Present.Perfect.
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“Shows of Women Who Eat Bananas Seductively are Banned”: Shengze Zhu on Present.Perfect
Before authorities cracked down in June, 2017, over 400 million customers watched live streaming in China, primarily on three internet sites: douyu.com; huya.com; and panda.tv. (According to Variety, panda.tv closed in March, 2019.) Live streaming in China resembles amateur YouTube broadcasts here, with a slightly different vocabulary. In China “anchors” host “showrooms,” or channels, and transmit “bullets” to their followers. Documentary filmmaker Shengze Zhu (Another Year, 2016) screened hundreds of hours of footage for Present.Perfect. What starts as a survey of live streaming narrows down to focus on a handful of anchors, including a seamstress assembling underwear in a clothing […]
by Daniel Eagan on May 17, 2019 -
Rotterdam 2019: Livestreaming the Ephemeral in Present.Perfect.
If the International Film Festival Rotterdam can be credited for just one thing–and this would leave aside their robust global funding initiatives and industry market–it would be expanding the definition of what fits at a festival. And, therein, the definition of film. For instance, IFFR spotlights everything from installations to initiatives like this year’s Blackout program (curated by Julian Ross), which centered on performances using the now defunct Kodak 35mm carousel slide projector. It follows, then, that the festival’s centerpiece program, the Bright Future section, challenged the narrow idea of film being a title card followed by three acts and […]
by Kiva Reardon on Apr 5, 2019 -
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2019: “The Spying Thing”
In his introduction to “The Spying Thing,” a 20-title selection of espionage films that he curated with Gustavo Beck, long-time IFFR programmer Gerwin Tamsma goes back to the deep well of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and finds in it a timely new metaphor. Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound peeping tom is now a 21st-century government or multinational corporation, collecting data from his neighbors without their knowledge or consent, constrained only by the length of his lens (technology) and by the walls of his apartment (the pesky rule of law that governs democracies and capital). Grace Kelly’s wealthy socialite, then, is the […]
by Darren Hughes on Apr 2, 2019
