EVERYTHING IS CINEMA AND A MARRIED WOMAN with Richard Brody, books, and wine.

On Friday night we present a critical biography of a filmmaker who sought to merge life and art and began to forget that the camera view wasn't life and the screen wasn't the stage and the world was more than that dialectic. And then we'll project one of his lesser-shown films, which purports to be about a woman's affair but is about the way the visual ad-driven media has fucked sex for everyone.

This is the first in a series.

July 23 7:30 p.m.

Unnameable Books

600 Vanderbilt Ave.

718-789-1534

When they come out, books have parties. Over the first months of their release they'll get a few parties in a few different regions. After that, nothing.

What about those books still good past their appointed shelf life? Maybe they should get a party now and then, too.

But this is a CINEMA series. So we're showing films, and celebrating books related to the films, and bringing in the authors to talk about the books AND the films, years after that initial tiny birth-death cycle of publishing. And we'll be drinking wine.

July 23rd will by the first installment of this reading/screening party. We'll be showing A MARRIED WOMAN by Jean-Luc Godard, and celebrating the book EVERYTHING IS CINEMA by Richard Brody. Brody will be present to discuss the book, two years later, and talk about A MARRIED WOMAN, forty-six years later. And we'll sit outside and have some wine.

EVERYTHING IS CINEMA: THE WORKING LIFE OF JEAN-LUC GODARD (Metropolitan, 2008) Paying as much attention to Godard’s technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, New Yorker critic Richard Brody traces an arc from the director’s early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years.

A MARRIED WOMAN (1964, Godard) Macha Méril plays Charlotte — the title character. She’s married to aviator Pierre. She sleeps with thespian Robert. She talks “intelligence” with renowned critic-filmmaker Roger Leenhardt, and takes part in a fashion-shoot at a public pool. The “fragments” of the film’s subtitle are chapters, episodes, vignettes, tableaux; Une femme mariée is a pile of magazines made into a film, and a film turned into a magazine — the table of contents reading: Alfred Hitchcock. Jean Racine. La Peau douce. A Peruvian serum. Nuit et brouillard. The “Eloquence” bra. The quartets of Beethoven. Madame Céline. Fantômas. Robert Bresson. A Volkswagen making a right turn. A film shot in 1964, and in black and white.

Upcoming events in this series will include Cineaste's Richard Porton (Film and the Anarchist imagination) with Vigo and Bruñuel, and Robert Gardner with Robert Gardner.

LA COMMUNE (an attempt at a daytrip from Universal Time)

"We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the conjunction of Post Modernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking in the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalization, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered “old fashioned.” Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born." --Peter Watkins

LA COMMUNE, (Watkins, 2000, 345mins, DVD) is one of Peter Watkins most assertive measures against Monoform,* methods of media production and distribution. It is an event, a collaboration, and a beseeching -- a warm, crafty endurance that produces questions like weeds throughout its nearly six hour run time.

Length is only the most discussed abbererant feature of LA COMMUNE, and perhaps the least interesting. Watkins employed techniques in casting, research, shooting, and editing that address form and delivery in radical ways, many of which surface in his other work, but are taken to a deliberately lengthy extent here.

“If Hollywood’s colonization of world cinema markets is an integral component of the media apparatus, as the film explicitly argues in the later sections (by means of the black title screens that narrate a bulk of the action), then making a film in deliberate defiance of the standards which embody the Hollywood ethic is a step toward reappropriating cinema. Every aspect of the filmmaking serves this end: the overwhelming use of non-professional actors; the director’s deference to the actors for much of the script; the offhand shift in temporal perspectives; the constant breaking of the “fourth wall”; the exclusion of all on-screen violence; the unusual amount of reading the viewer is forced to do. None of these techniques are new in themselves, but rarely have they been fused in one film, on the scale of La Commune.” --Jacob Collins, Evergreen Review

For this day-long screening, we will divide the film into two parts, with a 30 minute break in between. The screening will begin at 11:30am. Following the film, there will be a light meal and conversation at the 16 Beaver space.

Admission is free. Please if possible bring food, tea, juice, coffee to share during the break, or something to contribute to the dinner/conversation, which will consist mainly of salad, cheese, bread, and wine.

Rachael Rakes and Red Channels are preparing a reader to be distributed on the day of the event.

Here is a list of preparatory material:
On the film:
http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/commune.htm
http://www.rebond.org/english.htm
http://www.critikat.com/L-Association-Rebond-pour-La.html
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/film-peter-watkins-la-commune.html
On Commune history:
http://www.unbossed.com/index.php?itemid=2496
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Pariscommune.htm
http://www.marxists.org/history/france/paris-commune/index.htm
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/kropotkin/pcommune.html
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/bakunin/paris.html
http://www.bloom0101.org/toafriend.html

16 Beaver: http://www.16beavergroup.org/

*The MONOFORM is the internal language-form (editing, narrative structure, etc.) used by TV and the commercial cinema to present their messages. It is the densely packed and rapidly edited barrage of images and sounds, the 'seamless' yet fragmented modular structure which we all know so well. This language-form appeared early on in the cinema, with the work of pioneers such as D.W.Griffith, and others who developed techniques of rapid editing, montage, parallel action, cutting between long shots/close shots, etc. Now it also includes dense layers of music, voice and sound effects, abrupt cutting for shock effect, emotion-arousing music saturating every scene, rhythmic dialogue patterns, and endlessly moving cameras. http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/hollywood.htm

DVDs of LA COMMUNE are available from Icarus Films athttp://homevideo.icarusfilms.com/new2002/la.shtml

Many thanks to Jonathan Miller at Icarus for permission to hold this community screening.

News From Navarra -- A showcase of Punto de Vista's anti-documentary documentaries.

Friday, July 16
7:30pm
at Millennium Film Workshop
66 E. 4th Street, NYC

A program of new Spanish experimental non-fiction, in conjunction with the festival Punto de Vista, selected by Doctruck and Uniondocs, and co-presented with Pragda. 

The Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival is an annual festival held in Navarra dedicated to forms of cinema generically grouped under the heading of ‘documentary.’ Programmed by Artistic Director Josetxo Cerdán, films come from around the world, with an emphasis on finding rarities in form and subject. The festival seeks to reward risk-taking and non-narrative approaches, and to uncover glints in Spanish and World Cinema. 

AMANAR TAMASHEQ, Directed by Lluis Escartin, 2010 15', DVD
Best Short Film Prize Winner --PDV 2010

In Tuareg with English Subtitles
Lluis Escartín's Amanar Tamasheq  communicates a highly political message by respectful and reflexive means, delivered in an intelligent and poetic combination of sound and image. Escartin lived with Tuareg rebels in the desert of Mali, and turned his camera on them in order to bring back their messages -- to the degree that the mistranslations of language and history allow.

LOS MATERIALES, Directed by Los Hijos, 2009, 67', DVD
Jean Vigo Best Director Prize Winner -- PDV 2010

English Subtitles

Los Materiales explores an empty landscape around the reservoir of Riaño, in the province of León, in which the former town and nine other villages lie submerged as a consequence of a flood in 1987. The three members of Los Hijos, a young experimental filmmaking collective from Madrid, spent a year walking the area, and the resulting work is a spare, diffuse document of a village just below the surface of history. Subtitles replace dialogue, leaving the occasional background noise as the sole sound source, and the story reliant on written text. 

“’Los Materiales defies our expectations on audiovisual language (specially the sound edition and mixing), on certain landscape aesthetic, even on the motivation or the ethic of filmmaking.” Blogs and Docs

“Interesting and fearless, lively and stimulating, the film´s purpose is the exploration of Riaño, not only to dismember its dramatic structure but its semantic field.... The recovering of village´s history turns out to be impossible, just suggested, almost abstract, while the movie´s plot drives to metacinematographic issues and ends -in a mysterious, strange and disconcerting turn- becoming a terror history.”
Cahiers du cinema , España.

Discussion to follow with Josetxo Cerdán, María Adell of Pragda, and Spanish Film Critic Manu Yáñez.