The New STYLEThis is the second year that the New York Film Festival has presented Projections, its extensive showcase of experimental film and video that for years had been called Views From the Avant-Garde. The name change (or "rebranding," in the parlance of our ugly times) corresponded, of course, to the departure of longtime programmer Mark McElhatten. Under his stewardship, Views became one of the premiere experimental film festivals in the world, a long weekend of high caliber dispatches from established masters, alongside bracing discoveries by up-and-coming makers whose work somehow caught Mark's eye. His programming partner, Film Comment's Gavin Smith, often brought along selections that complemented Mark's, even as they were out of his usual bailiwick.The Views era was not without its dissenters. Some complained that McElhatten rounded up the usual suspects year after year, sometimes without regard to the relative quality of their latest offerings. Others, most prominently Su Friedrich,...
- 10/2/2015
- by Michael Sicinski
- MUBI
Utopian Comedies: The Films of Jim Finn, the filmmaker's first retrospective in the Us, opens this evening at New York's Anthology Film Archives and runs through Wednesday. "Finn is a major talent," declares Vadim Rizov in the L Magazine, "a vaguely avant-garde video specialist whose work is far too accessible to be ghettoized and left to the tender mercies of museums and academia. Finn's three features (barely so: at 71 minutes, Interkosmos is the longest) all set about recreating the mental landscape and cultural textures of different Communist cultures. His tools: scenes of the indoctrinated reciting party dogma with diligent blankness, fervently patriotic musical numbers, overblown archival footage celebrating fake achievements.... Politically, Finn's three features would be palatable to both liberals and conservatives: they have sympathy for the textural feel of each regime/movement while unambiguously condemning them."...
- 5/27/2010
- MUBI
What happens when you take an independent American filmmaker, a fetish for Communist memorabilia, and subtract all irony? Pretty much the films of Jim Finn. From May 27-June 2, the Anthology Film Archives will be playing the shorts and features of Jim Finn. Disclaimer: I have shown his films at film festivals I work for and commissioned Finn to make a Lunchfilm. The Busby Berkeley of propaganda, Finn has made three features with a lo-fi indie style that mixes larger Hollywood genre trappings in a big bowl. The results are funny, but also packed with socio-political commentary. Seems hard to pull off but Finn does it without pandering to being hip. Interkosmos follows two Eastern German cosmonauts into space, where love gets in the way...
- 5/24/2010
- by Mike Plante
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
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