Mayukh Sen
Too often, summer filmgoing is associated with trite, escapist popcorn entertainment. A number of New York-based film and video exhibitions insist otherwise. These events, ranging from feature-length film screenings to mixed-media video installations, push us to reexamine our place in relation to the moving image.
Anthology Film Archives
Hollywood Musicals of the 1970s and 80s (June 17 – July 26, July 29 – August 9)
Some claim that the cinematic musical, in its purest form, has disappeared. This series highlights how the filmmakers of New Hollywood began to deconstruct the Hollywood musical, projecting their new seventies-era sensibilities onto the medium. Anthology has split the series into two parts to examine how, from the time of Hanoi to Reagan, American filmmakers would replicate, critique, and ultimately sustain the musical tradition in response to the country’s sociopolitical turmoil.
William E. Jones, Berlin Flash Frames, 2010. Part of SculptureCenter and Anthology Film Archive’s Time Again collaboration. Courtesy SculptureCenter.
Time Again Screening Series (July 5-6)
In collaboration with SculptureCenter, Anthology features a screening series that serves as a companion piece to the Time Again exhibition on display at SculptureCenter. The short films will engage further with the themes touched upon in the exhibit, namely those of time, displacement, and how humans move through physical spaces.
David Zwirner Gallery
Screenings of Two Documentary Films About Donald Judd (June 25)
Donald Judd, one of the most influential American minimalists, was known for his close relationships with those who lived around him. These two documentary films serve to delve deeper into the late artist’s life, examining how his personal life was imprinted upon his artistic work. Michael Blackwood’s The Artist’s Studio: Donald Judd, in particular, details how Judd drew inspiration from his close friends and neighbors; Marfa Voices, directed by Rainer Judd – Judd’s very own daughter – provides a more intimate, outwardly subjective, look at Judd.
Film Forum
Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray) by Éric Rohmer (July 1 – July 5)
Éric Rohmer’s little-seen 1986 masterpiece, released as Summer in the United States, plays exclusively at Film Forum for five days in July. The film is a parable about a young woman (Marie Riviere) and her naive, rather childish longing for human contact. With this film, Rohmer challenges his often verbose, dialogue-driven cinematic structure. Using Jules Verne’s concept of a mythical “green ray” to foreground his protagonist’s preoccupation with fantasy, he incorporates traditions of romanticism, Impressionism, and documentary realism.
Marie Riviere in Éric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert. Courtesy Film Forum.
Films in Tompkins
Films in Tompkins Summer Screening Series (June 30 – September 1)
As part of the Verizon FiOS EPIX Movie Free-For-All series, Films in Tompkins will present a number of American films in various outdoor locales across the city. Such seminal pieces as Raging Bull will be showcased alongside such oft-neglected fare as The Pope of Greenwich Village, providing a minor survey of the changes undergone by mainstream American cinema from New Hollywood to the present day. Each film will be accompanied by live music.
Light Industry
Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (June 26)
A study of the collective mindset of the Parisian psyche during the summer of 1960, Chronicle of a Summer is a collaboration between French ethnographer-turned-filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin. A documentary essay, the film focuses on a number of different city-dwellers, ranging from the working-class to the bourgeoisie, to convey the city’s mindset during one of its most chaotic, disordered times.
Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer. Courtesy Light Industry.
The Museum of Modern Art
Crafting Genre: Kathryn Bigelow (through August 13)/Lawrence Weiner and Kathryn Bigelow: Films and Videos (July 15 -23, 2011)
Before she reached public consciousness with The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow was a filmmaker with an innate pop art sensibility. MoMA provides an in-depth cultural study of Bigelow’s works, highlighting her progression from an artist of parodic genre texts to one who engaged in such “serious” issues as antiwar polemics. In conjunction with this film series, MoMA will also feature a screenings by Conceptual art icon Lawrence Weiner. Bigelow, who partnered with Weiner throughout much of the seventies, shared similar stylistic concerns with Weiner, and their collaborations will be screened as part of the retrospective.
ContemporAsian (Ongoing)
A region once defined solely by Japanese auteurs and Satyajit Ray, Asia has, throughout the past few decades, flourished as an area of fresh cinematic talent. Ongoing since 2008, MoMA’s monthly ContemporAsian exhibition focuses on Asian films that receive limited distribution in the United States. Featuring films that range from Sri Lanka, China, Pakistan, Mongolia, Indonesia – and even some transcontinental collaborations – the series aims to chronicle this new Asian cinematic landscape and its complex relation to the West.
Museum of the Moving Image
The Cinema of Jerzy Skolimowski (Through July 3)
This retrospective highlights the works of actor, director, painter, poet, and writer Jerzy Skolimowski. One of the forefathers of the Polish New Wave, the filmmaker began creating films amid the harsh, turbulent sociopolitical climate of 1960s Poland. His films would examine, if not outright critique, the often contradictory aspects of postwar Poland’s political shifts. Ultimately forced into exile because of such radical thematic concerns, Skoliomowski moved throughout Europe and the United States, going on hiatus until he recently reemerged with two critically-lauded films.
Trash Mirror (Through August 15)
Educator and developer Daniel Rozin’s Trash Mirror is a kinetic installation that explores urban disorder, movement, and loss of individuality. Rozin collects hundreds of scraps from New York City streets and attaches them to computer-based motors which, in turn, create a constantly-changing reflection of the viewer. The mixed-media work allows us to reexamine our role in a space of decay and chaos.
Christopher Baker’s Hello World or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise. Courtesy Museum of the Moving Image.
Christopher Baker: Hello World or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise (July 18 – Nov 6)
Christopher Baker, with his educational foundations in science, has crafted a interdisciplinary study of how we create our own identities in spaces of commodification. Baker’s collage-based work combines thousands of video diaries posted by Facebook, Myspace, and YouTube users, calling forth the notion of an imagined audience. It functions at once as both a critique of the automatons mass consumerism has built us into and as an optimist’s treatise on the benefits of this new form of communication.
Rooftop Films
Creation, Construction, Convento (July 16)
Though the prospect of a machine-saturated age ridden with robots may frighten us, this series takes a more optimistic approach to such a future. These films and installations anticipate machines who contain the same capacity for emotion we, as humans, possess, examining how we interact with these technological beings.
Kill Screen Videogame Film Festival (July 30)
In response to cries that video games represent a form of low, degenerate pop art, a series of films and videogames made by independent artists will be screened at Rooftop in an attempt to probe how this pervasive art form impacts our day-to-day lives.
The Whitney Museum
Film Screening: Weekend At Bernie’s (June 30)
Artist Cory Arcangel introduces 80s comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, which he will be seeing for the first time. Arcangel considers the movie an example of the “high concept” genre of cinema, in which the hook or plot of the movie can be summed up in a sentence, or even the title – a structure apparent in Arcangel’s own work.
