Rouge. 12.

Once again, Manny Farber. This time it's the new issue of Rouge, with an impressive six-part special section that opens with Donald Phelps's piece for the issue of For Now he edited in 1969 and closes with a piece from Farber himself, "Seers for the Sleepless," written in 1951.

In between are Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1983 essay comparing and contrasting Farber's work as a painter and as a film critic; in a similar vein, Bill Krohn in 1998 on the painting My Budd ("As far as Farber on Boetticher is concerned, this picture may be all we ever get"); a 1986 piece from Patrick Amos and Jean-Pierre Gorin, also on the Auteur series; and a newly revised 1999 piece from Rouge co-editor on Adrian Martin: "[I]f Farber wishes neither to possess a film nor give it undue momentousness, what does he seek instead?"

Vinzenz Hediger argues that "archives have now become an important driving force in the global media economy"; his concern "is with the shape and dynamics of cinematic memory in the age of digital video technologies, with a special focus on European cinemas."

Anthology Film Archives comes up in Stefan Grissemann's conversation with Jonas Mekas, of course, but there's also this: "I do not know any film publication today that has any intensity, anger, passion, obsession."

André Habib has quite a long talk with Péter Forgács.

Harun Farocki's recent work "seems fully a part of that dominant trend in recent visual arts designated most handily by Nicolas Bourriaud as 'postproduction,' a trend characterised by the persistent reuse, quotation and refunctioning of pre-existing works of art and prerecorded materials," writes Christopher Pavsek. "Though Farocki's recent works have an implicit leftist air about them - be it the product of their emphasis on particular content or the after-effect of Farocki's own reputation as a long-time political filmmaker - one wonders nonetheless about the significance of this move to the museum and whether or not it heralds a retreat from the principles of engagement that influenced Farocki's films and videos well into the 90s. Or, rather, does it reflect a change in the status of the social world and its images?"

The note that follows Jean-Pierre Coursodon's piece says it all: "This is a translation, by the author, of an essay originally published in the December 2007 issue of Positif. Just as Tanner on Tanner is a sequel to a much longer series, the essay is a sequel to a much longer piece on Tanner '88 also published in Positif (November 1988)."

Similarly, the note that precedes Gilberto Perez's: "This article on Fahrenheit 9/11 was written in the summer of 2004, when the film came out. That was before the November election, which the film was intended to influence, though the article was to have appeared after the election. It was written for a quarterly journal, The Yale Review, whose regular film critic I had been for nearly a decade. But The Yale Review declined to publish this article. I offer it for reading now, in the midst of another Presidential campaign whose outcome is uncertain." Not any more, of course, but revisiting the debates of 2004 lends to an understanding of why Barack Obama (who has a cameo in Coursodon's piece) won.

With Mark Rappaport's piece, alongside David Cairns's for Moving Image Source, the rehabilitation of Mitchell Leisen is well underway.

Yvette Bíró on The Edge of Heaven: "In this intricate and original film [Fatih Akin] is capable of using rough, wild, unusual building blocks for a deliberately conventional, formulaic story."

"No wonder that mock-documentary has been finally appropriated by Russian filmmakers." Julia Vassilieva on Alexei Fedorchenko's First on the Moon.

"Why have there been so many documentaries about fish and fishermen?" As Alan Wright demonstrates, the question is anything but frivolous.

"Does cinema really need to retain a sense of original sin in order to achieve moral gravity?" asks Kent Jones. "We need to trust in our own intellects rather than in systems of thought, to stop thinking in terms of moral-aesthetic hierarchies... This kind of pluralistic approach to film criticism is one of the side benefits of the blogosphere, in which, under ideal circumstances, informality often leads to a looser approach to aesthetics."

With an open letter, Juan Pablo Miranda remembers Guido Mutis (1934 - 2008), director of the Valdivia International Film Festival.

Posted by dwhudson at November 10, 2008 8:44 AM