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Noted: Je, Tu, Il, ELLES

Shorts. Fashion. Pretty. Vacant? You decide!

The DKNY Intimates brand has teamed up with Elle Magazine on "Four Windows," a short film from famed director Ry Russo-Young. The dreamy vid brings cameras into the apartments of four young New York women who live in four distinct Manhattan neighborhoods (Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, Chinatown, and the Flatiron District), and explores their bond with the city at a pace that's both lazy and frenetic, and above all, magically romantic. [via]

Over/under on how many of these women are St. Ann's alums/offspring of famous people?

Meanwhile, back on the left coast...

Hollywood’s latest darling, Elle Fanning, goes digging for buried treasure in Todd Cole's new collaboration with Rodarte, The Curve of Forgotten Things, ...while Georgia-based indie rockers Deerhunter provide the dreamy soundtrack. As for the title, Cole explains: “It's the title of a Richard Brautigan poem. The poem and the film are about forgotten things—circles and the curve of time.” [via/watch here]

I guess after the Juarez contretemps, calling the short The Abortion was out of the question?

Clip reel

Watch more free documentariesCinema [of] attractions, forthwith:

• Let's start with the harrowing: SnagFilms hosts High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell [above], the HBO doc that followed three crackheads, including Dickey Eklund, high half-brother of The Fighter biopic subject Micky Ward.
• In a NYRB dialogue with Diana Ossana about True Grit, Larry McMurty reveals "My favorite lines in modern cinema are from The Big Lebowski": Tara Reid’s character says, “I’ll suck your cock for a thousand dollars.” And The Dude (Jeff Bridges) replies, “I’m just gonna go find a cash machine.”
• From the NYT Sunday book review of Stefan Kaner's Tough Without a Gun by Holly Brubach: "Bogart’s appeal was and remains completely adult — so adult that it’s hard to believe he was ever young. If men who take responsibility are hard to come by in films these days, it’s because they’re hard to come by, period, in an era when being a kid for life is the ultimate achievement, and “adult” as it pertains to film is just a euphemism for pornography."
• Via the Boston Globe's Movie Nation blog, a Valentine for pre-cinema lovers: "On Valentine's Day, another Muybridge site debuts, the Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive. The archive will bring together and make available thousands of Muybridge images. Among the sequences will be "The Kiss," which shows two nude women chastely doing just that. David Gordon, an artist who teaches at North Shore Community College, created and curates the site. For its debut, he's made a short film loop of the two women kissing."
• Intelligent Life maps the changing afterlife of movies, using my least-favorite male weepie as a test case: "[F]or all its delayed success, “The Shawshank Redemption” was the high-water mark of what might be called the traditional afterlife of a movie. It was released theatrically, given a short rest period, was released on VHS rental, then VHS purchase, then given another rest period, then paid-for television, then repackaged again and sent around the world to re-appear for ever more on free-to-air TV. Its releases on each format were meticulously controlled and measured, and it became a television hit on the cusp of the DVD era, when television movies were still a bonding event—an occasion on which many people looked forward to seeing a movie for the first time, and a natural conclusion to a film’s life-cycle. Just 15 years later, the landscape is much altered, and the familiar afterlife of a movie is disintegrating."
• Let's end with a round of applause! Hilobrow's Josh Glenn brings us "Clapping Music" [below], "Steve Reich’s famous minimalist composition from 1972 “performed” by the stars of Point Blank."

R.I.P. Miriam Hansen

Miriam Hansen on Post-Medial Culture from Film Studies Center on Vimeo.

Word has trickled out via Facebook from those in the position to know that Miriam Hansen, long of the University of Chicago, has died. The callow young cinetrix was fortunate to take Hansen's grad intro to film studies course in the screening room that served as physical evidence of the program and facilities Hansen built there as a condition of her hire [or so I've long heard]. She was as intimidating as hell; what I first learned in her classroom years ago and in her comments as second reader on my M.A. thesis manifests itself constantly in my teaching and thinking about film.

Not to mention her sartorial influence. I can't remember which of my classmates first made the observation that Professor Hansen's garb tended to complement that day's film, but it is true that her outfit to teach Johnny Guitar, say, echoed somehow the Teflon invincibility of Joan Crawford's white dress and the butchness of Vienna's otherwise masculine Western wear. Whenever I pause in the morning in front of the closet and consider which movie we'll be discussing before selecting the day's pedogogical drag, I think of Miriam Hansen. I wish I'd had the opportunity to tell her so.

UPDATE: The U of C's death notice for Professor Hansen. Services were held yesterday, but donations may be made to the Miriam Hansen Fellowship Fund, c/o the Division of the Humanities, 1115 E. 58th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

And a note: I feel embarassment and chagrin that somehow this post became for many the first widespread notice of Professor Hansen's passing. The 'Fesser and I met at Chicago, and it was through Facebook posts from his friends in the department and elsewhere late Saturday that we first heard the awful news. I am grateful for the mentions by Film Studies for Free [from whom I grabbed the clip] and WideScreen, and my sorrow and the sentiments above are genuine, but better encomia can and should be forthcoming, like Tom Gunning's tribute at SCMS.

Once I get to school, I will post a PDF of Hansen's reading list for that long-ago class I mentioned. But first, I need to pick out something to teach in.