The Screengrab : museum of the moving image

2008: Still Combing the Wreckage

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

The results if the Village Voice/L.A. Weekly year-end critics' poll are in. The snarling, pointy-headed elitists who make up the core voting bloc went with a kiddie cartoon and box-office smash, Andrew Stanton's Pixar instant classic WALL-E, a choice that meets with the Screengrab's hearty approval. "Sometimes", writes Voice Grand Poo-bah J. Hoberman, "the movies really are universal." However, Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, which finished out of the Top Ten at #12, deserves recognition as the year's "prize critical cult film...Despite generally mixed reviews, Demme’s independent feature received a higher percentage of first- and second-place votes than even WALL-E, meaning that the people who liked it really liked it." Hoberman detected an optimistic strain in many of this year's top films, not just WALL-E and Rachel but also such favorites as Happy-Go-Lucky and (its ending aside) Milk, extending even to Let the Right One In, "an unexpectedly touching treatment of child vampirism", and his own choice for best film of the year, "the relatively cheerful" Flight of the Red Balloon. Maybe if this optimistic vibe can be fully tapped, the Voice itself will be able to last another year.

One last, must-see on-line portal for tributes to the year past: "Moments of 2008", parts one and two, at the Museum of the Moving Image's "Moving Image Source" site. Here, a lively selection of writers and film folk, including Guy Maddin, Karina Longworth, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jonathan Lethem, Todd Gitlin, Joshua Land, Dennis Lim, Scott Foundas, and others, cite their own most thrilling "moving-image highlights", with results that include movies both new (Man on Wire, Before I Forget, Madden's own My Winnipeg) and old as well as TV (The Wire, The Wire, The Wire) and news and politics. Also among those participating: David Hudson, whose work at GreenCine Daily has set a high standard, and provided invaluable assistance, to the Screengrab and all on-line film writers. Hudson has just gravitated over to IFC's fil blog The Daily, leaving the GreenCine site in the capable hands of Aaron Hillis. We offer our thanks for past services and wish them both well in the coming year.

Derek Jarman Jubilee

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:45:00 GMT

As a friend of the Screengrab pointed out a few weeks ago when we did our Gay Pride list of great movies with homosexual symbolism and thematic content, we missed a bet by not including the innovative, daring British filmmaker Derek Jarman in our tally of the most influential gay filmmakers of the 20th century. Always fiercely political at the same time he was deeply personal, Jarman -- who worked wonders in both experimental and narrativef formats --was not only one of the earliest and best gay directors of modern cinema, but also arguably the first true punk rock filmmaker, beating out even his countryman Alex Cox for the privelege of that title. (See his astonishing film Jubilee for an especially choice example of Jarman's many and often contradictory tendecies blending together perfectly.)

Almost fifteen years after Jarman's death from complications related to AIDS, Sam Adams at the Museum of the Moving Image pens a thoughtful and informative appreciation of the man and his art, which even today is far more internally contradictory than many imagine: "Sometimes fusing the personal and political, and sometimes pitting them against each other," Adams writes, "Jarman's films are animated by the interplay between past and present, accuracy and anachronism, nostalgia and protest. They are, quite often and quite openly, at war with themselves, tied to national and cinematic traditions and rebelling against them." Noting the irony of Film London's Jarman Award, which aims to celebrate directors who are to their time what Jarman was to his, he notes "if there were a Derek Jarman of today, he or she might be as proccupied with shunning Jarman's influence as succumbing to it.

The article -- which also contains useful links to other Jarman scholarship, including a sensitive treatment of his legacy by contemporary writer Jon Savage and a letter to Jarman in his final days from Tilda Swinton -- concludes by discussing the director's refusal to be driven into the softness of metaphor by his own confrontation with the AIDS epidemic. "As AIDS hysteria and homophobia mounted in the 1980s,Jarman sharpened his knives and strengthened his stance." Even the eventual loss of his sight to the disease didn't stop him from expressing his feelings in a visual medium: Jarman's films became literally and figuratively darker, until finally there was Blue, "a solid, unwavering block of color, matched to a complex audio collage of interwoven voiced and ambient sounds" -- a series of "profane hyms" that "make hash of identity politics" that literalized the polyhonic approach of his visual fims and allowed him the perfect, and final, expression of "divergent, but not conflicting voices".

Related Posts:

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part One)

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Three)

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.

Come Blow Your Mind

Peter Smith — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Andy Warhol, always a troublesome figure in the American arts scene, has undergone more critical evaluations and re-evaluations than almost any other artist of the 20th century. With his plastic arts enjoying a well-deserved critical renaissance, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, inspired by a new retrospective of his work at the Queens-based Museum of the Moving Image, attempts to kick-start a similar fresh look at his films. Warhol’s pictures — praised as brilliant by a few and unimaginably tedious by many others — deserve to be thought of as groundbreakingly daring, she argues, having done more than anything before or since to normalize homosexuality and standing as a shameful indictment of what passes for independent film today. — Leonard Pierce