Cahiers2Cinéma

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

Road movies: On Chris Petit's film & video essays

Last updated February 24, 2010

Scene From The Other Side - Chris Petit from White DolphinFilms on Vimeo.

Brilliant profile of film director Chris Petit in conversation with Allan Bairstow.

“I was interested in seeing if there was a way of producing a film which was constructed more like writing - because when you are writing something you don't necessarily know where it is going to end up... The Falconer [Petit, 1997] for example never really aspired to be a film, more to a state of mutation or hybrid. It was an essay or graphic novel as much as it was a film, an exercise in vertical layering rather than linear unfolding.”
(Chris Petit, Screenonline 2006)

Truth and invention, real lives and fiction become indistinct and equal elements, merging with other people's work in the found-footage style, to create a single fabric of random spontaneous expressiveness, not unlike the life that slides by in front of a shop video camera. Each piece of film presents a clue to an inextricable tangle to which everything in the world is connected in its spider web of time, space and chance.
— Excerpt from Serafino Murri, `Chris Petit, Anatomies of the Image', in Afterall - A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 5, February 2002

Chris [Petit] was much taken with [critic Manny Farber's] writings on American cinema of the 1940s, and with the way in which Farber could notice a detail in a movie, a moment, a glance, and celebrate the beauty and complexity of just that. The narrative was largely unimportant, but the way an actor like Robert Mitchum moved, or the way Bogart looked up just before crossing a street, these were the things that Farber believed were significant.
So Chris made a film essay about these ideas that is a road trip across Arizona and Nevada and California, and through the psyche of American cinema. It's a documentary in which the road becomes a movie, just as it did for Wenders and so many others. It's about film and about memory, as well as about the way we mis-remember movies -- and life -- all the time. It's a television programme that's also about photography (the Polaroid frame is a key device) and about painting. It's about Rossellini and Godard, and about Europe and the USA. And it's a sort of a love story too, between the filmmaker and his travelling companion.
There are so many things to like about negative space: the ways in which it interrogates sequences and the surfaces of the cinema image; its complex, half-heard and half-recalled soundtrack; the sense of nostalgia for cinema, and for a particular studio-based cinema from a specific historical moment; the unexpected beauty of small-town America in both the 1940s and the 1990s; its analysis of physical and psychological and cinematic space; the bold, deliberate provocation of a film made for television that breaks most of the rules; and then at its centre, the rueful, wise and fragile Manny Farber, filmed so informally by the director on a camcoder that sometimes you wonder if he ever looked through the viewfinder.
John Wyver, 'The late Manny Farber: critic, painter, good guy', Illuminations, September 14, 2008

Film Studies For Free's author has been doing a little research on the wonderful work of British filmmaker and video essayist Chris Petit. It seemed only proper, therefore, that she should share the excellent online and freely accessible sources she came across in the process -- including the remarkable documentary embedded above - with this blog's faithful readers.

If you are specifically interested in Manny Farber, subject of Petit's brilliant 1999 film for television negative space (someone, anyone, please release this film on DVD!), then you should also check out yesterday's FSFF post.

Petit has recently premiered, in Rotterdam and London, a new documentary called Content, described in its press material thus:

an ambient 21st century road movie that is essay rather than fiction, drift rather than destination. It is a film about life in the rearview mirror, memories of other journeys (Poland to Texas), the You Tube generation and email seduction. It is also about driving into the flatlands of late middle age, about fathers and sons and growing up in the cold war, about genocide and political assassination, and the postwar landscapes of Europe and the USA.

Content will be screened again in early March at London's ICA.

If you live in or near that city, you can see two of Petit's feature-length films for free at the BFI Southbank Mediatheque (Radio On [1997] and London Orbital [2002], co-directed by Iain Sinclair).

Online work by Chris Petit:

Online writing about Chris Petit's films

Monday, 22 February 2010

Manny Farber Studies

Last updated February 23, 2010

Distinguished scholars Robert Polito and Patricia Patterson discuss Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, a collection of Farber's film criticism that spans his early weekly reviews for The New Republic and The Nation to his later essays (some written in collaboration with his wife, Patricia Patterson). Farber's unusual and pointed prose was credited by many with reinventing film criticism. Later, he devoted himself to his painting and taught film and art at UC San Diego from 1970 to 1987. Courtesy of UCtelevision January 14, 2010

Well, looky here at this, says Film Studies For Free: a remarkably rich and informative, hour-long discussion about the work of legendary American film critic Manny Farber. And there's another, half hour shorter documentary embedded at the foot of this post that tackles the subject of Farber's painting, and places it in the context of his film-critical work, to a certain extent.

FSFF adds to the experience by providing some links to other choice scholarly material about Farber. Readers might also like to revisit FSFF's monumental links post The Value of Style: Film Criticism in Scholarship.

There's another Farber related post coming up at this here blog very soon [now posted], so y'all come back now, and we'll ditch the possibly unconvincing, and certainly irrelevant, American accent...

Manny Farber and Hugh Davies of Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
[The video package about Manny Farber begins eleven minutes in].

Learn about two men who are helping to put San Diego on the art world's map: Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and local painter Manny Farber. In the studio with Gloria Penner are: Stephanie Hanor, Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Robert Pincus, Art Critic, San Diego Union-Tribune.

Thursday, 18 February 2010

To Decasia and Back: Film Preservation Studies

Short documentary by Louise Lambert (2005) about Bill Morrison's experimental collage film Decasia (2002). You can also read David Cairn's great entry on this film for the Film Preservation Blogathon here. Further articles on this film are listed below.

Film Studies For Free is very honoured to contribute an entry to the "For the Love of Film! Film Preservation Blogathon". As FSFF readers will already know, this highly worthwhile event has been organised by greatly esteemed bloggers Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand (the latter of the wonderful Ferdy on Film).

Below are embedded some entertaining and informative online videos about film preservation, and below those are some links to further, openly accessible, scholarly material about this essential but expensive art and science.

If you would like to make a donation to the Blogathon's chosen charitable recipient, the National Film Preservation Foundation (U.S.A), one of the most active and important preservers of film anywhere in the world, please click here.

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support. The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

So you can see for yourselves the important work that the NFPF does, here's the list of films it has helped to preserve so far.

If you would like to contribute to the cause of film preservation in a country other than the U.S. you can find details of all national affiliates to the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) via FIAF's online directory here.

To access a list of all entries to the "For the Love of Film" Blogathon to date please click here. If you need further inspiration to donate or otherwise get involved in this cause, do watch Greg Ferrara's wonderful video commercial for the Blogathon at his website Cinema Styles.

A great introduction to the practicalities of film preservation (with a terrifically entertaining voiceover). It looks at the preservation of Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister's 1942 film Listen to Britain at the British Film Institute archive.

Treasures of the Academy/"Guardians of History" Documentary Channel/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produce an in-depth look at the importance of film preservation. John Huston's World War 2 documentaries, "Battle of San Pietro" and "Let There Be Light," which have been preserved by DOC and AMPAS, are highlighted as examples of film as living history. Featuring interviews with John Huston's son, Tony, and top directors and historians who shed considerable light on this important, exciting subject. Parts 2 & 3 below.