April 2: All Film Edition

More film festivals: Brian at Hell on Frisco Bay is a-twitter about the San Francisco International Film Festival line-up:

http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/2010/03/four-lists-of-53rd-sfiff-titles.html

Across the continent, the ever-more-important Tribeca Film Festival has its own great line-up:

http://therumpus.net/2010/03/coming-soon-the-tribeca-film-festival/

Fresh from the Berlin Film Festival, the restored version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1973 science fiction mini-series World on a Wire is getting a New York run:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/movies/04wire.html

I cannot wait for the DVD to appear; Fassbinder is one of my gods. He is as fecund, and as great, as a Mozart.

I am also very excited to see that Bill Gunn, the director of the incredible Ganja and Hess, is receiving a retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music:

http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=2056

I remember first seeing Ganja and Hess at a screening at the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago, and practically being blown into Lake Michigan. Calling it a vampire movie is like calling Macbeth a supernatural thriller: not inaccurate, but inadequate to its majesty. One of the excitements of the current retrospective is that Gunn's first feature Stop (1970) is being exhumed, which seems to happen once a decade or so; man, I want to see that film someday. Also included is Gunn's last, long work, Personal Problems (1980), an "avant-garde soap opera" scripted by the novelist Ishmael Reed.

Another distinctive film-maker of the Sixties/Seventies era, Curtis Harrington, who also worked in "horror" if you want to consider that an adequate descriptor, is remembered at The Hollywood Interview:

http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2010/03/remembering-horror-maestro-curtis.html

Harrington came out of Fifties "avant-garde" film ("avant-garde" is probably not an adequate descriptor either), and it is fun to read about his friendships with Kenneth Anger, Orson Welles's cinematographer Gary Graver, TV's Jimmy Olsen Jack Larson (who later wrote the opera libretto Lord Byron for Virgil Thomson!), and others. I get the same sense that I do from reading Patrick McGilligan's Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff, that there were genuine salons and circles then, in Los Angeles as well as New York, San Francisco, London, and elsewhere, and folks from many different art forms (and different levels of fame) "mixed it up" in a way that was stimulating for all. I'm not sure that happens anymore.

John Kenneth Muir, doing the hard work of finding the good under-the-radar genre films, flags the apocalyptic thriller Carriers (2009) as especially interesting:

http://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/2010/03/cult-movie-review-carriers-2009.html

Ciaran Hinds talks about making the film The Eclipse (which also has supernatural elements) with the playwright Conor McPherson:

http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2010/03/ciaran-hinds-hollywood-interview.html

Samuel Wilson greatly enjoyed Akihisa Okamoto's Yokohama Underworld: Machine Gun Dragon (1978), an unofficial "Japanese do-over" of White Heat with James Cagney:

http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2010/03/yokohama-underworld-machine-gun-dragon.html

Among notables born on this date are diarist Giacomo Casanova, fabulist Hans Christian Andersen, novelist Emile Zola, George MacDonald Fraser, and Robert Arlt (Argentina), poet J.C. Squire, theater critic Kenneth Tynan, cultural critic Camille Paglia, painters Max Ernst and William Holman Hunt, aviation pioneer Clement Ader, singer/songwriters Serge Gainsbourg, Marvin Gaye, Emmylou Harris, and Leon Russell, and actors Alec Guinness, Jack Webb, Buddy Ebsen, Christopher Meloni, Pamela Reed, Linda Hunt, and Michael Fassbender. Among the feature films that JackWebb directed, I especially like the underrated newspaper drama -30-, which seems to be a cult movie for some of us (I've noticed fond comments scattered across the Web). It's got one of the great closing lines of all time, very moving in its context: "They're printing the funny papers!" Who expected warmth from Jack Webb?