The Formal Life of Thom Andersen opens tonight at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle and runs through Tuesday. Andersen will be on hand for every screening and will speak after the closing film, Get Out of the Car. E Steven Fried talks with him about Los Angeles and the movies for Parallax View.
Michael Joshua Rowin for the LA Weekly: "Still the foremost name in 'cosmic,' 'expanded' or, simply put, 'triply' cinema, 85-year-old Jordan Belson will be deservedly celebrated by LACMA on Saturday with a program presented by the Center for Visual Music, surveying six decades of the filmmaker's mind-altering visual palette."
More goings on in Los Angeles: Long Live Our Love: New Works by Laida Lertxundi, Michael Robinson, and Ben Russell happens tomorrow evening, followed on Monday with Victory over the Sun: Films and Videos by Michael Robinson at REDCAT. Genevieve Yue for Artforum: "Robinson mines artifacts of the too-recent past — Top Forty hits, video games, pulpy romance novels, and prime-time sitcoms that haven’t yet accrued the familiar patina of nostalgia — and explores their still-shifting meanings, these semiforgotten objects still rotting atop our collective cultural garbage heap."
"If Werner Herzog used to have the market on art-cinema primitivism cornered," writes Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, "the recent films making up the First Person Rural series at the Pacific Film Archive take a different tack, disavowing outlandish narratives of madness and expedition for reality-hungry visions of work and rough beauty. As a group, they privilege phenomenal experience to exposition; affective texture to intelligibility; nonverbal utterance to patent explication. They often seem more in line with epic poetry than documentary realism." The series opens this evening with Lisandro Alonso's La libertad and runs through April 17.
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