Melissa Gronlund

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  film May 06, 2009

  Define Intervention

  “THE QUESTION IS, WHAT’S NOT ‘EXPANDED CINEMA’?” artist Malcolm Le Grice noted during Tate Modern’s sold-out conference April 17–19, which featured three days of films, performances, and presentations on the subject. The event was an attempt to historicize and bring into mainstream academic discourse the indefinite “movement” of Expanded Cinema, an oft-marginalized grouping of works and practices within the already fringe movement of experimental film. A number of speakers from the London Film-makers’ Co-op gave interviews about their work, younger academics traced connections between canonical

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  film February 12, 2009

  Paper Trail

  IN 1993, STANLEY KUBRICK abandoned the extensive research he’d been conducting for Aryan Papers, a film about a young Jewish woman, Tania, who tries to save her family by pretending they are Catholic. The project’s ephemera remain in Kubrick’s London archive: photographs of Johanna ter Steege, the Dutch actress cast for the lead, in various costumes; Kubrick’s own notes; images of Warsaw during World War II; and photographs from 1939–40 of Ealing Studios in London. As a complement to the Kubrick retrospective currently screening at the British Film Institute, the artists Jane and Louise Wilson

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  film January 29, 2009

  Brick House

  SOME SOUNDS STICK WITH YOU, and three years after I last saw Robert Beavers’s masterful cycle My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure (1967–2002), the noise of fluttering pigeons is still madeleine material, a direct connection to the flapping birds in the Italy of the filmmaker’s tightly focused, mosaiclike works. Living abroad in the 1970s, Beavers documented old Europe through the lens of a young American, finding in its manicured gardens, crumbling facades, and handed-down craft techniques the problems of beauty, age, and artistic influence. In Ruskin (1975/1997),

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  film November 11, 2008

  Boot Camp

  WELL, HE’S STILL ALIVE. At filmmaker Curtis Harrington’s funeral last year, Kenneth Anger predicted that he himself would die on October 31, 2008—the date that he later chose for the London premiere of his two most recent videos: Ich Will!, comprising found footage of a Hitler Youth rally, and Uniform Attraction (both 2008), a study of US Marines. (“I’ve always found men in uniform very attractive, and I think a lot of women do, too,” he told the rowdy crowd at the debut.)

  The screening’s venue, the Imperial War Museum, turned out to be more portentous than the forecasted Halloween date; gone