2001-2010

“Narrated by actress Charlize Theron, Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies (2001) is a documentary about the Hollywood legend whose acting career was overshadowed by her much-criticized love affair with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The film features the final on-camera interview with Davies’ biographer Fred Guiles as well as interviews with film historians Kevin Brownlow, Jeanine Basinger, and Cari Beauchamp; former film critic Charles Champlin; and actress Virginia Madsen, who researched Davies for her portrayal of the star in the made-for-TV movie The Hearst and Davies Affair (1985). First-hand accounts of events in Davies’s life will be shared by Carl Roup, a studio newspaper boy who was chosen by Davies to appear as an extra in The Red Mill (1927); Davies’s friends, including actress Constance Moore and King Vidor’s daughter, Belinda Vidor Holiday; and Life magazine correspondent Stanley Flink, who taped interviews with Davies in 1951, excerpts which are heard in the documentary.Read More »

Review by Michael Hastings (Allmovie)

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Though Paul Schrader isn’t often tapped to direct scripts other than his own, his touch proves essential to Auto Focus, a true-life tale of sex, celebrity, and videotape that seems tailor-made to the man who dreamed up Taxi Driver and American Gigolo. Schrader’s clinical, detached directorial style proves well-matched to the genial, humorous tone of Michael Gerbosi’s script; it’s like Hardcore without all the proselytizing (and without the sight of George C. Scott in a campy porn-producer costume). What Auto Focus is most interested in is not the narcotizing effects of anonymous sex — though that’s undeniably a big part of it — but the latent homosexuality lurking behind Bob Crane and John Carpenter’s buddy-buddy sexcapades. Finally cast in a role that successfully sends up and subverts his All-American charm, Greg Kinnear perfectly captures Crane’s kid-in-a-candy-store sexual awakening; meanwhile, Willem Dafoe underlines the desperation at the heart of the swinging lifestyle. Schrader overplays his hand in the film’s “downward spiral” sequences, switching to hand-held camera and bleached-out film stock, but even those minor technical miscalculations don’t detract from the film’s portrait of Crane as a man whose determination to lead the unobserved life ultimately led to his death.Read More »

The Old School of Capitalism is rooted in the first wave of workers revolts to hit Serbia since the advent of capitalism. Desperate workers bulldoze through factory gates and are devastated to discover the site looted by the bosses. Eccentrically escalating confrontations, including a melee with workers in football shoulder-pads and helmets and boss and his security force in bulletproof vests, prove fruitless. Committed young anarchists offer solidarity, take the bosses hostage. A Russian tycoon, a Wall Street trader and US VP Biden’s visit to Belgrade unexpectedly complicate events that lead toward a final shock. Along the way, the film produces an increasingly complex and yet unfailingly lively account of present-day, in fact, up-to-the-minute struggles under the misery-inducing effects of both local and global capital.Read More »

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Synopsis

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
—Socrates

Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets…

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.Read More »

Le Streghe, Femmes entre elles (The Witches, Women among Themselves).2008. France/Italy. Written and directed by Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Dialogues with Leucò, by Cesare Pavese. With Giovanna Giuliani, Giovanna Daddi. 35mm. In Italian. 21 min.

The enchantress Circe recounts to Leucò her attempts to bewitch and bed Odysseus. She talks about men and women, the human and the divine, and the brave hero who chooses to become neither pig nor God. In her adamantine repose, Circe also hints at the monotony of her own immortal fate, and contrasts it with the vibrating currents of life she so dearly craves and envies in Odysseus, with his longing for home, childhood, and love. These women-demigods are frank and sensitive at the same time, like the men of Raoul Walsh’s films, where the communities of male and female are deathly separate, and massive to each other. Walsh made a western, The Tall Men, in 1955. This 2008 Straub-film is its reverse shot. (Joshua Siegel – MoMA)Read More »

Jean-Marie Straub’s first film after the death of Danièlle Huillet is a love poem to her. Le Genou d’Artémide is based on Cesare Pavese’s “Dialogues of Leuco”, which had already been adapted by Straub et Huillet as Ces Rencontres Avec Eux (2006).Read More »

Text from Diagonal Thoughts

“Before being a conflict of classes or parties, politics is a conflict concerning the configuration of the sensible world in which the actors and the objects of these conflicts may appear. Politics is then this exceptional practice, which makes visible that which cannot be seen, which makes audible that which cannot be heard, which counts that which cannot be counted.”Read More »

A short comic flick by a Moldavian director. Enjoy!Read More »

An ordinary hunter accidentally helps a criminal to escape from his accomplices. Two completely different men tries to reach a distant city, but the price of life will be truly terrifying.Read More »