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Get a Move On

 If you want to be moved and you're visiting or live in New York, I suggest you spend some kinetic time tomorrow at "Moving Pictures: A Symposium of Illustration and Motion." Moderator and organizer Lauren Redniss reveals a history of blind spots; Jody Rosen unveils “The Knowledge” of London taxi drivers (the "it" that every London cabbie must know); Joel Smith, a Saul Steinberg scholar, maps the artist's mind; NYPL artist-in-residence Richard McGuire screens the film Fear(s) of the Dark .

The event is FREE and open to the public at The New School Jazz Performance Space Arnhold Hall. It's tomorrow, November 11, 2009, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m., at 55 West 13th Street, 5th floor, New York City. 

via: The Daily Heller

“The Red Balloon” as “a masterpiece of simplicity.”

 

A. O. Scott, film critic for The New York Times  asks what it takes to entertain a child. Does it take 3-D, talking animals or CGI? Mr. Scott sees children’s pleasures as much simpler and describes the 34-minute long, 1956 film The Red Ballon as “a masterpiece of simplicity.” 

Interview with William Eggleston

This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director

Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston's retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

A key figure in American photography, Eggleston is credited almost single-handedly with ushering in the era of color photography.

"Adventures of Prince Achmed"

If you ask the average person what the first feature-length animated film was, just about everyone will answer Walt Disney's "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs". But Disney's film wasn't the first animated feature by a longshot. Arguably, that honor belongs to Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Achmed". 

In 1923, Reiniger and her husband and business partner, Carl Koch began work on an ambitious project... a feature length silhouette puppet film based on "The One Thousand and One Nights". She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. Reiniger continued to animate her distinctive silhouette films up into the mid-1970s. 

On Nov. 11 and 15 the artist Kara Walker will introduce one of the earliest feature-length animated films, Lotte Reiniger’s “Adventures of Prince Achmed” (1926), as restored by the Deutsches Filmmuseum.

"Big Fan"

Films without end have been made about the heroes of sport, but who speaks for the fans, the fervent admirers and supporters no team can exist without? Who especially speaks not for the weekend dabbler but for the hard-core fanatic, the zealot who devotes an entire life to a team with the single-minded intensity of a monk meditating in a cave? "Big Fan" does, and it does it exceptionally well.

Written and directed by Robert Siegel and starring an ideally cast Patton Oswalt in the title role, "Big Fan" is a poignant, dead-on character study, an examination of a crisis in the life of the most die-hard of die-hard New York Giants football fans. Its situations can be outrageous, its dialogue is often scabrous, but its sense of the core reality it describes is impeccable.

Read more here

The Great Madeline Kahn in "Paper Moon"

" Madeline Kahn has eyes like sad soup, a jaw that is both long and vulnerable, and hair like unexplored jungle. Her voice is high and tinny, as though a midget were making a speech inside a beer can.

All these things are part of her comic equipment, but they aren't what make her a genuine comedian. What she has—as W. C. Fields and Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin had—is a kind of unwavering purpose at right angles to reality, a concentration that she bears, Magoolike, through all kinds of unreasonable events. What is funny is not so much her visible actions as her visible mind."

Excerpt from a movie review by Richard Eder for The New York Times -- May 27, 1976

Luchino Visconti's "Senso"

"If Stendhal had a camera, it would be like Senso," says Martin Scorsese of Visconti's elaborate melodrama. 

Scorsese's deconstruction of Senso is of vital importance for it seemingly explains how Visconti's communist-tainted aristocratic upbringing informed the director's Marxist approach to filmmaking. Scorsese draws our attention toward Senso's colorful cinematography and how it monochromatically crumbles by film's end. 

via: Slant

Classic Scorsese

In 1995's CASINO, Scorsese brought together much of the stylistic and theoretical content of his earlier works.

The engaging world and controlling power structure of the Mafia (a source repeatedly tread by Scorsese) is brought to life in the loud and visually stunning world of the casino.

 In tone, style, and content, Scorsese is constantly pushing the boarders of the film, seeing how much we can come to feel about the most foreign and familiar characters. For many, Martin Scorsese is the most important living American filmmaker—one whose relentless search for the furthest emotional reaches of his genre have led him to the center of the American psyche.

"The Unknown Hipster"

Born French (naturally), Unknown Hipster moved to New York to become a painter, a poet, or anything (within reason) art world related. All that can be said is that Unknown frequently appears at fashionable and cultural events without being necessarily on the list.

"An overdose of quirk and colors"

Anyone wondering what an overdose of quirk and colors might look like without having to resort to drugs would do well to check out "Pepperminta." The helming debut of Swiss video-art wunderkind Pipilotti Rist rolls some of her favorite themes -- female sexuality, childlike curiosity and happiness, and abundant use of vivid hues -- into one bombastic, heavily chroma-keyed package. This is take it or leave it material for fest auds, with commercial prospects as flat as a stick of Doublemint gum.

via: Variety