Fests and events, 12/24.

At Twitch, Ard Vijn has news of an interesting project the International Film Festival Rotterdam is cooking up: Films to be made by Nanouk Leopold, Carlos Reygadas and Guy Maddin for three very, very, very large outdoor screens.

"Sternberg had Dietrich, and Godard had Anna Karina - malleable, mysterious subjects whose faces eagerly absorbed the light their directors shone upon them. Preston Sturges had William Demarest." Jim Ridley: "Of the 10 features in the Film Forum's Essential Sturges, running Christmas Eve through New Year's Day - roughly the time frame encompassed by the wistful Barbara Stanwyck-Fred MacMurray gem Remember the Night - the ex-pug and former vaudevillian shows up in eight, and his combustible presence is so key to their speed, spirit, and tone that they're unimaginable without him."

Also in the Voice, Nick Pinkerton on Dave Fleischer's Hoppity Goes to Town, also at Film Forum from tonight through January 1.

Colin MacCabe in Criterion's Current on Opening Bazin, a conference held a couple of weeks ago in Paris: "The Yale event was extraordinary not simply for the eminence of the critics gathered, both from France and America, but for the striking fact that almost all of them had done considerable original research for the event, many in the archive of Bazin's complete writings that Dudley Andrew has established at Yale. The picture that emerged at the conference was of a thinker whose fundamental engagement with the nature of cinema makes him an essential reference point as the cinema finds new forms, both in museums and on the Internet, while remaining the key crystallization of value in the entertainment industry."

"Gabe Klinger, one of the heads of the non-profit that's put the event together, Chicago Cinema Forum, asks me to help him fix his bowtie. Today is Manoel de Oliveira's 100th birthday and Gabe intends to make an announcement. [Michael] Almereyda is standing at the back of the room as people trickle in. He has a gentle voice; a listener, a watcher, as Paradise will suggest." Ignatiy Vishnevetsky in the Tisch Film Review.

Posted by dwhudson at December 24, 2008 7:24 AM