Ai Weiwei has been a presence on the international art scene for three decades, but within the past few years the Chinese artist has become a superstar. His profile has grown for a couple reasons. First, he’s made large-scale works that have been seen by millions in London, Berlin and, recently, in New York City, where in 2011 Mayor Michael Bloomberg heralded the installation of Ai’s sculptures at the southeastern edge of Central Park. Second, Ai has used just about every means available—documentary films, photography, crowd-sourced art projects, newspaper op-eds and his Twitter feed, which had more than 155,000 followers […]
I’ve had wind of this for a while, via both filmmaker Kentucker Audley and programmer Miriam Bale (who has a feature on Beasts of the Southern Wild in our current issue), but now the news is public. On September 14 and 15, the 92Y Tribeca will host the first La Di Da film festival, which takes a look at the recent work of a group of post-Mumblecore figures, including Amy Seimetz, the Safdies, Sean Price Williams, Dustin Guy Defa, Alex Karpovsky, Kate Lyn Sheil, Eléonore Hendricks and Audley. In the press release explaining the genesis of the event, Bale says, […]
Artistry, despair and rage — the New York City of the 1980s and ’90s was defined by its fusion of these elements as artists and activists became frontline soldiers in the fight against the health crisis of AIDS. “Silence = Death” was the slogan of activist group ACT UP, an admonishment to all those who’d deny the severity of the epidemic by not taking a position. And as ACT UP members took direct action against fearful politicians, a generation of artists incorporated the movement’s anger and social critique into their own passionate work. These New York years form the backdrop […]
When I get on the phone with Julia Garner, she has just returned from the Catskills and her eighth feature since breaking into film last year in Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene. Garner played a vulnerable young cultist in that movie, and in her latest shoot, Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are, she is one of two cannibal sisters. Cannibals are the topic du jour, but Garner is matter-of-fact about the role. “[The movie] is mostly about how [the sisters] relate to their mother’s death,” she says. “It’s weird — they don’t exactly know what they are, and […]
We invent stories, narrative personas fixed in autobiographical form, to understand ourselves. For some of us, these stories are modest ones — simple acceptances of conventional social roles. For others they are grander, more mythic. Throughout his life, Sam Shepard has created compelling fictions about not only the postwar American man, but America itself. The restless characters of his plays, often the product of turbulent families, invent and reinvent themselves, reinvigorating the concept of the American frontier experience along the way. These characters are echoed in Shepard himself, a romantic figure, both Hollywood star and loner artist, relentlessly following his […]
For years, people misjudged Julie Delpy. A screen actress since the age of nine, by her late teens Delpy was a gorgeous, willowy blonde who perfectly fit the mold of the French cinematic ingénue. After standout performances in films by Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa), Volker Schlöndorff (Voyager) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors: White), Delpy decamped from Europe to America, where she worked both in mainstream Hollywood fare and in more distinguished indie productions, playing muse to directors such as Alan Rudolph, Jim Jarmusch and, most notably, Richard Linklater. But Delpy was far from just a muse. In addition to inspiring […]
Independent film has long been considered the farm leagues for Hollywood’s majors. But with fewer specialized distributors and a risk-averse studio system, do up-and-comers still have the opportunities they once did during the ecstatic exuberance of the sector’s heyday? The crossover success of former DIY filmmakers Lena Dunham (with HBO’s Girls), Sean Durkin (who is developing The Exorcist TV series) and the Duplass brothers (with their studio-indies Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives at Home), suggests that breakthroughs are still very possible. And yet, for every Jeff Nichols (Mud) or Zal Batmanglij (The East), there are numerous filmmakers who have made […]
In early May, with much hoopla, Columbia University’s graduate Film Program celebrated the 25th anniversary of its annual Film Festival at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The auditorium was nearly packed as tuxedo-attired Ira Deutchman, Columbia Film Program chair, took the podium to introduce both the evening, a weeklong series of events and screenings honoring Columbia’s film school, and, more particularly, the school’s maturation over the past quarter century. The opening night featured some of the best student films to come out of Columbia, including Adam Davidson’s superbly paced Academy Award-winning short The Lunch Date, and Greg Mottola’s charming Swingin’ […]
The incongruity of Michael Haneke winning the Palme d’Or for the second time in four years was that his film featured two veteran actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, in a year that may well be remembered for introducing us to several new talents. The common denominator of the films that opened the official competition, Un Certain Regard and Directors’ Fortnight, was that only the parents and school friends of the young actors would have heard of the leads before they became the darlings of the Croisette. Moonrise Kingdom’s Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, as well as Broken’s Eloise Laurence, […]
Normally the spotlight at the Cannes film festival is stolen by attractive young celebrities and hip, hot films (Tarantino’s, for example). This Cannes was a little bit different. The most interesting films addressed Big Issues and, perhaps coincidentally, were awarded the top prizes. They are mature films, for the mature. Two provocative topics stood out. CONFRONTING OLD AGE Very different takes on living out the geriatric years are apparent in Austrian director Michael Haneke’s French production Amour, which took the Palme d’Or, and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s Japanese film, Like Someone in Love (no prize, because, even if it […]