Film
Idle in Ireland: Albert Serra’s Singularity
By Samuel AdelaarAlbert Serra’s Singularity is a sublimely scaled narrative film in the form of a five-screen, six-sound-channel installation.
Drifting Architectures: Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables
By Joe BuccieroThe Illinois Parables, a documentary by the Chicago-based filmmaker Deborah Stratman, begins with a brief series of shots from above the titular state’s landscape. Illinois is “flyover country” after all: most coastal Americans see it as a undifferentiated stretch of farmland, flanked by the Mississippi on one side and cut through by the country’s two longest interstate highways, I-90 and I-80.
Wild and Vocal: Flaherty NYC Autumn 2016
By Irina Leimbacher“Wild Sounds” is the name of this fall’s 2016 Flaherty NYC screening series, showing every other Monday night at Anthology Film Archives. Curated by Chris Stults and Genevieve Yue, the series offers a chance to see the work of a number of too-rarely screened international artists exploring women’s domestic and political lives.
Artist and Models: Bresson’s Interviews and Writings
By Michael BlumIn 1940, a French soldier named Robert Bresson was captured and detained in a German labor camp as a prisoner of war. Improbably, just two years following his release, the soldier would go on to complete a feature film, Les Anges du péché (1943). More improbably still, upon this film’s premiere, he would be interviewed by Je suis partout (literally, “I am everywhere”)—a far-right, ultra-collaborationist, avowedly anti-semitic French journal, then edited by Robert Brasillach, who would be executed for treason not long after the liberation of Paris.
Urban Legend: Matt Tyrnauer’s Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
By Erica PeplinThere was a housing project in East Harlem with a large rectangular lawn. The residents of the project despised it. “What good is it?” they asked. “Who wants it?” Jane Jacobs, one of the most important writers and activists of 20th century urbanism, describes this lawn and the negative reactions it provoked in her 1960 book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities.
