Jean-Claude Vannier and his orchestra working with Yves Saint-Laurent in the early 70s.

I think he, more than any one person or thing, crafted my mental image of LA when I didn’t live here.

1940s Studio Organization, 20th Century Fox.

The following diagrams outline the structure of the 20th Century Fox film studio in the 1940s. The charts detail everything from the highest to the most menial of positions at the studio, from the catering through the legal department. They appear in approximately the same order as they appeared in the book they were scanned from.

Bidoun and Anthology Film Archives present an encore screening of Ben Hayeem’s unmissable, unfathomable wonder. Born and raised in Bombay, Hayeem (1933-2004) made a number of well-regarded films and was close with experimental film pioneers Maya Deren and Slavko Vorkapich. Early in his career he joined the Living Theater group in New York and became the only Indian Jew to play a Chinese Priest with a Yiddish accent in a Brecht play. This comedic, cross-cultural experience must have set him down the path to the rather incredible and risque happenings in The Black Banana.

The original promotional notes inform us that, “In this zany, ribald Middle Eastern comedy, young Jews, Arabs and Texans revolt against the parental and conventional authority, represented by old-fashioned Jews, Arabs and Texans…Despite its message of peace and good will between Jew and Arab, The Black Banana has the distinction of being the only film ever banned in Israel because its mixture of nudity and religious satire offended the Israeli censorship board.”

The Black Banana will be preceeded by Ben Hayeem short films:
Papillote (1964, 10.5 minutes, 16mm)
Flora (1965, 6 minutes, 16mm)

Tuesday, December 22 at 8:00 PM
Anthology Film Archives: 32 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10003

(This movie absolutely blew my mind, I cannot recommend it enough. DO NOT MISS!)

EVERYTHING, NOTHING, SOMETHING, ALWAYS (WALLA!)
a project by Emily Mast for Performa 09

Two projects that fit loosely into a larger idea of supporting ideas that work quietly and locally.

I have a few projects from this Porto-based label via trades with my friend Isabel (who produced the work above, from BF10/Wanda II). BdF’s website is pretty clear and concise as to aims and background information, so there’s not much else to say here other than this is one of my favorite imprints.

I met Maki Hakui in NYC at this years Art Book Fair, and her magazine School was the only title I ended up shelling out cash for. I support her mission to avoid discussing the usual aspects and figures of Japanese art culture, and going straight to intimate, direct dialogues with its lesser exposed – but equally interesting – women creatives.

While ostensibly fulfilling and bringing to a close the initial aesthetic criteria he created during the rise of the French New Wave in the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard shifts his gaze more intently onto the climate of design and branding in his 1967 film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Whereas Godard’s dozen or so films in the early 1960s interrogated the impressions from the dominance of the Hollywood image onto cultural consciousness, the meat of 2 or 3 Things is branding, identity, and the rise of the corporate spirit.

Continue Reading…

Abdellah Taïa +
An American In Tangier, Mohamed Ulad, 1993, 27 mins
Chronicles/Morocco, Michel Auder, 1971-71, 26 mins
Morocco 1972: The Real Chronicles with Viva, Michel Auder, 2002, 36 mins

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at Light Industry, Brooklyn
7:30pm, $7

More information here

via South Willard

Tuesday July 14, 7PM
LACMA Bing Theater

Brought to you by tank.tv, the LACMA film program, The Young and Evil, guest-curated by the Tate Modern’s Stuart Comer, features works by filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Anna Halprin, Curt McDowell, and Barbara Rubin, and will be followed by an onstage conversation between Stuart Comer and artist William E. Jones.

NOTE: This program contains material of an adult nature, which may be inappropriate for some viewers. Discretion is advised.

On Friday, July 17, Outfest will host the contemporary program at REDCAT, originally commissioned and presented on www.tank.tv.

See www.outfest.org for more information.


Bing Theater | Tickets required:
$7 general admission,
$5 members, seniors 62+ and students with ID.

You are invited to attend:

CONTRA MUNDUM III
Sunday, July 5, 2009
7PM

Animalize
Elad Lassry, artist, will discuss animal subjectivity
and the animal as subject in film and photography.

The talk will be followed by a DJ set by Wendy Yao of related music.

Mandrake
2692 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90034
(between Venice Blvd and Washington Blvd)

www.mandrakebar.com
www.osloeditions.com

and again

Another Border:
A Selection of Films and Videos from the Cinémathèque de Tanger Archives
@ LACMA

Tuesdays: June 9, 16, 23 & 30 | 7 pm | Bing Theater
Tickets required: $7 general admission, $5 museum members,

TONIGHT, June 9

PROGRAM 1: (HI)STORY Tellers
 
An American in Tangier
Dir. Mohamed Ulad | 1993 | 27 min
The American writer and composer, Paul Bowles, reflects on his life in Morocco, his adopted home for over fifty years.
 
Vues du Grand Socco at du Petit Socco (View of the Main Square and the Small Square)
Dir. Gabriel Veyre | 1935 | 7 min
Photographer and filmmaker Gabriel Veyre was 25 years old when engaged by the Lumière brothers as a cinematograph operator. In 1901 he became the photographer and cinematographer to the Sultan of Morocco, and in 1935 he traveled around the country to build an archive of daily life in Morocco.

Intermission

Ouarzazate Movie (The Door of the Desert)
Dir. Ali Essafi | 2001 | 57 min
The people of Ourzazate, a small Moroccan town, make a living from international cinema productions. The whole population works as extras in films they will most likely never see. In the cloakrooms and casting sets, Essafi follows the people of the town in both their humiliations and Hollywood dreams.
 
This program will be accompanied by a special introduction by Bidoun Magazine (www.bidoun.com) and a reading by author Gary Dauphin. During the intermission attendees are invited to a reception sponsored by Bidoun Magazine.

The Cinémathèque de Tanger (www.cinemathequedetanger.com) is a nonprofit organization based in Tangiers, Morocco devoted to the preservation and promotion of Moroccan cinema. Curated by Bouchra Khalili and Yto Barrada, Another Border showcases the vitality of contemporary Moroccan film and video alongside the richness of historic archival footage from the region. This selection of Moroccan short movies, documentaries, experimental films, and videos follows the fault lines between representation and reality, in both daily life and extraordinary circumstances. The intersection between tradition, globalization, and shifting notions of ‘modernity’ creates not a clash, but a fertile space for reflection. Addressing both the complex space between the West and Morocco, the program provides a platform for further dialogue on the ideas of hope and hospitality.

Rudo y Cursi. This special evening is part of Cinema Tuesdays, a new weekly series curated by Flux celebrating innovative film at The Montalbán special events theatre in Hollywood.

Tuesday May 5th, 2009
7pm — Acamonchi art show; Clorofila (Nortec Collective)
8pm — Screening plus Q&A with director Carlos Cuarón

by A. O. Scott

The first thing you see in “Tyson,” James Toback’s powerful and troubling new documentary, is an old television clip showing Mike Tyson, on Nov. 22, 1986, defeating Trevor Berbick to win the W.B.C. heavyweight title. Just 20 years old, Mr. Tyson was the youngest fighter to win that belt, and to see him take it is to recall, especially in light of the shambling, thuggish caricature he would later become, what a dazzling and ferocious boxer he was in his prime.

The only thing more astonishing than the speed of his combinations was their force, and his ability to blend quickness with brute strength quickly overpowered his early opponents, not many of whom lasted very long in the ring with him. Mr. Berbick, a taller, heavier and more experienced fighter, was done before the second round was over, and what the slow-motion video shows most indelibly is the terror on his face before the referee mercifully called a TKO.

The essence of boxing is violence, but few fighters have refined it — have embodied it — quite as effectively as Mr. Tyson has; he sometimes speaks to Mr. Toback’s camera about the murderous clarity he took into the ring with him. He says he used to imagine his fists smashing through his opponent’s faces and out the backs of their heads. The pure terror in Mr. Berbick’s eyes (and in those of most of the other fighters Mr. Tyson met during his rapid rise and brief reign) suggests that he might well have been capable of wreaking that kind of damage.

But the damage surveyed in “Tyson” is mostly self-inflicted. Fear is certainly one of the film’s motifs, but it seems that Mr. Tyson suffers from at least as much as he inspires. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid,” he says at one point, giving voice to his state of mind in the moments before a bout. He also remembers being bullied and humiliated as a child in Brooklyn, but in listening to his moody, rambling and frequently thoughtful disquisitions on his own life you are struck by intimations of a dread much deeper than the fear of physical harm or loss of face.

With a single exception — his relationship with his trainer and mentor, Cus D’Amato — Mr. Tyson’s experience of the world has been marked by mistrust and suspicion, by a view of other people that is hard and pitiless. They are users, operators, “leeches,” he says, but he rarely claims to be any better. He is only human.

Most of the movie consists of the former champ sitting in a house near the Pacific Ocean, speaking into the camera as if no one else were around. This produces an effect of almost unnerving intimacy — it is a bit scary to be so close to him — but also an upwelling, perhaps unexpected, of compassion. It is hard to imagine anyone more radically alone.

Whether or not he deserves our sympathy is a fair question. It is easy, and not entirely unjustified, to look at Mr. Tyson, his left eye ringed by a Maori tattoo, his head shaved clean, and see a self-pitying, self-justifying man who squandered his talent and good fortune and caused much more hurt than his brutal profession required. He started out as a street criminal in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and was plucked from juvenile detention by Mr. D’Amato and his associates, who disciplined the young man’s natural volatility and turned him into a fighter.

But Mr. Tyson never learned to control his brutish, self-destructive instincts. His brief first marriage, to the actress and model Robin Givens, was marked by accusations of abuse, and in 1993 he went to prison after being convicted of sexually assaulting a beauty pageant contestant in Indiana. By now he may be better known for ranting and press conferences and for biting Evander Holyfield’s ear during a 1997 fight than for the mighty pugilistic feats of his youth.

And a lot of people, even passionate boxing fans, might prefer to forget about Mr. Tyson rather than spend 90 minutes in his company. But “Tyson” is worth seeing even if you have no particular interest in the sport or the man.

It may lack the detachment and the balance that Barbara Kopple brought to “Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson,” the 1993 documentary she made for NBC, but Mr. Toback’s film, partly because it restricts itself to Mr. Tyson’s point of view, offers a rare and vivid study in the complexity of a single suffering, raging soul. It is not an entirely trustworthy movie, but it does feel profoundly honest.

From time to time the screen is divided into two or three almost identical images, and the sound is edited to make it sound as if Mr. Tyson is in dialogue with himself, his words echoing and overlapping. These effects emphasize the film’s main point, which is that Mr. Tyson is too mercurial, too self-contradictory, to be easily summed up.

He is by turns boastful, angry, remorseful and bewildered, choking up when he recalls Mr. D’Amato, whose death in 1985 remains the central tragedy of Mr. Tyson’s life. He relates the details of that life with candor and feeling, and also with an analytical ardor that is moving because it reveals his struggle to figure himself out.

Without the sympathetic presence of Mr. Toback, whom he has known for many years, it is unlikely that Mr. Tyson would have opened up in this way. And it is also likely that without Mr. Tyson’s presence, the director would have been unlikely to restrain his own self-indulgent impulses.

Mr. Toback’s fascination with hyperbolic visions of masculinity predates his filmmaking career, going back at least to a notorious 1967 essay on Norman Mailer. As a screenwriter and director — from “Fingers” to “Harvard Man” — he has been preoccupied with brutality, vanity and sexual conquest, and with the interplay between those elemental impulses and the refinements of art and culture.

His protagonists tend to be variously romanticized versions of himself: intellectuals seduced by fantasies of crime, risk, sexual wantonness and violence. Even in his most interesting projects he frequently loses track of the difference between exploring such fantasies and indulging them, but in “Tyson,” his first nonfiction film, he is held in check by the irreducible, excruciating realness of the man in front of the camera. The transaction between them is charged with a strange kind of magic. The filmmaker allows the fighter to have his unchallenged say to justify, condemn and contradict himself. In exchange Mr. Tyson has enabled Mr. Toback to make his best film, which is also, paradoxically, his most personal.

“Tyson” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has profanity and violence.

TYSON

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by James Toback; director of photography, Larry McConkey; edited by Aaron Yanes; music by Salaam Remi, with the song “Legendary” by Nas; produced by Mr. Toback and Damon Bingham; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 30

via South Willard

via South Willard

Who Speaks For Earth? — Episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos available on Hulu.

via Lined & Unlined

The Box in Chinatown is hosting the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles of work by pioneering artist and filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek (1927-1984). The show includes a number of original collage works, as well as a recreation of his Movie Mural (1965) and Panels for the Walls of the World, Telephone/Fax Mural (1970). Not to be missed. On view March 14 - April 18, 2009.

More info here.

An excerpt from Nine Lives artist Charlie White’s cartoon OMG BFF LOL from his project “Girl Studies”, 2008. (Run Time: 3 min., 16 sec.)

Dorothy, a 73-year-old retired librarian, and her husband Herb, an 85-year-old retired postal clerk started buying minimal and conceptual art in New York in the early 1960s, living on Dorothy’s salary and spending Herb’s on art. Thirty years later, the Vogels had managed to accumulate over 4,000 pieces, filling every corner of their living space from the bathroom to the kitchen. “Not even a toothpick could be squeezed into the apartment,” recalls Dorothy. Their apartment was near collapse, holding way over its limit - something had to be done.

In 1992, the Vogels made headlines that shocked the art world: their entire collection was moved to the National Gallery of Art, the vast majority of it as an outright gift to the institution. Many of the works they acquired at modest prices appreciated so significantly that their collection became worth several million dollars, yet the Vogels never sold a single piece to breakdown the collection. Herb and Dorothy still live in the same apartment today- with 19 turtles, lots of fish, one cat -once completely emptied, now refilled again with piles of artworks.

Cried my eyes out when I saw this documentary. Maddd cute.

On Paris Hilton, on Madonna, on Art Basel Miami Beach and on food, music and poetry.