Travis Jeppesen
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Travis Jeppesen at the 27th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
April 2013
CHANGE IS IN THE AIR, but is it happening fast enough? Certainly the season begs for more: The freezing cold and snowy winds of the past two weeks in London have established that spring has no intention of working her magic anytime soon. No… READ ON
FILM
OPENINGS: SUNG HWAN KIM
March 2013
FOR SUNG HWAN KIM, ideas are less the thing than stories. “I know that it doesn’t matter if things are true or not,” Kim begins in From the Commanding Heights . . . , 2007. “But this is a true story.” He launches into a narrative … READ ON
IN PRINT March 2013 [TOC]
House of Style
Travis Jeppesen at the 63rd Berlinale
February 2013
SELLING OUT IS HARD TO DO. One becomes known for a certain style, and then what? Several directors—Gus Van Sant and Wong Kar-wai among them—showed up to this year’s Berlinale with the sort of average pictures that made you yearn for … READ ON
FILM
Crime Wave
Travis Jeppesen at the 63rd Berlinale
February 2013
NAVIGATING THE HUNDREDS of films comprising the Berlinale is nerve-wracking—you always feel like you’re bound to miss the big one, whatever that may be. Lest your Berlinale experience become a marathon of unwatchables showcasing … READ ON
FILM
“Vertigo of Freedom”
Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
January 2013
Inside: We are shrouded in darkness—necessarily so, as most of the works are video-based and projected along the walls with a raised platform accelerating our path through the works, which can be better thought of as instances: i.e., what… READ ON
PICKS
Travis Jeppesen
December 2012
“Joan Mitchell: The Last Paintings” at Hauser & Wirth, London (February 3–April 28, 2012) The most unjustifiably underappreciated Abstract Expressionist, Mitchell painted as intensely as she lived. This intensity galloped to a defiant… READ ON
SLANT
Family Portrait
Travis Jeppesen on Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean
December 2012
THE BIOPIC is not typically revered by serious cinephiles. Its generic restrictions as an exercise in hero worship or, worse, food for the celebrity lore–hungering denizens of the culture industry, tend to transform the most earnest endeavors… READ ON
FILM
Oleg Kulik
Regina Gallery | London
November 2012
Oleg Kulik’s latest exhibition consists largely of photographs of the artist having sex with different animals. To be fair, Kulik makes these relations somewhat less shocking by becoming an animal himself; in his most famous performances,… READ ON
PICKS
Eternal Return
Travis Jeppesen at the 10th DocLisboa
November 2012
ONE MORNING IN 1992, in a cornfield in northeastern Germany just over the Polish border, two Romany men, illegal immigrants from Romania, were shot and killed by local hunters who supposedly mistook them for wild boar. Investigation of the … READ ON
FILM
Doc Holiday
Travis Jeppesen at the 10th DocLisboa
October 2012
AS GARY INDIANA once observed, the best novels are essentially plotless, completely resistant to any effort one might undertake to submit them to the painful castration of synopsis: Indeed, maybe Borges got it right by implying that the best… READ ON