The Animated World is a regular feature spotlighting animation from around the globe. Lewis Klahr's Circumstantial Pleasures is exclusively showing on Mubi starting June 23, 2021 in many countries in the Undiscovered series. Circumstantial Pleasures Collage refuses known systems of meaning, instead sifting through the detritus of cultural production in order to orchestrate accidental insights into human experience. Its heyday was the early 20th century when modernists and surrealists harnessed its power to manifest the unconscious and juxtapose familiar objects into strange new landscapes. Artists like Hannah Hoch, Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield, and Marcel Duchamp created unique and perplexing works that some found disturbing, or, as famously labeled by the Nazis, degenerate. Their work often unleashed new possibilities, visual puns, erotic undercurrents and hidden political realities. Collage has lost none of its relevance over the years and continues to resonate, with filmmakers joining in as well—especially animators like Larry Jordan,...
- 7/6/2021
- MUBI
Yayoi Kusama David Zwirner Gallery, NYC Thru December 16th, 2017
Spots are a disease -- a "Pop Art" pox; a sign of madness, an hallucination. As Tony Hancock says in his brilliant comic movie The Rebel (1961) where he plays a modern artist: "I get the spots before my eyes, the red mist, and I'm off."
Yayoi Kusama is off again at David Zwirner Gallery on 533 West 19th Street in Chelsea. You will have to queue around the block to see her new installations. But you can just walk into a room on 19th street and see 66 of her new paintings. This is a review of the work in that room.
Paranoia is lonely, ironically the sense you have of being watched belies the fact that no one's taking any notice at all. The putting on of spots was an act, for Kusama, of "field" being used to cover neurosis. Kusama's paintings...
Spots are a disease -- a "Pop Art" pox; a sign of madness, an hallucination. As Tony Hancock says in his brilliant comic movie The Rebel (1961) where he plays a modern artist: "I get the spots before my eyes, the red mist, and I'm off."
Yayoi Kusama is off again at David Zwirner Gallery on 533 West 19th Street in Chelsea. You will have to queue around the block to see her new installations. But you can just walk into a room on 19th street and see 66 of her new paintings. This is a review of the work in that room.
Paranoia is lonely, ironically the sense you have of being watched belies the fact that no one's taking any notice at all. The putting on of spots was an act, for Kusama, of "field" being used to cover neurosis. Kusama's paintings...
- 12/3/2017
- by Millree Hughes
- www.culturecatch.com
The frames-within-frames Wes Anderson uses in his work show his filmography’s obsession with memory.The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014).
The artist Joseph Cornell took glass-fronted boxes and placed things such as birds, springs, ice cubes, and balls inside them, turning these everyday and otherwise benign objects into microcosms for something bigger than any of us can ever be. These boxes were referred to as “shadow boxes”, “memory boxes” and “poetic theaters,” and with each box the viewer is given an invitation to enter a new world. This world is not unknown to the individual viewer, but instead a collective and shared world in which memories exist. As the artist’s website states: “using things we can see, Cornell made boxes about things we cannot see: ideas, memories, fantasies, and dreams.” The boxes, both tragic and beautiful, present an artist trying as hard as they can to turn something intangible, something...
The artist Joseph Cornell took glass-fronted boxes and placed things such as birds, springs, ice cubes, and balls inside them, turning these everyday and otherwise benign objects into microcosms for something bigger than any of us can ever be. These boxes were referred to as “shadow boxes”, “memory boxes” and “poetic theaters,” and with each box the viewer is given an invitation to enter a new world. This world is not unknown to the individual viewer, but instead a collective and shared world in which memories exist. As the artist’s website states: “using things we can see, Cornell made boxes about things we cannot see: ideas, memories, fantasies, and dreams.” The boxes, both tragic and beautiful, present an artist trying as hard as they can to turn something intangible, something...
- 1/17/2017
- by Sinéad McCausland
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
NEWSEnd of the year "tops" and "best ofs" are starting to appear online—well before many critics have seen many of the year's important films, we may add—and our favorite so far is Sight & Sound's poll for the best films of 2016. Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann deservedly tops the list, and aside from a few outliers (American Honey, Evolution), it looks pretty good from where we're sitting. Also just published are the the year's best movies as chosen by The New York Times: Manohla Dargis tops her list with Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie and A.O. Scott fetes Moonlight.The film world is just beginning to wrap 2016, and already we're looking at the next year: the Sundance Film Festival has begun announcing it selections, which we're gathering (and updating) here.Recommended VIEWINGWe may all have too much to watch (or so it seems), but here is something very...
- 12/7/2016
- MUBI
Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Metrograph
“Fassbinder’s Top 10” offers Salò on Friday, Walsh‘s The Naked and the Dead & Visconti‘s The Damned on Saturday, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on Sunday. All are on 35mm.
Roman Polanski‘s Frantic shows this Sunday, as does Ashes and Embers.
Spirited Away and The Cat Returns play as part of “Studio Ghibli Weekends.
Metrograph
“Fassbinder’s Top 10” offers Salò on Friday, Walsh‘s The Naked and the Dead & Visconti‘s The Damned on Saturday, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on Sunday. All are on 35mm.
Roman Polanski‘s Frantic shows this Sunday, as does Ashes and Embers.
Spirited Away and The Cat Returns play as part of “Studio Ghibli Weekends.
- 4/29/2016
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Flicker Alley's posted a round of essays and interviews in conjunction with its release of its collection of American avant-garde works on DVD and Blu-ray. Discussed here are Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, Lawrence Jordan, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke and more. Also in today's roundup: Books on Werner Herzog, Groucho Marx, Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, David Hare and Christopher Isherwood; new Film-Philosophy essays on Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse, Busby Berkeley, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox and Samuel Beckett. And more. » - David Hudson...
- 12/24/2015
- Keyframe
Flicker Alley's posted a round of essays and interviews in conjunction with its release of its collection of American avant-garde works on DVD and Blu-ray. Discussed here are Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, Lawrence Jordan, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke and more. Also in today's roundup: Books on Werner Herzog, Groucho Marx, Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, David Hare and Christopher Isherwood; new Film-Philosophy essays on Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse, Busby Berkeley, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox and Samuel Beckett. And more. » - David Hudson...
- 12/24/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
Totally and tragically unconventional, Peggy Guggenheim moved through the cultural upheaval of the 20th century collecting not only not only art, but artists. Her sexual life was -- and still today is -- more discussed than the art itself which she collected, not for her own consumption but for the world to enjoy.
Her colorful personal history included such figures as Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and countless others. Guggenheim helped introduce the world to Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko and scores of others now recognized as key masters of modernism.
In 1921 she moved to Paris and mingled with Picasso, Dali, Joyce, Pound, Stein, Leger, Kandinsky. In 1938 she opened a gallery in London and began showing Cocteau, Tanguy, Magritte, Miro, Brancusi, etc., and then back to Paris and New York after the Nazi invasion, followed by the opening of her NYC gallery Art of This Century, which became one of the premiere avant-garde spaces in the U.S. While fighting through personal tragedy, she maintained her vision to build one of the most important collections of modern art, now enshrined in her Venetian palazzo where she moved in 1947. Since 1951, her collection has become one of the world’s most visited art spaces.
Featuring: Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Vasil Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Leger, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Jean Miro, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Kurt Schwitters, Gino Severini, Clyfford Still and Yves Tanguy.
Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Director and Producer)
Lisa Immordino Vreeland has been immersed in the world of fashion and art for the past 25 years. She started her career in fashion as the Director of Public Relations for Polo Ralph Lauren in Italy and quickly moved on to launch two fashion companies, Pratico, a sportswear line for women, and Mago, a cashmere knitwear collection of her own design. Her first book was accompanied by her directorial debut of the documentary of the same name, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012). The film about the editor of Harper's Bazaar had its European premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, going on to win the Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the fashion category for the Design of the Year awards, otherwise known as “The Oscars” of design—at the Design Museum in London.
"Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict" is Lisa Immordino Vreeland's followup to her acclaimed debut, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel". She is now working on her third doc on Cecil Beaton who Lisa says, "has been circling around all these stories. What's great about him is the creativity: fashion photography, war photography, "My Fair Lady" winning an Oscar."
Sydney Levine: I have read numerous accounts and interviews with you about this film and rather than repeat all that has been said, I refer my readers to Indiewire's Women and Hollywood interview at Tribeca this year, and your Indiewire interview with Aubrey Page, November 6, 2015 .
Let's try to cover new territory here.
First of all, what about you? What is your relationship to Diana Vreeland?
Liv: I am married to her grandson, Alexander Vreeland. (I'm also proud of my name Immordino) I never met Diana but hearing so many family stories about her made me start to wonder about all the talk about her. I worked in fashion and lived in New York like she did.
Sl: In one of your interviews you said that Peggy was not only ahead of her time but she helped to define it. Can you tell me how?
Liv: Peggy grew up in a very traditional family of German Bavarian Jews who had moved to New York City in the 19th century. Already at a young age Peggy felt like there were too many rules around her and she wanted to break out. That alone was something attractive to me — the notion that she knew that she didn't fit in to her family or her times. She lived on her own terms, a very modern approach to life. She decided to abandon her family in New York. Though she always stayed connected to them, she rarely visited New York. Instead she lived in a world without borders. She did not live by "the rules". She believed in creating art and created herself, living on her own terms and not on those of her family.
Sl: Is there a link between her and your previous doc on Diana Vreeland?
Liv: The link between Vreeland and Guggenheim is their mutual sense of reinvention and transformation. That made something click inside of me as I too reinvented myself when I began writing the book on Diana Vreeland .
Can you talk about the process of putting this one together and how it differed from its predecessor?
Liv: The most challenging thing about this one was the vast amount of material we had at our disposal. We had a lot of media to go through — instead of fashion spreads, which informed The Eye Has To Travel, we had art, which was fantastic. I was spoiled by the access we had to these incredible archives and footage. I'm still new to this, but it's the storytelling aspect that I loved in both projects. One thing about Peggy that Mrs. Vreeland didn't have was a very tragic personal life. There was so much that happened in Peggy's life before you even got to what she actually accomplished. And so we had to tell a very dense story about her childhood, her father dying on the Titanic, her beloved sister dying — the tragic events that fundamentally shaped her in a way. It was about making sure we had enough of the personal story to go along with her later accomplishments.
World War II alone was such a huge part of her story, opening an important art gallery in London, where she showed Kandinsky and other important artists for the first time. The amount of material to distill was a tremendous challenge and I hope we made the right choices.
Sl: How did you learn make a documentary?
Liv: I learned how to make a documentary by having a good team around me. My editors (and co-writers)Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng were very helpful.
Research is fundamental; finding as much as you can and never giving up. I love the research. It is my "precise time". Not just for interviews but of footage, photographs never seen before. It is a painstaking process that satisfies me. The research never ends. I was still researching while I was promoting the Diana Vreeland book. I love reading books and going to original sources.
The archives in film museums in the last ten years has changed and given museums a new role. I found unique footage at Moma with the Elizabeth Chapman Films. Chapman went to Paris in the 30s and 40s with a handheld camera and took moving pictures of Brancusi and Duchamps joking around in a studio, Gertrude Stein, Leger walking down the street. This footage is owned by Robert Storr, Dean of Yale School of Art. In fact he is taking a sabbatical this year to go through the boxes and boxes of Chapman's films. We also used " Entre'acte" by René Clair cowritten with Dadaist Francis Picabia, "Le Sang du poet" of Cocteau, Hans Richter "8x8","Gagascope" and " Dreams That Money Can Buy" produced by Peggy Guggenheim, written by Man Ray in 1947.
Sl: How long did it take to research and make the film?
Liv: It took three years for both the Vreeland and the Guggenheim documentary.
It was more difficult with the Guggenheim story because there was so much material and so much to tell of her life. And she was not so giving of her own self. Diana could inspire you about a bandaid; she was so giving. But Peggy didn't talk much about why she loved an artist or a painting. She acted more. And using historical material could become "over-teaching" though it was fascinating.
So much had to be eliminated. It was hard to eliminate the Degenerate Art Show, a subject which is newly discussed. Stephanie Barron of Lacma is an expert on Degenerate Art and was so generous.
Once we decided upon which aspects to focus on, then we could give focus to the interviews.
There were so many of her important shows we could not include. For instance there was a show on collages featuring William Baziotes , Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell which started a more modern collage trend in art. The 31 Women Art Show which we did include pushed forward another message which I think is important.
And so many different things have been written about Peggy — there were hundreds of articles written about her during her lifetime. She also kept beautiful scrapbooks of articles written about her, which are now in the archives of the Guggenheim Museum.
The Guggenheim foundation did not commission this documentary but they were very supportive and the film premiered there in New York in a wonderful celebration. They wanted to represent Peggy and her paintings properly. The paintings were secondary characters and all were carefully placed historically in a correct fashion.
Sl: You said in one interview Guggenheim became a central figure in the modern art movement?
Liv: Yes and she did it without ego. Sharing was always her purpose in collecting art. She was not out for herself. Before Peggy, the art world was very different. And today it is part of wealth management.
Other collectors had a different way with art. Isabelle Stewart Gardner bought art for her own personal consumption. The Gardner Museum came later. Gertrude Stein was sharing the vision of her brother when she began collecting art. The Coen sisters were not sharing.
Her benevolence ranged from giving Berenice Abbott the money to buy her first camera to keeping Pollock afloat during lean times.
Djuana Barnes, who had a 'Love Love Love Hate Hate Hate' relationship with Peggy wrote Nightwood in Peggy's country house in England.
She was in Paris to the last minute. She planned how to safeguard artwork from the Nazis during World War II. She was storing gasoline so she could escape. She lived on the Ile St. Louis with her art and moved the paintings out first to a children's boarding school and then to Marseilles where it was shipped out to New York City.
Her role in art was not taken seriously because of her very public love life which was described in very derogatory terms. There was more talk about her love life than about her collection of art.
Her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1960) , was scandalous when it came out — and she didn't even use real names, she used pseudonyms for her numerous partners. Only after publication did she reveal the names of the men she slept with.
The fact that she spoke about her sexual life at all was the most outrageous aspect. She was opening herself up to ridicule, but she didn't care. Peggy was her own person and she felt good in her own skin. But it was definitely unconventional behavior. I think her sexual appetites revealed a lot about finding her own identity.
A lot of it was tied to the loss of her father, I think, in addition to her wanting to feel accepted. She was also very adventurous — look at the men she slept with. I mean, come on, they are amazing! Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and she married Max Ernst. I think it was really ballsy of her to have been so open about her sexuality; this was not something people did back then. So many people are bound by conventional rules but Peggy said no. She grabbed hold of life and she lived it on her own terms.
Sl: You also give Peggy credit for changing the way art was exhibited. Can you explain that?
Liv: One of her greatest achievements was her gallery space in New York City, Art of This Century, which was unlike anything the art world has seen before or since in the way that it shattered the boundaries of the gallery space that we've come to know today — the sterile white cube. She came to be a genius at displaying her collections...
She was smart with Art of the Century because she hired Frederick Kiesler as a designer of the gallery and once again surrounded herself with the right people, including Howard Putzler, who was already involved with her at Guggenheim Jeune in London. And she was hanging out with all the exiled Surrealists who were living in New York at the time, including her future husband, Max Ernst, who was the real star of that group of artists. With the help of these people, she started showing art in a completely different way that was both informal and approachable. In conventional museums and galleries, art was untouchable on the wall and inside frames. In Peggy's gallery, art stuck out from the walls; works weren't confined to frames. Kiesler designed special chairs you could sit in and browse canvases as you would texts in a library. Nothing like this had ever existed in New York before — even today there is nothing like it.
She made the gallery into an exciting place where the whole concept of space was transformed. In Venice, the gallery space was also her home. Today, for a variety of reasons, the home aspect of the collection is less emphasized, though you still get a strong sense of Peggy's home life there. She was bringing art to the public in a bold new way, which I think is a great idea. It's art for everybody, which is very much a part of today's dialogue except that fewer people can afford the outlandish museum entry fees.
Sl: What do you think made her so prescient and attuned ?
Liv: She was smart enough to ask Marcel Duchamp to be her advisor — so she was in tune, and very well connected. She was on the cutting edge of what was going on and I think a lot of this had to do with Peggy being open to the idea of what was new and outrageous. You have to have a certain personality for this; what her childhood had dictated was totally opposite from what she became in life, and being in the right place at the right time helped her maintain a cutting edge throughout her life.
Sl: The movie is framed around a lost interview with Peggy conducted late in her life. How did you acquire these tapes?
Liv: We optioned Jacqueline Bogard Weld’s book, Peggy : The Wayward Guggenheim, the only authorized biography of Peggy, which was published after she died. Jackie had spent two summers interviewing Peggy but at a certain point lost the tapes somewhere in her Park Avenue apartment. Jackie had so much access to Peggy, which was incredible, but it was also the access that she had to other people who had known Peggy — she interviewed over 200 people for her book. Jackie was incredibly generous, letting me go through all her original research except for the lost tapes.
We'd walk into different rooms in her apartment and I'd suggestively open a closet door and ask “Where do you think those tapes might be?" Then one day I asked if she had a basement, and she did. So I went through all these boxes down there, organizing her affairs. Then bingo, the tapes showed up in this shoebox.
It was the longest interview Peggy had ever done and it became the framework for our movie. There's nothing more powerful than when you have someone's real voice telling the story, and Jackie was especially good at asking provoking questions. You can tell it was hard for Peggy to answer a lot of them, because she wasn't someone who was especially expressive; she didn't have a lot of emotion. And this comes across in the movie, in the tone of her voice.
Sl: Larry Gagosian has one of the best descriptions of Peggy in the movie — "she was her own creation." Would you agree, and if so why?
Liv: She was very much her own creation. When he said that in the interview I had a huge smile on my face. In Peggy's case it stemmed from a real need to identify and understand herself. I'm not sure she achieved it but she completely recreated herself — she knew that she did not want to be what she was brought up to be. She tried being a mother, but that was not one of her strengths, so art became that place where she could find herself, and then transform herself.
Nobody believed in the artists she cultivated and supported — they were outsiders and she was an outsider in the world she was brought up in. So it's in this way that she became her own great invention. I hope that her humor comes across in the film because she was extremely amusing — this aspect really comes across in her autobiography.
Sl: Finally, what do you think is Peggy Guggenheim's most lasting legacy, beyond her incredible art collection?
Liv: Her courage, and the way she used it to find herself. She had this ballsiness that not many people had, especially women. In her own way she was a feminist and it's good for women and young girls today to see women who stepped outside the confines of a very traditional family and made something of her life. Peggy's life did not seem that dreamy until she attached herself to these artists. It was her ability to redefine herself in the end that truly summed her up.
About the Filmmakers
Stanley Buchtal is a producer and entrepreneur. His movies credits include "Hairspray", "Spanking the Monkey", "Up at the Villa", "Lou Reed Berlin", "Love Marilyn", "LennoNYC", "Bobby Fischer Against the World", "Herb & Dorothy", "Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child", "Sketches of Frank Gehry", "Black White + Gray: a Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe", among numerous others.
David Koh is an independent producer, distributor, sales agent, programmer and curator. He has been involved in the distribution, sale, production, and financing of over 200 films. He is currently a partner in the boutique label Submarine Entertainment with Josh and Dan Braun and is also partners with Stanley Buchthal and his Dakota Group Ltd where he co-manages a portfolio of over 50 projects a year (75% docs and 25% fiction). Previously he was a partner and founder of Arthouse Films a boutique distribution imprint and ran Chris Blackwell's (founder of Island Records & Island Pictures) film label, Palm Pictures. He has worked as a Producer for artist Nam June Paik and worked in the curatorial departments of Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, Mfa Boston, and the Guggenheim Museum. David has recently served as a Curator for Microsoft and has curated an ongoing film series and salon with Andre Balazs Properties and serves as a Curator for the exclusive Core Club in NYC.
David recently launched with his partners Submarine Deluxe, a distribution imprint; Torpedo Pictures, a low budget high concept label; and Nfp Submarine Doks, a German distribution imprint with Nfp Films. Recently and upcoming projects include "Yayoi Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots", "Burden: a Portrait of Artist Chris Burden", "Dior and I", "20 Feet From Stardom", "Muscle Shoals", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Rats NYC", "Nas: Time Is Illmatic", "Blackfish", "Love Marilyn", "Chasing Ice", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Cutie and the Boxer"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Wolfpack, "Meru", and "Station to Station".
Dan Braun is a producer, writer, art director and musician/composer based in NYC. He is the Co-President of and Co-Founder of Submarine, a NYC film sales and production company specializing in independent feature and documentary films. Titles include "Blackfish", "Finding Vivian Maier", "Muscle Shoals", "The Case Against 8", "Keep On Keepin’ On", "Winter’s Bone", "Nas: Time is Illmatic", "Dior and I" and Oscar winning docs "Man on Wire", "Searching for Sugarman", "20 Ft From Stardom" and "Citizenfour". He was Executive Producer on documentaries "Kill Your Idols", (which won Best NY Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival 2004), "Blank City", "Sunshine Superman", the upcoming feature adaptations of "Batkid Begins" and "The Battered Bastards of Baseball" and the upcoming horror TV anthology "Creepy" to be directed by Chris Columbus.
He is a producer of the free jazz documentary "Fire Music", and the upcoming documentaries, "Burden" on artist Chris Burden and "Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots" on artist Yayoi Kusama. He is also a writer and consulting editor on Dark Horse Comic’s "Creepy" and "Eerie 9" comic book and archival series for which he won an Eisner Award for best archival comic book series in 2009.
He is a musician/composer whose compositions were featured in the films "I Melt With You" and "Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Radiant Child and is an award winning art director/creative director when he worked at Tbwa/Chiat/Day on the famous Absolut Vodka campaign.
John Northrup (Co-Producer) began his career in documentaries as a French translator for National Geographic: Explorer. He quickly moved into editing and producing, serving as the Associate Producer on "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012), and editing and co-producing "Wilson In Situ" (2014), which tells the story of theatre legend Robert Wilson and his Watermill Center. Most recently, he oversaw the post-production of Jim Chambers’ "Onward Christian Soldier", a documentary about Olympic Bomber Eric Rudolph, and is shooting on Susanne Rostock’s "Another Night in the Free World", the follow-up to her award-winning "Sing Your Song" (2011).
Submarine Entertainment (Production Company) Submarine Entertainment is a hybrid sales, production, and distribution company based in N.Y. Recent and upcoming titles include "Citizenfour", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Dog", "Visitors", "20 Feet from Stardom", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Muscle Shoals", "Blackfish", "Cutie and the Boxer", "The Summit", "The Unknown Known", "Love Marilyn", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Chasing Ice", "Downtown 81 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Wild Style 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Good Ol Freda", "Some Velvet Morning", among numerous others. Submarine principals also represent Creepy and Eerie comic book library and are developing properties across film & TV platforms.
Submarine has also recently launched a domestic distribution imprint and label called Submarine Deluxe; a genre label called Torpedo Pictures; and a German imprint and label called Nfp Submarine Doks.
Bernadine Colish has edited a number of award-winning documentaries. "Herb and Dorothy" (2008), won Audience Awards at Silverdocs, Philadelphia and Hamptons Film Festivals, and "Body of War" (2007), was named Best Documentary by the National Board of Review. "A Touch of Greatness" (2004) aired on PBS Independent Lens and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Her career began at Maysles Films, where she worked with Charlotte Zwerin on such projects as "Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser", "Toru Takemitsu: Music for the Movies" and the PBS American Masters documentary, "Ella Fitzgerald: Something To Live For". Additional credits include "Bringing Tibet Home", "Band of Sisters", "Rise and Dream", "The Tiger Next Door", "The Buffalo War" and "Absolute Wilson".
Jed Parker (Editor) Jed Parker began his career in feature films before moving into documentaries through his work with the award-winning American Masters series. Credits include "Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart", "Annie Liebovitz: Life Through a Lens", and most recently "Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides".
Other work includes two episodes of the PBS series "Make ‘Em Laugh", hosted by Billy Crystal, as well as a documentary on Met Curator Henry Geldzahler entitled "Who Gets to Call it Art"?
Credits
Director, Writer, Producer: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Produced by Stanley Buchthal, David Koh and Dan Braun Stanley Buchthal (producer)
Maja Hoffmann (executive producer)
Josh Braun (executive producer)
Bob Benton (executive producer)
John Northrup (co-producer)
Bernadine Colish (editor)
Jed Parker (editor)
Peter Trilling (director of photography)
Bonnie Greenberg (executive music producer)
Music by J. Ralph
Original Song "Once Again" Written and Performed By J. Ralph
Interviews Featuring Artist Marina Abramović Jean Arp Dore Ashton Samuel Beckett Stephanie Barron Constantin Brâncuși Diego Cortez Alexander Calder Susan Davidson Joseph Cornell Robert De Niro Salvador Dalí Simon de Pury Willem de Kooning Jeffrey Deitch Marcel Duchamp Polly Devlin Max Ernst Larry Gagosian Alberto Giacometti Arne Glimcher Vasily Kandinsky Michael Govan Fernand Léger Nicky Haslam Joan Miró Pepe Karmel Piet Mondrian Donald Kuspit Robert Motherwell Dominique Lévy Jackson Pollock Carlo McCormick Mark Rothko Hans Ulrich Obrist Yves Tanguy Lisa Phillips Lindsay Pollock Francine Prose John Richardson Sandy Rower Mercedes Ruehl Jane Rylands Philip Rylands Calvin Tomkins Karole Vail Jacqueline Bograd Weld Edmund White
Running time: 97 minutes
U.S. distribution by Submarine Deluxe
International sales by Hanway...
Her colorful personal history included such figures as Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and countless others. Guggenheim helped introduce the world to Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko and scores of others now recognized as key masters of modernism.
In 1921 she moved to Paris and mingled with Picasso, Dali, Joyce, Pound, Stein, Leger, Kandinsky. In 1938 she opened a gallery in London and began showing Cocteau, Tanguy, Magritte, Miro, Brancusi, etc., and then back to Paris and New York after the Nazi invasion, followed by the opening of her NYC gallery Art of This Century, which became one of the premiere avant-garde spaces in the U.S. While fighting through personal tragedy, she maintained her vision to build one of the most important collections of modern art, now enshrined in her Venetian palazzo where she moved in 1947. Since 1951, her collection has become one of the world’s most visited art spaces.
Featuring: Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Vasil Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Leger, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Jean Miro, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Kurt Schwitters, Gino Severini, Clyfford Still and Yves Tanguy.
Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Director and Producer)
Lisa Immordino Vreeland has been immersed in the world of fashion and art for the past 25 years. She started her career in fashion as the Director of Public Relations for Polo Ralph Lauren in Italy and quickly moved on to launch two fashion companies, Pratico, a sportswear line for women, and Mago, a cashmere knitwear collection of her own design. Her first book was accompanied by her directorial debut of the documentary of the same name, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012). The film about the editor of Harper's Bazaar had its European premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, going on to win the Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the fashion category for the Design of the Year awards, otherwise known as “The Oscars” of design—at the Design Museum in London.
"Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict" is Lisa Immordino Vreeland's followup to her acclaimed debut, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel". She is now working on her third doc on Cecil Beaton who Lisa says, "has been circling around all these stories. What's great about him is the creativity: fashion photography, war photography, "My Fair Lady" winning an Oscar."
Sydney Levine: I have read numerous accounts and interviews with you about this film and rather than repeat all that has been said, I refer my readers to Indiewire's Women and Hollywood interview at Tribeca this year, and your Indiewire interview with Aubrey Page, November 6, 2015 .
Let's try to cover new territory here.
First of all, what about you? What is your relationship to Diana Vreeland?
Liv: I am married to her grandson, Alexander Vreeland. (I'm also proud of my name Immordino) I never met Diana but hearing so many family stories about her made me start to wonder about all the talk about her. I worked in fashion and lived in New York like she did.
Sl: In one of your interviews you said that Peggy was not only ahead of her time but she helped to define it. Can you tell me how?
Liv: Peggy grew up in a very traditional family of German Bavarian Jews who had moved to New York City in the 19th century. Already at a young age Peggy felt like there were too many rules around her and she wanted to break out. That alone was something attractive to me — the notion that she knew that she didn't fit in to her family or her times. She lived on her own terms, a very modern approach to life. She decided to abandon her family in New York. Though she always stayed connected to them, she rarely visited New York. Instead she lived in a world without borders. She did not live by "the rules". She believed in creating art and created herself, living on her own terms and not on those of her family.
Sl: Is there a link between her and your previous doc on Diana Vreeland?
Liv: The link between Vreeland and Guggenheim is their mutual sense of reinvention and transformation. That made something click inside of me as I too reinvented myself when I began writing the book on Diana Vreeland .
Can you talk about the process of putting this one together and how it differed from its predecessor?
Liv: The most challenging thing about this one was the vast amount of material we had at our disposal. We had a lot of media to go through — instead of fashion spreads, which informed The Eye Has To Travel, we had art, which was fantastic. I was spoiled by the access we had to these incredible archives and footage. I'm still new to this, but it's the storytelling aspect that I loved in both projects. One thing about Peggy that Mrs. Vreeland didn't have was a very tragic personal life. There was so much that happened in Peggy's life before you even got to what she actually accomplished. And so we had to tell a very dense story about her childhood, her father dying on the Titanic, her beloved sister dying — the tragic events that fundamentally shaped her in a way. It was about making sure we had enough of the personal story to go along with her later accomplishments.
World War II alone was such a huge part of her story, opening an important art gallery in London, where she showed Kandinsky and other important artists for the first time. The amount of material to distill was a tremendous challenge and I hope we made the right choices.
Sl: How did you learn make a documentary?
Liv: I learned how to make a documentary by having a good team around me. My editors (and co-writers)Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng were very helpful.
Research is fundamental; finding as much as you can and never giving up. I love the research. It is my "precise time". Not just for interviews but of footage, photographs never seen before. It is a painstaking process that satisfies me. The research never ends. I was still researching while I was promoting the Diana Vreeland book. I love reading books and going to original sources.
The archives in film museums in the last ten years has changed and given museums a new role. I found unique footage at Moma with the Elizabeth Chapman Films. Chapman went to Paris in the 30s and 40s with a handheld camera and took moving pictures of Brancusi and Duchamps joking around in a studio, Gertrude Stein, Leger walking down the street. This footage is owned by Robert Storr, Dean of Yale School of Art. In fact he is taking a sabbatical this year to go through the boxes and boxes of Chapman's films. We also used " Entre'acte" by René Clair cowritten with Dadaist Francis Picabia, "Le Sang du poet" of Cocteau, Hans Richter "8x8","Gagascope" and " Dreams That Money Can Buy" produced by Peggy Guggenheim, written by Man Ray in 1947.
Sl: How long did it take to research and make the film?
Liv: It took three years for both the Vreeland and the Guggenheim documentary.
It was more difficult with the Guggenheim story because there was so much material and so much to tell of her life. And she was not so giving of her own self. Diana could inspire you about a bandaid; she was so giving. But Peggy didn't talk much about why she loved an artist or a painting. She acted more. And using historical material could become "over-teaching" though it was fascinating.
So much had to be eliminated. It was hard to eliminate the Degenerate Art Show, a subject which is newly discussed. Stephanie Barron of Lacma is an expert on Degenerate Art and was so generous.
Once we decided upon which aspects to focus on, then we could give focus to the interviews.
There were so many of her important shows we could not include. For instance there was a show on collages featuring William Baziotes , Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell which started a more modern collage trend in art. The 31 Women Art Show which we did include pushed forward another message which I think is important.
And so many different things have been written about Peggy — there were hundreds of articles written about her during her lifetime. She also kept beautiful scrapbooks of articles written about her, which are now in the archives of the Guggenheim Museum.
The Guggenheim foundation did not commission this documentary but they were very supportive and the film premiered there in New York in a wonderful celebration. They wanted to represent Peggy and her paintings properly. The paintings were secondary characters and all were carefully placed historically in a correct fashion.
Sl: You said in one interview Guggenheim became a central figure in the modern art movement?
Liv: Yes and she did it without ego. Sharing was always her purpose in collecting art. She was not out for herself. Before Peggy, the art world was very different. And today it is part of wealth management.
Other collectors had a different way with art. Isabelle Stewart Gardner bought art for her own personal consumption. The Gardner Museum came later. Gertrude Stein was sharing the vision of her brother when she began collecting art. The Coen sisters were not sharing.
Her benevolence ranged from giving Berenice Abbott the money to buy her first camera to keeping Pollock afloat during lean times.
Djuana Barnes, who had a 'Love Love Love Hate Hate Hate' relationship with Peggy wrote Nightwood in Peggy's country house in England.
She was in Paris to the last minute. She planned how to safeguard artwork from the Nazis during World War II. She was storing gasoline so she could escape. She lived on the Ile St. Louis with her art and moved the paintings out first to a children's boarding school and then to Marseilles where it was shipped out to New York City.
Her role in art was not taken seriously because of her very public love life which was described in very derogatory terms. There was more talk about her love life than about her collection of art.
Her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1960) , was scandalous when it came out — and she didn't even use real names, she used pseudonyms for her numerous partners. Only after publication did she reveal the names of the men she slept with.
The fact that she spoke about her sexual life at all was the most outrageous aspect. She was opening herself up to ridicule, but she didn't care. Peggy was her own person and she felt good in her own skin. But it was definitely unconventional behavior. I think her sexual appetites revealed a lot about finding her own identity.
A lot of it was tied to the loss of her father, I think, in addition to her wanting to feel accepted. She was also very adventurous — look at the men she slept with. I mean, come on, they are amazing! Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and she married Max Ernst. I think it was really ballsy of her to have been so open about her sexuality; this was not something people did back then. So many people are bound by conventional rules but Peggy said no. She grabbed hold of life and she lived it on her own terms.
Sl: You also give Peggy credit for changing the way art was exhibited. Can you explain that?
Liv: One of her greatest achievements was her gallery space in New York City, Art of This Century, which was unlike anything the art world has seen before or since in the way that it shattered the boundaries of the gallery space that we've come to know today — the sterile white cube. She came to be a genius at displaying her collections...
She was smart with Art of the Century because she hired Frederick Kiesler as a designer of the gallery and once again surrounded herself with the right people, including Howard Putzler, who was already involved with her at Guggenheim Jeune in London. And she was hanging out with all the exiled Surrealists who were living in New York at the time, including her future husband, Max Ernst, who was the real star of that group of artists. With the help of these people, she started showing art in a completely different way that was both informal and approachable. In conventional museums and galleries, art was untouchable on the wall and inside frames. In Peggy's gallery, art stuck out from the walls; works weren't confined to frames. Kiesler designed special chairs you could sit in and browse canvases as you would texts in a library. Nothing like this had ever existed in New York before — even today there is nothing like it.
She made the gallery into an exciting place where the whole concept of space was transformed. In Venice, the gallery space was also her home. Today, for a variety of reasons, the home aspect of the collection is less emphasized, though you still get a strong sense of Peggy's home life there. She was bringing art to the public in a bold new way, which I think is a great idea. It's art for everybody, which is very much a part of today's dialogue except that fewer people can afford the outlandish museum entry fees.
Sl: What do you think made her so prescient and attuned ?
Liv: She was smart enough to ask Marcel Duchamp to be her advisor — so she was in tune, and very well connected. She was on the cutting edge of what was going on and I think a lot of this had to do with Peggy being open to the idea of what was new and outrageous. You have to have a certain personality for this; what her childhood had dictated was totally opposite from what she became in life, and being in the right place at the right time helped her maintain a cutting edge throughout her life.
Sl: The movie is framed around a lost interview with Peggy conducted late in her life. How did you acquire these tapes?
Liv: We optioned Jacqueline Bogard Weld’s book, Peggy : The Wayward Guggenheim, the only authorized biography of Peggy, which was published after she died. Jackie had spent two summers interviewing Peggy but at a certain point lost the tapes somewhere in her Park Avenue apartment. Jackie had so much access to Peggy, which was incredible, but it was also the access that she had to other people who had known Peggy — she interviewed over 200 people for her book. Jackie was incredibly generous, letting me go through all her original research except for the lost tapes.
We'd walk into different rooms in her apartment and I'd suggestively open a closet door and ask “Where do you think those tapes might be?" Then one day I asked if she had a basement, and she did. So I went through all these boxes down there, organizing her affairs. Then bingo, the tapes showed up in this shoebox.
It was the longest interview Peggy had ever done and it became the framework for our movie. There's nothing more powerful than when you have someone's real voice telling the story, and Jackie was especially good at asking provoking questions. You can tell it was hard for Peggy to answer a lot of them, because she wasn't someone who was especially expressive; she didn't have a lot of emotion. And this comes across in the movie, in the tone of her voice.
Sl: Larry Gagosian has one of the best descriptions of Peggy in the movie — "she was her own creation." Would you agree, and if so why?
Liv: She was very much her own creation. When he said that in the interview I had a huge smile on my face. In Peggy's case it stemmed from a real need to identify and understand herself. I'm not sure she achieved it but she completely recreated herself — she knew that she did not want to be what she was brought up to be. She tried being a mother, but that was not one of her strengths, so art became that place where she could find herself, and then transform herself.
Nobody believed in the artists she cultivated and supported — they were outsiders and she was an outsider in the world she was brought up in. So it's in this way that she became her own great invention. I hope that her humor comes across in the film because she was extremely amusing — this aspect really comes across in her autobiography.
Sl: Finally, what do you think is Peggy Guggenheim's most lasting legacy, beyond her incredible art collection?
Liv: Her courage, and the way she used it to find herself. She had this ballsiness that not many people had, especially women. In her own way she was a feminist and it's good for women and young girls today to see women who stepped outside the confines of a very traditional family and made something of her life. Peggy's life did not seem that dreamy until she attached herself to these artists. It was her ability to redefine herself in the end that truly summed her up.
About the Filmmakers
Stanley Buchtal is a producer and entrepreneur. His movies credits include "Hairspray", "Spanking the Monkey", "Up at the Villa", "Lou Reed Berlin", "Love Marilyn", "LennoNYC", "Bobby Fischer Against the World", "Herb & Dorothy", "Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child", "Sketches of Frank Gehry", "Black White + Gray: a Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe", among numerous others.
David Koh is an independent producer, distributor, sales agent, programmer and curator. He has been involved in the distribution, sale, production, and financing of over 200 films. He is currently a partner in the boutique label Submarine Entertainment with Josh and Dan Braun and is also partners with Stanley Buchthal and his Dakota Group Ltd where he co-manages a portfolio of over 50 projects a year (75% docs and 25% fiction). Previously he was a partner and founder of Arthouse Films a boutique distribution imprint and ran Chris Blackwell's (founder of Island Records & Island Pictures) film label, Palm Pictures. He has worked as a Producer for artist Nam June Paik and worked in the curatorial departments of Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, Mfa Boston, and the Guggenheim Museum. David has recently served as a Curator for Microsoft and has curated an ongoing film series and salon with Andre Balazs Properties and serves as a Curator for the exclusive Core Club in NYC.
David recently launched with his partners Submarine Deluxe, a distribution imprint; Torpedo Pictures, a low budget high concept label; and Nfp Submarine Doks, a German distribution imprint with Nfp Films. Recently and upcoming projects include "Yayoi Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots", "Burden: a Portrait of Artist Chris Burden", "Dior and I", "20 Feet From Stardom", "Muscle Shoals", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Rats NYC", "Nas: Time Is Illmatic", "Blackfish", "Love Marilyn", "Chasing Ice", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Cutie and the Boxer"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Wolfpack, "Meru", and "Station to Station".
Dan Braun is a producer, writer, art director and musician/composer based in NYC. He is the Co-President of and Co-Founder of Submarine, a NYC film sales and production company specializing in independent feature and documentary films. Titles include "Blackfish", "Finding Vivian Maier", "Muscle Shoals", "The Case Against 8", "Keep On Keepin’ On", "Winter’s Bone", "Nas: Time is Illmatic", "Dior and I" and Oscar winning docs "Man on Wire", "Searching for Sugarman", "20 Ft From Stardom" and "Citizenfour". He was Executive Producer on documentaries "Kill Your Idols", (which won Best NY Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival 2004), "Blank City", "Sunshine Superman", the upcoming feature adaptations of "Batkid Begins" and "The Battered Bastards of Baseball" and the upcoming horror TV anthology "Creepy" to be directed by Chris Columbus.
He is a producer of the free jazz documentary "Fire Music", and the upcoming documentaries, "Burden" on artist Chris Burden and "Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots" on artist Yayoi Kusama. He is also a writer and consulting editor on Dark Horse Comic’s "Creepy" and "Eerie 9" comic book and archival series for which he won an Eisner Award for best archival comic book series in 2009.
He is a musician/composer whose compositions were featured in the films "I Melt With You" and "Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Radiant Child and is an award winning art director/creative director when he worked at Tbwa/Chiat/Day on the famous Absolut Vodka campaign.
John Northrup (Co-Producer) began his career in documentaries as a French translator for National Geographic: Explorer. He quickly moved into editing and producing, serving as the Associate Producer on "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012), and editing and co-producing "Wilson In Situ" (2014), which tells the story of theatre legend Robert Wilson and his Watermill Center. Most recently, he oversaw the post-production of Jim Chambers’ "Onward Christian Soldier", a documentary about Olympic Bomber Eric Rudolph, and is shooting on Susanne Rostock’s "Another Night in the Free World", the follow-up to her award-winning "Sing Your Song" (2011).
Submarine Entertainment (Production Company) Submarine Entertainment is a hybrid sales, production, and distribution company based in N.Y. Recent and upcoming titles include "Citizenfour", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Dog", "Visitors", "20 Feet from Stardom", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Muscle Shoals", "Blackfish", "Cutie and the Boxer", "The Summit", "The Unknown Known", "Love Marilyn", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Chasing Ice", "Downtown 81 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Wild Style 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Good Ol Freda", "Some Velvet Morning", among numerous others. Submarine principals also represent Creepy and Eerie comic book library and are developing properties across film & TV platforms.
Submarine has also recently launched a domestic distribution imprint and label called Submarine Deluxe; a genre label called Torpedo Pictures; and a German imprint and label called Nfp Submarine Doks.
Bernadine Colish has edited a number of award-winning documentaries. "Herb and Dorothy" (2008), won Audience Awards at Silverdocs, Philadelphia and Hamptons Film Festivals, and "Body of War" (2007), was named Best Documentary by the National Board of Review. "A Touch of Greatness" (2004) aired on PBS Independent Lens and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Her career began at Maysles Films, where she worked with Charlotte Zwerin on such projects as "Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser", "Toru Takemitsu: Music for the Movies" and the PBS American Masters documentary, "Ella Fitzgerald: Something To Live For". Additional credits include "Bringing Tibet Home", "Band of Sisters", "Rise and Dream", "The Tiger Next Door", "The Buffalo War" and "Absolute Wilson".
Jed Parker (Editor) Jed Parker began his career in feature films before moving into documentaries through his work with the award-winning American Masters series. Credits include "Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart", "Annie Liebovitz: Life Through a Lens", and most recently "Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides".
Other work includes two episodes of the PBS series "Make ‘Em Laugh", hosted by Billy Crystal, as well as a documentary on Met Curator Henry Geldzahler entitled "Who Gets to Call it Art"?
Credits
Director, Writer, Producer: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Produced by Stanley Buchthal, David Koh and Dan Braun Stanley Buchthal (producer)
Maja Hoffmann (executive producer)
Josh Braun (executive producer)
Bob Benton (executive producer)
John Northrup (co-producer)
Bernadine Colish (editor)
Jed Parker (editor)
Peter Trilling (director of photography)
Bonnie Greenberg (executive music producer)
Music by J. Ralph
Original Song "Once Again" Written and Performed By J. Ralph
Interviews Featuring Artist Marina Abramović Jean Arp Dore Ashton Samuel Beckett Stephanie Barron Constantin Brâncuși Diego Cortez Alexander Calder Susan Davidson Joseph Cornell Robert De Niro Salvador Dalí Simon de Pury Willem de Kooning Jeffrey Deitch Marcel Duchamp Polly Devlin Max Ernst Larry Gagosian Alberto Giacometti Arne Glimcher Vasily Kandinsky Michael Govan Fernand Léger Nicky Haslam Joan Miró Pepe Karmel Piet Mondrian Donald Kuspit Robert Motherwell Dominique Lévy Jackson Pollock Carlo McCormick Mark Rothko Hans Ulrich Obrist Yves Tanguy Lisa Phillips Lindsay Pollock Francine Prose John Richardson Sandy Rower Mercedes Ruehl Jane Rylands Philip Rylands Calvin Tomkins Karole Vail Jacqueline Bograd Weld Edmund White
Running time: 97 minutes
U.S. distribution by Submarine Deluxe
International sales by Hanway...
- 11/18/2015
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
"The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men. It was an expression of youth–that, and no more; with sweetness and foolishness, the lingering accent, the heavy stresses–the delicacy, too–belonging to that time."—"The Professor's House," Willa CatherHis last words, in a hospital four months later, are said to have been 'Mind your own business!' addressed to an enquirer after the state of his bowels. Friends got to the studio just before the wreckers' ball. Pictures, a profusion, piles of them, littered the floor: of 'a world that will never be seen except in pictures'"—"The Pound Era," Hugh Kenner***Heart Of FIREOften when I go to a movie, usually one made before 1960, I think about the opening scene of The Red Shoes, of Marius Goring and his...
- 10/2/2015
- by gina telaroli
- MUBI
Powerful imagination and credible spatiality are among the major absences in today’s cinema lamented by Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson. A compensatory corrective is provided, of course, by his own films, including multiple award-winning commercials and the films in “The Living Trilogy”: Songs From the Second Floor (2000), You the Living (2007), and, just opening in the Us, the marvelously wry A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). The movies are assemblages of broad tableaus of relatively short duration, filmed with a static camera. The segments are like an inspired mix of tromp l’oeil, flattened Joseph Cornell boxes, and Gregory […]...
- 6/2/2015
- by Howard Feinstein
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Powerful imagination and credible spatiality are among the major absences in today’s cinema lamented by Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson. A compensatory corrective is provided, of course, by his own films, including multiple award-winning commercials and the films in “The Living Trilogy”: Songs From the Second Floor (2000), You the Living (2007), and, just opening in the Us, the marvelously wry A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). The movies are assemblages of broad tableaus of relatively short duration, filmed with a static camera. The segments are like an inspired mix of tromp l’oeil, flattened Joseph Cornell boxes, and Gregory […]...
- 6/2/2015
- by Howard Feinstein
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
Plot isn't what matters to Wes Anderson – his movies care more about lush palettes and playfulness. Seitz's collection of essays and interviews with the director reveals a rare film-maker who isn't afraid to take risks
In Wes Anderson's 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, an insensitive father fails to appreciate his daughter's childhood attempt at writing and staging a play. There's no narrative, he complains, and as for characters, "What characters? It's a bunch of little kids dressed up in animal costumes." You might be tempted to dismiss Anderson's films in similar terms: the stories don't always add up to much, and while we know we're watching grownups (played by major Hollywood actors such as Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston and Ralph Fiennes), they often behave more like children dressed in their parents' clothes.
This quality of Anderson's cinema is captured in Max Dalton's paintings for a lavishly illustrated recent book,...
In Wes Anderson's 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, an insensitive father fails to appreciate his daughter's childhood attempt at writing and staging a play. There's no narrative, he complains, and as for characters, "What characters? It's a bunch of little kids dressed up in animal costumes." You might be tempted to dismiss Anderson's films in similar terms: the stories don't always add up to much, and while we know we're watching grownups (played by major Hollywood actors such as Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston and Ralph Fiennes), they often behave more like children dressed in their parents' clothes.
This quality of Anderson's cinema is captured in Max Dalton's paintings for a lavishly illustrated recent book,...
- 2/15/2014
- by Jonathan Romney
- The Guardian - Film News
Reservations will soon be made at theaters across the country for "The Grand Budapest Hotel." Wes Anderson's latest Joseph Cornell box displays a wholly imagined Europe of the past that still touches upon its real history. As we wrote in our review, the film takes "place in a world so perfectly contained it might as well be in a snowglobe," and today some more images have arrived to take you into Anderson's cinematic universe. IMDb has the latest snaps that go behind the scenes and in front of the camera. Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jude Law and Jeff Goldblum are featured, but of course, they are just a sliver of the extensive cast that appears in this one. Mostly, it's another tease for the movie, one that promises all the obsessive attention to detail you've come to expect from a Wes Anderson movie,...
- 2/14/2014
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi attended the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam CineMart with a film seeking financing: The Sky is Blue Like an Orange, about the artist Joseph Cornell. For three days he and screenwriter Arnold Barkus met with assorted financiers. Zahedi’s diary is below. December 10, 2013 I receive an email informing us that our project about the artist Joseph Cornell’s relationship with a waitress in the early ’60s, has been accepted to Cinemart. January 21, 2014 We receive our list of meeting requests. We have 37 meetings scheduled over a three-day period. The last time I was at Cinemart […]...
- 2/2/2014
- by Caveh Zahedi
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi attended the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam CineMart with a film seeking financing: The Sky is Blue Like an Orange, about the artist Joseph Cornell. For three days he and screenwriter Arnold Barkus met with assorted financiers. Zahedi’s diary is below. December 10, 2013 I receive an email informing us that our project about the artist Joseph Cornell’s relationship with a waitress in the early ’60s, has been accepted to Cinemart. January 21, 2014 We receive our list of meeting requests. We have 37 meetings scheduled over a three-day period. The last time I was at Cinemart […]...
- 2/2/2014
- by Caveh Zahedi
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
Anaheim, Calif. -- The items arrive by the thousands, borne on furniture dollies, in Radio Flyer wagons or nestled carefully in owners' arms. The hodge-podge parade consists of paintings, teapots, firearms, mannequins decked out in military uniforms and more. Much more.
Grade-schoolers have show-and-tell for their treasures. The adult counterpart is PBS' "Antiques Roadshow," which has become an institution as it approaches its 18th season and holds fast as public television's highest-rated series.
That's right: It's No. 1. Not glamorous, romantic "Downton Abbey," but homespun and earnest "Antiques Roadshow," where Civil War firearms, Tiffany lamps and autographed baseball cards are the stars. Even Kevin Bacon watches it, which he admits in an on-air PBS promo.
As the show hopscotches from U.S. city to city, each stop draws some 6,000 people and the one or two possessions they believe are – or, wishful thinking, might be – worth a few minutes of TV airtime and a lot of money.
Grade-schoolers have show-and-tell for their treasures. The adult counterpart is PBS' "Antiques Roadshow," which has become an institution as it approaches its 18th season and holds fast as public television's highest-rated series.
That's right: It's No. 1. Not glamorous, romantic "Downton Abbey," but homespun and earnest "Antiques Roadshow," where Civil War firearms, Tiffany lamps and autographed baseball cards are the stars. Even Kevin Bacon watches it, which he admits in an on-air PBS promo.
As the show hopscotches from U.S. city to city, each stop draws some 6,000 people and the one or two possessions they believe are – or, wishful thinking, might be – worth a few minutes of TV airtime and a lot of money.
- 7/2/2013
- by AP
- Huffington Post
May 9, 2012 My friend Arnold Barkus and I decide to collaborate on a script about the true-life relationship between outsider artist Joseph Cornell, a 59 year-old virgin who still lived at home with his mother and crippled younger brother, and Joyce Hunter, a 19 year-old waitress and teen runaway. January 17, 2013 Arnold and I submit a draft of our script, titled The Story of Joseph Cornell and Joyce Hunter, to the Hamptons Screenplay Lab. March 18, 2013 I receive a voicemail from David Nugent, the artistic director of the Hamptons International Film Festival. He informs me that our …...
- 6/10/2013
- by Caveh Zahedi
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
News.
Above: Filmmaker Andrei Ujică in conversation with Dennis Lim.
Dennis Lim is the new year-round Cinematheque programmer for the Film Society at Lincoln Center. Not too long ago we reported Robert Koehler had taken the position, but due to family health issues, he has stepped down. We congratulate Dennis Lim and our thoughts are with Robert Koehler. He may not be a household name, but he meant a lot to those who knew him: Ric Menello passed away at the age of 60 last week. Menello is known for co-writing Two Lovers and Lowlife with James Gray, and for directing this. Take a look at the Ditmas Park Corner blog's remembrance of Menello.
Editor of The Chiseler and Notebook contributor Daniel Riccuito has a new book coming out, and it's a humdinger: The Depression Alphabet Primer, with illustrations by Tony Millionaire. You can find a sample of the delights...
Above: Filmmaker Andrei Ujică in conversation with Dennis Lim.
Dennis Lim is the new year-round Cinematheque programmer for the Film Society at Lincoln Center. Not too long ago we reported Robert Koehler had taken the position, but due to family health issues, he has stepped down. We congratulate Dennis Lim and our thoughts are with Robert Koehler. He may not be a household name, but he meant a lot to those who knew him: Ric Menello passed away at the age of 60 last week. Menello is known for co-writing Two Lovers and Lowlife with James Gray, and for directing this. Take a look at the Ditmas Park Corner blog's remembrance of Menello.
Editor of The Chiseler and Notebook contributor Daniel Riccuito has a new book coming out, and it's a humdinger: The Depression Alphabet Primer, with illustrations by Tony Millionaire. You can find a sample of the delights...
- 3/6/2013
- by Adam Cook
- MUBI
My usual explanation in this space: I am especially interested in piano and choral music, plus symphonies, so that’s what I get the most promos of. Other stuff obviously gets through my filters, but the percentages of what comes in inevitably affect what comes out, i.e. this list. That said, in terms of number of centuries spanned, rather than genres or formats or whatever, I think I'm covering as much or more musical territory than most critics. By the way, look for a shorter list of my favorite classical reissues of 2012, to follow in a day or two.
1. Tokyo String Quartet, Jon Manasse, Jon Nakamatsu Brahms: Piano Quintet, Clarinet Quintet (Harmonia Mundi) There were recordings this year that were more important in terms of bringing new repertoire to light, or featuring young artists, or bringing classical into the 21st century, or being more controversially newsworthy. Examples of all of those follow.
1. Tokyo String Quartet, Jon Manasse, Jon Nakamatsu Brahms: Piano Quintet, Clarinet Quintet (Harmonia Mundi) There were recordings this year that were more important in terms of bringing new repertoire to light, or featuring young artists, or bringing classical into the 21st century, or being more controversially newsworthy. Examples of all of those follow.
- 1/2/2013
- by SteveHoltje
- www.culturecatch.com
Larry Jordan, occasionally known in more formal circles as Lawrence Jordan, has been making experimental and animation films for half a century now. He grew up in Denver, won a scholarship to Harvard, then dropped out to start a theater back in Colorado with his high school friend, Stan Brakhage. "Stan was always the director," Jordan wrote in a remembrance in the Millennium Film Journal in 2003. "He seemed to have far-reaching radar for locating people and works in the art world. Five of our gang came out to San Francisco in about 1954. (Stan came first — always the avant-garde.) When I arrived, he was living in the basement of poet Robert Duncan and painter Jess Collins. We had one old car, a flatbed trailer for our gear, and about five films between us. So naturally we started out to tour California, showing our wares."
They eventually wound up in New York,...
They eventually wound up in New York,...
- 3/27/2012
- MUBI
The 8th annual Brakhage Center Symposium has been programmed by curator Kathy Geritz and will examine the concept of experimental narrative over three days of screenings and lectures on March 16-18 at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Geritz has pulled together a program in which experimental films explore notions of narrative through diverse means, whether combining with documentary or animated elements, or through nonlinear structure, or through the direct experience of time. As Geritz hopes: “In these different ways, the films presented will challenge and expand our expectations as they push the boundaries of storytelling conventions.”
Some of the filmmakers who will be present at the symposium are animators Stacey Steers and Chris Sullivan, experimental documentary filmmaker Amie Siegel and Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who will be screening his 1987 acclaimed feature film Syndromes and a Century and the more recent short film Emerald (2007).
Also, film critic and historian J.
Geritz has pulled together a program in which experimental films explore notions of narrative through diverse means, whether combining with documentary or animated elements, or through nonlinear structure, or through the direct experience of time. As Geritz hopes: “In these different ways, the films presented will challenge and expand our expectations as they push the boundaries of storytelling conventions.”
Some of the filmmakers who will be present at the symposium are animators Stacey Steers and Chris Sullivan, experimental documentary filmmaker Amie Siegel and Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who will be screening his 1987 acclaimed feature film Syndromes and a Century and the more recent short film Emerald (2007).
Also, film critic and historian J.
- 3/12/2012
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
New York. In Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good), a show at the Public Theater through Sunday, the German/British collective Gob Squad reconstructs a batch of films by Andy Warhol, in particular, of course, Kitchen (1965). Amy Taubin files a terrific report at Artforum, recalling an early-ish assessment of the film by Norman Mailer and noting "the Warhol/Godard connection." At the outset of the performance, the audience is taken on a tour of the set and told "that the black-and-white video projections which comprise almost the entire performance (and which resemble the texture and tonalities of Warhol's black-and-white 16mm films) are a simulcast of the performance taking place in the colorful, three-dimensional space behind the screens — and not a prerecorded video. The strategy works. Paradoxically, the video, which is larger than life but also ghostly, is more convincing than seeing flesh-and-blood performers moving around a...
- 2/2/2012
- MUBI
Laura Linney's father has just died of cancer and now she's starring as terminally ill Cathy in TV comedy The Big C. She talks about how the show has touched her, and the viewers
While growing up, Laura Linney spent many happy hours putting together Joseph Cornell boxes – collections of objects that represented an idea, a fantasy, or a person. "I had learning disabilities, and I couldn't express myself in the written word," she says, "so when teachers asked for a book report, I would try to fudge my way through. For Tom Sawyer, I made a whole creation based on what would have been in Tom Sawyer's pocket, and then I did another one for the story of Anastasia. It was the groovy 60s, so they let me get away with it."
I ask what a Cornell box representing Cathy Jamison, Linney's character in the new comedy series The Big C,...
While growing up, Laura Linney spent many happy hours putting together Joseph Cornell boxes – collections of objects that represented an idea, a fantasy, or a person. "I had learning disabilities, and I couldn't express myself in the written word," she says, "so when teachers asked for a book report, I would try to fudge my way through. For Tom Sawyer, I made a whole creation based on what would have been in Tom Sawyer's pocket, and then I did another one for the story of Anastasia. It was the groovy 60s, so they let me get away with it."
I ask what a Cornell box representing Cathy Jamison, Linney's character in the new comedy series The Big C,...
- 2/8/2011
- by Kira Cochrane
- The Guardian - Film News
Five-star opulence in the works for London's preternaturally spoiled insects
Next week, five new hotels will be completed in London. They will be the picture of exclusivity, with custom rooms, balconies, and spectacular views of greenery at every turn. They will cater to the city's most loyal tourists, by which we mean, of course, the insects.
Yes, the insects of London are just days away from fetching up in five-star opulence. To this we owe Beyond the Hive, a competition that asks architects to design high-class critter habitats, as part of London's celebrations for the International Year of Biodiversity. Five teams were short-listed recently and started construction on their assorted digs, from a "Beevarian" chalet to an "Inn Vertebrate." (Ah, Brits. They're just crawling with puns.)
Here's a rendering of the Inn Vertebrate, designed by Metalanguage Design. The inn's described as a "boutique bug hotel" in the "fashionable area of Old Street" (in a cemetery,...
Next week, five new hotels will be completed in London. They will be the picture of exclusivity, with custom rooms, balconies, and spectacular views of greenery at every turn. They will cater to the city's most loyal tourists, by which we mean, of course, the insects.
Yes, the insects of London are just days away from fetching up in five-star opulence. To this we owe Beyond the Hive, a competition that asks architects to design high-class critter habitats, as part of London's celebrations for the International Year of Biodiversity. Five teams were short-listed recently and started construction on their assorted digs, from a "Beevarian" chalet to an "Inn Vertebrate." (Ah, Brits. They're just crawling with puns.)
Here's a rendering of the Inn Vertebrate, designed by Metalanguage Design. The inn's described as a "boutique bug hotel" in the "fashionable area of Old Street" (in a cemetery,...
- 6/11/2010
- by Suzanne LaBarre
- Fast Company
Tim Burton invades New York, New Italian Cinema hits Los Angeles, Harold and Kumar spread holiday cheer in Austin and everywhere you look, they're celebrating All Tomorrow's Parties -- just some of the holiday film fun you can have this winter at your local repertory theater.
More Holiday Preview: [Theatrical Calendar]
[Repertory Calendar] [Anywhere But a Movie Theater]
New York
92YTribeca
In November, the 92YTribeca Screening Room will have some special guests in the house when it hosts the already sold out "A Conversation with Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman" on November 10th, with the two longtime collaborators discussing their latest film "Fantastic Mr. Fox." But tickets are still available for the night before (Nov. 9th), when actor Ben Foster and director Oren Moverman will screen their acclaimed new post-war drama "The Messenger". Much of the rest of the month is devoted to Cinema Tropical's Ten Years of New Argentine Cinema series with screenings of Adrián Caetano's immigration...
More Holiday Preview: [Theatrical Calendar]
[Repertory Calendar] [Anywhere But a Movie Theater]
New York
92YTribeca
In November, the 92YTribeca Screening Room will have some special guests in the house when it hosts the already sold out "A Conversation with Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman" on November 10th, with the two longtime collaborators discussing their latest film "Fantastic Mr. Fox." But tickets are still available for the night before (Nov. 9th), when actor Ben Foster and director Oren Moverman will screen their acclaimed new post-war drama "The Messenger". Much of the rest of the month is devoted to Cinema Tropical's Ten Years of New Argentine Cinema series with screenings of Adrián Caetano's immigration...
- 11/3/2009
- by Stephen Saito
- ifc.com
When Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider said in May that DreamWorks planned to make a biopic on Martin Luther King Jr., it took less than 24 hours for the project to hit a speed bump.
Two of King's children disputed a third's authority to speak for the estate, and soon enough King's own words came to mind: "All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem."
Granted, putting someone's life story on film hardly compares to the struggle for civil rights. But the biographical movie is a uniquely frustrating beast. Discovering a fascinating life story is the easy part, but acquiring the appropriate life/film/art/music rights, appeasing relatives' and audiences' expectations, persuading financiers to ante up and actually making money on the project can be as arduous a task as universal equality.
This is why, despite their undeniable magnetism at awards time,...
Two of King's children disputed a third's authority to speak for the estate, and soon enough King's own words came to mind: "All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem."
Granted, putting someone's life story on film hardly compares to the struggle for civil rights. But the biographical movie is a uniquely frustrating beast. Discovering a fascinating life story is the easy part, but acquiring the appropriate life/film/art/music rights, appeasing relatives' and audiences' expectations, persuading financiers to ante up and actually making money on the project can be as arduous a task as universal equality.
This is why, despite their undeniable magnetism at awards time,...
- 10/1/2009
- by By Jay A. Fernandez
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.