Directors' Fortnight @ BAM.

"Directors' Fortnight emerged as a sort of Gallic Slamdance: an independent alternative to Cannes," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. "Presenting four decades' worth of alt-programming highlights, BAMcinématek kicks off Directors' Fortnight at 40 with a fabulously appropriate, week-long run of Céline and Julie Go Boating, Jacques Rivette's 1974 hoof up and down cinematic and psychosomatic memory lane." Friday through July 3.

Updated through 6/13.

"As mind-blowing as it may seem, in 1971 Susan Sontag, Werner Herzog, Nagisa Oshima, RW Fassbinder and George Lucas all presented their films at the same festival: the Directors' Fortnight, then in its third year." Melissa Anderson runs through a historical overview at Time Out New York, and then: "Two films from actor-directors that debuted at Fortnight 07, Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget and Serge Bozon's La France (both of which are in BAM's tribute and will receive a proper theatrical release in New York next month), prove just how singular the festival lineups are."

Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine: "Céline and Julie Go Boating is Jacques Rivette's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - psychedelically assisted, indebted blatantly to Lewis Carroll and overrated to the point that conventional wisdom has deemed it a masterpiece, even if fans know that the movie actually rates somewhere nearer to the middle of the creator's oceanic oeuvre."

Updates, 6/12: "Arriving at the tail end of the New Wave... Céline and Julie seemingly predicts, among other things, the Lacanian cinema theory of Christian Metz's Imaginary Signifier (1977) and Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (written in 1973, published in 1975)," writes Michael Ned Holte for Artforum. "If the latter essay dissected the male's gaze and the female's 'to-be-looked-at-ness' encoded in cinema, then Rivette's film is remarkable in its positioning of its female leads as both characters and spectators (mostly) in control of the film's subjectivity and outcome."

In conjunction with BAM's series, the French Institute: Alliance Française presents a busy weekend of La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs screenings (June 20 through 22).

Updates, 6/13: "One thing the series aims to reflect is a lack of cinematic hierarchy," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "The Fortnight at 40 program accommodates everything from Roger Corman's The Trip - a 1967 time capsule artifact written by Jack Nicholson and starring Peter Fonda as a television commercial director who spends a hard day's night on his first LSD trip - to Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, which saturates the viewer in trancelike perceptions instilled by 15-minute takes."

"There's cinema, and then there's Céline and Julie Go Boating," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "It's the Ulysses of moving pictures: You can feel Rivette exploring the art form's modes of expression and then erasing their borders, one by one."

Posted by dwhudson at June 11, 2008 1:55 PM