locus novus

Please take note that I will keep on reporting from a new blog.

http://foliedujour.wordpress.com/

recalling 'big red son'

"Every spring, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents awards for outstanding achievement in all aspects of mainstream cinema. These are the Academy Awards. Mainstream cinema is a major industry in the United States, and so are the Academy Awards. The AAs' notorious commercialism and hypocrisy disgust many of the millions and millions and millions of viewers who tune in during prime time to watch the presentations. It is not a coincidence that the Oscars ceremony is held during TV's Sweeps Week. We pretty much all tune in, despite the grotesquerie of watching an industry congratulate itself on its pretense that it's still an art form, of hearing people in $5,000 gowns invoke lush clichés of surprise and humility scripted by publicists, etc.—the whole cynical postmodern deal—but we all still seem to watch. To care. Even though the hypocrisy hurts, even though opening grosses and marketing strategies are now bigger news than the movies themselves, even though Cannes and Sundance have become nothing more than enterprise zones. But the truth is that there's no more real joy about it all anymore. Worse, there seems to be this enormous unspoken conspiracy where we all pretend that there's still joy. That we think it's funny when Bob Dole does a Visa ad and Gorbachev shills for Pizza Hut. That the whole mainstream celebrity culture is rushing to cash in and all the while congratulating itself on pretending not to cash in. Underneath it all, though, we know the whole thing sucks.

Your correspondents humbly offer an alternative.

Every January, the least pretentious city in America hosts the Annual AVN Awards. The AVN stands for Adult Video News, which is sort of the Variety of the US porn industry. This thick, beautifully designed magazine costs $7.95 per issue, is about 80 percent ads, and is clearly targeted at adult-video retailers. Its circulation is appr. 40,000.

Though the sub-line vagaries of entertainment accounting are legendary, it is universally acknowledged that the US adult-film industry, at $3.5-4 billion in annual sales, rentals, cable charges, and video-masturbation-booth revenues, is an even larger and more efficient moneymaking machine than legitimate mainstream American cinema (the latter's annual gross commonly estimated at $2-2.5 billion). The US adult industry is centered in LA's San Fernando Valley, just over the mountains from Hollywood.1 Some insiders like to refer to the adult industry as Hollywood's Evil Twin, others as the mainstream's Big Red Son."

excerpt from the David Foster Wallace essay on porn industry "Big Red Son".

"alle anderen"

"What is a family? What is a couple? What is domestication? What is to live with another person, to domesticate another person, to have another person living in one's house or to create a home with another person? It has to do with that violence of adaptation, of "training" which is not limited to animals.. I do the other what one in the cattery with the sphinx. I try to create people who can live with me."
(Avital Ronell, Life Extreme)

20 Best Films of 2009 Poll

I sent my contribution to Film Comment's Readers' Poll a while ago. I thought, I should post them here, too. Being said, there are a number of 2009 titles I recently caught up that would have easily sneaked into this list. This can be read more as films seen in 2009 either by theatrical release or festival screenings. In 2009, I was able to attend most of the festivals and screenings throughout Toronto and Montreal therefore majority of these films included in the list have either been caught in one of these cities' film festivals or at one of the screening venues with the exception of Uprise and Iki Dil Bir Bavul which were caught up only in digital copies.

Melancholia (Lav Diaz, 2008)
Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain, 2008)
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2009)
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009)
Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008)
A Serious Man (Ethan&Joel Coen, 2009)
Film ist: A Girl& A Gun (Gustave Deutsch, 2009)
The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy (Peter Liechti, 2008)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont, 2009)
Left Handed (Laurence Thrush, 2009)
Double Take (Johan Grimonopez, 2009)
No one Knows About Persian Cats (Bahman Ghobadi, 2009)
Atashkar (Mohsen Amiryoussefi, 2009)
Uprise (Sandro Aguilar, 2008)
Un Prophete (Jacques Audiard, 2009)
On the Way to School (Orhan Eskikoy&Ozgur Dogan, 2009)
White Lightnin’ (Dominic Murphy, 2009)
Clone Returns Home (Kanji Nakajima, 2009)
Historias extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás, 2008)
Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

Farber on Jeanne Dielman

When this movie's going right, it makes the spectator aware not only of repetitiousness but of the actual duration of a commonplace act. What's wonderful is that we are made to feel the length of time it takes to filter through in coffee-making, the length of time a sponge bath consumes, the number of spoonfuls it takes to eat soup, the number of steps from the kitchen stove to dining-room table, how many floors it takes elevator to move Jeanne from her flat to the ground. (Farber on Film: The Complete Writings of Manny Farber, p. 767)

Mourn Culpable Forgetfulness

So near, I say, so touchable near.
That it will never leave my mind

(Snowwhite, Robert Walser)

A talk by Eija-Liisa Ahtila

ARTIST TALK (in English)
Tuesday, January 26 - 7 PM
Grande Bibliothèque - 475 de Maisonneuve Blvd. E.
Info : (514) 866-6767 / 116
FREE ADMISSION

Internationally acclaimed Finnish filmmaker, photographer, and video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila is known mainly for complex multi-screen narratives that reveal the fragile inner life of her protagonists, as well as the tenuous line separating fantasy from reality. Using the visual language of cinema, her work is presented as split-screen projections on multiple panels, which has the powerful effect of dramatising a psychological perception of space and time for the viewer.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s film installations experiment with narrative storytelling, creating extraordinary tales out of ordinary human experiences. Her sharp, vivid film and video installations are concerned with the psychological impact of interpersonal conflict, and are sensitively attuned to the intricacies and ambiguities of human emotion and romantic discord.

Ahtila refers to her work as “human dramas,” fictional narratives drawn from her own observations and experiences and from long periods of research. Her installations fuse urgency and detachment, documentary realism and cinematic fantasy. The many unsettling emotions in her work—intimacy, loss, and repression—are leavened by a gentle humour and absurdity, and are presented in dynamic environments, which engage the viewer both physically and intellectually.

Taking its title from a “slug line” or master scene heading found in screenplays, INT. STAGE–DAY is the artist’s largest exhibition ever assembled outside Europe, spanning almost two decades of art and filmmaking.

The works on view include Today (1996-1997), which reflects upon the death of a grandfather as viewed and mourned by three family members on three screens; The Hour Of Prayer (2005), an exploration of grief and loss after the death of a dog—beginning in a winter storm in New York and ending in Benin, West Africa eleven months later; The Present (2001), a depiction of women who have developed a psychosis, shown in five short looped episodes on five separate monitors; The House (2002), a haunting three-screen film about madness and a woman who hears voices; Consolation Service (1999), a deft articulation of a bitter divorce culminating in a consolation service—the final giving up of the relationship; and finally, the dazzling and complex multi-screen Where is Where? (2008), presented at The Darling Foundry, which considers the emotional trauma of war on civilian victims, centering on a Finnish poet (played by Kati Outinen) and her efforts to morally untangle the real life incident of two Algerian boys who murdered a French playmate during the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s.

The exhibition will also comprise two photographic series: Dog Bites (1992-1997) and Scenographer’s Mind (2002).

EDUCATION: PROJECT SCÈNE/SCENE

SCENE is an art education project that encourages participants to respond to Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s artistic approach to narrative structures and cinematic language, by creating a fictional scene using, text, photography or drawing.

For more information:
www.dhc-art.org/en/education/scene