Warren Sonbert at Light Industry: A Dance to the Music of Time

At The L Magazine dot com:

Warren Sonbert’s films are echo chambers in which nothing is unrelated, case studies in formalist paranoia. Colors flash and leave and always reappear; small actions are repeated, creating mini-symphonies of gesture; politicians look like geese and geese look like piano players...

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Milking It

At Moving Image Source:

The most significant meme of the year probably wasn't an epic fail caught on a cell cam, nor a gonzo Japanese commercial, nor a ridiculous cat, nor anything particularly funny or ironic or Schadenfreude-ish or any of the other qualities we've come to associate with self-proliferating online distribution. It was, rather, a series of earnest, crowd-sourced videos telling LGBT youth that It Gets Better.

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Bruce Conner, Cultural Psychic

At The L Magazine:

It makes sense that the artist once hailed as the progenitor of the MTV aesthetic should also, 30 years later, be hailed as the progenitor the YouTube mash-up...

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Common as Air: To Whom Does Art Belong?

At The L Magazine:

Lewis Hyde can just cut right through culture, as when he says, "Carried over time [irony] is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage...

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Dicking Around: Vivienne Dick at Artists Space

At The L Magazine dot com:

The 1970s saw the institutionalization of experimental cinema, as celluloid seers and weirdos left their day jobs (or lack thereof) and took up teaching positions at various state universities (namely Binghamton and Buffalo) and art schools (namely the San Francisco Art Institute)...

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Code Eroded: At GLI.TC/H

At Rhizome:

In the inverted world of glitch art, functionality is just a sterile enclosure of creative space and degradation an agent of renewal.

Such was the spirit in the air at GLI.TC/H, a five-day conference in Chicago organized by Nick Briz, Evan Meaney, Rosa Menkman and Jon Satrom that included workshops, lectures, performances, installations and screenings. Intuitively, most people involved with new media know what glitch art is...

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Cast Glances: Thomas Comerford’s The Indian Boundary Line and the Contemporary Landscape Film

At Cinema Scope:

Although he has been making a name for himself as a director of exquisitely quiet, meditative avant-garde films since 1997, Thomas Comerford has remained a relatively unsung figure on the experimental scene, partly because he often prefers to bypass film festivals and instead organize DIY tours to various microcinemas around the US...

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Freedom

At The L Magazine:

''Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout 'Freedom! Freedom!' as if it were obvious to all people what it means, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do...

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Market Forces

At Moving Image Source:

In “Why Bother?” a thoughtful, searching essay on the place of literature in contemporary society, author Jonathan Franzen frets that whenever books attempt to critique modern society, they only ever find an audience already in agreement with them, and then he offers this aside...

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Madness and Civilization

At Moving Image Source:

When Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux was released in April 1947, its director was already on his way to becoming persona non grata in American culture. On top of personal scandal...

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Elizabeth Hardwick Shines On

At The L Magazine:

Hardwick, who died in late 2007, is most famous as a critic, and perhaps the most remarkable aspect of her essays was her cutting psychological insight. The first eight stories here, written between 1946 and 1959, are penetrating, richly detailed character sketches...

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Wood's Dilemma

At Moving Image Source:

Robin Wood once wrote, "Any critic who is honest...is committed to self-exposure, a kind of public striptease." In keeping with that spirit...

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Reinterpreting the Gods

At Moving Image Source:

In the story of English-language film criticism, Robin Wood looms large. He was one of the first film critics to publish serious, book-length studies of individual directors, and also one of the first to get a job teaching at a university...

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Sturm und Drang und Irony

At The L Magazine dot com:

I don’t really know what they’re about,” my friend remarked, “I just know I really, really like them.” She was voicing a not uncommon reaction to the films and videos of Michael Robinson...

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Bad Filmmaker Makes Bad Film About Good Filmmakers

At The L Magazine:

The American film avant-garde is in need of an approachable documentary that could make its staggering accomplishments more readily accessible to a wider audience. Or an erudite documentary that could spark discussion among those already in the know...

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Enough with All the 60s Godard!

At The L Magazine dot com:

I have a friend who jokes, whenever another early Godard film is playing at Film Forum, “When is that series going to be over?”—as if Film Forum were running one continuous series of Godard films from the 60s...

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Dziga Amuck: Daffy Duck and the French New Wave's Marxist Spaghetti Western

At The L Magazine dot com:

Tonight, Light Industry is having a screening of the Dziga Vertov Group’s Wind from the East with Chuck Jones’s Duck Amuck—the kind of inspired curatorial pairing that sets the mind ablaze...

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Call and Response: The Music Video and The Meme

At The L Magazine dot com:

The controversy surrounding M.I.A.'s "Born Free" video is a reminder that the music video is proving to be one of the most durable popular art forms of the late 20th/early 21st centuries. In 1985, J. Hoberman wrote, "The music video is the quintessential postmodern form—this week, anyway...

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Evening Land: Just Because Peter Watkins Was Paranoid...

At The L Magazine dot com:

Tonight at 8, RedChannels presents a rare screening of Peter Watkins’s Evening Land at 92YTribeca. In their program notes, RedChannels says that Watkins was often accused of being paranoid...

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After the Wall Fell Down

At The L Magazine:

According to artist Amie Siegel, her newest film, DDR/DDR, is part of a series of works about "voyeurism, psychoanalysis, memory, surveillance and modernist architecture," as well as "objectivity, authority and performance." Unafraid of big themes or broad gestures...

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Sam Fuller, Newspaperman

At The L Magazine dot com:

Before mass culture became pop culture, the reigning forms in the public sphere were the tabloid and the picture-show; the headline and the credit sequence were the virtual talismans of some wildly imagined global village...

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The Videofreex: Pronounced "Video Freeaks"

At The L Magazine dot com:

Early video art was a Wild West of a creative front. Filmmaking required technical skills; a certain level of connoisseurship and an amateur-enthusiast know-how. As such, artist’s film remained tied, however complexly, to old notions of the art-object. Not so with video art...

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Nathaniel Dorsky's Intimate Screenings Move to MoMA Tonight

At The L Magazine dot com:

“A great cut,” says Nathaniel Dorsky, “brings forth the eerie, poetic order of things,” and his films are case studies in how to use film editing for just such effects...

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The Hart of London: Ontario Symphony

At The L Magazine dot com:

Brooklyn’s Light Industry, which recently moved from Sunset Park to Downtown Brooklyn, is quickly evolving from DIY-screening series into bona-fide New York Institution, fueled largely by their tireless and inventive programming. Run by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter...

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