Film
ADOLFAS MEKAS (1925–2011)
Adolfas Mekas—filmmaker, teacher, and co-founder (with his brother Jonas) of the influential magazine Film Culture—died on May 31, 2011. The Brooklyn Rail asked Mekas’s fellow filmmakers, colleagues, students, and friends to share their thoughts and reminiscences about his life and work.
Notes on W.C. Fields (for Jim Gardner)
By Jim SupanickSome men, when they laugh, sound like geese hissing, others like grumbling goslings; some recall the sigh of woodland pigeons, or doves in their widowhood; others the hoot-owl; one an Indian rooster, another a peacock; others give out a peep-peep, like chicks.
PURE AMERICAN CRAZY: Errol Morris’s Tabloid
By Jacob MikanowskiOver the span of his career, Errol Morris has been two different directors. One is an epistemologist, a clear-eyed, if somewhat bemused, analytical philosopher, whose main preoccupations are the nature of truth, the limits of evidence, the fallibility of perception and the pitfalls of self-delusion. The other is an ethnologist of vernacular American craziness.
ONCE UPON A TIME, THE PRINCESS WOKE UP: Catherine Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty
By Anya Jaremko-GreenwoldThe French are the inventors of the fairy tale: Charles Perrault founded the genre in the 17th century with Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Cinderella—and, of course, The Sleeping Beauty.
BLURRED BOUNDARIES: Selections from Migrating Forms 2011
By Colin Beckett and Jason LivingstonMelanie Gilligan’s Popular Unrest (2010) opened this year’s Migrating Forms with a pointed set of questions: Is it relevant to render human stories in a traditional moving-image format? (Arguably not.) Can a movie portray the abstractions of capital amidst an increasingly global, savage monetarization of physical life?
