Film
The Practice of Description: Films and Videos by Thom Andersen
By Colin BeckettWhen a film is called “didactic,” it is most often intended either as an insult or as a way of bolstering a work’s particular theoretical ambitions. Thom Andersen’s resolutely nonfictional films are didactic in a richer, more specific sense.
In Conversation
ROBERT GREENE with Valentina Canavesio
Once a promising actress with a recurring role on the hit TV show The Wire, Brandy Burre is now stuck in the routine of life as a suburban housewife and mom, in upstate New York. In his captivating new documentary Actress, Robert Greene offers her a chance to perform.
In Conversation
ALWAYS IN THE PRESENT TENSE
KEVIN JEROME EVERSON with Benjamin Schultz‑Figueroa
Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa speaks with filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson about Everson's new work.
OUT OF EDEN
Jarmusch Since 2009
By Joseph Pomp
If Broken Flowers (2005) was in a certain sense a distillation of the blue period that Bill Murray had entered upon teaming up with Wes Anderson in 1998, then Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) is a crystallization of how Jim Jarmusch has been subtly caricaturing his own boho persona over the last few years.
The Theater of Outlaws
The Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road
By Xin Zhou
Following its week long retrospective on screen at Anthology Film Archives in 2012, the Wooster Group, the long-standing experimental theater and media ensemble, returns with Rumstick Road, a video reconstruction of an important early work of the same name, the second installation of the Three Places in Rhode Island trilogy performed by the company in 1977.
FADE TO BLUE
On Derek Jarman’s Final Film
By Shana Beth Mason
Works of art made under the auspices of grave illness or impending demise require a delicate approach from the critic: both an observational clarity and a genuine empathy. Derek Jarman’s final feature-length film Blue (1993) is a freestanding aesthetic construct, but it is nonetheless determined by its existence as a final, courageous act.
