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The New York Choral Society chorus member Craig Schoenbaum with music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman on Richard Einhorn’s oratorio Voices of Light and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc: “It’s intense.”

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film La Passion De Jeanne d'Arc, shot by Rudolph Maté and starring Renée Falconetti with Eugène Silvai, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, Antonin Artaud, Michel Simon, Jean d’Yd, and Louis Ravet is a cinematic masterpiece, based on transcripts of Joan of Arc’s actual trial. With a fascinating history of lost prints and numerous edits, the film still speaks to us about faith, calling, and the divine, as they clash with deception, corruption, and power.

Craig Schoenbaum with Ed Bahlman and Anne-Katrin Titze on Music Director and Conductor David Hayes: “You want to be prepared, you want to go there prepared when you're doing it with this guy.

Principal photography of Mexican writer-director Iria Gómez Concheiro’s dystopian thriller “Here be Dragons” is underway in Mexico, with Gómez Concheiro’s Ciudad Cinema producing alongside “La Jaula de Oro” producer Machete Prods., led by Edher Campos.

“When the project was broached to me last year by Iria and her producing partner Rodrigo Rios Legaspi, I was immediately drawn to it as I was keen to make a science fiction film, especially because it deals with themes that interest me, trouble me and that are very relevant today: the control over a society, the fragility of youth, its struggle in a failing system, global warming, the scarcity of resources and the power those resources hold within a government,” said Campos.

“And that control makes you believe you should be afraid. That indeed, here be dragons,” he added wryly.

Starring Chile’s Alfredo Castro (“El Conde”), Hernán Mendoza (“The Box”) and...

Mark Margolis, a veteran actor with hundreds of credits dating back to the 1970s but perhaps best known for his Emmy-nominated portrayal of cartel don Hector “Tio” Salamanca on TV’s Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City following a short illness. He was 83.

His death was announced by son Morgan Margolis, the CEO of Knitting Factory Entertainment. Morgan Margolis said he and Mark’s wife Jacqueline were at his bedside at the time of death.

“He was one of a kind,” said manager Robert Kolker of Red Letter Entertainment. “We won’t see his likes again. He was a treasured client and a lifelong friend. I was lucky to know him.”

Born on November 26, 1939 in Philadelphia, Margolis briefly attended Temple University before moving to New York City to study acting, first under Stella Adler at the Actors Studio and subsequently...

We’re sad to report that beloved actor Mark Margolis died at 83 on Thursday. He is known for his show-stopping roles in movies like Scarface and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, Requiem For A Dream, and The Fountain. On the television side of the industry, Margolis’ credits are incredibly impressive, covering an expansive spectrum of memorable roles and one-off characters. A valuable film, television, and stage player, he’s best known for his break-out role of Alberto “The Shadow” in Scarface and recently as the character Hector “Tio” Salamanca in the TV series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

Margolis passed away August 3, 2023, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in his beloved and longtime home of New York City, with his wife Jacqueline and Morgan at his bedside, following a short illness.

“He was one of a kind. We won’t see his likes again. He was a treasured client and a lifelong friend.

Following on “Huesera,” a double Tribeca winner, Mexico’s Machete, headed by Edher Campos, is returning to female filmmaker social issue genre with “Cachorra,” a darkly humoured horror thriller set on the Mexico-u.S. desert border.

The feature debut of Madrid-based genre scribe and consultant Elisa Puerto Aubel, who penned Sitges Audience Award winner. “La venganza de Jairo,” “Cachorra” is one of the newest additions to a five movie 2002-23 slate at Machete, producer of Cannes Festival winners “Leap Year” and “La Jaula de Oro.” It forms part of a robust lineup at this week’s Sanfic-Mórbido Lab, which packs many of Sanfic Industria’s most commercial propositions,

All of Machete’s films, three now in post-production, carry social point. A trio – “Huesera,” “Pups” and “The Path of Silence” – show Machete driving into genre and LGBTQ themes, fast emerging as the cutting edge focuses for many of the most exciting of Latin America movies.

In Episode 7 of “Euphoria” Season 2, titled “The Theater and its Double” (a canny nod to Antonin Artaud’s theory concerning the relationship between performers and their audience), viewers were finally treated to Lexi’s (Maude Apatow) autobiographical magnum opus. “Our Life,” a stage production seemingly produced with the budget of a Tony-winning musical, was a fanciful retelling of her adolescence, including characters based on her sister, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), and best friend, Rue (Zendaya). But like any great theatrical impresario, she saved the best for last.

Lexi treated her high school crowd to a full-blown musical number set in an all-male gym, in which Ethan (Austin Abrams) — embodying a full-bro version of East Highland’s resident tortured jock, Nate (Jacob Elordi) — performs a full-out sexual rock ballet to Bonnie Tyler’s iconic “Holding Out for a Hero.” The production came complete with a hunky male ensemble, lots of well-placed squirting water bottles,...

Spoiler Alert: Do not read if you have not seen the first seven episodes of “Euphoria” Season 2.

Chloe Cherry’s favorite memes about “Euphoria” are the ones about “Euphoria High School,” which parodies the way that her fellow castmates in Season 2 have decided to dress for class— if they even go to class, that is.

“I love the one about the bugs that go to ‘Euphoria High School.’ It is this pink, sparkly toy cartoon bug. I swear I rolled laughing when I saw that on my feed,” Cherry said.

The choice uniform of the drama-fueled “Euphoria” student body is bedazzled, is cropped, is mini and, in almost every instance, would never be allowed in any public or private school, but that out-of-touch aesthetic was one of the many decisions showrunner, creator, writer and executive producer Sam Levinson made that has made the show a bonafide sensation. Another choice that Levinson made that was smart?...

Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s feature debut traces the story of a troubled young woman on the outside of outsider art

Before it dissolves out into a watery sort of nothingness, this feature debut from Norwegian director Itonje Søimer Guttormsen is an intriguing and subversive docu-type drama about the nature of creativity and how modern-day equivalents of the avant gardist Antonin Artaud might expect to be treated. Birgitte Larsen plays Gry-Jeanette Dahl, who goes by the name “Gritt”. She is a troubled, intense young woman, trying to break into experimental theatre and radical performance artforms, and basically in the unhappy position of being on the outside of outsider art.

As the film begins, Gritt has managed to fluke her way to New York, part of a grant-funded Norwegian theatre company; she is employed as the emotional support person for Marte (Marte Wexelsen Goksøyr), a writer-performer with Down’s. Gritt affects a...

Itonje Søimer Guttormsen's Gritt is showing exclusively on Mubi in many countries starting December 22, 2021 in the series Debuts.The making of Gritt, or how to put stones in your shoes to prevent you from getting where you think you should be going, and instead bump into all that other stuff you can put into the pot, to brew some new reality.In 2009 I ran into Birgitte Larsen (a.k.a. Gritt) sitting on a blanket in a park in Oslo. She had acted in a film school exercise I did two years earlier, but although I was struck by her intense and unusual presence even then, we hadn’t stayed in touch. Nevertheless, we immediately felt that this was a crucial encounter. I was in a crisis with the film medium in terms of format and production method and was aching to experiment. Also, I had recently encountered the...

New films from Oscar laureate Vanessa Ragone (“The Secret in Their Eyes”) and Camera d’Or winners Edher Campos (“Leap Year”) and Juan Pablo Miller (“Las Acacias”) are among attractions at this year’s Ventana Sur’s Primer Corte and Copia Final, the pix-in-post industry centerpieces at Latin America’s biggest film-tv market.

Ragone co-produces “The Face of the Jellyfish,” from Argentina’s Rotterdam-prized Melisa Liebenthal. Campos unveils “Journey to the Land of the Tarahumara,” Mexican Federico Cecchetti’s follow-up to the multi-prized “Mara’akame’s Dream.”

Miller introduces “Sublime,” one of the section’s buzz titles, along with “Diogenes,” from Peru’s Leonardo Barbuy, and two titles from Brazil: Gregorio Graziosi’s “Tinnitus” and Gabriel Martin’s “Mars One,” winner of Ventana Sur’s prestigious Paradiso Wip Award.

Titles brim with talent, observes Eva Morsch-Kihn, curator of Primer Corte and Copia Final along with Mercedes Abarca and Maria Nuñez.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams on the set of Meek's Cutoff (2010). Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams will be working on a fourth project together, entitled Showing Up. The film, which goes into production this summer, follows an artist ahead of a career-changing exhibition. The Berlin Film Festival is unveiling its plans for this year's festival, beginning with its selection of six titles to premiere at the Berlinale Series that follow this year's theme: Toxic Antiheroes, Utopias of Freedom. Italian director, screenwriter, and producer Alberto Lattatuda will be the subject of the Locarno Film Festival's annual retrospective, to be held August 4-14. Following his biopic of Siegfried Sassoon, Terence Davies is set to direct an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s post-wwi-set novel The Post Office Girl. Recommended VIEWINGThe official trailer for Beginning, the striking...

The series The Psychomagic Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky is now showing on Mubi.Fando y LisI can’t easily think of another filmmaker as uncompromisingly personal as Alejandro Jodorowsky. He and his cinema evoke either a magnetism for their idiosyncrasies, or a complete dismissal for their shock-value as distasteful nonsense. There is no in-between. His concoction of mysticism and erratic, physically aggressive cinema is part of a deeply personal and spiritual journey through art, one which he adapted into his own therapeutic practice known as “Psychomagic.” Over time I have come to understand Jodorowsky’s difficult and fascinating career as a cinematic odyssey composed of two halves—first an exploration of the external for a mystical and elusive “truth” and then an internal excavation and confrontation with trauma, reality, and the subconscious.Heavily influenced by surrealists like Dalí and Buñuel, as well as avant-garde boundary pushers like Antonin Artaud, Jodorowsky...

Alejandro Jodorowsky sees filmmaking as an art, not a business. He expands on this in the very title of his latest film: Psychomagic, A Healing Art. The film is a personal documentation of Jodorowsky’s theory of trauma therapy, called Psychomagic, in action. We can trust Jodorowsky when he calls action, though beware when he calls cut as his wife, artist Pascale Montandon, who has been his cinematographer on all his films, may keep the cameras rolling. Performance art is an effective placebo to confront psychic suffering and film does it in real time, breaking the wall between reality and performance. Those are real tears on the screen.

A son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, the “father of the midnight movie” was born in 1929 in Chile. His father was a staunch Stalinist who ran a dry-goods store called Casa Ukrania. His mother made him wear his hair long as part of a...

Pau Brunet and Jana Díaz Juhl at L.A.-based Amplitud have boarded Federico Cecchetti’s sophomore feature “Journey to the Land of the Tarahumara,” produced by Edher Campos at Mexico’s Machete Producciones in co-production with Yanick Letourneau’s Quebec-based Périphéria (Juan Andrés Arango García’s “V-500”) and Thierry Lenouvel’s Paris-based Cine-Sud (Rubén Mendoza’s “Wandering Girl”). Mexico’s Eficine production fund is also backing the project.

As producers, Brunet and Díaz have previously backed productions such as Mexico’s Oscar submission “The Chambermaid” (Lila Avilés), a large critical and commercial success, and SXSW Special Jury winner “10,000 Km” (Carlos Marques-Marcet). Their new company, Amplitud, primarily focuses on first or second works from promising Latin American directors.

Machete produced Carlos Carrera’s “Tales of Mexico” (‘La Habitación’), and Cannes’ Un Certain Regard winner “La Jaula de Oro” from Diego Quemada-Diaz.

According to Campos, the feature is a “tribute...

On May 31st, Patti Smith will appear on Peyote Dance, an album with the experimental musicians of the Soundwalk Collective. The New York-based group are known for making new art out of “found sounds” – everything from antenna effects to old classical recordings. The new album will include “Ivry,” a new song with lyrics written by Smith that pay tribute to the French poet Antonin Artaud, who died in 1948.

The Soundwalk Collective wrote it with instruments that included Mexican Tarahumara guitars from the valley where Artaud wrote 1947’s The Peyote Dance,...

Guadalajara, Mexico — New Mexican production shingle Zafiro Cinema, launched by Machete Prods. founder Edher Campos and Bolivian producer Gabriela Maire late last year, is gearing up to make its first film, “Perros” (“Dogs”), written and to be directed by Chilean director Vinko Tomičić.

Chilean thesp Alfredo Castro, who broke out internationally in Pablo Larraín’s films and then Lorenzo Vigas’ Venice Golden Lion winner “From Afar” (“Desde Alla”), will play opposite a yet-to-be discovered non-pro from La Paz, Bolivia.

This will be Tomičić’s sophomore feature. His debut film “Cockroach” (“Fumigador”), co-directed with Francisco Hevia, won the best film at the 2016 Santiago International Film Festival (Sanfic) among others.

Tomičić is currently polishing his script at the Cannes Festival’s Cinefondation Residence program in Paris, one of two Chilean filmmakers selected for its 38th session.

Set to begin shooting later this year in La Paz on an estimated $450,000 budget, “Perros” turns...

F.J. Ossang's 9 Fingers (2017) is exclusively showing November 9 – December 8, 2018 as a Special Discovery. The retrospective F.J. Ossang: Cinema Is Punk is showing November 2018 - January 2019 on Mubi in most countries around the world.Dharma GunsThe films of F.J. Ossang are richly paradoxical objects. One of the things that struck me most forcefully on my initial encounter with his work was the odd and compelling discrepancy between a bursting-at-the-seams fullness on one level, and an almost minimalistic void on another level. The friction of these two levels—the full and the empty—is simultaneous and constant, from the first moments of Ossang’s first feature film to the termination of his latest, 9 Fingers (2017). The evidence of this unusual style is directly there, poured into your eyes and ears. The characters—themselves palpably “there” as physical presences, yet militantly lacking any conventional psychology—never stop talking about the...

Los Cabos, Mexico — Ringing its options as one of Canada’s most internationally-minded companies, Yanick Letourneau’s Quebec-based Périphéria has boarded “Viaje al País de los Tarahumaras” and English-language “In Cold Light.”

Directed by Federico Cecchetti, “Viaje,” which won the best pitch Talent On The Road Award at Los Cabos Film Festival on Saturday, is set up at Edher Campos’ Mexico-City based Machete Producciones, and co-produced by Périphéria and Thierry Lenouvel’s Paris-based Ciné-Sud Promotion.

Mike MacMillan’s Toronto-based Lithium Studios is producing “In Cold Light” with Périphéria and “I Am Not a Witch’s” Emily Morgan, at London-based Quiggety Productions.

“Viaje” is Périphéria’s second co-production with Machete, after “V-500,”a three-part take on migration and transformation in Canada, Mexico and Colombia which Périphéria majority-produced, with Machete as its Mexican partner.

For Périphéria, and indeed Giroux, “In Cold Light” marks a move toward the mainstream in a broader audience movie.

Los Cabos, Mexico — Adding to its burgeoning best picture trophies, “Genesis,” the consecration of Quebec’s Philippe Lesage, won Los Cabos Competition Award Saturday night.

“Genesis” scored at a busy Los Cabos Intl. Film Festival, given star gravitas by Spike Lee, Adam Driver and Terry Gilliam and whose hard-driving industry news flow, especially from the robust young Mexican industry belied Los Cabos initial positioning as a post-afm chill out.

Following on Lesage’s debut, “The Demons,” “Genesis” marks “Another rewardingly complex reflection on the emotional trials of youth,” Variety announced in its Locarno review. Superbly acted by Théodore Pellerin and Noe Abita, the chronicle of an ebullient brother and sister’s suffering from machista disdain and aggression was always a frontrunner at Los Cabos.

Otherwise, the other big competition winner – and doing its foreign-language Oscar nomination credentials no harm at all – was Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s Colombian thriller...

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Blu ray

Criterion

1928 / 1:33 / 81 Min. / Street Date March 20, 2018

Starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti, Eugene Silvain

Cinematography by Rudolph Maté

Written by Joseph Delteil, Carl Dreyer

Music by Richard Einhorn, Will Gregory, Adrian Utley

Edited by Carl Dreyer, Marguerite Beaugé

Produced and directed by Carl Dreyer

For over a century the story of Joan of Arc has been catnip to an army of filmmakers ranging from DeMille to Bresson. Surrounded by meddlesome producers and difficult divas, maybe those weary moviemakers saw something of themselves in the embattled heroine – but no director had better insight into God’s own rabble-rouser than Carl Dreyer.

90 years on, The Passion of Joan of Arc continues to astonish. Combining the grim-faced piety of Renaissance art with the unvarnished intimacy of depression era portraits, Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece still has the power to transform the lowliest grindhouse into a cathedral.

In 1417 a trio...

Comic book fans had best get used to Josh Brolin.

Thanks to 20th Century Fox and its recent shake-up, there are now only two weeks separating the release of Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2, David Leitch’s star-studded sequel that heralds the arrival of Nathan Summers – the time-traveling bandit better known to you, I, and the Merc With a Mouth as Cable.

And as if that wasn’t exciting enough, Josh Brolin is also playing a little-known Marvel villain by the name of Thanos, whose presence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been teased since as far back as 2012. It’s the role of a lifetime for the actor, who is expected to reprise as Marvel’s Mad Titan in time for Avengers 4. It’ll tend to unfinished business in 2019, but thanks to Brolin’s recent Instagram, we now have a little more insight into how the actor approached his McU debut.

movies

• Deadline we didn't believe this would ever actually happen but supposedly James Cameron starts shooting today on his Four consecutive Avatar sequels with an estimated budget of over 1 billion dollars

• Cartoon Brew this year continues to be weak for animated features but next year's trailers are already popping up. Peter Rabbit anyone? And, in case you missed it...

• Tfe Isle of Dogs trailer

• Cinematic Corner Sati always keeps us up to date on what Hugh Jackman is doing. Apparently he's making a movie called The Front Runner but, alas, it is Not an adaptation of that famous gay novel that has never managed to get a movie made despite numerous rumors that it would become a movie over the decades. Instead it's a movie about the politician Gary Hart.

• Out how's this for an odd sounding project. Moonlight's writer Tarrell Alvin McCraney is going to script a musical for...

The Open City Documentary Festival, taking place across London between the 5th and 10th of September 2017, will present three films by Belgian filmmaker Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd: Lost Land (2011), For the Lost (2014) and The Eternals (2017). The films, shot mostly on 16mm and Super 8, are poetic essays exploring the lives of those affected by exile, conflict, loss, and the ecology of harsh environments, hauntingly soundtracked by British Avant-Garde musician Richard Skelton. Ahead of the festival I interviewed Vandeweerd concerning the aesthetic and thematic connections between his films, his anthropological approach and the role of language in his cinema.Notebook: You’ve studied anthropology, amongst other subjects, and you’ve worked as a teaching assistant in a Philosophy and Literature department. What led you to utilize filmmaking as an extension of your research? Pierre-yves Vandeweerd: The first area I worked in as an anthropologist, at the beginning of the 90s, was Niger in West Africa.

Mubi's retrospective, Catherine Breillat, Auteur of Porn?, is showing April 4 - June 3, 2017 in Germany.Sex Is ComedyThroughout her career, Catherine Breillat has provided viewers with a long-form meta-cinema experience. While metacinema is as old as the medium itself, since her debut feature A Real Young Girl in 1976, Breillat has developed a distinct form of it: one that collapses ‘autobiographical’ material, various artistic sensibilities, and the process of filmmaking itself.Like dozens of other English words—such as ‘aesthetic’ or ‘abject’—the word ‘meta’ has been largely misused or misapplied with regard to the film and literary criticism. Regarding the consumption of fiction, the appropriate use of the term 'metafiction,' 'metafilm,' et cetera, has its basis in the Greek meta, which does not translate directly into English but can be understood as a preposition similar to the English word ‘about’ (‘having to do with,’ or ‘on the subject of’). Metafiction is therefore,...

Consumer culture sucks the content out of every subculture it touches. All except Glam, which returns every ten years or so altered by time but with its central message of theatricalized otherness unchanged. Glam pop and fashion were in all the magazines both for teenyboppers and young mums. It was commercial, not very musically challenging, and seemed to have arrived already fully absorbed. But British glam (glam of the '70s as opposed to American glam of the '80s, otherwise known as "hair metal") was highly critical of the counterculture.

Hippy

Hippy culture was 'real' as opposed to 'straight culture' which was 'fake'. America's support of democracy in North Vietnam disguised a terrible agenda. The hippies proposed an alternative world; one were real freedom could be cultivated.

Sex

However, women suffered a great deal of abuse in the name of free love. The '60s generation have compained that...

This article was produced as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring journalists at the Locarno Film Festival, a collaboration between the Locarno Film Festival, IndieWire and the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the support of Film Comment and the Swiss Alliance of Film Journalists. The following interview, conducted by a member of the Critics Academy, focuses on a participant in the affiliated Filmmakers Academy program at the festival.

Federico Cecchetti is a 34-year-old filmmaker based in Mexico City. He’s currently living in Paris as one of five residents of the prestigious Cinéfondation residency program, which was designed by the Cannes Film Festival to help promising filmmakers with their first and second feature films.

Read More: Abbas Kiarostami’s Final Film, Nine Minutes That Explain His Brilliance

Cecchetti’s unique films raise cultural understanding and social awareness by means of interweaving psychology, philosophy and poetry in film.

I would like to accompany 2011's Nana with a printed text at the door of a public screening, a text written precisely before the word “contextualize” (b. 1934) existed as the verb form of “context” (b. 1840).It would be Jean Epstein, 1921—"Now the tragedy is anatomical. The décor of the fifth act is this corner of a cheek torn by a smile. Waiting for the moment when 1,000 meters of intrigue converge in a muscular denouement satisfies me more than the rest of the film. Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin."(…)"The film is nothing but a relay between the source of nervous energy and the auditorium which breathes its radiance…" (from “Magnification”)Or Antonin Artaud writing in 1927—"The human skin of things, the epidermis of...

The following article accompanies the audiovisual essay Paratheatre - Plays Without Stages (From I to IV) by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López and commissioned by Chris Luscri for the 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival premiere of Jacques Rivette's 1971 magnum opus Out 1 - Noli me tangere.

In Jacques Rivette’s monumental Out 1 (1971), we see two theatrical works perpetually in progress — until, due to the force of many factors both internal and external, both projects collapse. Yet what we witness are not, in any conventional or normative sense, rehearsals. They are more like what Jerzy Grotwoski called paratheatre: playing without a stage, without an audience ever in mind or in attendance, playing for the sake of playing itself, for the process of working it out and working it through.

Every critical commentary on Out 1 (and its double, Out 1: Spectre from 1974) refers to the prominent place in it of theatre — a prominent place it enjoys,...

Derek Jarman is remembered as an innovative film-maker and artist but his stage work is key to his career – even his own residence was a performance

Derek Jarman wandered into theatre, as he did into much of his creative life. The stage design department at the Slade School of Art in 1963 was casually structured, and, for the era, an uncloseted zone of gaiety. He'd previously slapped a distemper brush on scenes for Lorca's Blood Wedding and other plays put on by fellow students at King's College, London. He had not seen much theatre, as movies – even concerts – came cheaper; the first production that really excited him was Peter Brook's short and gory staging of Antonin Artaud's Spurt of Blood in the RSC's 1964 Theatre of Cruelty season.

Jarman put a lot of effort into his design course, outlining a surreal play, The Billboard Promised Land (a mashup of The Wizard of Oz...

There are very few directors who have worked almost entirely within the field of surrealism. But the directors we most associate with this style of film, are Luis Buñuel, a Spanish director who had a lengthy career producing surreal films and David Lynch who is known as the Modern Master of Surrealism.

But basing the whole list on the works of Buñuel and Lynch would be to ignore the other great contributions to the canon of surrealism. They deserve as much exposure as the directors who work with surrealism as their primary medium of art. Some pretty far out films have been produced by directors embracing surrealism and ten of them are listed below for your perusal.

10. The Seashell And The Clergyman (1928)

A priest suffers a lot of bizarre erotic hallucinations and dreams about a general’s wife whom he is lusting after.

Banned by the BBFC because they couldn...

Think silent films reached a high point with The Artist? The pre-sound era produced some of the most beautiful, arresting films ever made. From City Lights to Metropolis, Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best

• Top 10 teen movies

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10. City Lights

City Lights was arguably the biggest risk of Charlie Chaplin's career: The Jazz Singer, released at the end of 1927, had seen sound take cinema by storm, but Chaplin resisted the change-up, preferring to continue in the silent tradition. In retrospect, this isn't so much the precious behaviour of a purist but the smart reaction of an experienced comedian; Chaplin's films rarely used intertitles anyway, and though it is technically "silent", City Lights is very mindful of it own self-composed score and keenly judged sound effects.

At its heart,...

A mood of optimism prevailed at the Copenhagen documentary showcase despite the explicitly political lineup, as Algerian film Bloody Beans walked away with the top prize

Reading on mobile? Click here to watch Bloody Beans trailer

"It is better to be than to obey," runs a line by the French poet Antonin Artaud at the end of Bloody Beans, the Algerian film that walked away at the weekend with the top prize at this year's Cph:dox festival in Copenhagen. That quote could refer to the festival itself: although it officially ended Sunday, the event took the unusual step of presenting its prizewinners to the public for three more days, wrapping on Wednesday after nearly three weeks of screenings, concerts and YouTube mashup shows. Indeed, now in its 11th year, Cph:dox looks very little like any other film festival on the calendar; it lists parties in its catalogue, and for the...

“Jackass,” as an MTV series and even more so as a less-censored big-screen franchise, felt new and different and outrageous, even if you could trace its component parts to ancestors as far afield as “Candid Camera,” circus sideshows and Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. Watching a jockstrap-clad Johnny Knoxville dangle over an alligator pit with chicken parts between his legs, or Steve-o intentionally give himself paper cuts, or the late Ryan Dunn inserting a toy car into his own nether regions gave the show’s fans a distinct kind of pleasure, causing them to erupt in sounds that were somewhere between.

Film, opera and stage director known for La Reine Margot and his Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1976

Unusually for a director, Patrice Chéreau, who has died of lung cancer aged 68, had more or less equally prestigious careers in the theatre, cinema and opera. Although he was internationally known from films such as La Reine Margot (1994) and his groundbreaking production of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth (1976), he was renowned in his native France mostly for his "must-see" stage productions, especially during his long stints as co-director of the Théâtre National Populaire (1971-77) and the Théâtre des Amandiers (1982-90).

At these two subsidised theatres, in Villeurbanne, near Lyons, and Nanterre, in western Paris, respectively, Chéreau was able to introduce modern plays and bring a freshness to bear on the classics, particularly Marivaux, whose La Dispute he directed to acclaim at the Tnp in three different versions in the 1970s. At the Amandiers,...

Donal Logue and Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter had talked for a few years about Logue guesting on the show, but the timing never worked. And Logue’s happy about that now, because he loves the role he ended up with: Artaud-reading former U.S. Marshal Lee Toric, the brother of the nurse (Logue’s real-life sibling Karina Logue) that Otto (Sutter) killed in prison.

On a conference call with reporters today, Logue explained his take on the character and the meaning behind his book choice in last night’s episode, and teased that next week’s season finale...

Reel Ink is a new, hopefully bi-monthly column in which I’ll review a wide selection of recent books about film, covering everything from more scholarly tomes to biographies, film histories and lighter, fan appreciation type publications and whatever else of interest catches my eye.

The first column will be divided into two parts, as I’ve had such a great response from book publicists I contacted about the column that it is going to take me a little longer than anticipated to get through all the books I’ve acquired (and thanks to all who contributed review copies).

Part 1 includes a look at one of the greatest British films of the ‘60s, meditations on contemporary cinema from one of America’s most incisive film writers, an examination of some of the most troubled productions in film history, a loving photographic homage to Britain’s greatest cinema icon, the biography...

By the end of Tuesday's (Nov. 27) episode of "Sons of Anarchy" -- the next-to-last one of Season 5 -- Jax is dealing with or has dealt with no fewer than five crises, any one of which could throw off his vision for the future of Samcro.

Galen and the Irish are paid off, with help from Nero, whose ties to the club are now even deeper. But Clay, following his ouster from Sons, is attempting to set up his own freelance business with Galen, and possibly Tig.

The cartel is getting what it wants, but not before putting on a show of power to both Jax and the Irish. Damon Pope is interested in the Charming Heights development, and calling in his marker on Tig. Jax has seemingly taken care of Wendy, albeit by pretty despicable means. And then there's Lee Toric, the former U.S. marshal with the interesting reading...

Georg Baselitz Gagosian Gallery Through April 7, 2012

"Art demands fanaticism" -- Adolf Hitler, 1915

Georg Baselitz's (born 1938, Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Germany) recent work at Gagosian, paintings on a monumental scale, presents the artist as a still-vital explorer, using both his personal history as well as myriad art historical references in a search for a unified, iconic image. Enormous canvases, measuring over twelve feet high, combine elements from his early works, such as "Die grosse Nacht im Eimer" (1962–63) and "A Modern Painter" (1966), remixed in a gambit designed to distance himself still further from the nearly thirty-year span of his signature, inverted, pseudo-Ab Ex work. A sense of nostalgia and reflection is evident here, as well as an undiminished appetite for new forms and styles.

Of these pieces, Baselitz says, "I don't want to create a monster; I want to make something which is new, exceptional, something that only I do...something that references tradition,...

Jean Dubuffet: The Last Two Years Pace Gallery Through March 10, 2012

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) was born in Le Havre and moved to Paris, where he was briefly enrolled at the Académie Julian. Leaving the school in 1918, he began to follow his own path in painting and, after a brief sojourn in wine dealing (the family business), spent the rest of his artistic life seeking an authentic art based on the work of prisoners, the insane, the naïve, and other marginal outsiders. The style he developed, and which ultimately became its own school, is now called Art Brut.

Dubuffet often presented himself as outside the "art world," but this is mildly disingenuous. He was a close friend of both André Masson and Antonin Artaud. His copious writings on art were gathered in the seminal book Asphyxiating Culture -- almost a bible for art students following the wave of Neo Expressionism and the...

You might not expect it from the whimsical, episodic structure, or the convivial air promised by the retinue of famous and semi-famous faces, but Jonas Mekas’ Sleepless Nights Stories is downright creepy. Opening with an insomniac Mekas wandering about his new apartment at 4 am bemoaning a life packed away in cardboard boxes, it blossoms into a peripatetic nocturnal diary, told via chance meetings, literary references, and typewritten inter-titles, a collection of stories bound thematically by invocations of Dante, The Arabian Nights and Japanese haiku.

It’s a midnight ramble that, despite quotations from peaceful, naturist haikus by Bashō and Kobayashi Issa, has one foot in the demon-infested world of Japanese folk legends, where literal manifestations of doom creep at every turn. The film’s shadowy atmosphere, playing out in crowded bars, gallery openings and friends’ apartments, shifts from crepuscular to spooky because these encounters, through their stories, imagery or simply...

by Steve Dollar

Now an avuncular 82, Alejandro Jodorowsky still has the air of a sly wizard about him—even over an Internet phone connection across the ocean in Deauville, France, where he was vacationing this week. This, after all, is the guy who once claimed: "Most directors make films with their eyes. I make films with my cojones." Not even age can wither that kind of spirit, as the Chilean émigré remains just as provocative in thought now as when he played the macho shaman in his classic cult movies El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), wildly influential hippie-era mindfucks that spun the tripped-out counterculture on its pointy little head.

The movies spent a long time in limbo, circulating on multiply dubbed VHS tapes for years before lingering legal issues were sorted out and they were released in remastered high-definition versions in 2006, complete with screenings at the New York Film Festival.

N.Y.C. Opera General Manager and Artistic Director George Steel. Photograph by René Perez.Friday sees the premiere of the New York City Opera’s Monodramas—an evening of three mini-operas, all for sopranos. The performances include an opera with a libretto by Samuel Beckett and a wordless John Zorn number featuring animations of drawings that Antonin Artaud made while institutionalized in a mental hospital. Sound crazy? Nope, sounds like George Steel—the general manager and artistic director of the N.Y.C. Opera since 2009. His bold approach calls for up-and-coming performers and fresh productions, all in the name of getting younger bodies into the seats. But where does he go for an after-opera cocktail? Vanity Fair's Rebecca Sacks caught up with Steel to find out that, and more.

From the pioneers of the silver screen to today's new realism, French directors have shaped film-making around the world

France can, with some justification, claim to have invented the whole concept of cinema. Film historians call The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, the 50-second film by the Lumière brothers first screened in 1895, the birth of the medium.

But the best-known early pioneer, who made films with some kind of cherishable narrative value, was Georges Méliès, whose 1902 short A Trip to the Moon is generally heralded as the first science-fiction film, and a landmark in cinematic special effects. Meanwhile, Alice Guy-Blaché, Léon Gaumont's one-time secretary, is largely forgotten now, but with films such as L'enfant de la barricade trails the status of being the first female film-maker.

The towering achievement of French cinema in the silent era was undoubtedly Abel Gance's six-hour biopic of Napoleon (1927), which...

The annual Bird’s Eye View Film Festival was held in London from 8th March to 17th. This year saw a major theme exploring women’s role in gothic and horror cinema with live accompaniments to silent classics, a screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and a specially commissioned score and live performance by Grammy award-winner Imogen Heap to Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928).

Bloody Women: From Gothic To Horror wasn’t the only thing going down with screenings, workshops, seminars and talks on the role women play in the medium we all know and love. In an art form still ruled largely by men it’s nice to see a film festival celebrate the female perspective, and not only that, deliver some downright brilliant films.

Below is a report on a collection of films and events we attended this great year.

Victor Sjostrom’s 1928 melodrama,...

Above: Zoulikha Bouabdellah's Al Attlal (Ruines), left, and Pierre Léon's À la barbe d'Ivan, right.

Nicole Brenez has curated two programs of new work from the French avant-garde for this year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema 2011 in New York; below she has offered her program notes in French. Program one (on Saturday) concentrates on filmmakers reappropriating images; program two (Sunday) is the new feature by Ange Leccia, Nuit bleue. Below, I’ve translated Brenez’s extended appreciation of Leccia and Nuit bleue; as usual, I’ve tried to stay faithful to the sound and rhythm of the original where possible. Beneath the translated extract you'll find the full article by Ms. Brenez in its original French. —David Phelps

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…Although Ange Leccia has also practiced re-appropriating images (especially Jean Luc-Godard’s) in his installations and his films, Nuit bleuetakes up a different aesthetic vein, one rich with a long tradition of the French avant-garde.

Is the new film about Allen Ginsberg and the Howl obscenity trial a little too sane?

Allen Ginsberg, who set out to change the world so that he could fit into it, was admitted to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, in upper Manhattan, in 1949. He was 23. On his first day there, he met Carl Solomon, two years younger but already bearing a history of mental imbalance. Solomon was well-read, with a special interest in the French symbolist writer Antonin Artaud, who had died in a lunatic asylum the previous year, and who Solomon believed had appointed him his representative in America.

The two psychiatric cases sized each other up. "I'm Prince Myshkin", Ginsberg said, alluding to the gentle anti-hero of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. The reference would have escaped most inmates, but Solomon got it. "And I'm Kirilov", he replied (from The Possessed). A friendship had begun, which would be immortalised in a declamatory,...

The line-up has been announced for the 2011 Slamdance Film Festival, and while we found only one true horror film on the list, there are a few others that seem to be genre-bending enough to merit mention here on Dread Central.

Slamdance, which is being presented again by Kodak, runs concurrently with the Sundance Film Festival, January 21-27, 2011 in Park City, Utah. As a year-round organization, Slamdance serves as a showcase for the discovery of new and emerging talent and is dedicated to the nurturing and development of new independent artists and their vision. Slamdance lives by its mantra: "By Filmmakers, For Filmmakers." No other festival is fully programmed by filmmakers, and for the 2011 Festival Slamdance received a record number of over 5,000 submissions.

Here are the narrative films in competition that should appeal to genre fans:

Atrocious – directed by Fernando Barreda Luna. (Mexico, Spain) World Premiere, 75 min (See trailer below)

Recorded...

Jackass is back and on the verge of artistic respectability. Not that Johnny Knoxville could care less

It should come as no surprise that within minutes of our meeting,Johnny Knoxville is talking about his penis. More precisely, how he broke his penis three years ago in a motorcycle stunt that went wrong. It's a war story the Jackass star has often told, so the gory details don't need repeating – suffice to say, he has to self-adminster a painful-sounding procedure twice daily that wouldn't look out of place in the latest Jackass movie.

The point, though, is that it's impossible to imagine having this sort of discussion with anyone else. Just as it's impossible to think of any other mainstream movie in which bodily fluids are liberally ejected and ingested, male nudity is so liberally on show, or the human body is so routinely and genuinely abused. The joke was...

Missed out on this year's Frigid New York Festival? You still have a chance to catch a selection of shows with Frigid Hangover. Frigid New York is the fastest growing celebration of fringe theater in the Lower East Side. Now in its fourth year, the wintertime festival featured 30 edgy productions that are selected in part as first-come, first-serve, and in part by lottery. All shows run less than sixty minutes. One hundred percent of the box office goes to the participating company. The festival this year ran from February 24th to March 7th, 2010 in three East Village venues: The Kraine Theater, The Red Room, and Under St. Marks. A selection of the top shows have been chosen to participate in Frigid Hangover, which offers theater mavens one last chance to catch these shows. Hangover runs from March 9 to 13, 2010. Shows include: "Kill the Band," "The Bike Trip," "Four Quarters," "Ramblings of a Gentleman Scumbag,...

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film classic The Passion of Joan of Arc is a renowned masterpiece whose rescue from obscurity is the stuff of legend. Long thought to have been lost to fire, the original version was miraculously found in perfect condition in 1981—in a Norwegian mental institution. I first heard of the film through the diaries of Anaïs Nin in her compassionate written portrait of Antonin Artaud, who portrayed the monk Massieu. Long interested in Artaud, I welcomed the opportunity to view the film when it achieved a digital restoration for its Criterion DVD release.

The film details the last hours of Joan of Arc after she has been captured by the English. Her trial, imprisonment, torture and final execution are rendered similarly to a passion play, particularly through Dreyer’s facial close-ups, effected through the use of recently-developed panchromatic film. Renée Jeanne Falconetti (aka “Maria” Falconetti) was...