NYFF. Views from the Avant-Garde.

"One of the highlights from the Views from the Avant-Garde program was veteran experimental filmmaker, Ernie Gehr's New York Lantern, a painterly, intuitive, and unexpectedly political three-part composition (as demarcated by three distinct musical scores) assembled from black and white and color tinted vintage photographs taken around New York City at the turn of the century," writes Acquarello. Also, a few words on Bruce Conner's America Is Waiting and more short notes on the series.

Updated through 10/15.

Ed Halter for Artforum: "'Avant-gardes have only one time; and the best thing that can happen to them is to have enlivened their time without outliving it.' Guy Debord throws down this critique near the end of his last film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), a 100-minute Niagara of images stolen from cinema and magazines, détourned into illustrative counterpoint for an anti-masscult philippic interwoven with autobiographical self-reflection.... Encountering Debord's words today, as they further an elaborate military analogy spoken atop footage from a cinematic depiction of the Crimean War, it is impossible not to reinterpret his language now as an autodestructive maneuver, deftly undermining his own twenty-first-century legacy as academic commodity in the nostalgia trade of May '68 philosophical memorabilia. Yet this week's context also raises the question of what constitutes avant-garde film as it enters its second century."

More on the Debord:

• "The title of the work is a not-quite-Classical Latin palindrome," notes Keith Sanborn at Moving Image Source, "which Hollis Frampton, borrowing from Yeats, once translated as: 'At night we go out in a gyre, and are consumed by fire.' In a less elegaic turn, we might say: 'At night we go in a circle and are consumed by fire.' But 'in girum imus' means not only 'we go in a circle,' but more metaphorically, 'we wander.' As a palindrome, it suggests a play of mirrors in its form; it is also said by some to contain a riddle of the 'What am I?' genre, referring to the mayfly, suggesting that it goes, like a moth to the flame, and is burnt alive. All are apposite meanings for Debord: dérive, destruction, and holding a mirror to himself and his time."

• "Most famously in his 1967 book (and later film) The Society of the Spectacle, Debord presented one of the most incisive and damning critiques of Western society as we move from producers of goods to consumers of culture," writes Adrian Peppernick in the filmlinc blog. "It may be no longer possible to believe in Debord's program, but we have failed to put anything in its place."

• "[T]he salient point I took away from this film was that there is now nobody like Debord who is telling the truth like this - even if Debord himself only half-believed it," writes Ed Champion. "I am not aware of anybody using the great possibilities provided to us by YouTube making a film like this who doesn't care about the audience and who doesn't care about how their offerings are perceived. It's all about giving into the slim possibilities of fifteen minutes of fame, rather than living a lifetime of unapologetic infamy."

One of the series' biggest draws seems to have been RR; Jonathan Rosenbaum caught it in Vancouver: "Part of what makes James Benning's masterpiece such a satisfying culmination of his prodigious work in 16-millimeter is the way it both clarifies and intensifies the tension in his work between formal and political preoccupations, which could also be described as his love-hatred for industrial waste - a near-constant in his work." Jonathan also points to the location list at new filmkritik: stills from all 43 shots, with notes.

More:

• "As so often happens with structural films, small variations become evident to the alert viewe," writes Kristen Thompson. "RR draws us to enter into perceptual play, often with a distinct touch of humor."

• "It is our attempts as spectators to find the subjects of the images, both visual and auditory, as well as its jokes, which provides RR with its substance," argues Michael J Anderson. "It is likewise the film's theoretical foundation: namely, to produce moment-to-moment interest in the introduction of new and novel items in his mise-en-scène and on his soundtrack. Through the film's repetitions Benning highlights the minimum conditions for the temporal side of cinematic form (most commonly, though not here, taking the form of narrative). RR represents yet another essential entry into one of the the contemporary avant-garde's most indispensable corpuses."

• "As in Benning's previous films, 13 Lakes and Ten Skies, a minimalist approach yields a maximal harvest of ideas, simply and rhythmically lulling the spectator into a contemplation of the images' rich implications about, on the one hand, time, framing, and structure and, on the other, history, economy, and ecology." Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

• "[W]hile both 13 Lakes and RR have inspired in me the kind of concentrated, theoretical thought about the properties of film that I don't usually engage in, RR reminds me of qualities I have valued more in great American poetry than in great American cinema," writes Andrew Chan in Reverse Shot. "In its careful accretion of physical detail, it has a cumulative effect similar to that of certain poems by Elizabeth Bishop. What has been said time and again about her work - how description acts in place of narrative; how a stage is set on which neither the drama nor the players appear - could also be said for Benning's films."

• "Here's a litmus test: if you can groove without problem on Béla Tarr, you're already 3/4 of the way there," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "Benning is easily one of the ten best visual thinkers working today, period."

Online viewing tips. Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa interviews Ken Jacobs at the filmlinc blog. Also: interviews with Mary Helena Clark and David Gatten.

Updates, 10/14: "Presented in a newly restored and subtitled 35mm print, In girum kicked off an intensive three days of programming, curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith," writes Genevieve Yue in an overview of the series for Reverse Shot. "It was an instructive choice, a primer on how images are made and then destroyed, and how we, like Debord, might begin to see things differently. Like the chess game in Les Visiteurs du soir (an echo of the 'game of war,' which Debord himself invented) there's one swift, secret move that can reveal everything. During the panel discussion, and nearly jumping out of his seat, filmmaker Olivier Assayas exclaimed of the film, 'This is dangerous, this is violent, this is beyond cinema!' His description, after all, captures in large part what the avant-garde strives to be: a call to arms, a radical new way of seeing. And whether or not any film actually achieves this, it's worth remembering just how high the stakes are in any image, as dreams, fantasies, lies, and promises."

"James Benning's RR and Craig Baldwin's Mock up on Mu are two films that seem as completely different as can be," writes Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa at the filmlinc blog. "After watching the two films I found myself struck by what I saw as a shared theme in the two films, despite their differences."

Updates, 10/15: "Aberration of Starlight is "a tour de force of digital distortion," writes David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook, "an imitation of light, though [Andrew] Noren himself would claim that he's obsessed with capturing the effects of light on the world and that his movie is packed with subtle gradations of grays. But he would, at least, assert there is no such thing as objective vision: the world as we see it is how light catches and illumines it."

In girum is "a terminal film in all kinds of ways - not only the artist's final cinematic statement, but also an elegy for a lost time (Debord's own youth), a farewell to fallen comrades, and a post-mortem on his generation's failure to bring about a new society." Nelson Kim at Hammer to Nail: "And yet none of that gets close to the film's true spirit, which is burningly intense, engaged, and alive. And defiant. And angry."

Posted by dwhudson at October 12, 2008 11:27 AM