World Picture, Midnight Eye, Fests and More

"Arousal" is the theme of the new, fourth issue of World Picture, featuring a multi-media piece and a 9½-minute film, The Color of Love (1994; image above), by Peggy Ahwesh as well as Elena Gorfinkel's essay on the work; five films by Ken Jacobs accompanied by a brief must-read essay, "About Myself"; four unpublished poems by Maya Deren; Sam Cooper on, among other things, sex and the Situationists; Rosalind Galt on Maria Beatty; Michael Lawrence on Adam and Eve on screen; editor John David Rhodes on cinematic desire; Domietta Torlasco's "Notes for a Phenomenology of Narcissism" (with clips); and James Mensch, Kelly Oliver, Nicole M Rizzuto and Meghan Sutherland on the nature of arousal.

"Susumu Hani (b.1928) is one of the most unjustly neglected Japanese filmmakers of the 1960s," write Alexander Jacoby and Rea Amit, who explain the neglect before interviewing the director. Also new at Midnight Eye is Rea Amit's review of Hani's Bad Boys (1959), "an extraordinarily multi-layered and a multi-functional film which is also a brilliant cinematic experiment that only a few directors would dare undertake, even more so as a debut feature." And the results of the readers poll are in. Sion Sono's Love Exposure has been voted the best Japanese film of the decade. Seriously, people? Of the decade? The editors did a far better job ranking the 00s.

 

FEST AND EVENTS

"The film festival scene in Southern California certainly seems more crowded than ever," report Amy Kaufman and Steven Zeitchik in the Los Angeles Times. "Between mid-April and mid-May, at least nine film festivals will take place in the Southland, most featuring independent films that could potentially attract similar audiences. There are ethnic festivals — Indian, Polish, French, Jewish and Mexican — as well as others, like the Newport Beach Film Festival, which do not have a specific theme." Susan King concentrates on this weekend's goings on, while, in the LA Weekly, Ernest Hardy has a quick overview of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, opening today and running through May 8.

For a quick guide to festivals and events happening right now in New York, turn to Steve Dollar in the Wall Street Journal.

 

IN OTHER NEWS

"The Oscar-nominated screenwriter Furio Scarpelli, who co-wrote some of the best Italian comedies of the post-war period and who ventured into the spaghetti-western genre with the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, died Wednesday," reports the AP. "He was 90."

"Dorothy Provine, part Hollywood blond bombshell and part girl next door, has died," reports the Kitsap Sun. Robert Cashill: "I'm surely not alone in remembering her most vividly as the oasis of calm among the comedians in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, the one who discovers the 'Big W,' then watches as its riches slip away (and is spared the final slapstick indignities). 'It was a nice dream, if only for a couple of minutes,' she says wistfully to Spencer Tracy. Lovely moment, lovely performer."

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