May 16, 2013
Family Plot

A short blurb on Alfred Hitchcock’s delightful final film, screening on the occasion of a retrospective devoted to the actress Karen Black. The L Magazine, May 14.

Black is perhaps otherwise best known for providing a welcome dose of human vulnerability to offset Jack Nicholson’s cold fish in Five Easy Pieces. She was just one of many wonderful actresses to shine with Hitchcock, a filmmaker too often unfairly labeled as a technician. Watch Hitch’s lead women from throughout his career find room to convey a tremendous range of emotions, often within the same scene. In this piece I spotlight Carole Lombard (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) and Shirley MacLaine (The Trouble with Harry), but there are loads of others, including Anna Ondry (Blackmail), Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps), Sylvia Sidney (Sabotage), Margaret Lockwood (The Lady Vanishes), Joan Fontaine (Rebecca and Suspicion), Laraine Day (Foreign Correspondent), Teresa Wright (Shadow of a Doubt), Ingrid Bergman (whose performance in Under Capricorn is every bit as excellent as her more celebrated turns in Spellbound and Notorious), Grace Kelly (Rear Window), Vera Miles (The Wrong Man), Kim Novak (whose work in Vertigo becomes more overpowering the more one sees the film from Madeleine’s point of view), Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest), Janet Leigh (Psycho), and Tippi Hedren (The Birds and Marnie). This is not to mention the frequently vivid supporting actresses. Just one example: If you’ve seen Rebecca, do you remember Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers?   

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May 15, 2013
Extending the Paintbrush: A Quarter-Century of Chinese Independent Documentaries

An article touching on a vast survey of recent Chinese independent documentaries, co-curated for New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by Sally Berger and Kevin B. Lee. The piece makes reference to many of the films in the series, though not all, and among the ones that I’ve seen that go unmentioned I’d recommend There’s a Strong Wind in Beijing, San Yuan Li, i.Mirror by China Tracy (aka Cao Fei) Second Life Documentary Film, and Longing for the Rain. Moving Image Source, May 15.   

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May 12, 2013
São Paulo International Film Festival - inscriptions open

May 12: Submissions are now open for the 37th edition of the São Paulo International Film Festival, whose home site is http://mostra.org. This year’s festival will unfold October 18-31 in theaters throughout South America’s largest city. Given that I work as a programming aide for the outfit, I am also happy to hold this role - the festival is friendly to young filmmakers and to adventurous work in general, and the public is very responsive. So if you have a feature film that hasn’t yet screened in Brazil, please give us a try.

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May 11, 2013
Attack of the Twitter

May 11: I am starting a Twitter account under the name AaronJCutler. (Thanks to the critic Calum Marsh for suggesting I join.) For now the account will be used primarily to provide links to this site. What other uses it will have are to be discovered with time. 

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May 9, 2013
Taylor Mead, 1924-2013

May 9: Yesterday one of the great stars of the American avant-garde died. Mead was a charming, unpredictable, beanpole of a comedian with a ceaselessly contorting face. Watching him onscreen is a pleasure. In addition to the films Mead made with Andy Warhol, I recommend his starring roles in Ron Rice’s pair of films The Flower Thief and The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, as well as his appearance in the last segment of Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, as starting points. 

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May 8, 2013
The Mother and the Whore

A brief piece on Jean Eustache’s great film, playing as part of BAM’s “Booed at Cannes” series, whose other excellent titles include Gertrud, L’Eclisse, David Cronenberg’s Crash, Robert Bresson’s L’Argent, El, The Soft Skin, and Tropical Malady. The L Magazine, May 8.

I have only seen one other Eustache film - his wonderful feature-length interview with his grandmother, Número Zero. But The Mother and the Whore would have made me register him as an important artist even if I had never watched anything else by him. Others feel even stronger. The great Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu, who I interview in the current issue of Cinema Scope about his new film Three Interpretation Exercises, recently wrote to me:

“For me, thinking of my cinema is thinking of The Mother and the Whore, with all the things that I like in it and all the things that I dislike in it. This film has put me in front of my most secret fears. It is the film that helped me find a place at the window. It is the film that protects me and makes me feel less alone. In a way, this film is my shelter.”

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May 4, 2013
French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris 1923-1929

A brief review of a new home video release featuring five silent films from the French production company Films Albatros. The company produced work by dazzling experimental filmmakers such as Jean Epstein, René Clair, and Marcel L’Herbier, whose amazing The Late Mathias Pascal is included in the set. If this film appeals, I would also recommend L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (from 1923) and L’Argent (from 1928). Film Comment, May/June.

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May 3, 2013
It's All True, in Different Ways

A wrap-up piece on the Brazilian documentary festival It’s All True, whose São Paulo leg I attended. In addition to the IAT films discussed - including all of Dziga Vertov’s films, only a few of which I name in the article -  I would additionally recommend two recent Israeli films: Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts, which I wrote about for The L Magazine this past November, and Avi Mograbi’s Once I Entered a Garden, a surprising and continuously evolving film that I would like to see again before any further discussion. Fandor, May 2.

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May 2, 2013
Days of Heaven (from When Movies Mattered, by Dave Kehr)

A review of a review by the great film critic Dave Kehr, which can be found in Kehr’s book When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade. The book collects pieces that Kehr wrote for the alternative weekly paper The Chicago Reader between 1974 and 1983. Kehr can also be read each Sunday in The New York Times, for which he writes a column about new home viewing releases. The Believer, May 2013.

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May 1, 2013
Memories Look at Me

A brief piece on a wonderful new Chinese film that will be playing in a weeklong theatrical run as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s ContemporAsian series, which showcases the efforts of active Asian filmmakers. Some directors previously honored in ContemporAsian have been Ying Liang, Brillante Mendoza, Edwin, Adolfo Alix, Jr., Zhao Dayong (responsible for 2008’s very strong Ghost Town), Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-Liang, Jia Zhangke, Hong Sang-soo, Eric Khoo, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, as well as many others whose work I don’t yet have the pleasure of knowing. This is a valuable series. The L Magazine, May 1.     

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