An Evening with Greil Marcus featuring a screening of I’m Not There

Saturday, November 1, 7 pm

$8 ($6 Walker and IFP members)

Cinema, Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis

“[Greil Marcus'] kind of creative imagination, and the way he’s converted his own medium into something you can’t even categorize, is something I do feel inspired by, and something I hope I can do as a filmmaker.”-Todd Haynes

Renowned music writer Greil Marcus will introduce a screening of I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ film inspired by the life of Bob Dylan and the work of Marcus, including his books The Old Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. Following the screening, Marcus and film curator Sheryl Mousley will engage in conversation about the film and the life and work of Bob Dylan.

I’m Not There Film Description:

Inspired by the life of Bob Dylan, Todd Haynes’ stunning directorial achievement brings together six actors playing characters who craft a unique response to the elusive artist in different phases of his life, career, and persona. Cate Blanchett, in an Academy-Award nominated performance, and Christian Bale (the literal Dylan), Richard Gere (Dylan and Billy the Kid), Heath Ledger (an actor haunted by the legacy of Dylan), Marcus Carl Franklin (Dylan in Woody Guthrie mode), and Ben Whishaw (Rimbaud as Dylan) are set in the political and cultural reality of the era, and filmed in the cinematic styles of the 1960s. Award-winning I’m Not There is “a profoundly, movingly personal film, passionate in its engagement with the mysteries of the recent past.” (New York Times) 2007, 35mm, 135 minutes.

Greil Marcus Bio

“Greil Marcus’ work is very likely the most imaginative criticism being done, but it’s more than that: it’s a light in dark times.”-New York Magazine

In 1968, Greil Marcus began publishing criticism in Rolling Stone, becoming the magazine’s first record review editor. Best known for being a pop music critic, Marcus has also written extensively on literature, art movies, and politics in such publications as Artforum, Interview, the New York Times, Esquire, Salon.com, and Village Voice.

Marcus’s first book redefined rock criticism. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (1975), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and is widely considered one of the finest and most scholarly studies of rock music ever published.

Other books authored by Marcus include: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20^th Century (1989); Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of A Cultural Obsession (1991); Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1997-1992 (1993); The Dustbin of History (1995); Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997); Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000); The Manchurian Candidate (2002); and The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (2006).

Marcus served on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle Award (1983-1989). He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton and the New School, has lectured throughout the United States and Europe, and is currently the Winton Chair Fellow at the University of Minnesota, teaching the seminar “The Old Weird America.”

Béla Tarr

The folks over at Bomb magazine published an interview with Béla Tarr in their summer issue. It focuses a great deal on his latest work, The Man From London, which will make it’s Midwest premiere here at the Walker on october 20, but delves into what drives his filmmaking in general.

Now for the contest.

If you would like to win two free tickets to the Regis Dialogue with Béla Tarr, email your answer to the following question to: joe [dot] beres [at] walkeart [dot] org.

-What was the subject of the 8mm film Béla Tarr made when he was nearly 16 years old?*

The first three people with the correct answer will win the tickets.

*hint, the answer can be found in Bomb.

We have just added a free preview screening of the new Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose!

Thursday, June 7. 7:30pm. Walker Cinema. FREE!

A swirling, impressionistic portrait of an artist who regretted nothing, writer-director Olivier Dahan’s La Vie En Rose stars 2005 Cesar Award–winner Marion Cotillard (A Very Long Engagement, A Good Year) in a blazing performance as the legendary French icon Edith Piaf. Perhaps finding her nearest American analogues in figures such as Billie Holiday and Judy Garland, the world-famous chanteuse lived a tragic life worthy of a novel by Zola or Balzac. From the mean streets of Paris’ Belleville district–where she was born into abject poverty and grew up surrounded by street performers, hookers, and pimps–to the dazzling limelight of New York’s most famous concert halls, Piaf constantly battled to sing and survive, to live and love. Her magical voice made her a star on both sides of the Atlantic. 2007, color, 35mm, 140 minutes.

Take a look at the trailer below.

With the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival opening tonight, there has been little printed material in advance. Their website, however, has never been easier to navigate.

Here are my recommendations based on what I’ve seen and heard:

Films that I’ve seen that I’d recommend:

Journals of Knud Rasmussen (4/28)

Ghosts of Cité Soleil (4/24-4/26)

Something Like Happiness (4/24-4/26)

12:08 East of Bucharest (4/27-4/28)

Films I’m looking forward to seeing:

Away From Her (4/27)

Summer Palace (4/26)

Forever (4/25)

Sweet Mud (4/26-4/28)

Once (4/27)

Eagle vs. Shark (4/24-4/28)

]]> http://blogs.walkerart.org/filmvideo/2007/04/19/minneapolisst-paul-international-film-festival-recommendations/feed/ 1 http://blogs.walkerart.org/filmvideo/2005/10/18/blog-only-offer-free-tickets-to-darwins-nightmare/ http://blogs.walkerart.org/filmvideo/2005/10/18/blog-only-offer-free-tickets-to-darwins-nightmare/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2005 13:33:08 +0000 Paul Schmelzer http://blogs.walkerart.org/filmvideo/?p=20

Cause and effect factors heavily into Hubert Sauper’s new documentary Darwin’s Nightmare (screening tomorrow through Sunday at the Walker Cinema), all the way down to its conception. In 1997 while working on the film Kisangani Diary, which tracked the plight of Rwandan refugees during the Congolese rebellion, he noticed an odd juxtaposition, two planes carrying very different cargos. One, coming in, was loaded with 45 tons of yellow peas, sent from the US to feed refugees in UN camps. The other, departing the Congo, was filled with 50 tons of filleted fish heading to markets in wealthy European countries. “But soon it turned out that the rescue planes with yellow peas also carried arms to the same destinations,” he writes, “so that the same refugees that were benefiting from the yellow peas could be shot at later during the nights.”

This effect had an unlikely cause: as an experiment in the ’60s, Nile perch were introduced into Tanzania’s Lake Victoria and wiped out local fish populations. While people living near the lake languished on the brink of starvation, a booming export market for the fish emerged, bringing with it the byproducts of globalization–factories, guns, and corrupt trade officials. Sauper writes, “I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this ‘fittest’ animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order. I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds, in Honduras, bananas, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil.” The winner of more than a dozen film prizes, including the 2004 European Film Award for Best Documentary, Darwin’s Nightmare was praised by New York Times critic A.O. Scott as “an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time.”

Now, if that all sounds too depressing, here’s something to cheer you up: We’re giving away five pairs of tickets to screenings of Darwin’s Nightmare. Just be among the first five people to email Joe Beres in the Walker Film/Video department (please mention which screening you’d like to see). View dates and times–or for those of you who are too slow, buy tickets–here.

Going into its 8th year, The San Francisco Independent Film Festival is looking for entries. Send in “your most delicous, twisted, unique, historical, fictional, subtitled, stop-motion, curious, cadaverous, outsider, outstanding and otherwise brilliantly-executed indie-films and videos.” Deadline is October 15; the festival runs February 2-16, 2006. Download an application here.

[Via WiFi Art.]