Artforum. October 08.

"No major figure in postwar Japanese cinema eludes classification more thoroughly than Nagisa Oshima," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "The director of 23 stylistically diverse feature films since his directorial debut in 1958, at the age of 26, Oshima is, arguably, the best-known but least understood proponent of the Japanese New Wave that came to international prominence in the 1960s and 70s (though it is a label Oshima himself rejects and despises). Given the size of his oeuvre and the portions that remain virtually unknown in the West - including roughly a quarter of his features and most of his twenty-odd documentaries for television - the temptation to generalize about his work must be firmly resisted.... He often comes across as a man who hates Japan almost as much as he hates Japanese cinema yet is hard put to come up with any other sustaining topic."

See also last week's Oshima roundup.

Updated through 10/4.

Also in the new issue of Artforum, Amy Taubin on Ballast and Wendy and Lucy: "Both films grow out of an acute sense of place - specifically, rural landscapes, the light that models them, and the sounds that fill them: birdcalls, the wind, freight-train rumbles and whistles, car engines on their last legs. Both are shot on film, almost entirely with available light, and the medium itself, nearing obsolescence, suggests an affinity to a history of poetic Neorealism, from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. Both eschew movie music and are wary of words, preferring the language of the body in stillness and motion. And both are concerned with money, or rather the lack of it, and with passionate attachments, although not of the romantic kind. Loss, abandonment, and resilience - just enough of the last to keep one from dying of heartbreak - they also have these in common."

And Brian Sholis interviews Ballast director Lance Hammer.

[I]t seems a fitting irony that, if Mad Men functions as allegory, the drama takes as its setting an ad agency, that place where the world is refigured into representation, organized into a narrative revolving around prompts for desire and identification, illumination and reflexivity - but only at the direction of self-interested parties." Editor Tim Griffin: "As one interstitial recently aired by the show's producers puts it, quoting media scholar Jef I Richards: 'Creative without strategy is called "art." Creative with strategy is called "advertising."'"

Update, 10/4: Artforum's Brian Sholis interviews Wendy and Lucy director Kelly Reichardt.

Posted by dwhudson at October 1, 2008 6:28 AM