Frieze. September 08.

"Two films literally changed my life. The first one made me decide to become a cinematographer and the desire to see the second one made me travel to New York, which became my home and where I later made my films." Babette Mangolte writes the "Life in Film" column for the new issue of Frieze. Her name may not be immediately familiar, but she's worked with Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer and: "Over the past three decades, she has directed several non-narrative experimental films, as well as a documentary about the making of Robert Bresson's 1959 film Pickpocket entitled Les Modèles de Pickpocket (2003)." Oh, and those two films? Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and Michael Snow's Wavelength.

"We live in an age of virtuality, a time in which, as Guy Debord ominously foresaw in the late 1960s, 'life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.'" Amelia Jones on recent work by Lynn Hershman Leeson: "In such an age nothing could be more important than a practice like that of LH←→RB, an ongoing range of works that acknowledge and enact the spectacularized virtuality of our 'real' in and through the body."

"In contrast to most projections - including [Bojan Sarcevic's] own early ones - Only After Dark comprises both films and mini-cinemas," writes Jennifer Allen. "Everything - the walls and the ceilings, the churning reels of the projector and the moving images glowing on the wall - becomes a surface."

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith on Steve McQueen and Hunger: "'The body as site of political warfare is becoming a more familiar phenomenon. It is the final act of desperation. Your own body is your last resource for protest. One uses what one has, rightly or wrongly.' If McQueen's quoted comments on the ethics of the Republican protest are understandably circumspect, his thoughts on its pragmatics are consistent with the tenor of previous work."

Posted by dwhudson at August 23, 2008 4:09 PM