Film

ASVOFF TOKYO TEASER from Diane Pernet's ASVOFF on Vimeo.

Šarūnas Bartas is a Lithuanian film director

"Gomorrah" is art taken to a high point of conscience and conscientiousness.

Martin Scorcese declared Matteo Garrone's "Gomorrah" , "the greatest Mafia film ever made". Artforum in a long essay in 2008 by Alexander Stille gauged the film as "an adaptation that manages to be a compelling work in its own right and indeed one of the best crime movies Italy has produced in decades."

It is ultimately about ways of seeing. What is the way in which you choose to see fashion as opposed to art as opposed to sex as opposed to advertising in contrast to life, real life ? What are the lines separating and distinguishing all these driving forces in our culture? Photography is only truly powerful when it can provoke a body of questions and the beauty of this film lies precisely in the questions it pulls up in its wake..

You can see "Stag Film" for its pure beauty, as a series of images rendering the horse's classical form as a sculptural black and white abstraction. As the initial press release this summer for the gallery exhibition of "Stag Film" explained " Is it that Stag Film is simply about motion and emulsion and how light at 250th of a second captures and renders life static?".

But you also have the option of being startled and shocked by "Stag Film": by its realness in documenting the urgency in which this stallion battles a "phantom" mare.

Or you could synthesize all these layers of reaction and see a shadow play of life and death and sex ... of the species fighting desperately to perpetuate itself, of an artist identifying poetry in that struggle.

For further information on purchasing the book edition of Stag Film, here are the full details

Swinton served as one of the producers of " I Am Love"

A friend recommended this film, suggesting it was my particular cup of tea.

Still from "The Conformist"

I'm shaking with excitement at the thought that William Klein's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant "Qui êtes vous Polly Magoo ?" is finally availble on DVD. Well almost. The film is probably the fashion photographer's most known film excursion starring a real 60's gem of a model, Dorothy McGowan as a charming American girl stranded in the wilderness of the Paris fashion scene. Films about the fashion world and about models often times get it completely wrong, but Klein's film in its satirical spirit gets it so absolutely right you would swear it is a documentary. "Qui êtes vous Polly Magoo ?" is part of the Eclipse Series (9 )- The Delirious Fictions of William Klein - Eclipse from Criterion (Criterion Collection) and can be pre-ordered right now at amazon.com. In the meantime here's a little taste of the iconic film via youtube.

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, at a theater near you

TI usually breaks into the reference vault when picking flicks but the promise of Gus Van Sant's latest, "Paranoid Park", actually dragged me out to an actual theater for the screening. As critics have been underscoring, "Paranoid Park" makes for a beautiful bookend to Van Sant's first outing , "Mala Noche". Based on the "young adult" novel by Blake Nelson, the film centers on the emotional torment the lead character Alex suffers when he accidentally causes the death of a security guard. The impressionistic blur created by the mix of 35mm, Super-16 and videotape makes this film feel very much like an elegy to the state of suspension represented by adolescence. Gabe Nevis in the lead, btw shimmers with serious star quality. Found via Myspace in fact!

Still from Jean Luc Godard's Breathless

When I was in film school this kid in our film-group used to sketch "Godard Is God" in his notebook.

The Films Of Derek Jarman: Rubell Family Collection

Talk about a man at the right place at the right time. Derek Jarman (1942-1994) flew fast and furious in his career lensing 11 feature films and over 36 shorts. When punk exploded, changing the English cultural scene forever, Jarman was there with "Jubilee". When the New Queer Cinema bandwagon started to roll, he was right there with "Caravaggio". He continued to take his idiosyncratic point-of-view on historical subjects in the 90's wih "Edward II" "Wittgenstein". Nobody ever spoke more eloquently about the films of Derek Jarman than his close friend and frequent lead actress than Tilda Swinton. She said ina 2002 talk at the Edinburgh Film Festival:

"This is what I miss, there being no more Derek Jarman films: the mess, the vulgarity, the cant, the poetry, the edge, the pictures, Simon Fisher Turner’s music, the real faces, the intellectualism, the science, the bad temperedness, the good temperedness, the cheek, the standards, the anarchy, the gauchness, the romanticism, the classicism, the optimism, the activism, the challenge, the longeurs, the glee, the playfulness, the bumptiousness, the resistance, the wit, the fight, the colours, the grace, the passion, the goodness, the beauty...."

The Rubell Family Collection is staging the for films mentioned above over the next four Saturdays, starting Jan 18th. If in Miami please make the pilgrimage.