John Menick

I got to see the Fischli and Weiss retro at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris yesterday. Of course, it included their amazing The Way Things Go:

From the Web site:

The 2007 New York Arab & South Asian Film Festival (NYASAFF) presents the best in recent features, docs, & shorts that increase awareness of the creative vitality and sociopolitical realities of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and their diasporas. Given the historical and cultural affinities between these geographic regions, as well as the contemporary political landscape, several cultural and media organizations, including Alwan for the Arts, 3rd i NY, South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, and Downtown Community Television have launched a collaborative series encompassing film, video, music, visual art, and literature, that will culminate in the annual, NYASA Film Festival running from February 23 – March 4, 2007.

Update: More from the Reeler.

From Wim Wenders Room 666.

Just days after a suspicious auction of an infamous window, an eerie new 8mm film surfaces capturing the first lady and President Kennedy moments before the assassination. And it’s released on President’s Day no less.

Except for the footage’s crisp, Kodachrome-bright imagery, there is nothing obviously outstanding about its 39 seconds, but, like the dodgy window, its origins are fairly strange. Is it possible to ask without a hint of conspiratorial innuendo why it was released now? As with the window auction, Dallas Morning News has the most detailed coverage:

After the motorcade passed, [the cameraman] Mr. [George] Jefferies returned to his office, not aware that the president had been shot.

After he had the film developed, “I showed it to a few people and then put it in a drawer, and frankly, I forgot all about it.”

He casually mentioned it more than a year ago to his daughter and son-in-law, Bonnie and Wayne Graham, who live in suburban Fort Worth. They asked to see it, and Mr. Jefferies later gave it to them.

Mr. Graham called Mr. Mack about a year ago to ask if the film might be valuable. The curator not only thought it might have historical value, he asked Mr. Graham if he’d be interested in donating it to the museum.

“I talked about the tax advantages, and he sounded interested,” Mr. Mack said. “As far as I know, he didn’t shop it around before he gave it to us.”

After museum officials acquired the film, they had it professionally restored to bring out the original color and eliminate scratches, he said.

Though the movie is the sixth in the museum’s collection, and is of far less historical interest than the Zapruder film (which is owned by the federal government), its public release generated intense interest.

I was too late in finding out about the Werner Herzog talk this Friday to get tickets, but in the meantime there’s Tom Bissell’s The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog.

From Errol Morris’ First Person.

From a description of “New Athens,” a future artists’ utopia in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953):

The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest — and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on “total identification.” The history of cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old “moving pictures” more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become — for a while at least — any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be a plant or an animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the “program” was over he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life — indeed, indistinguishable from life itself.

A nice addition to SimplyScripts: A collection of Mohsen Makhmalbaf scripts in Persian and English. The exact quality of the scripts is hard to ascertain, however, mostly because they all are listed as “undated, unspecified script.”

Avellar: I enjoy reading other critics, not only film critics but also art and literature critics — just coming to mind is some writing by Rosalind Krauss, for example. I think I started to write about cinema after reading the texts by (Sergei) Eisenstein that gave me the feeling that to write and read about films could be as good as seeing or making a film.

And still today, I remember how good the feeling was to read for the first time not only Eisenstein (it is a very special case, of course) but also (Andre) Bazin, (Jean) Epstein, (Pier Paolo) Pasolini, (Siegfried) Kracauer. … In this field, some anthologies or essay books — as in Brazil, the ones by Ismail Xavier and Jean-Claude Bernardet — are a good help.

Worth a read.

From Clouzot’s Mystery of Picasso (1956). Via Tinselman.