The 2005 Women with Vision film festival at Walker opened last May with Susanne Bier’s film Brothers. This past Sunday the nominations for the 2005 European Film Awards were announced Sunday at the Seville Film Festival. The prizes will be presented on December 3rd in Berlin. Leading the list with seven nominations is Michael Haneke’s Cache, followed closely by Susanne Bier’s Brothers . Both movies are nominated for best European Film this year, along with Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne’s L’Enfant, Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love, and Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl - The Final Days.
Is Star Wars the greatest postmodern film ever? Aidan Wasley at Slate seems to think so. He writes:
Star Wars, at its secret, spiky intellectual heart, has more in common with films like Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books or even Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle than with the countless cartoon blockbusters it spawned. Greenaway and Barney take the construction of their own work as a principal artistic subject, and Lucas does, too. “This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level,” one of John Ashbery’s works begins. Star Wars, we might say, is concerned with plot on a very plain level. Everything about the films, from the opening text crawls to the out-of-order production of the two trilogies, foregrounds the question of plot. As an audience, we grapple with not just the intricate clockwork of a complex and interwoven narrative, but, in postmodern fashion, with the fundamental mechanics of storytelling itself.
Agree? Disagree? Discuss (ahem, there is a comment function).
Via Greg.org, where you can also find musings on watching all five Cremaster films in order, including:
Best overheard comment after Cremaster 1, when a guy at a suddenly partially visible urinal complained that the mens room door was being propped open by the line: “We just spent 45 minutes in someone’s ovaries. I’m sure no one cares about seeing you take a piss.”
The Globe and Mail confirms that filmmaker David Cronenberg will be “co-curating” the Canadian appearance of ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964. The first Warhol show organized by the Walker, it opens in Minneapolis November 13 with 20 photo-silkscreens featuring images pulled from mass-media of Warhol’s day: tabloids, newspapers, and LIFE magazine. What distinguishes it from other Warhol shows is the inclusion of darker imagery--electric chairs, gory car wrecks, and civil rights marchers attacked by police dogs--amid portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. Which is maybe why Cronenberg is a fitting pick for its showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario next July: his last film was A History of Violence. In preparation for his work, he traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to view some of the artist’s early films, including Sleep (which will be included in the Walker film series Factory Films, January 15-26). The exhibition was curated by former Walker curator Douglas Fogle, now curating the Carnegie International.
Read “Cronenberg to help stage Warhol show.”
