Aaron Cutler

• 

  interviews November 15, 2016

  Deborah Stratman

  The American film and video artist Deborah Stratman has made a number of works that use sounds and images in elliptical ways to lead audience members to question their awareness of their own surroundings. Her recent hour-long film The Illinois Parables (2016) tells eleven stories set in the titular state (and, by extension, the United States), between the years 600 C.E. and 1985, that refer to past traumas through voice-over, music, and reenacted scenes combined with present-day landscape studies. The Illinois Parables is distributed educationally in the US by Grasshopper Film and will screen

• 

  interviews May 26, 2015

  Andrew Bujalski

  Andrew Bujalski’s fifth feature film, Results (2015), is a romantic comedy about personal fitness that unfolds primarily in Austin. As in Bujalski’s previous works, such as Beeswax (2009) and Computer Chess (2013), humor arises from how the characters’ carefully made plans lead to unpredictable ends. Results opens in New York and Austin on May 29, 2015. Here, Bujalski discusses the ways in which the film is a continuation of his “kicking away [his] crutches.”

  RESULTS is my version of romantic comedy, a genre that has fallen into ill repute. Romantic comedies are fun to write, but they also tend

• 

  interviews April 20, 2015

  René Frölke

  Two films from German director René Frölke will screen on April 22, 2015 in New York as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series Art of the Real 2015. The feature-length Le beau danger (2014), which Frölke primarily discusses here, gives a present-day portrait of Romanian author Norman Manea, who has lived in exile for many years in the US; the medium-length Guided Tour (2011) presents a 2008 trip taken by German president Horst Köhler to the HfG Karlsruhe, a fine arts university, where he observes similarities between art and politics.

  IN BOTH OF THESE FILMS, I’m interested in exploring

• 

  film April 08, 2015

  Only Human

  THERE ARE FEW wider-sung songs than Brazilian composer Tom Jobim’s “The Girl from Ipanema,” myriad versions of which are performed in The Music According to Antonio Carlos Jobim (2012). The documentary, codirected by Nelson Pereira dos Santos and the late composer’s granddaughter Dora Jobim, almost entirely consists of archival concert and studio footage of musicians (among them Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Gal Costa, and Chico Buarque) rendering Jobim tunes like “Girl,” “Desafinado,” and “Waters of March” across a wide span of languages and decades. Occasionally performing is the Rio de

• 

  interviews March 19, 2015

  Eugène Green

  In La Sapienza (2014), the filmmaker Eugène Green’s fifth feature-length work, a middle-aged French architect named Alexandre (played by Fabrizio Rongione) travels to Italy to finish a book on the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. His wife, Aliénor (Christelle Prot), comes with him, and the two find spiritual renewal in conversation with a pair of teen siblings named Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) and Lavinia (Arianna Nastro). La Sapienza is distributed in the United States by Kino Lorber and begins a run at Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York on March 20, 2015. Here, Green speaks about the film.

• 

  film October 27, 2014

  Indie Rocks

  ALBERT SERRA’S STORY OF MY DEATH (2013) animates the past with glinting life. Serra, a thirty-nine-year-old Catalonian, focuses on a corpulent, decaying, half-mad Casanova (Vicenç Altaió) who spends his waning days in a Swiss castle admiring himself—and younger women. He leads a group of followers on a trip to a sunlit pastoral setting where no less forbidding a figure than Dracula (Eliseu Huertas) awaits them. The group succumbs to vampirism within a film whose nighttime images often hover on the precipice of visibility. We witness the spectacle of an older world burning out like a candle on

• 

  interviews August 29, 2014

  Nuria Ibáñez

  The Spanish documentarian Nuria Ibáñez’s most recent film, The Naked Room (2013), was recorded entirely inside a pediatric therapist’s office in a Mexico City children’s hospital and is composed primarily of close-ups of the young patients’ faces during consultations. The film will screen at Anthology Film Archives from August 29 to September 4, 2014 in its New York theatrical premiere run. 
 


  WITH THE NAKED ROOM I wanted to show something that is often treated as though it were invisible. There is no real and sincere media reflection today on the wounds of childhood and adolescence. Filming

• 

  interviews June 23, 2014

  Joanna Hogg

  The British filmmaker Joanna Hogg has made three intimate, sympathetic features in which vulnerable friends and family members attempt to hide secrets from each other within large houses and open frames. Exhibition (2013) is currently playing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, through July 3, and Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2009) will also screen there from June 27 to July 3, 2014.

  I MAKE FILMS BUT DON’T LOOK AT THEM AFTERWARD, which means I haven’t seen Unrelated or Archipelago for some time. I feel strong connections between the three films, though. They form a chain, each one linked

• 

  film June 17, 2014

  Hope Springs Eternal

  NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY (2013) tells a Filipino tale. The film begins on the northern Philippine island of Luzon with a disillusioned former law student, Fabian Viduya (Sid Lucero), espousing to friends his “new morality,” according to which a society rebuilds itself by extinguishing its undesirables. For Fabian, these dregs include a local usurer and her daughter, both of whom he soon stabs to death. Joaquin (Archie Alemania), an impoverished DVD salesman, is framed and imprisoned for the crime, leaving his wife Eliza (Angeli Bayani) and sister-in-law Ading (Hazel Orencio) behind to raise

• 

  interviews January 27, 2014

  Marielle Nitoslawska

  Canadian Marielle Nitoslawska’s feature film Breaking the Frame (2012) is a portrait of the American artist Carolee Schneemann. A collage drawn from interviews, excerpts from her private notebooks, and music composed by the late James Tenney, the film celebrates Schneemann as a guide for subsequent generations of artists. Breaking the Frame’s US theatrical premiere will run at Anthology Film Archives in New York from January 31 to February 6, 2014, and will be followed by screenings at London’s ICA. Nitoslawska and Schneemann will be in discussion on opening night in NYC.

  MY PREVIOUS FILM BAD

• 

  film November 03, 2013

  In the Margins

  A MAN IS SHOWN RACING down a narrow, dimly lit corridor, with a handheld camera trailing him—this image, played out by several different patients in an unnamed Chinese psychiatric ward, recurs periodically throughout Wang Bing’s new documentary film ’Til Madness Do Us Part (2013). Wang and cameraman Liu Xianhui rarely leave the floor of this institution, remaining instead in close observation of the men and absorbing the rhythms of their daily lives. The resulting footage depicts a realm largely beyond the purview of any doctor or staff member. Throughout the film the men strive to take advantage

• 

  interviews September 16, 2013

  Roddy Bogawa

  MoMA’s film exhibition “Roddy Bogawa: If Films Could Smell” tracks twenty-five years in the life of the Japanese-American artist, who was born in 1962. The Los Angeles–bred punk rocker turned filmmaker has made a wide variety of films with topics ranging from the elusive story of a conflicted family (1991’s Some Divine Wind) to showcasing extreme self-portraiture (2003’s Talking Shit About Myself). The series runs September 18–23, 2013.

  THE TITLE OF THIS SURVEY comes from a few sources, one being the Clash song “If Music Could Talk” and the other being Proust, who famously wrote about smell