Jem Cohen
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Sundance Announces 2018 Art of Nonfiction Fellows and Grantees
The Sundance Institute today announced the four filmmakers and six grantees who comprise the 2018 Art of Nonfiction program. Launched in 2018, Art of Nonfiction is the Institutes’s program “working at the vanguard of inventive artistic practice in story, craft and form.” This year’s Art of Nonfiction Fellows are Deborah Stratman, Natalia Almada, Sam Green and Sky Hopinka. Grantees are Jem Cohen, Kevin Jerome Everson, Kevin B. Lee and Chloé Galibert-Laîné, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Leilah Weinraub. “This year’s cohort reflects our continuing desire to explore the space in between,” said Tabitha Jackson, Director of the Documentary Film Program, in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 23, 2018 -
Looking and Listening: Jem Cohen on Counting
Hewing closely to the tradition of documentary as diaristic essay, Jem Cohen’s Counting moves from New York to Sharjah as the cinema eye ruminates on street life, destruction, displacement and disparate urban portraiture. Divided into 15 chapters, Counting seldom forces any conclusions, drawing on the viewers’ emotional responses to its alternately lyrical structure and literal depictions — the removal of Brooklyn’s iconic Kentile Floors sign among them. Filmmaker spoke to Cohen about where Counting falls in the documentary tradition, and how his approach was not all that different from his most recent “narrative,” Museum Hours. Counting is now in theaters from Cinema Guild. Filmmaker: What is your process on an essayistic […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 5, 2015 -
Previewing Berlinale 2015: Malick, Herzog, Panahi and More
Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 4, 2015 -
Testing the Bechdel Test
One of the clever recent innovations at the subscription streaming service Fandor is the ability to filter films using the Bechdel Test. Created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the Bechdel Test applies three criteria to judge the quality of female representation in a motion picture: 1) it has to have at least two [named] women in it; 2) who talk to each other; 3) about something besides a man. In a new video essay, “Beyond Bechdel: Testing Feminism in Film,” Lee interrogates the Bechdel Test using films from the Fandor library, asking whether the test is a meaningful criteria when considering […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 9, 2014 -
The Intersection of Film and Live Music: Jem Cohen’s We Have an Anchor
Jem Cohen is back at BAM with the New York premiere of We Have an Anchor — a hybrid documentary that blends projections of landscapes in a variety of formats (Super 8, 16mm, HD), poetry and newspaper clippings to the sounds of a live score by an indie rock supergroup featuring members of Fugazi, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and more. A spiritual sequel to 2008’s Evening’s Civil Twilight in Empires of Tin, We Have an Anchor is an exploration of place (specifically Nova Scotia, more specifically Cape Breton) utilizing footage Cohen has shot over the last 10 years. Cohen departs […]
by Shaun Seneviratne on Aug 28, 2013 -
Jem Cohen on Museum Hours
Jem Cohen’s highly recommended Museum Hours — the winner of the Filmmaker-sponsored 2013 Cinema Eye Heterodox Award — opens in theaters today from Cinema Guild. Below is an excerpt (about half) of my interview with Cohen in the current print issue of Filmmaker. You can read the whole interview in the issue, and in the iPad version there’s also a 12-minute video with Cohen explicating various scenes in the film. What does it mean, in 2013, to photograph — to reproduce — a painting? Does it, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 28, 2013 -
Fifth Time’s a Charm: BAMcinemaFest
Something of a cinematic wunderkind, BAMcinemaFest (June 19-28) is the offspring of the three-year marriage, consummated in Brooklyn in 2006, between the Sundance Institute and BAMcinematek. The festival jumped past the Sundance-only model, adding submissions and films from SXSW, Toronto, and True/False. Curator Florence Almozini expertly cherry-picks the best indies from the previous year; each is a New York premiere. Around the time the betrothal was dissolving, Almozini explains, “We were looking at the NYC festival scene to find our own niche. We felt that no other festival was actually focusing on new U.S. indie films. BAMcinemaFest as a showcase […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jun 17, 2013 -
Frame of Reference
What does it mean, in 2013, to photograph — to reproduce — a painting? Does it, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” drain the painting of an essential “aura,” even as it makes the image itself accessible to a much larger audience? Does it, as John Berger elaborated in his 1972 book and television program, Ways of Seeing, alter the painting’s meaning, rendering the original a symbol of capitalist exchange? Or, in today’s image-sharing world of Tumblr, is reproduction nothing more than whimsical statement of affinity, of a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2013 -
Locarno Critic’s Notebook #3
Leviathan. You may have heard the title by now. By the time it screened to press, the film had already gained some momentous hype, and I’m pleased to report it does not disappoint. Often exhilarating, Véréna Peraval and Lucien Castaing-Taylor‘s creation is a unique viewing experience—loud, disorienting, frightening, exciting and visually awesome. The best film from the main competition, at the very least, Leviathan (above) offers the sort of sensory adventure that cinema can but rarely does offer. Using cheap GoPro digital cameras, the filmmakers show us images and perspectives we’ve never seen before. Apparently, Apichatpong Weerasethakul did not like […]
by Adam Cook on Aug 13, 2012 -
WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS
I haven’t done one of these in a while, so a few of these links are less than current. In any case, here are some links of interest from my Instapaper archives. First, Instapaper itself, and its founder Marco Arment, got some love from today’s New York Times. In The Paris Review, filmmaker Michael Almereyda collects largely unseen and uncollected photographs by William Eggleston. He writes: William Eggleston’s color photographs are among the most widely viewed, and widely admired, in the medium. But I wanted to survey Eggleston’s unseen, unpublished work—his B-sides, bootlegs, unreleased tracks—and to that end I made […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 12, 2010
