Fast, Cheap, and Under Control

THE MIDCENTURY JAPANESE avant-garde is an undeniable presence in New York City right now. The Museum of Modern Art’s “Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde” show, in conjunction with a film program on “Art Theater Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema, 1960–1986,” wraps up this week, just as Anthology Film Archives prepares to screen “Rituals in the Avant-Garde: Film Experiments in 1960s–70s Japan.”

With a program highlighting gems amid the trashy cinematic gewgaws of Shintoho Company, Japan Society’s “Into the Shintoho Mind Warp: Girls, Guns & Ghosts from the Second Golden Age of Japanese Film,”

Left: Michael Glawogger, Megacities, 1998, still from a color film, 90 minutes. Right: Michael Glawogger, France, Here We Come!, 2000, still from a color film, 80 minutes.

film April 17, 2012

Messy and Vital

“THE ABSURD IS THE CULTURAL HERITAGE OF ALL MANKIND,” says a man who identifies himself as SuperBarrio Gomez, declaiming to the slums of Mexico City while wearing the flamboyant uniform of a masked lucha libre wrestler, as though to illustrate his own point. SuperBarrio Gomez is one of hundreds of subjects in Austrian Michael Glawogger’s sensory overload Megacities (1998), a sui generis global-symphony film that displays its author’s intrepid, incurably curious camera and his dab-handed editing from the opening set piece sequence, which follows a train through Mumbai’s Govandi slums, breaking