herself," reports Susan Mansfield for the Scotsman. Via Movie City News.

In Good, Patrick James reports on Women in the City, a viral public art exhibition infecting all of Los Angeles.

The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, Part II: Realisms, at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden from June 19 through September 7.

Cynthia Rockwell has a brief preview of Silverdocs, running June 16 through 23.

Attendance was up this year at the Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF) in Cluj, "drawn principally, I suspect, by the recent mini-renaissance of Romanian films," blogs Ronald Bergan for the Guardian. "If they were expecting to find another The Death of Mr Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or 12:08 East of Bucharest, they would have been disappointed. Nevertheless, there were enough signs to indicate that Romanian cinema is still a force to be reckoned with, despite some curious anomalies."

James Crawford, blogging for Reverse Shot, doesn't seem to have warmed up to either Sydney or Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky.

Brian Darr in San Francisco: "Two museum screening rooms on opposite sides of Third Street between Mission and Howard have posted more information about their summer film schedules."

"The setting is the story at the Explorers Club Film Festival, which kicks off its sixth edition on Friday evening at the organization's New York headquarters with a revival of George Lowe's classic 1953 adventure documentary The Conquest of Everest. S James Snyder in the New York Sun.

Posted by dwhudson at June 9, 2008 6:17 AM