Asia Argento
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“Everything in this Film is Autobiographical, But Then Again Everything is Not”: Asia Argento on Her Debut Feature, Scarlet Diva
From Filmmaker‘s print issue archives comes this Fall, 2000 interview with director Asia Argento, who discusses her highly recommended and, today, even more vital feature debut Scarlet Diva with Travis Crawford. (Richard Kern did the original photos.) “Mixing humor and self-laceration, Tortoise and Nina Simone, Argento uses the tools of digital video to create a thoughtful aesthetic distance from her own semi-autobiographical lead character,” was our subhed for the piece, which we’re reposting today as the theatrical rerelease of the film opens at the Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn. One could be forgiven for approaching Scarlet Diva with a healthy degree of […]
by Travis Crawford on May 11, 2018 -
“25 New Faces” Update: Our Nixon at MoMA, Kickstarting F to 7th, Borscht Commissions, Mayer Erases the Web
I’ve not been posting as regularly recently as much of my focus has been on the redesigned Filmmaker website, which will be launching in the very near future. But, on this quiet Friday afternoon, I thought I’d take the opportunity to provide a few quick updates on the current class of filmmakers in our “25 New Faces,” who are a very productive bunch. Firstly, New Yorkers should head to MoMA this Sunday, October 28, for The White House Home Movies: Richard Nixon on Super-8, a screening which is part of the 10th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. There will be clips […]
by Nick Dawson on Oct 26, 2012 -
Catherine Breillat, The Last Mistress
ASIA ARGENTO IN DIRECTOR CATHERINE BREILLAT’S THE LAST MISTRESS. COURTESY IFC FILMS. Hated and loved in equal measure, Catherine Breillat is a filmmaker who could never be accused of being boring. The French writer director seems courting controversy since the beginning of her career: she was a literary sensation at the age of 17 when she published her first novel, L’homme Facile which was sufficiently racy to be forbidden reading for minors and her first cinematic involvement was acting in Bernardo Bertolucci’s sordid classic Last Tango in Paris (1972). She made her directorial debut in 1976 with an adaptation of […]
by Nick Dawson on Jun 27, 2008 -
IS AMY PASCAL REALLY AMY PASCAL?
I supposed I should take note of the whole JT Leroy thing. I’m referring, of course, to the recent piece by Warren St. John in the New York Times revealing that the shy, diminuitive figure with a floppy hat, black sunglasses, and a smear of red lipstick appearing in public as author JT Petty is actually a woman named Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Geoffrey Knoop, husband of Laura Albert. Albert is the 40-year-old Brooklyn woman who, in a New York magazine piece a few months ago, Steven Beachy asserted was the person behind JT Leroy’s fiction and rapidly […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 13, 2006 -
ARGENTO, GLOVER AND MORE…
The New York Underground Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 2005 edition that runs from March 9 – 15 at the Anthology Film Archives. The festival is bookended by films you’ve read about in the magazine or on this blog by filmmakers we are big fans of. Asia Argento opens the festival with her J.T. Leroy adaptation, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and the festival is closed with Crispin Hellion Glover’s What Is It?, which premiered at midnight at Sundance this year. Check out these movies and all the interesting stuff in between! .
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 3, 2005 -
Great Expectations
Years ago, before I worked in film, I was a curator and programmer at The Kitchen, New York’s center for contemporary performance and video. In my first year there, the organization produced a one-off TV special entitled “Two Moon July,” and in it David Byrne performed a work of solo performance art that involved the Talking Head running in giant circles through The Kitchen’s Soho loft space, chanting out the names of future movies culled from the AFM issue of Variety. It might sound a bit slim, but it was a nice piece — there is something oddly poignant and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 4, 2004
