Zack Godshall’s Low and Behold, which has been somewhat missing in action since premiering at Sundance 2007, screens tonight at Anthology Film Archives in New York before coming to DVD via Carnivalesque in November. Starring eventual Alexander the Last dreamboat Barlow Jacobs, who also co-wrote and produced, it’s a drama/documentary hybrid feature set in just-post-Katrina New Orleans that doesn’t always hold up in terms of narrative, but is always interesting in the frission between fact and embellishment. As I wrote when I saw it at Sundance:

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David Redmon and Ashley Sabin are releasing their second feature, Kamp Katrina, on DVD today via their Carnivalesque Films imprint. I wrote about the film nearly two years ago when it screened in New York, and described the film’s exploitation of the odd beauty of low grade imagery, a stylistic trope which the directors have expanded on in ther subsequent features, Intimidad and Invisible Girlfriend:

Kamp Katrina is shot cinema verite style on prosumer digital video. The roughness inherent to the format produces unexpectedly exciting effects. As co-directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon buzz like flies around the action in the tent city, their handheld cameras are set to low shutter speeds to compensate for a lack of natural light.The resulting image is slightly slowed, tinted neon pink, and at times, it almost seems to float off the screen. The hallucinogenic spin brought by the video amplifies the feeling that post-Katrina New Orleans might as well be on another planet, in as much as it resembles the “normal” American city.

The DVD package includes two essays: one on the movie itself by Stuart Klawans of The Nation, and another byJeff Ferrell on the notions of “cultural criminology” and the “carnivalesque.” The latter doesn’t directly reference the movie in the case, but instead provides theoretical backup for Redmon and Sabin’s wider project.

You can buy Kamp Katrina at Amazon or via the Carnivalesque web site.

In Coppola’s house on Broadway. Outside the wind is howling, whipping the laurel bushes. The sailboats in the bay are lying almost flat, the waves sharp-contoured and restless. The Alcatraz Light is flashing signals, in broad daylight. None of my friends is here. It is hard to buckle down to work, to shoulder this heavy burden of dreams. Only books provide some measure of comfort.

The NYTimes.com has published an excerpt of Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, his diary of the making of Fitzcarraldo.

Maybe it’s not fair for me to begin the review of a festival film with a lengthy digression on nostalgia and the death of Michael Jackson, but somehow all of these things seem to point in the same direction (and not geographically speaking, despite the connection to Westwood). So please, bear with me:

The Associated Press published an editorial this morning by Ted Anthony, titled “2 lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day.” In it, he assesses the impact of the near-simultaneous deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson on the segment of the population who were at their most demographically desirably in the late 80s-early 90s. He attributes the following portentous quote to a 38-year-old HBO employee:

“This,” he said, “is the moment when Generation X realizes they’re grown up.”

Thanks to this article and others, “Generation X” has been bopping around Google’s Top 100 search terms all day. Which is funny, because I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the concept of Generation X … before earlier this week, when I watched Passenger Side, Matt Bissonnette’s third feature and an entry in the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Narrative Competition. Starring the director’s brother Joel Bissonnette and Adam Scott as two brothers (one a struggling novelist with an aversion to modern technology, the other a personable recovering junkie) who spend a day driving around Southern California looking for the ex-girlfriend who one of them wants to marry, Passenger Side also seems to have that age group’s reconciliation of age and nostalgia for a simpler time on its mind.

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This piece was originally published in March during the AFI Dallas Film Festival. The Hurt Locker opens in select theaters today.

When I was finishing my BFA in the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 00s, Kathryn Bigelow was the school’s most famous filmmaker alum, despite the fact that she matriculated at SFAI as a painter (she studied filmmaking as a graduate student at Columbia after a stint in the Independent Study program at the Whitney Museum). The work of the woman who made Point Break and Strange Days wasn’t exactly part of the curriculum of the then fine art-focused (sometimes to a fault) Film program at SFAI, where Hollywood film was rarely considered worthy of scrutiny; those who did readily embrace her success as part of the school’s pedigree often named glass ceiling smashing as Bigelow’s greatest achievement — as if to say, “Yes, she makes mainly action and genre blockbusters with big name stars, but she’s a woman, so that makes her subversive.” The argument that Bigelow’s work is somehow subversive just because she has a vagina is not only ludicrous, but unnecessary, being that her films are actually subversive. Marked by moral ambiguity, insistently complicating easy distinctions between good and evil, using Bigelow’s patented point-of-view camera to implicate the viewer in the dark worlds and questionable choices of her subjects, her films literally subvert the viewer’s expectations dictated by genre.

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October Country, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s debut documentary feature describing a year in the lives of four generations of Moshers living in a depressed upstate New York suburb, is a rare work of impressionistic nonfiction. Its patchwork of visual detail often reminded me of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (whose work you might have seen on the cover of this Yo La Tengo album, or this Six Feet Under campaign). Crewdson’s work usually imbues suburban and domestic scenes with the aura of the supernatural; nothing actually horrific is visible in the frame, but the presence of something is always implied, out of frame, in the air. With their arresting images of smoked-clogged rooms and American flags convulsing in the wind, Mosher and Palmieri demonstrate a similar knack for lighting and framing the mundane to spin it towards the surreal, suggesting an invisible but not imperceptible force altering the proceedings. The style fits because the Moshers are essentially living a ghost story, with each member so haunted by past decisions that’ve lost control of the future.

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Matt Grady, formerly of Plexifilm, is launching a film and music distribution label called Factory 25, which has bought world rights (barring France) to Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland. According to a just-dropped press release, Factory 25 “will concentrate on releasing films theatrically, digitally and on DVD, as well as in conceptualized limited edition DVD/Vinyl combination packages.” For Frownland, the limited edition will include “in addition to extra footage (practically a given these days) … a comic book written in character by one of the actors, art drawn by lead actor Dore Mann, a soundtrack on vinyl, and a newsprint film poster.”

Apparently intent on hitting the hipster sweet spot between indie music and indie movies, Factory 25 also have plans to release a DVD set of videos by Damon & Naomi, early 90s indie rock doc Songs for Cassavetes, and Ben Wolfinsohn’s High School Record, a faux-documentary comedy starring members of Mika Miko and No Age that premiered at Sundance in 2005 (listen to my podcast with Wolfinsohn here).

This is exciting news, but I have questions. One thing the press release doesn’t specify is whether or not Frownland will be given a wider theatrical run; it’s had some isolated theatrical bookings and a run in France, but by no means has it reached market saturation. I also wonder, since they’re obviously buying stuff with cross over appeal to an audience that might not ordinarily care about indie film, if Factory 25 plans to find ways to subvert the current, stagnant indie film releasing model. I sent them an email; I’ll update this post when I get a response.

UPDATE: I asked Matt Grady via email to tell me a bit more about his plans for theatrical distribution, particularly in regards to Frownland, and he wrote: “I am looking into a series of event screenings that combine a musical performance with film screenings and am also working on having a couple film/music US tours in the fall. Frownland will continue to play event screenings…Frownland really lends itself to midnight screenings.”

Other projects on Factory 25’s slate include Dutch Harbor: Where The Sea Breaks Its Back, a documentary on Alaska featuring music by a supergroup including Will Oldham, Jim O’Rourke, David Grubbs and Michael Krassner called the Boxhead Ensemble, which will tour and perform with the film; and a Spiritualized concert film, which Grady directed and is currently in post-production.

On Friday evening at SilverDocs, I attended a panel on film criticism moderated by Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, and featuring contributions from critics David Edelstein, Lisa Schwarzbaum and Amy Taubin, and filmmaker/documentary programmer Thom Powers. In his opening remarks, Kennicott positioned the panel as a referendum of sorts on “Wanted: Documentary Critics”, a blog post by Powers in which he posed the question, “Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” I was surprised that the conversation that ensued mostly skirted the issue of “where” contemporary documentary film will find its defining critic, and was instead weighed down by argument as to whether or not this is a valid question at all.

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On a panel discussion before its world premiere screening at SilverDocs last night, AJ Schnack used the phrase “Robert Altman-esque” to describe the construction of his new film, Convention. This is accurate as a reference to the stylistic tropes we classically think of when we think of Altman — shot by nine filmmaker/camerapersons, Convention tracks the interwoven stories of a number of semi-interrelated characters as they produce, participate in, protest, protect and/or report on the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver — but the film also shares what Roger Ebert, in his review of Nashville, refered to as Altman’s “humanism”, the way he “sees people with his camera in such a way as to enlarge our own experience.” The multiple cameras and the multi-faceted streams of vision that they bring to Convention accomplish two major feats in terms of altering the scale of perspective: they condense nearly an entire city’s goings-on during the biggest international event in its recent history into the managable microcosmic experiences of a few of its thoroughly “normal” citizens, while at the same time opening up spaces in the lives of strangers that the viewer can sink into, and thus sync up to a communal sense of Something Happening. It seems so simple, and yet it’s so rare that you actually find yourself in a theater, having a moment of collective transcendance that makes you think, “This is why movies exist.”

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I literally have not owned a video game console in 20 years (I got bored with my Sega Genesis very quickly), but I was about ready to finally get one after hearing this news: Lars von Trier’s controversial new Cannes-winning sensation Antichrist is being adapted into a first-person video game called Eden. Fortunately, I probably won’t need a Wii or Xbox or whatever the kids are playing with these days, since the game will apparently work on my PC (the only game I’ve ever played on my computer is Solitaire). Not much plot is know about this game except that it will feature the voice of Willem Dafoe, will take place after the events in the film and “invites players to confront their fears.” So, I guess that means there could actually be genital mutilation involved, since ejaculating blood is definitely a fear of mine.

This tie-in makes me hope other Von Trier films will get their own video games. The Element of Crime should be the easiest to adapt, but here’s some other ideas: In Breaking the Waves you have to sleep with sailors and then tell your husband about it. In Epidemic you’re the doctor in the film within the film trying to cure an epidemic that you ironically are also spreading. In The Boss of it All you’re an actor pretending to be a company boss without the staff figuring out they’re being duped. And, of course, Dancer in the Dark would be a hybrid game: part first-person shooter in which you have to kill cops trying to steal your savings; part Dance Dance Revoution-type music video game.

Check out what other film blogs are saying about the video game after the jump:

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BAMcinemaFEST, Brooklyn’s new summer showcase of American film festival favorites culled from Sundance, SXSW and elsewhere, begins tonight with a screening and party for Don’t Let Me Drown. I’ll be away (at SilverDocs, then LAFF, then on an off-the-grid vacation) during much of the fest, but we’ve previously covered many of the new films screening. Including, in the order in which they screen:

• Children of Invention (screening Thursday night and Saturday afternoon)
• Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same (screening Thursday night and next Wednesday)
• You Won’t Miss Me (screening Friday and Tuesday night)
• Humpday (screening Saturday night and Sunday afternoon)
• Beeswax (screening Sunday evening)
• Sorry, Thanks (screening Wednesday night)
• The Exploding Girl (screening next Thursday night)

Next weekend, the Fest moves into a wave of rep programming, starting with the annual BAM takeover, an all night movie marathon/party this time featuring four programs and the unlikely juxtaposition of Hou Hsiao-hsien with Diana Ross, demonlover with Look Who’s Talking Too. Choices, choices. There’s more info at the BAM site.

“Why is it so hard to make a film about yourself?” asks Richard Rogers in Alexander Olch’s The Windmill Movie. He shortly thereafter unwittingly answers his own question via another question: “Is there anything to say?” Opening today at Film Forum in New York, Windmill is a kind of personal documentary by proxy. After his teacher/mentor/collaborator Rogers died of cancer, Olch was invited by Rogers’ widow, world-renowned photographer Susan Meiselas, to comb through the Harvard professor/documentarian’s vast archives of film and video, shot towards a hypothetical autobiographical movie that Rogers was never able to put together.
For Rogers, self-examination lead to a kind of tunnel-vision, embodied by an oft-seen image in Windmill of Rogers looking into the mirror from behind the camera. One of Windmill’s key ideas seems to be that the camera actually got in the way of Rogers’ ability to clearly see his own reflection. that, because of constant self-doubt as to whether he, as a white man born into money, had anything worthwhile to say, the apparatus through which he made his living filming other people couldn’t double as a tool through which to see himself. The service that Rogers provided to his subjects — of finding the truth in the raw material they offered up — Olch attempts to perform by any means necessary for his lost friend.

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Adnkronos, an Italian press agency that specializes in English-language news from the Arab world, is reporting today that Persepolis creator/co-director Marjane Satrapi and her fellow Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (probably best known here for his 2001 film Kandahar) “presented a document to Green Party MPs in the European parliament claiming to show that defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi had received over 19 million votes in the weekend election.” The document, purportedly from the Iranian Electoral Commission, also claims that standing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came in third place with just 12 percent of the national vote.

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Of the seven features I watched in full whilst at the 2009 CineVegas Film Festival, it seemed that the bravest endeavors, those that took the greatest stabs into the unknown both formally and conceptually, were actually shot on film. If this isn’t notable enough in a space increasingly dominated by digital photography (and, all too often, an aesthetic indifference that fails to push beyond the ease of use of the tools), the fact that films like Impolex, Modus Operandi and Redland are all the first features of men either barely or not quite the age of 30 is astounding. While other young filmmakers exploit ever-changing technology to shrink production budgets and experiment with non-theatrical models of distribution, Alex Ross Perry, Frankie Latina and Asiel Norton have made uncompromising films that defy contemporary technological trends and notions of financial convenience.

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