The Brooklyn Rail

Planetarium of Blended Dreams

By Felix Bernstein

Ben Coonley’s new show at Microscope Gallery in Bushwick throws net art, Silicon Valley tech, avant-garde professionalization, micro-cinema, diaristic video, and fatherhood into a panoramic blender. The heart of the show is within a small DIY dome on the far side of the gallery.

In Conversation

LANA LIN and CAULEEN SMITH

The Winter/Spring edition of Flaherty NYC, programmed by the filmmakers Cauleen Smith and Lana Lin, takes as its theme the concept of transition in many different forms and senses—psychic, bodily, and aesthetic. To explore this theme, Lin and Smith have organized their series, entitled “Tranforming Provocations,” around a number of film and video works by artists including Jennifer Montgomery, Jacolby Satterwhite, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Akwaeke Emezi, Jeanne Liotta, Julie Murray, and Kathleen Collins. We invited the programmers to expand on these themes and the inspirations behind the program, how they brought these works and ideas together, and how their themes have resonated with their own work.

The Belly of a Filmmaker: Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato

By Rumsey Taylor

Herewith the film’s medley of unusual visual tactics commences: superimposition, triptych photography, and interminable tracking shots, one of which will pivot fastidiously around a Doric column as though the film has become momentarily distracted by architecture. Put simply, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is a Peter Greenaway film, and another of the British expatriate’s biographical forays into art history.

In Conversation

JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS with Herb Shellenberger

James N. Kienitz Wilkins can turn a phrase. The dynamic works of the Brooklyn-based writer/director are distinctive in their investigation of language, unconventional approach to performance, and exploration of conversation as a potent transmitter of ideas.

THE BLACK LIBERATION KOOL-AID ACID TEST
On Chi-Raq

By Brandon Harris

The final image of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq—an adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata named the best film of 2015 by venerated critics like Amy Nicholson (formerly of the LA Weekly) and The New Yorker’s Richard Brody—is a shot of the city of Chicago’s flag bearing the words “WAKE UP.” It’s unclear, though, what exactly we’re supposed to wake up from.

In Conversation

ADAM & ZACK KHALIL with Leo Goldsmith

The title of Ojibway filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil’s début feature is INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./]—and if that’s not a hint that this is something other than a straightforward educational documentary, I don’t know what is.