January at first glance may not seem to have that much to offer as far as moviegoing goes, other than mostly unpromising studio comedies and thrillers, and awards-season hopefuls if you're seeking better quality. Thankfully, there are alternatives available, especially here in NYC, if you're willing to look beyond the multiplex or your local arthouse theater.
One of the best alternatives to multiplex vacuousness and Oscar-buzz chatter is the Museum of the Moving Image's First Look festival (January 9-18), an annual showcase of international cinema, in its 4th edition this year. As in past editions, First Look's core is introducing its audiences to acclaimed, innovative, and inventive features that have screened at film festivals around the world, as well as a few world premieres.
This year, however, First Look has expanded its scope to offer its most ambitious slate yet, including installations, avant-garde features and short films, and other provocative and challenging moving-image work alongside its feature film screenings. The programming has expanded to two theaters in the museum, with several programs being presented to the public free of charge.
The expanded programming this year includes the U.S. premiere of Jessica Hausner's Amour Fou, First Look's opening night film this year. Other highlights include the late Alexei Guerman's Hard to be a God; maverick independent U.S. filmmaker Jon Jost's Coming to Terms, starring avant-garde filmmaker James Benning; two new works in 3-D by veteran avant-garde New York-based filmmaker Ken Jacobs; acclaimed Canadian director Denis Cote's latest film Joy of Man's Desiring; August Winds, Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro's celebrated festival hit; as well as eye-opening documentaries from places as far flung as Syria, North Korea, Brazil, and the Bronx, the fruitful result of the festival's programming collaboration this year with FIDMarseille, the French documentary film festival.
Also - and this is a first in my experience - one of the festival selections will be shot and have its world premiere at the festival, as well as feature members of the festival audience. Jane Gillooly will screen her film Suitcase of Love and Shame on January 11, 2:30pm. Gillooly will film the audience watching this screening and use it as the basis of a new work, Audience, which screens on January 18, 3pm.
So, for the next two weekends, for little more than the price of a Metrocard, New Yorkers can experience some mind-expanding work by some of the best cinema artists working today, not to mention possibly appearing in one of the films themselves.
Click through the gallery below for my picks of must-see films at this year's festival. For more information on these and other films, and to purchase tickets, visit the Museum of the Moving Image's website.
AMOUR FOU (Jessica Hausner) *OPENING NIGHT FILM
Hausner's latest depicts the suicide pact between the 19th century German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist (author of the classic The Marquise of O) and Henriette Vogel, a married woman, with arresting compositons (inspired by Dutch master Vermeer), dry, understated humor, and a vivid evocation of the political and social fabric of the period. At that time, Germany was experiencing the effect of France-based ideas of political liberty, which directly threatened the status of the aristocracy. At the film's heart is Henriette's personal liberation through her death pact, in which she shakes off the shackles of high society's strictures. (Jan. 9, 7pm)
THE GUESTS (Ken Jacobs)
Jacobs combines today's technology and the birth of cinema to create this avant-garde 3-D silent masterwork, in which a one-minute 1896 Lumiere Brothers film - depicting the bride and groom and guests arriving at a church wedding - is stretched to 70 minutes. Jacobs adds an intermittent soundtrack of music and other sounds, and the 3-D images refract and disembody the guests, creating an eerie and ghostly experience. Jacobs' remixing of the original film - the infinitesimal movement of the wedding guests floating through the 3-D space becoming ever more hypnotic as the film progresses - allows the past, present and future to speak to each other in thrilling ways. (Jan. 10, 2pm)
WIRE FENCE (Ken Jacobs)
This 22-minute short, screening before The Guests, consists of successive still images of construction wire fencing on Jacob's street, filmed (to use Jacobs' own cheeky description) in "Blockbuster 3D." Wire Fence playfully employs the illusion created in the mind of similar images combining into one, an illusion on which the act of film watching itself depends. The 3-D images invite us in as we focus back and forth on the repetitive patterns of the fence and the street scenes behind them. The result is a truly interactive experience, far more intellectually stimulating than the carnival, tossing-stuff-at-the-screen antics of most 3D features. (Jan. 10, 2pm)
I TOUCHED ALL YOUR STUFF (Maira Buhler and Matias Mariani)
This documentary tells the outlandish, almost unbelievable story of Chris Kirk, an self-effacing, self-described "computer geek" who goes to Colombia on a whim after reading an article on Pablo Escobar's abandoned hippos, and also to seek adventure lacking in his U.S. suburban hometown. He falls hard for "V," a mysterious Japanese-Colombian woman, and through an ever escalating, and globe-trotting, series of events, during which V is revealed to be not who she appears to be, Kirk ends up in a Brazilian prison. Kirk's own computer is mined for images and videos that reveal as much as they conceal. This is a compelling tale that makes us question everything we see, including Kirk and his story itself. (Jan. 16, 7pm)
COMING TO TERMS (Jon Jost)
A family patriarch (played by avant-garde filmmaker James Benning), diagnosed with terminal cancer, gathers his estranged family to ask them to honor his request for assisted suicide in Jon Jost's latest film. Montana's landscape of houses and natural settings are also a major chraracter, as this troubled family becomes metaphorical of America's broken promises with its citizens. The characters share intimate feelings, but never face one another when they speak; they are aware of each other's pain, but they remain atomized from one another, trapped in their solitary emotional prisons. Slow dissolves of landscape scenes (which often recall Benning's work) stand as Ozu-esque contemplation between the scenes of the family and their expressed burdens of the painful past that simultaneously separates and binds them. (Jan. 18, 2pm)
Bx46 (Jeremie Brugidou and Fabien Clouette)
This artful documentary portrait of Hunts Point in the Bronx is an engaging, collage-like film that vividly evokes a place where three different entities emerge in this industrial area across from Riker's Island: the Fulton Fish Market, a waste-transfer facility, and a floating prison barge. These places represent necessary functions - food production, waste processing, and incarceration - the dirty business of which is often housed in poorer areas of the city, far away from the more affluent sections that benefit from the work done here. People's stories and arresting color compositions combine to create an immersive, perceptive outsider's look that illuminates the experience of this place with beautiful artistry. (Jan. 17, 2pm)
INTERNATIONAL TOURISM (Marie Voignier)
Thanks to Seth Rogen and James Franco, North Korea and its relationship with cinema is very much in the news lately. In sharp contrast to The Interview, a much more artful and nuanced cinematic portrait of North Korea can be found in this 48-minute documentary, a formally inventive travelogue of a foreign excursion to Pyongyang. The international visitors to North Korea (including the filmmaker) are taken by their tour guide to carefully selected areas, such as art museums, embroidery centers, and other would-be edifying cultural experiences. The streets of the capital are clean and carefully manicured, but much more sparsely populated than other major cities of this size normally are. Voignier uses one main formal device to counteract the sanitized propaganda they are fed by the tour guides: erasing their voices from the soundtrack. All other ambient sounds are retained, so that the missing human voice lends an eerie, haunting air to the images, an evocative rendering of the silence and lack of human agency enforced by the North Korean government. (Jan. 17, 4:30pm; screens with I for Iran)
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