MoMA's Collaborations in the Collection series has been rolling along nicely since December 2007 and comes to a close on Monday. Curator Jenny He's concept might be read as a counter-argument to auteurism: "Filmmaking is an inherently collaborative artform that usually involves a team of artists and craftsmen.... This June, we highlight collaborations both on and off the set, where professional and personal relationships intertwine, in an examination of the romantic muse." Featured this evening and Monday is Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (1954) with George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman.
David Phelps in the L Magazine: "The film works as if by excavation. As in so much modernist lit, love, the past, and the natural world are the God-like sources to revitalize a daily life of habits that the protagonists struggle to reclaim amidst a routine existence. But what looks so fundamental to the French New Wave and however much current 'contemplative cinema' is Rossellini's own Hitchcockian-Joycean approach to the idea, his loving attention to routine and a distillation of characterization from overarching 'character traits' (classic) into momentary consciousness and reaction (modern)."
Milestone Films turns 20 this year and the Austin Film Society is celebrating with a series of ten films screening Saturdays at noon at the Alamo Ritz, beginning today with Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home (2001). Marjorie Baumgarten in the Chronicle: "Milestone's co-founders, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, are avid preservationists and film restorers, seeking out the best print sources and occasional missing footage to present viewers with optimum film experiences."
IN OTHER NEWS
"Last month, one day before the previous disappeared Iranian director, Jafar Panahi, was released from jail following a hunger strike, another Iranian artist and filmmaker, Daryush Shokof, went missing," reports Benjamin Sutton in the L Magazine. "The exiled director, who lives in Germany, was last seen in Cologne when he was planning to board a train to Paris on May 24, but nobody has seen or heard from him since. Last month he premiered two new films in Berlin, Iran Zendan and Hitler's Grave [also known as Heaven's Taxi], both of which were sharply critical of the current regime in Iran."
An AP report quotes Kazem Moussavi, "a friend of Shokof's and self-described regime critic": "We fear that the Iranian regime is responsible for his disappearance." The Berlin-based organization Stop the Bomb has been collecting all that's known about the case so far — in English as well. The above message sent to Shoot 4 Change was posted in February. Update, 6/7: German to English translates a story from the Kölnische Rundschau reporting that Daryush Shokof has been found alive "on the banks of the Rhine river in the suburb Cologne-Porz — completely soaked, and in a bad physical condition." An additional note on a story in the Kölner Stadtanzeiger: "According to this article, three teenage pupils first discovered Shokof, who approached them with drenched clothes and in a disoriented state, reiterating in English: 'My name is Shokof, call the police, I’m kidnapped.'"
"Joseph Strick, an independent filmmaker who brought James Joyce's Ulysses to the big screen and won an Academy Award for best documentary short subject for Interviews with My Lai Veterans, has died," reports Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times. "He was 86." Sight & Sound is running Henry K Miller's terrific profile from late last year.
WEEKEND BROWSING AND READING
The Danish Film Institute's "much-anticipated" Carl Theodor Dreyer website is up and, as Luke McKernan puts it, "It has been worth the wait."
Catherine Grant has updated her list of open access e-books at Film Studies for Free.
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