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Illustration by Stephanie Lane Gage.It's that time of the year again! Here at Notebook, we celebrate the season of light in the traditional way: with a gift guide, of course, stuffed with all manner of goodies to delight the lucky cinephile in your life—and why not get yourself a little something while you’re at it?You might start with a Mubi subscription and a Notebook print subscription if your recipient is still without either: these are the gifts that keep on giving. Plus: get a jump on next year’s holiday rush by preordering Read Frame Type Film, the just-announced first book by Mubi Editions. Naughty? Nice? Who are we to judge? Whatever your pleasure, we hope you’ll enjoy this twice-checked list.Jump to a category:BooksHome videoMusic and soundtracksPosters, prints, and memorabiliaApparel and home goodsMiscellanyBOOKSIf this first category is somewhat overrepresented in the scope of the overall guide,...

Petite Planète: Japon.In the hundreds of images in Staring Back, Chris Marker’s 2007 exhibition and corresponding book, the artist captures the gazes of strangers, protestors, recognizable figures, and even animals during his travels far and wide. The critic Brian Dillon wrote to Marker with a request to discuss the photographs but, when he found Marker “crushed under [his] present grind” in his Paris studio, he was left to stare back into these faces and see what he found. Responding to a series of photographs of metro riders, Dillon considered Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” a whole world of observations cohabitating between these fourteen words: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.Not long after the piece was published, Dillon received an email. Marker wrote that he had Pound’s poem in mind when organizing the book and exhibition but...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film Forum

Films by Oshima, Tony Scott, Alex Cox, John Carpenter, Abel Ferrara, and Tobe Hooper play in “Out of the 80s“; Le Samouraï continues in a new 4K restoration; Back to the Future plays on Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art

A massive overview of Bulle Ogier has its final weekend with two films by Rivette.

Museum of the Moving Image

The Thin Red Line, The Big Lebowski, and Defending Your Life all play on 35mm as part of “See It Big at the ’90s Multiplex.”

Bam

The rarely screened films of György Pálfi are given a retrospective.

Metrograph

Films by Haneke, Kiarostami, and more play in an mk2 retrospective; Saturday brings Three Days of the Condor on 35mm; ’90s Noir, Euro-Heists, Dream with Your Eyes Open, and Ethics of Care, continue, while a Chris Marker series includes Sans Soleil and a shorts program.

The spirit of “Sans Soleil” casts a long shadow over Miguel Gomes’ beguiling “Grand Tour,” a less essayistic but similarly atemporal travelogue that sometimes feels almost as indebted to Chris Marker as Gomes’ “Tabu” was to F.W. Murnau. Much like Marker’s 1983 masterpiece, Gomes’ film is propelled by the mysterious frisson that it creates between “exotic” documentary footage and disembodied narration. And much like “Sans Soleil,” “Grand Tour” uses that non-stop voiceover to shape its accompanying images into an abstract story about the elusive relationship between time and memory.

In this case, that story is a love story (of sorts), one that again finds Gomes harkening back to the kind of blinkered colonial romances that were so prevalent in the silent era and the early days of Hollywood. And since a love story requires a tactile anchor for its yearning, Gomes — in stark contrast to Marker — cast a pair of...

After living undocumented in the US for 26 years, in Nowhere Near (2023), director Miko Revereza journeys back to the Philippines in an attempt to trace the source of the colonial ghosts causing his parents’ amnesia. Through an abstract odyssey into personal history à la Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Revereza works in a range of mediums to express the borderless aesthetic of statelessness. What results is an investigative documentary layered with the narration of his own novel, floating into the mysteries of psychogeographical disconnect with superimposed images and submerged family portraits. On the day of the film’s US premiere, Revereza […]

The post Exorcising the Curse of the US: Miko Revereza on Nowhere Near first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

After living undocumented in the US for 26 years, in Nowhere Near (2023), director Miko Revereza journeys back to the Philippines in an attempt to trace the source of the colonial ghosts causing his parents’ amnesia. Through an abstract odyssey into personal history à la Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Revereza works in a range of mediums to express the borderless aesthetic of statelessness. What results is an investigative documentary layered with the narration of his own novel, floating into the mysteries of psychogeographical disconnect with superimposed images and submerged family portraits. On the day of the film’s US premiere, Revereza […]

The post Exorcising the Curse of the US: Miko Revereza on Nowhere Near first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Whether or not you agree with Quentin Tarantino’s unsparing assertion that “’80s cinema is, along with the ’50s, the worst era in Hollywood history,” there’s a curiously undeniable truth to his follow-up statement: “Matched only by now! Matched only by the current era.” Revisiting the defining movies of the ’80s from our current perspective at the height of Barbenheimer summer, two things become abundantly clear.

The first is that modern Hollywood would probably need a Barbenheimer every month in order to equal the creative output of a studio system that used to be capable of releasing “Blade Runner” and “The Thing” on the same night as if it were just another Friday. The second is that, in a wide variety of different ways both negative and not, the ’80s provide a perfect match for the movies of our current moment — if not the current moment itself.

Perhaps that...

While we’ve known the results of Jeanne Dielman Tops Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Greatest Films of All-Time List”>Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll for a few months now, the recent release of the individual ballots has given data-crunching cinephiles a new opportunity to dive deeper. We have Letterboxd lists detailing all 4,400+ films that received at least one vote and another expanding the directors poll, spreadsheets calculating every entry, and now a list ranking how many votes individual directors received for their films.

Tabulated by Genjuro, the list of 35 directors, with two pairs, puts Alfred Hitchcock back on top, while Chantal Akerman is at number two. Elsewhere in the top ten are David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick, and tied for the tenth spot is Wong Kar Wai and Ingmar Bergman.

Check out the list below,...

Asif Kapadia, the Oscar-winning guest curator for 2022’s Sheffield DocFest, has unveiled his program A Documentary Journey with Asif Kapadia.

Kapadia, who is best known for his documentaries ‘Amy,’ about Amy Winehouse, and ‘Senna’ about Brazilian motor-racing champion Ayrton Senna, opened the last in-person iteration of Sheffield DocFest in 2019 with his feature about legendary Argentine footballer Diego Maradona.

The festival, now in its 29th year, was digital only in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic.

Featuring “films that have had significant impact for him, inspiring his own style and creative choices as a filmmaker,” Kapadia has selected eight documentaries for the series, including “When We Were Kings” about Muhammad Ali (pictured above).

“Without this film, there would be no ‘Amy.’ There would be no ‘Senna.’ There would be no ‘Diego Maradona,’” said Kapadia of the Ali feature.

“This selection is personal to me, as someone who grew up in Hackney in the 1970s and 1980s,...

While the way history is connected to our lives is for most of us abstract and bound to the few times we visit a museum, watch a documentary on TV or share a few moments of contemplation, the links are often too complex to truly fathom. Even though there is no denying its impact, there are many cultures and systems which take a different stance to their past, silence those who speak about it or omit certain details that may violate a nation’s self-image. Throughout his career, French filmmaker Chris Marker has dedicated his many features to the subject of time, how it shapes us and the world we live, along with the concepts of individual and cultural narratives. In works such as “La Jetée”, “A Grin Without a Cat” and “Sans Soleil”, arguably his best work, he has explored ways to highlight these connections and concepts, using a unique and creative audiovisual approach.

The work of Chris Marker reminds me to seek the childlike inquisitiveness still possible in life, to dive into the aching questions I have and map out the world, and to enter into places even if I have never traveled there. For someone as sensitive as I am to the letter as a format with infinite possibility, its feel as a relic lost in time and an exciting art form, Marker's epistolary and essayistic approach to storytelling has been a guiding force of audio/visual possibilities. A typewriter rustles in the background and traditional Siberian chant plays as still shots of desolate and beautiful Russian landscape opens one of the sonic scenes in this mix. As we hear the narrator of Letter from Siberia (1957), still shots of silver birch trees glow over pockets of forgotten communities. Mapping out textures through camera, through virtual reality, through narration and correspondence, Marker transcended mediums to connect world-spanning letters.

A Night of Knowing Nothing, the debut of Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia and winner of the Oeil d’or for Best Documentary at last year’s Cannes, cannily fuses two forms of knowing, or two ways of absorbing an important moment in one’s life: experiencing and its near-opposite, remembering. Through its slippery cinematic language and elusive point-of-view, Kapadia depicts a moment happening urgently in the film’s present-day strand––a wave of anti-government student protests and their resulting crackdown––and treats it like memory, which we know operates as anything but a direct mental recording device. Influential film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum convincingly argues that a film can’t be both incoherent and political––at its best, A Night of Knowing Nothing offers a challenge to this wisdom.

Through the narrative device of disputable “recovered” letters, juxtaposed with reams of poetic visuals that offer counterpoint, rather than simple illustration of the text,...

As Sheffield Doc Fest wrapped its first online edition, we spoke with one of the most promising filmmakers to emerge from that discipline in recent years. With just two titles released, Parisian director Julien Faraut has become quietly synonymous with finding new and surprising territory in one of documentary cinema’s most hackneyed genres: the sports documentary.

In The Realm of Perfection came like a breath of fresh air in 2018; his latest continues the trend. Again working with footage from the National Institute of Sport, where he continues to work as an archivist, The Witches of the Orient tells the story of the 1964 Japanese Women’s Olympic volleyball team and the television anime they would later inspire–two distinct threads Faraut weaves into something hypnotic. As the film arrives in the U.S. read our conversation below.

The Film Stage: I read a nice line recently from Marc Nemcik. He said,...

Three years after debuting with the exhilarating essay film In the Realm of the Perfection (2018), about American tennis icon John McEnroe, French filmmaker Julien Faraut returns with a sports-related feature that dives even further into the well of cultural history. In The Witches of the Orient, Faraut looks east, to the story of a women’s volleyball team that became a sensation in Japan on their way to capturing Olympic gold in 1964. Formed in 1953 at the Nichibo Kaizuka textile factory, the team comprised a group of day laborers who by night practiced under the tutelage of a notoriously demanding coach to become an unstoppable force in the world of women’s volleyball, inspiring legions of fans and spawning untold numbers of manga comics and anime television programs in their likeness.Charting the team’s rise from their quaint origins in Osaka to their Olympic victory in Tokyo, Faraut—whose day...

Assembled from a single couple’s trove of home movies—50 reels, nearly 30 hours, of 16mm footage captured at home and on vacation from the 1940s to the 1960s—My Mexican Bretzel is another challenge to a couple of bad, but lingering assumptions. First, that Generations Y & Z are uniquely prone to self-documentation; and second, that the quality of consumer-grade photographic equipment has meaningfully improved over the last, oh, 75 years. This is one of those photographic reveries that immerses you in a past at once tinglingly present-tense and poignantly conscious of posterity.

The couple in question are, we’re told, Vivian and Léon Barrett, Swiss and childless. In her headscarf and sunglasses she looks like Isabella Rossellini; he, it must be said, is something of a Hoskins-chested zaddy in the copious footage of them skimming across the continent’s waterways in a wood-paneled cabin cruiser. Camera-buff Léon, who takes some ambitious aerial shots,...

Jennifer West's Film Title Poem (2016) is exclusively showing July 7 - August 8, 2020 on Mubi.It is my great pleasure to introduce Film Title Poem, an etched, hand-painted 35mm digitized film comprised of collaged words, images, patterns and glitches shot from over 500 movie title cards to a musical soundtrack. It is a psychic montage of my inner-history of film in alphabetical order—that I hope you will compare your own cinema-lover list to, noting what is missing from mine—or attempting to write your own top 100 or 300 or 500 film list for the first time: your “collection” of films and the memories they are connected to. An audience member once compared this film to creating a collection of music or books—and that it is, but entirely ephemeral born out of a genuine and continued deep love for watching movies and films of all sorts—discussing them, connecting them with phases and...

Stars: Jacques Ledoux, Davos Hanich, Jean Négroni, Hélène Chatelain, Alexandra Stewart | Written and Directed by Chris Marker

La Jetee is Chris Marker’s 1962 mini sci-fi film. It tells the story of the aftermath of World War 3, and the survivors living underground. A scientist (Jacques Ledoux) performs experiments in time travel, so a man (Davos Hanich) can go and fetch food and medical supplies.

The film is almost entirely composed of monochrome still images. It’s a form that requires a narrator (Jean Négroni) to explain everything at every moment, which makes you wonder what the images – many of which are library pictures depicting real-world destruction – really add to the piece. I wonder also if such a film were made today, making use of the devastation in, say, Syria, then it would be seen as tasteless and crass.

Still, it’s an arresting montage. By using still images, Marker circumvents normal...

Can you describe “Sans Soleil” with something as banal as words? Because how could one come to express the cinematic equivalent of a memory with a series of letters? What choice of vocabulary could be adequate enough to talk about a 105 minutes epic? I mean, people have tried but they only seem naïve. They have called it an experimental film but how could we use such a word when experimental films have fallen in arms, when experimental film making has sadly been overlooked as it has slipped in the pitiless depths of modern day pretentiousness? They have called it an essay film but an essay film is too general of a description to fully capture what exactly this film is. So the question still remains, while one very specific thought still lingers on.

No one has the right to talk about great works of art but poets. Sadly, I am no poet.

From the bustle of neon-lit Shinjuku and its ultramodern skyscrapers to the traditional scenery of Mt. Fuji, cherry blossoms, and Shinto shrines, Tokyo has served as a source of creative inspiration for generations of international filmmakers. Anticipating the 2020 Summer Games, when the eyes of the world will once again fall upon Japan’s dynamic capital, Tokyo Stories: Japan in the Global Imagination considers the ways Japan—and the elusive concept of “Japaneseness” —is rendered and interpreted outside its borders with a revealing selection of Tokyo-set films by foreign directors, including Japanese co-productions, Hollywood blockbusters, and European arthouse favorites.

The series kicks off November 8 with Werner Herzog’s latest film Family Romance, LLC, a quasi-documentary narrative feature concerning the function of role-playing in matters of love and business, screening in New York for the first time since it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Herzog is one of...

Two filmmakers have new films that are made entirely of videos they found on YouTube. Penny Lane’s “The Pain of Others,” a feature length documentary that will play at BAMcinemafest on Thursday, brings the viewer face-to-face with people who purport to suffer from Morgellons disease, which many in the medical community believe is a psychosomatic delusion that spread via the internet. Dan Schoenbrun’s 67-minute film, “A Self-Induced Hallucination” was released online last week and takes a look at how a real-life assault – in which two girls stabbed their friend 19 times in 2014 – led to the internet-fueled phenomenon known as Slenderman.

Lane and Schoenbrun found out about each other’s projects while developing them, and decided to team up to present their films as a unique double-feature around the country. IndieWire invited Lane and Schoenbrun to interview each other about the process of assembling a movie out of YouTube clips...

Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville's Liberté et Patrie (2002) is free to watch below. Mubi's retrospective For Ever Godard is showing from November 12, 2017 - January 16, 2018 in the United States.I. One of the most beautiful essay films ever made, Liberté et Patrie (2002) turns out to also be one of the most accessible collaborations of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. The deeply moving lyricism of this short may astonish even those spectators who arrive to it casually, without any prior knowledge of the filmmakers’s oeuvre. Contrary to other works by the couple, Liberté et Patrie is built on a recognizable narrative strong enough to easily accommodate all the unconventionalities of the piece: a digressive structure full of bursts of undefined emotion; an unpredictable rhythm punctuated by sudden pauses, swift accelerations, intermittent blackouts and staccatos; a mélange of materials where...

Colin MacCabe in a Chris Marker Cats Go Barack T-shirt Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger co-director Colin MacCabe and photographer Adam Bartos will be joined by Ben Lerner and Experimenter director Michael Almereyda for an In Chris Marker's Studio panel discussion following the screenings of Marker's Cat Listening To Music (Chat Écoutant La Musique), Ouvroir, Second Life featuring Guillaume-en-Égypte and excerpts from Agnès Varda's Agnès De Ci De Là Varda at Metrograph in New York.

Michael Almereyda's Escapes subject Hampton Fancher at BAMcinemaFest Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Almereyda's two latest films, Marjorie Prime (starring Lois Smith, Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Tim Robbins) and his Hampton Fancher documentary Escapes will be released this summer in the Us.

Marker's Sans Soleil, Tokyo Days and his Le Joli Mai with Pierre Lhomme will be shown as part of the series celebrating another cat man.

Untitled. © Lotus-FilmA pretty amazing aspect of the Berlinale is that a lot of the festival venues are multiplexes usually devoted to blockbusters, meaning that smaller films from the sidebars are often screened in theaters with gigantic screens and state-of-the-art sound systems. It’s in one such cinema that I got to experience the chromesthetic delirium of Ulysses in the Subway by Marc Downie, Paul Kaiser, Flo Jacobs and Ken Jacobs. And, let me tell you, it was mind-blowing. Describing the film is about as difficult as describing a drug trip—indeed, watching Ulysses in the Subway is what it might be like if you were to drop acid and ride around the New York subway with your eyes closed. With the intention of visualizing sound, the four artists took an audio recording Ken Jacobs made of a long subway ride home (Jacobs used the same recording in live performances of...

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) kicks off its 16th annual Doc Fortnight on Thursday, a 10-day festival that includes 20 feature-length non-fiction films and 10 documentary shorts. This year’s lineup includes four world premieres and a number of North American and U.S. premieres.

Read More: 2017 New Directors/New Films Announces Full Lineup, Including ‘Patti Cake$,’ ‘Beach Rats,’ ‘Menashe’ and More

The festival is far from the only major North American showcase for non-fiction cinema. Festivals ranging from Hot Docs to True/False have played key roles in the expanding documentary festival circuit. However, Doc Fortnight has maintained its own niche on the scene, by aiming to expose undiscovered stories and filmmakers, screening a range of documentaries from around the world and capturing the ways in which artists are pushing the boundaries of non-fiction filmmaking.

“It’s not an industry festival, there aren’t awards, and distributors aren’t all coming looking to buy,...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Lav Diaz's Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution (2011) is playing January 12 - February 10, 2017. Lav Diaz’s Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution is a unique example of how texts inform each other. In the film, elements of the past inform and comprise those of the present, while exposition ultimately informs images of the present. As a viewer, one can reasonably make a case that this was Diaz’s intention given the film’s story and structure: While its premise is relatively simple—a mysterious woman appears in various places in a 20th century city—Diaz tells it primarily with wordless storytelling, mostly images and extended takes. While the viewer gathers that the woman is the titular ‘visitor from the revolution,’ implying that she is from the late 1890s (the Philippine Revolution), it is only late...

Christmas has come a little early to anyone hoping to score some Criterion Collection deals on Amazon today. While Amazon has been running a pretty good sale on a handful of discs throughout December, they’ve lowered the prices on lots of Blu-rays today, including a few pre-orders for next year.

Amazon doesn’t usually announce when an impromptu sale like this will end, so don’t hesitate. And don’t forget that you can lock in the pre-order price for some of the upcoming titles as well, but Amazon won’t charge you until they ship.

You can currently pre-order The Before Trilogy for $52.47 (48% off)

The following Blu-rays are currently (as of December 23rd at 10:30pm Pacific) down below $21 each.

The Asphalt Jungle Boyhood The Complete Lady Snowblood The Devil’s Backbone Diabolique Easy Rider The Executioner F for Fake The Game Harakiri Harold and Maude Hidden Fortress...

I’ve spoken to many accomplished artists, but there are perhaps none who bear the same extent of experience as Kirsten Johnson. Don’t worry if the name doesn’t ring any bells: she’s built her repertoire as a documentary cinematographer by working with and for the likes of Michael Moore, Laura Poitras, and Jacques Derrida, and the things she’s seen have been funneled into Cameraperson, a travelogue-of-sorts through Johnson’s subconscious.

Her time as an interviewer, or at least a companion to interviews, came through when we sat down together at Criterion’s offices in New York last month. Never have I been more directly forced to think about my work than when she turned the tables on me — all of which started with some complementary danishes left for us in the room. It’s a level of engagement that befits one of this year’s greatest films,...

Eric Lavallee: Name me three of your favorite “2015 discoveries”.

Bernardo Britto: Jacques Demy’s Lola, Mexican singer Daniela Romo, Cool Cat Saves The Kids.

Lavallee: What was the first gist of an idea that you thought of before crystallizing this into what would become your first feature?

Britto: The very first germ of an idea was “what if Sans Soleil was actually kind of like a thriller?” And then it sort of snowballed from there.

Lavallee: Could you briefly talk about the visual style of the film – what were you and Eric aiming for?

Britto: We wanted something that was digital and real and fun. We wanted it to look authentic and feel dynamic.

Each week, the fine folks at Fandor add a number of films to their Criterion Picks area, which will then be available to subscribers for the following twelve days. This week, the Criterion Picks focus on eight films featuring cats!

Need we say more? Meet the furry feline familiars that have graced some of the world’s greatest movies with their mercurial and mesmerizing presence.

Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.

L’Atalante, the French Classic Drama by Jean Vigo

In Jean Vigo’s hands, an unassuming tale of conjugal love becomes an achingly romantic reverie of desire and hope.

Cléo from 5 to 7, the French Drama by Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy.

Grey Gardens, the Documentary by Ellen Hovde,...

The masterful political documentaries of Chilean Guzmán, constitute a national epic for a beloved country traumatized for trying something new within a hostile political environment. How can one keep the memory of a national betrayal alive, after being forced into exile by a military dictator?  How can the memory of a great national leader be kept alive, after so many dissidents were murdered or 'disappeared?'   Five Films by Patricio Guzmán The Battle of Chile, Chile Obstinate Memory, The Pinochet Case, Salvador Allende, Nostalgia for the Light, Filming Obstinately Meeting Patricio Guzmán DVD Icarus Films Home Video 1975-2011 B&W-Color / 1:33 flat full frame 775 min. Street Date September 29, 2015 / 79.98 Directed by Patricio Guzmán  

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

A few years ago I reviewed Patricio Guzmán's The Battle of Chile and Chile, Obstinate Memory. In forty years of exile from his home country, Guzmán has continued to document the same historical trauma.

The British Film Institute has a mouth-watering July program for across-the-pond documentary buffs and moviegoers. The series culls from BFI's most recent Sight & Sound Poll of 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers in search of the greatest docs of all time. The program, detailed here, spans the birth and life of the genre, from early ethnographic classic "Nanook of the North" and earth-shaking Soviet experiment "Man with a Movie Camera" to Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust epic "Shoah" (here screened in its entirety) and Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line," which in 1988 was an early example of the true crime mysteries that are now the craze of the zeitgeist.  Read More: British Film Institute Unlocks Ambitious Plan to Digitize Films The rest of the series includes a double bill of Chris Marker's ode to memory, "Vertigo" and cats "Sans Soleil" and Alain Resnais' profoundly upsetting concentration camp doc...

At Hammer to Nail, Evan Louison notes that the films in the BAMcinématek series The Vertigo Effect run the gamut of bewildering dreams, questionable memories, false identity, secret plots, and murder. From the schlock (Basic Instinct, Mulholland Drive) to the interstitial (Sans Soleil), it’s easy to see how this one replaced Citizen Kane at the top of the heap a few years back." More goings on: Catherine Deneuve, Eric Rohmer, Stan Brakhage and Preston Sturges in New York, Hou Hsiao-hsien in Chicago, Thom Andersen in Los Angeles, Robert Siodmak in London, Michelangelo Antonioni in Paris and Michael Glawogger in Vienna. » - David Hudson...

At Hammer to Nail, Evan Louison notes that the films in the BAMcinématek series The Vertigo Effect run the gamut of bewildering dreams, questionable memories, false identity, secret plots, and murder. From the schlock (Basic Instinct, Mulholland Drive) to the interstitial (Sans Soleil), it’s easy to see how this one replaced Citizen Kane at the top of the heap a few years back." More goings on: Catherine Deneuve, Eric Rohmer, Stan Brakhage and Preston Sturges in New York, Hou Hsiao-hsien in Chicago, Thom Andersen in Los Angeles, Robert Siodmak in London, Michelangelo Antonioni in Paris and Michael Glawogger in Vienna. » - David Hudson...

Above: the 2015 Crossroads Film Festival kicks off on Friday, April 10th, and features Paul Clipson's Hypnosis Display with a live soundtrack by Grouper. Check out the rest of the amazing lineup here. Like everyone, we're devastated that David Lynch will not be directing the Twin Peaks revival season after all. Above: the latest issue of La Furia Umana is online now and includes an intriguing survey of "What's (Not) Cinema Becoming?"From the new issue of The Brooklyn Rail: pieces on Tsai Ming-liang's Rebels of the Neon God, J.P. Sniadecki's The Iron Ministry, and an interview with Xin Zhou.For Cinema Scope, Jordan Cronk writes on this year's True/False Film Festival. There are two incredible websites for you to browse from La Cinématheque Francaise: one on Pier Paolo Pasolini, and one on Michelangelo Antonioni. For his blog Following Film, Christoph Huber writes on "The Siodmak Variations":...

To be absolutely mesmerized by a film, totally transfixed, is a rare happening in cinema, but should be the norm, right? Rwanda director Kivu Ruhorahoza's Things Of The Aimless Wanderer is just such a film, spectacular and ambitious in all its working parts, catapulting cutting-edge African cinema onto the world stage with the intensity of a new religion. Ruhorahoza's efforts are made up of a pure cinema, observant and immaculate, cutting deep swatches into East African culture, post-genocide, positing questions of what a modern Rwanda looks like, wondering where  Western influence and agendas end. The work is reminiscent of such filmmakers as Werner Herzog, Miguel Gomes (Taboo), Chris Marker (Sans Soleil) and Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), towing the...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2014?

Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2014—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2014 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2014 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

Have you ever wondered what are the films that inspire the next generation of visionary filmmakers? As part of our monthly Ioncinephile profile, we ask the filmmaker (in this case American independent writer-director Zachary Wigon) to identify their all time top ten favorite films of all time. Wigon’s The Heart Machine (see pic of actor John Gallagher Jr above) receives a limited theatrical and VOD release on October 24th via the Film Buff folks. This top 10 is a countdown folks. Drum roll please!

10. City Lights- Charlie Chaplin (1931)

“The deep pathos of pretending to be someone you’re not so that you may win over your love is taken, here, to heights alternatively comic and tragic, with the greatest closing shot in all of cinema.”

9. Goodbye, Dragon Inn – Tsai Ming-liang (2004)

“The loneliness of being a person, the desire to connect to each other through our behavior and through art,...

In Chris Marker's final feature film, a French computer scientist is developing a video game about the Battle of Okinawa while being haunted by the loss of her lover. Who else but Marker would make a film like "Level Five"? This mind-meltingly beautiful genre-crosser from 1997--15 years before Marker, best known for documentary "Sans Soleil" and sci-fi "La Jetee," died in 2012--is now headed to DVD and VOD from Icarus Films. More a visually hyperbolic cinematic essay than a narrative film -- as is the case for almost any Marker film --  "Level Five" arrives October 7. Watch the whacky, wonderful trailer below. More info from Icarus here.

Back on the big screen as part of Bam Rose Cinema's retrospective of his work, Chris Marker’s 1996 documentary “Level Five” is a staunch reminder of the singular cinematic oeuvre left behind by the filmmaker. The French visual essayist (“documentary” may be an insufficient descriptor for any of his films) grew up alongside exponents of the French New Wave, but was set apart by his unique approach to cinema and storytelling. Most renowned for the 1962 short masterpiece “La Jetée” (one of the most effective time travel movies ever made), and 1983’s documentary “Sans Soleil,” third in Sight And Sound’s all-time list of documentaries, Marker was fascinated with a number of anthropological themes. His work often resulted in visual collages touching upon history, war, collective memory, and modern technology. Any readers unfamiliar with Marker’s work shouldn't necessarily start with "Level Five," but Marker admirers will find much to savor from this intellectual.

With the Chris Marker series underway at Bam this week, it seems like a topical time to share this 2013 rumination on the essay film from Kevin B. Lee. Lee purports that the essay diverges from the rest of cinema in how it “[explores] its subject and at the same time [explores] how it sees its subject.” Words, images and sound interact and inform one another, producing a commentary that is often relegated to the external, or the conscience of the viewer. In his visual discussion of the three pillars of an essay film, Lee draws on Marker’s own Sans Soleil, Godard […]...

With the Chris Marker series underway at Bam this week, it seems like a topical time to share this 2013 rumination on the essay film from Kevin B. Lee. Lee purports that the essay diverges from the rest of cinema in how it “[explores] its subject and at the same time [explores] how it sees its subject.” Words, images and sound interact and inform one another, producing a commentary that is often relegated to the external, or the conscience of the viewer. In his visual discussion of the three pillars of an essay film, Lee draws on Marker’s own Sans Soleil, Godard […]...

From today through August 28, New York's BAMcinématek is presenting a comprehensive retrospective of films by Chris Marker. The highlight is the North American premiere of Level Five (1996). We gather reviews of this "playful, ruminative and melancholy" sci-fi "adventure" (New York Times) and point to overviews of the series, featuring not only Marker's best known works, La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983), but also early travelogues, such as Sunday in Peking (1956) and A Letter from Siberia (1958), and political essays along the lines of A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and The Last Bolshevik (1993). » - David Hudson...

From today through August 28, New York's BAMcinématek is presenting a comprehensive retrospective of films by Chris Marker. The highlight is the North American premiere of Level Five (1996). We gather reviews of this "playful, ruminative and melancholy" sci-fi "adventure" (New York Times) and point to overviews of the series, featuring not only Marker's best known works, La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983), but also early travelogues, such as Sunday in Peking (1956) and A Letter from Siberia (1958), and political essays along the lines of A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and The Last Bolshevik (1993). » - David Hudson...

Last week, Sight & Sound released their poll of the top 50 documentaries of all time, sourced from 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers. The list includes seminal films such as Nanook of the North, Sans Soleil, Man With a Movie Camera, and Salesman, as well as recent, form-pushing works in The Act of Killing and Leviathan. Robert Greene took time out of his impressively hectic schedule to craft a video essay that is a send up to said titles and more, examining documentary for its inimitable, observational approach, and noting that “the art of nonfiction lies in the tension between chaos and structure.” Head over to Sight&Sound to view it.

Last week, Sight & Sound released their poll of the top 50 documentaries of all time, sourced from 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers. The list includes seminal films such as Nanook of the North, Sans Soleil, Man With a Movie Camera, and Salesman, as well as recent, form-pushing works in The Act of Killing and Leviathan. Robert Greene took time out of his impressively hectic schedule to craft a video essay that is a send up to said titles and more, examining documentary for its inimitable, observational approach, and noting that “the art of nonfiction lies in the tension between chaos and structure.” Head over to Sight&Sound to view it.

As reported over at The Dissolve, highly respected British film magazine Sight & Sound is famous for its list of the greatest films off all time released once every decade. Since 1952, Citizen Kane held the number one spot until Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned it in the 2012 poll. Now for the first time Sight & Sound has released a list of the 50 greatest documentary films of all time. The list was compiled after polling from over 200 critics and curators and 100 filmmakers, including “John Akomfrah, Michael Apted, Clio Barnard, James Benning, Sophie Fiennes, Amos Gitai, Paul Greengrass, Jose Guerin, Isaac Julien, Asif Kapadia, Sergei Loznitsa, Kevin Macdonald, James Marsh, Joshua Oppenheimer, Anand Patwardhan, Pawel Pawlikowski, Nicolas Philibert, Walter Salles, and James Toback”.

The top 10 are:

Man With A Movie Camera, (Dziga Vertov, 1929) Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) Sans Soleil, (Chris Marker, 1982) Night And Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989) Chronicle Of A Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin,...

Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera tops the list of the greatest documentaries of all time, according to hundreds of film critics, curators, directors, and documentary film specialists surveyed by British film magazine Sight & Sound.

Every 10 years, Sight & Sound polls hundreds of film luminaries from around the world to generate a list of the best films of all time. In 2012, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo knocked Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane off its 50-year perch for the #1 spot. For the first time, the magazine is debuting a separate poll for documentaries. 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers were asked to participate; 100 of...

Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), Chris Marker's Sans soleil (1982), Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1989) are among the high-scorers in Sight & Sound's new poll of critics and filmmakers, The Greatest Documentaries of All Time." Meantime, Canyon Cinema's posted a free book chapter by Peter Tscherkassky, a manifesto from Abigail Child and notes on Stan Brakhage by Phil Solomon. Plus, the legacy of Wwi and more in today's roundup of news and views. » - David Hudson...

Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), Chris Marker's Sans soleil (1982), Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1989) are among the high-scorers in Sight & Sound's new poll of critics and filmmakers, The Greatest Documentaries of All Time." Meantime, Canyon Cinema's posted a free book chapter by Peter Tscherkassky, a manifesto from Abigail Child and notes on Stan Brakhage by Phil Solomon. Plus, the legacy of Wwi and more in today's roundup of news and views. » - David Hudson...

More than 200 critics and 100 filmmakers take part in poll.

Dziga Vertov’s silent film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) has topped Sight & Sound magazine’s first major poll of the world’s best documentaries.

More than 1,000 films were nominated by 200 critics and 100 filmmakers with more than 100 voting for Man with a Movie Camera.

Vertov’s surrealist classic in which a man travels around a city with a camera documenting urban life was shot in Odessa, Kiev and Khadliv.

Vertov also topped the critics’ list of top doc filmmakers while Frederick Wiseman is number one according to his fellow directors.

Participating filmmakers included Kevin Macdonald, Walter Salles, Joshua Oppenheimer, James Toback, Asif Kapadia, Carol Morley and Mark Cousins.

Critics’ Top 10 documentariesMan with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov (Ussr 1929) [pictured]Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (France 1985)Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker (France 1982)Night and Fog, dir. Alain Resnais (France 1955)The Thin Blue Line, dir. [link...