Colin Beckett
COLIN BECKETT has contributed film reviews to the Brooklyn Rail since 2011. He lives in Los Angeles.
A Future to Want
By Colin BeckettI am too young to have ever known an avant-garde with a future. The 10 years during which I have paid serious attention to experimental film have unfolded as an extended funeral procession after the death of cinema.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
By Colin BeckettGilded in the Palme d’Or, and spittle-flecked by word of mouth, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives arrives in New York to colossal expectations. Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest feature, his sixth, is more than capable of meeting them.
ART-HOUSE MIXTAPE 2011: Selections from New Directors/New Films
By Colin BeckettThis year’s edition of New Directors/New Films, presented annually by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society at Lincoln Center, marks the festival’s 40th anniversary.
THAI FUSION Uruphong Raksasad’s Agrarian Utopia and Stories from the North
By Colin BeckettWhether by design or circumstance, this June has become Thai Cinema Month in New York, with an array of the city’s art houses and museums boasting otherwise hard-to-see gems from the Thai film renaissance that began in the late 1990s.
THAI FUSION Uruphong Raksasad’s Agrarian Utopia and Stories from the North
By Colin BeckettWhether by design or circumstance, this June has become Thai Cinema Month in New York, with an array of the city’s art houses and museums boasting otherwise hard-to-see gems from the Thai film renaissance that began in the late 1990s.
BLURRED BOUNDARIES: Selections from Migrating Forms 2011
By Colin Beckett and Jason LivingstonMelanie Gilligan’s Popular Unrest (2010) opened this year’s Migrating Forms with a pointed set of questions: Is it relevant to render human stories in a traditional moving-image format? (Arguably not.) Can a movie portray the abstractions of capital amidst an increasingly global, savage monetarization of physical life?
The Uses of Richard Pryor
By Colin BeckettThere are a few things that everybody knows about Richard Pryor: that he lit himself on fire in a suicide attempt while freebasing cocaine; that his stand-up revolutionized the form and altered the terms of American race relations; and that the movies he made were, for the most part, very bad.
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.
History of the Thirteen Plus One
By Colin BeckettMore successfully than the now countless others that have tried, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 is a film that eludes succinct description. Every level of the film’s text, and every moment in the history of the film, has been animated by an adamant preference for circulation over transmission, flow over fixity.
AGAINST INTERPRETATION: Hong Sang-soo at the Museum of Moving Image
By Colin BeckettHong Sang-soo’s best films leave your retinas imprinted with a luminous clarity.
PASTS AND PRESENTS
The New York Film Festival’s Projections
By Colin Beckett
For 17 years, Views from the Avant-Garde, a sidebar program to the New York Film Festival, was the United States’s defining institution for the locus of films and videos that constitute what we still, half-heartedly, call the avant-garde.
SYMBOLS OF THE UNCONQUERED
On Pioneers of African American Cinema
By Colin Beckett
The first half-century of American cinema is almost perfectly contiguous with the life of Jim Crow, and parallels the brutal wave of imperialist expansion that kicked off with the Spanish-American war.
