Edited by Adam Cook
- For BOMB Magazine, Alan Licht talks to Michael Snow about his photography (thanks to Dave McDougall for the link!):
"AL: The films Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film (1970) and One Second in Montreal (1969) both feature still images. Were those in any way an outgrowth of the things you were doing in photography at the time?
MS: I filmed Wavelength in ’66, finished it in ’67, and in the show is a piece called Atlantic which has photographs of waves. I took those photographs the same day I took the photograph that I used in Wavelength, so there’s a stretch in there. But One Second in Montreal is about controlling the durations that a still image is on the screen, which is a very obvious thing you can do with film. One Second in Montreal relates to Recombinant (1992), eighty 35 mm slides projected against a surface made for the images to be projected on, and the duration is controlled there too. They’re all the same length of time, but the eighty variations relate or don’t relate to the surface that I made for the projection. And you mentioned Digest. There you have one frame after another, so to speak, but the spectator can look at them for any duration that they want to."
- Above: I mean, duh, but, still...
- For The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes on the Anthology Film Archives’ series “Auteurs Gone Wild”:
"For major directors, there are no more typical productions. Darren Aronofsky follows a low-budget erotic thriller with a grand-scale Biblical epic; Wes Anderson makes a historical anti-Nazi fantasy as well as an animated adaptation of a children’s classic. Every new movie is, by definition, eccentric, whereas in the studio era directors often found a niche and stuck (or were stuck) with it. Anthology Film Archives’ series 'Auteurs Gone Wild' (March 20-30) offers some of the exotic masterworks that arose when golden-age directors strayed from their usual fare to create some of their most distinguished works."
- Above: images from Neil Bahadur's piece on Charlie Chaplin's underrated A Countess From Hong Kong.
- For Artforum, Amy Taubin writes on Azazel Jacobs' new 6-part series Doll & Em:
"Jacobs, whose not quite autobiographical feature Momma’s Man (2008) starred his own parents, Ken and Flo Jacobs, and was set in the magical Chambers Street loft where he grew up, is a perfect director for this reality tinged fiction. The scenes between Emily and Doll have an improvisational feel, the camera hanging around long enough to let us know that what’s not being said is what’s important. Just as impressive is how the daily grind of shooting a mainstream independent movie is evoked on what was clearly a barebones budget, simply out of dialogue, behavior, and a smattering of star cameos."
- ...And speaking of Ken Jacobs, David Phelps has a conversation with him in Desistfilm.
- Above: more Dafoe as Pasolini!