So many film notables dying! Let's look toward the light.
First up, a truly cool series unspools in Atlanta at the Plaza, Emory, and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.
Friday March 25 at the Plaza Theatre, audiences will be treated to filmmaking as love-making between two intensively creative people with the first two of five installments of YOKO ONO: reality dreams, which Film Love is co-presenting with Emory University and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. John Lennon and Yoko Ono certainly must be one of the most famous couples of the 20th century, but these experimental films are rarely seen and aren’t available on video.
Dear Lee Tsiantis, the cinetrix would like very much to work with you.
Helping to make little-seen movies available to the public is part of Tsiantis' job at Turner, where he's a corporate legal manager at TBS' Entertainment Division. Though he does not have a legal background, he was hired 13 years because of his vast knowledge of film history to do rights research on the approximately 3,900 RKO, pre-1986 MGM and pre-1950 Warner Bros. features purchased in 1986 by Ted Turner (now owned and administrated by Warner Bros. Entertainment).
The Independent Film Festival of Boston has posted its film list, and there was much rejoicing. What should I see?
Are you reading Clothes on Film? Smart and pretty! Here's a snippet from a post on Desperately Seeking Susan, well-timed given that trove of early Madonna photos that recently made its way online.
But while this was an introduction of New York’s bourgeois style and attitude to the masses, it was also a counterculture to the burgeoning ‘yuppie’ sensibilities that were bubbling on Wall Street, the physical and social opposite of bohemian Bleecker Street. Even Roberta’s husband reacts with dismay and confusion after she purchases the jacket that so reflected the attitude of the time yet seems horribly outdated now, “You bought a used jacket? What are we, poor?”
Dang. I want this book: Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory [via the good Dr.]
One of the motivations for putting the book together was in order to join the concerns of academic film studies with the way cinemagoers talk about films. We were struck by how often, when people talk about films they’ve seen they say, ‘There’s this moment…’ Moments are touchstones for everyday conversations about film and they are often testing grounds for scholarly writing on the medium and on individual films as well. Within the academy, analysing moments closely is often characterised as the preserve of particular strands of film scholarship; in fact, a broader concentration on the ‘moment’ can question the territorialism of much contemporary film study while also contributing to long-standing arguments for the value of close ‘textual’ analysis.
Miranda July chats with More Intelligent Life, to which you should subscribe.
I get the feeling your creativity is, for the most part, not inspired by other works of art and comes quite purely from the way you experience life.
It's a question I always wrestle with because I've observed enough at this point from knowing other artists that I'm not actually inspired by other work in quite the same way. I'd love it if when I watched a movie I actually noticed how it was shot. But I'm watching it like a child and believing it's all really happening [laughs]. And I'm entirely concerned with only what the filmmaker wants me to be concerned with—just the story and the characters.
It's so rare that I'll get an idea from simply watching a movie. I wish I could because on a movie set you're always trying to come up with references for a team of technicians and it's pretty handy if you can say "see how 'Sex, Lies, and Videotape' is shot? Let's do that." But mostly what I get from other media is a feeling of "I can do that!" I'll see a detective movie and, instead of thinking "I'll make a detective movie!" I'll think "I could be a detective!"
