A pre-dawn dusting of snow fell on southern Oregon, wrapping Ashland like a gift. Morning’s bright sun melted white back to green to reveal the start of the 10th Ashland Independent Film Festival.
By midday, the endless crisp, blue sky instead hung low, grey, and ominous. A freakish snow squall swirled around the queue in front of the Varsity waiting for the first slate of films, then the clouds lifted and the world shone bright again.
Those changes - from cheery to dreary and b...
One of the founders of the New Wave, critic-turned-filmmaker Claude Chabrol (1930-2010) was instrumental in revolutionising French cinema in the 1950s. In an acclaimed career that spanned 6 decades, he made over 70 films and was renowned for his masterful thrillers and his incisive critique of class and society. In partnership with Ciné Lumière, Barbican Film celebrates Chabrol's contribution to cinema with a selection of his best-known films (1).
Sunday 6 March
4.00p...
The fine arts have always had a solemn embrace with the art of film since the days of silent movies. As the "art form of the 20th century" began to cement its reputation in the first two decades, artists (many with a surreal bent) experimented with the new form of moving image to give kinetic motion to their individual visions. Salvador Dali, Fernand Leger, El Lisitsky, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Strand and others collaborated with budding film artistes to expand the...
Jesse Eisenberg in THE SOCIAL NETWORK
As a media junkie (guilty as charged), I cannot help but be inundated this time of the year with all manner of critics pontificating on their "top ten" favorites of the year in the worlds of film, theater, music, art, fashion, politics, etc. While in the past, anxious readers waited with breath that is baited for what the New York Times writers and other major critics singled out as the year's best cultural attractions, the in...
Julian Schnabel strides two different worlds like a modern-day colossus. As a painter, sculptor and photographer, he has been in the A list of fine arts culture for more than 30 years. For the past decade, he has added "filmmaker extraordinaire" to his resume, becoming one of the most talked-about and lauded film artists of his generation. Painters making films is not completely new (Leger, Kandinsky, Dali and other early modernists did make film expressions, but they wer...
Jazz is one of the only art forms that originated in America, although it can be argued that its influences and popularity are great overseas than in the country of its origin. For years, jazz artists who were treated poorly in their own country (spurned by the recording industry’s mainstream and and physically prevented from enjoying their success by the draconian Jim Crow laws that limited where they could eat, sleep and recreate), found creative and inspirational sola...
Sidewalk Film Festival is proud to announce the 2010 Documentary Features Line-up. Sidewalk Film Festival will take place September 24th, 25th and 26th in Downtown Birmingham. Tickets are on-sale now at www.sidewalkfest.com. In Competition: (listed in alphabetical order by title)American Jihadist (Saturday, Sept. 26th – 2:45pm – Alabama Theatre Studio) Filmmaker – Mark Claywell *scheduled to attend American Jihadist profiles the enigmatic Isa Abdullah Ali, aka Clevin Raphael Holt, a self-d...
Even if you don't know his name, you probably know his imagery. The streetwise graffiti, the charismatic iconography, the madcap use of words and visuals from pop culture.....the coolness of the work and the indelible signature of a gifted, natural (as opposed to heavily trained) artist. And add one more romantic detail.....death at the tender age of 27 after a blazing career that now sees his doodlings capturing record prices on the art auction market. Like James Dean before him, ...
