Blogs Crosscuts

24 City

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 Friday, January 30 at 7:30 pm marks the next instillation of Expanding the Frame series in the Walker Cinema with Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City - a story whose jumping off point is the closing of a state-owned munitions factory, then plunges into the lives of the affected people through a series of interviews as the factory is [...]

24 City Friday, January 30 at 7:30 pm marks the next instillation of Expanding the Frame series in the Walker Cinema with Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City - a story whose jumping off point is the closing of a state-owned munitions factory, then plunges into the lives of the affected people through a series of interviews as the factory is replaced with the luxury housing complex also named 24 City.

Imagine a cross between documentary and fiction. Now imagine, if you will, that you cannot quite decipher clearly a distinction between either category – documentary or fiction. This is what Jia Zhang-ke captures in 24 City. The film addresses a subject far too many of us are familiar with today – factories, buildings, and other land being transformed into high-rise luxury apartments. Richard Brody wrote a synopsis of the film for The New Yorker, which articulates the personal aspect of the film’s characters, and the reason the line between documentary and fiction is so blurred.

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times also wrote a blurb about 24 City but, rather than simply review the film, compared and contrasted it to Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

As if a comparison to Indiana Jones weren’t enough for you – because clearly it pushed me over the edge – what really makes 24 City intriguing or at least worth-while, is the way that Jia uses the camera as his pen – a very sharp, digital pen at that – as a way to lyrically document the state of the world in a poignant yet eloquent way.

Repeat screening on Saturday, January 31st at 7:30 pm as well.

Welcome Emily Hanson

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It’s always a pleasure to welcome someone new to the blogfold. Emily Hanson just joined the team as an intern in Film/Video, and has kindly offered her time and expertise in our humble little blogosphere. A few things about Emily: She is in her last semester at Augsburg College with a major in English with [...]

It’s always a pleasure to welcome someone new to the blogfold. Emily Hanson just joined the team as an intern in Film/Video, and has kindly offered her time and expertise in our humble little blogosphere.

A few things about Emily:

  • She is in her last semester at Augsburg College with a major in English with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in Film.
  • She has a notebook full of strange quotes from David Lynch heard at a weekend-long seminar in Iowa.
  • Her love of film stems from a film analysis class in High School and 16mm filmmaking.”
  • She makes a mean cup of coffee.
  • Her favorite film is Annie Hall, but has been fluctuating between that and Breathless, Amelie, and Goodbye, Lenin for a while.
  • She has a keen ear for good music.
  • Oh, and she loves the Gilmore Girls.

Sound and Light: Projector Performances by Bruce McClure

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Thursday, January 15 at 7:30pm in the Walker Cinema (and it’s FREE!) we are kicking off our third annual Expanding the Frame series with a performance/screening by New York artist Bruce McClure. Bruce’s work blurs the lines of film presentation, live music, and performance and isn’t bound by any of the structures that could be [...]

Bruce McClure in the Cinema

Bruce McClure in the Cinema

Thursday, January 15 at 7:30pm in the Walker Cinema (and it’s FREE!) we are kicking off our third annual Expanding the Frame series with a performance/screening by New York artist Bruce McClure. Bruce’s work blurs the lines of film presentation, live music, and performance and isn’t bound by any of the structures that could be potentially imposed by any of the individual elements.

the effect pedal chain

the effect pedal chain

Every one of his performances is unique, but for his Walker show, he plans on trying a few things he hasn’t before. It will involve both of our 35mm projectors, three of Bruce’s modified 16mm projectors, and a chain of about 15 effect pedals to process the sound – all working simultaneously to create an aural and visual experience like no other.

Bruce has been working in the Cinema getting everything set up for the performance tomorrow. Even in the early stages of the set-up and preparation, I’ve been completely floored. What he creates is an enveloping, visceral experience that transcends any cinema presentation I have seen. The visuals and sound interact in way that seem to, for lack of a better word, trick your brain into sensing rhythms and patterns that perhaps aren’t actually present in either. The experience itself is intensely physical, almost violent in a way, yet ethereal and trance-inducing.

It has the potential to be the best film/performance/noise show for me, period. If you are anywhere in and around Minneapolis, don’t miss this. I can’t stress that enough. If nothing else, it will be something the likes of which you never have seen and possibly won’t see again.

all engines firing

all engines firing

The Exiles restoration: Interview with Ross Lipman

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Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film and Television Archive has become one of the foremost and experienced experts in the realm of Independent Cinema. He’s restored and preserved some landmark works of independent cinema including The Times of Harvey Milk, some of Kenneth Anger‘s most prominent titles, and the incredible Killer of Sheep. I would [...]

Ross Lipman at NYA

Ross Lipman at NYU

Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film and Television Archive has become one of the foremost and experienced experts in the realm of Independent Cinema. He’s restored and preserved some landmark works of independent cinema including The Times of Harvey Milk, some of Kenneth Anger‘s most prominent titles, and the incredible Killer of Sheep. I would argue that he is doing some of the most important and thankless work in the film world, and as someone who has had the pleasure of seeing several of his major restorations projected in a cinema, I can attest to the remarkable difference he has made with the titles he has worked on – not only restoring them from all possible states of degradation, but preserving them for future generations. I think that anyone that saw Killer of Sheep via one of the barely available 16mm prints before the restored version would certainly agree. Ross was kind enough to answer a few questions about his work on The Exiles (Opening at the Walker on January 16) via email.

As I understand it, The Exiles was essentially considered lost until Thom Anderson used a clip in his documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. From there, how did the film and the restoration project get to you at UCLA?

The Exiles wasn’t so much lost as forgotten. Los Angeles Plays Itself essentially brought the film to the light of day. Then Dennis Doros and Amy Heller at Milestone bought the rights and hunted the original down to where it was archived at USC. I was thrilled when he offered us the restoration job.

When you began the project, what film elements did you have access to, and what state were they in?

We had Kent Mackenzie’s original picture and soundtrack negatives, which were in pristine physical condition. That’s the ideal starting place.

Can you describe the restoration process on this particular film and its timeline?

The Exiles

The Exiles

We had the advantage of not just the original negative, but also a decent reference print and access to two of the cinematographers, John Morrill and Erik Daarstad. Under those circumstances, it’s mainly a question of grading and printing technique. That’s the process whereby one works out the film’s contrast and light values on a shot-by-shot basis. The tricky part came in when we needed to strike the duplicate negative, because there’s generational loss in analog film printing. Much of The Exiles was shot under high contrast, low light conditions, meaning it would be very easy to lose shadow detail. We went throughan extended testing process before we got what we were looking for in the release prints. I’m indebted to Walt Rose of Fotokem for his painstaking work on this.

The restoration of The Exiles was preceded by your restoration of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. Did the process of restoring Killer of Sheep inform your work on The Exiles at all?

Each restoration is a different story, but obviously you’re able to pick up certain techniques as you go along. Killer of Sheep was much more difficult than The Exiles from a technical standpoint, as the originals were in much worse shape. But The Exiles presented its own challenges.

Charles Burnett (The Director of Killer of Sheep), along with Sherman Alexie, is credited as a presenter of the restored film. What role did he play in this project?

Charles and Sherman lend their name to the release and help call critical attention to it. It’s a form of advertising for a good cause, in that they attract viewers who otherwise might not be interested in an “old, post-dubbed indy about Native Americans”. In the case of Charles it also spoke to his youth, as he knew downtown Los Angeles like the back of his hand and had ridden the Angels Flight. He also saw in Kent Mackenzie a kindred spirit in obscurity–an obsessed director working in a humanist neo-realist tradition in the maze of Los Angeles.

Do you have any closing thoughts?

I was particularly thrilled to work on The Exiles as it allowed me to continue developing my work in restoring American independent cinema. It’s so easy to get deceived by Hollywood as the dominant image of American narrative film. Our documentary and experimental work is largely respected abroad, but voices like Burnett, Mackenzie, Shirley Clarke, John Cassavetes, and many others comprise a strikingly powerful communal voice in the narrative realm. Look for some surprises in the coming years if UCLA can get the funding. Next up is Barbara Loden’s Wanda.

Expanding the There and Then

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There’s an astonishing moment early in Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s new nonfiction film 24 City–the highlight of the Walker’s latest “Expanding the Frame” series–where the imminent demolition of a 50-year-old factory is celebrated in a formal ceremony as auguring a “new and glorious chapter” for Chengdu City. Presiding over the pomp and circumstance of “progress”–a [...]

24 City

24 City

There’s an astonishing moment early in Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s new nonfiction film 24 City–the highlight of the Walker’s latest “Expanding the Frame” series–where the imminent demolition of a 50-year-old factory is celebrated in a formal ceremony as auguring a “new and glorious chapter” for Chengdu City. Presiding over the pomp and circumstance of “progress”–a swanky new apartment complex, of course–is a businessman who watches approvingly as a singing crowd dutifully salutes the transfer of land from people to corporation: Happy days are here, if not for all. Even more striking than this umpteenth illustration of Luxury Living is Jia’s climax–not the factory’s demolition, it turns out, but the subsequent testimony of a young woman who complicates our view of this ostensibly tragic development. In the end, one’s desire to advance her family in economic terms isn’t hard to understand–not in any language.

Along with 24 City (January 30 and 31 at 7:30 p.m.), films from Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States lend equal parts specificity and universality to the “Place and Time” half of the “Expanding” series. (Experimental cinema–including that of the late, great Derek Jarman, celebrated here with three features, a shorts package, and the area premiere of Isaac Julien’s biographical documentary Derek–constitutes the other half.) The range of these five “Place and Time” films extends to style and tone as well: There’s the acerbic Of Time and the City (January 23 and 24, 7:30 p.m.), native Liverpudlian Terence Davies’s sarcastic ode to his hometown, a found footage epic as kaleidoscopically surreal as Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg; the deadpan farce of Fernando Eimbcke’s Lake Tahoe (February 6 and 7, 7:30 p.m.), a sort of Mexican After Hours; and Alex Rivera’s sci-fi Sleep Dealer (February 27 at 7:30 p.m.), an Amerindie Brazil and a aptly forward-looking capper to the series.

But how on earth to describe The Exiles (January 16 and 17 at 7:30 p.m., and January 17

The Exiles

The Exiles

and 18 at 2:00 p.m.)? Recently rescued from oblivion, owing in part to its salute in Thom Andersen’s genius cult doc Los Angeles Plays Itself, this 1961 portrait of Native Americans in L.A.’s Bunker Hill district is, in fact, not truly a portrait, as director Kent MacKenzie has the subjects of his nonfiction playing themselves in reenactments. So, too, the film remains controversial–to this day, and, if anything, insufficiently so–for allegations that MacKenzie essentially paid (or plied) his vulnerable nonactors with alcohol. In other words, The Exiles, named for three men who go AWOL from their reservation–is a vision of a culture that isn’t just lost but on some level nonexistent. Which, come to think of it, is a fair definition of cinema–at least if one sees the camera as an even greater influence on “reality” than booze.

Thus “Expanding the Frame” doubles as a bold articulation of how movies–even documentaries–concoct as much as they preserve. Could it be any other way? In 24 City, Jia meets the inevitable head-on by employing professional actors, including Joan Chen, to fill in his nonfiction’s gaps. In Of Time and the City, Davies, with his witheringly intelligent voiceovers, flaunts the sense in which any assemblage is subjective. If the films by Rivera and Eimbcke appear comparatively conventional, each hardly fails to capture a reality that, if it ever existed, was already gone in the instants–24 per second, maybe 30–after the shutter snapped. The passing of time and place: that, unavoidably, is progress.