A special dossier on Chantal Akerman with articles by dossier co-editor Ivone Margulies, Laura Mulvey, and an interview by B. Ruby Rich; plus the first English language translations of some of Akerman’s work, a post-mortem bibliography of writing on Akerman, a special video tribute to Akerman and the importance of sound in her films by Barbara McBane; a report from the goEAST film festival, and a rich slate of book reviews round out this “back to school” issue.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase film culture and its mercurial meaning at a time when the art of the moving image is going through what may be its most profoundly transformational stage ever…
FEATURES: Hitchcock on Truffaut, Moonrise Kingdom, Interviews with Amie Siegel, Sharon Lockhart, Jane Gillooly, The Films of Koji Wakamatsu, Elio Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Upstream Color and more!
As a tribute to the great French film essayist Chris Marker, Mark SInker and Rob White discuss the director’s epic history of the New Left.
The Internet may have finally delivered avant-garde filmmakers the audience they always claimed they wanted. With experimentation rejected by the moving-image industry, and moving image shunned by commercial art galleries until the 1970s, film and video artists in the twentieth century relied on film festivals, grassroots film clubs, artist-run co-operatives, and art school curricula as channels of distribution.
Superhero blockbusters, The New World, Miklos Jancso, the “Orked” Trilogy, and an interview with Todd Haynes
READ: Send in the Cyborgs, Revitalizing Film Criticism, La Ronde, and Reconsidering John Frankenheimer
The “California Video: Artists and Histories” show, curated by Glenn Phillips, opened at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles on 15 March 2008, running through 8 June. Ambitious in its scope, it features the works, all made during periods when they were based in California, of fifty-eight individual artists and collaboratives.
In addition to regular commentary on narrative cinema and documentary, Film Quarterly has a useful role to play from time to time by publishing accessible writing about avant-garde film and video. Although there are rare exceptions (such as Matthew Barney’s films), this work is mostly not screened theatrically, which is one reason for it slipping through the net of magazine coverage.