Film
Girl’s Best Friend: Alexander Chee and The Earrings of Madame de...
By Brittany StiglerA rich history of mythology surrounds jewelry. With wear, a piece often comes to signify events—escape from debt, a lover’s last embrace. Personal history accumulates. Value shifts. Such a conversion occurs in The Earrings of Madame de... as the unwanted-turned-indispensable diamond earrings pass from scene to scene, gathering, as novelist Alexander Chee suggested recently, a “talismanic, magic quality.”
In Conversation
ROSS LIPMAN with Tanya Goldman
Taking as its starting point the fascinating production history of Samuel Beckett’s beleaguered Film in 1965, Ross Lipman’s documentary Notfilm is an evocative meditation on Beckett, cinema, memory, and the nature of vision and perception, and the first foray into feature filmmaking by the renowned archivist and essayist.
In Conversation
PEMA TSEDEN with Lu Yangqiao
Considered the first Tibetan director in China, Pema Tseden has chosen, from the very beginning of his filmmaking career, to make films only in the three Tibetan regions (Anduo, Kangba, and Weizang) and almost entirely in his Tibetan mother tongue.
Planetarium of Blended Dreams
BEN COONLEY Moonley
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.
On John Latham’s Films
By Nathan DunneThe former house and studio of British conceptual artist John Latham is tucked away among a row of sleepy terrace houses on Bellenden Road in South London. Known as Flat Time House, after Latham’s idiosyncratic theory of time, the façade has been replaced with a giant cantilevered book-sculpture called How the Univoice is Still Unheard.
Radu Jude’s Aferim! and the Politics of Distance
By Mihai-Dan CirjanIn contrast to the minimalist analyses of recent capitalism or defunct communism that characterize the Romanian New Wave, Radu Jude’s Aferim! is set in a past era that might seem foreign even to Romanian viewers, let alone Western audiences.
