The Lives of Others in DDR/DDR by J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

As self-reflexive as it is, DDR/DDR devotes much time to considering (and even using) anachronistic Stasi technology. Siegel interviews a West German who collects Stasi spy cameras on eBay and gets a former agent to describe the debriefing that went on in special “conspirative” apartments—the friendly kaffeeklatsch atmosphere he recalls is belied by the awkward murk of surveillance tapes of one such session. A dutiful analyst, the filmmaker appears to have gone through hundreds of hours of such “anonymized” tapes in search of odd personal moments and anomalies—even discovering a quasi-underground movie produced by a bored spy. Here is the ultimate expression of Stasi art: intelligence for its own sake… (read more)

DDR/DDR screens at Anthology Film Archives, May 7-13

Jean-Pierre Gorin by Erik Ulman, Senses of Cinema

If Godard has fashioned himself into “the ultimate image of the end of Europe” (as Charles Olson once wrote of Ezra Pound), Gorin has done something more modest. Each of his films chews on recurrent themes—of childhood or nostalgia for childhood, of language and exile—with intensely local concentration. If Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) or The Last Bolshevik (1993) expand grandly from their immediate subjects to the illumination of History, Gorin’s burrow instead into their locality. Since the generalizing rhetoric of the Vertov period, Gorin has allergically avoided “large statements”: instead, his work is allied with, and tender and inquisitive toward, the small, the individualizing detail. It is, in Manny Farber’s words, “termite art,” “eating its own boundaries,” leaving “nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” In this very modesty, Gorin’s work is perhaps of special importance in a time dominated by the soulless and grandiose spectacles of Hollywood, and by the cynicism and affectlessness of so much “independent” film. Instead, the eccentricity of Gorin’s movies reminds me of those from certain other great contemporaries, like Abbas Kiarostami or João Cesar Monteiro, whose quirky particularity allows them extraordinary range and engenders deep and abundant pleasures… (read more)

Moyra Davey by Tim Maul, Art in America

Moyra Davey’s first show with Murray Guy was an engrossing demonstration of the camera’s ability to isolate detail, organize content and serve agendas both simple and complex. Since the early ’90s, the New York-based photographer has created photographs, videos and publications whose subject matter—including studio ephemera, domestic objects and books—may suggest more sympathy toward the page than the wall. Davey steadily documents segments of her own world and operates in that narrow gap between the novel and the cinema. She is something of an intimist, and her modestly scaled C-prints, none larger than 20 by 24 inches, feature the things we value and accumulate…(read more)

The Practice of Everyday Life by Ed Halter, Artforum

The strategies of Old Cat and BZV culminate in Everson’s latest and, arguably, strongest feature, Erie, which like these two shorter works is told in a series of long, unbroken takes, each shot on a single roll of grainy black-and-white reversal 16-mm stock…These scenes bear the inherent pleasures of actuality-style longueurs, but they also present tangential references to the story of African Americans in Ohio, Niagara Falls calling to mind the Underground Railroad’s great gateway to Canada, the medical workers evincing the area’s more recent transformation, especially hard-hitting in the Rust Belt, from a manufacturing to a service economy. The most overt gesture in this regard is a segment early in the film recording a conversation with some of Everson’s older relatives, former General Motors plant workers and UAW members reminiscing about how the unions were blamed for the industry’s decline. “Mainstream America,” one of them recalls, “really did not like a UAW worker. ‘You people should not be making that kind of money. You do not have the education to make that kind of money. How did you get that job?’” she mimics. “You didn’t need the education to have that job. You just needed to know how to do that job. And everybody was taught to do a job. It was a learning experience. You didn’t go in there knowing how to build a panel. Nobody knew that. Everybody had to learn to do that.” The discussion draws from local history but also returns to one of Everson’s primary considerations—that of labor as an ongoing mental and physical process of learning, as well as a form of discipline and performance not always understood as such from the outside.

The idea—the validation, even—of education through practice and repetition goes to the heart of Everson’s work, as seen in Erie and beyond. Because so much of his output feels fragmentary and evocative, with connecting themes hidden behind what only seems to be a documentary lucidity, his filmmaking benefits from cumulative viewings, patterns emerging slowly over time. This element of intentional opacity can be seen as a reaction to the identitarian baggage inherited from long-standing debates about the politics of representation in cinema. Everson rejects the role of cultural explainer in his work, opting instead to place the burden of understanding on the audience and its own labor. In this way, he has carved a place for himself outside both the typical expectations of documentary and the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else. (read more)

TIFF 09: “Le Streghe, femmes entre elles” by David Phelps, The Auteurs

Streghe’s a dead man’s ode to life. In the end, Straub’s camera turns, if not to enter the space, to open it, and ends on an image of a tree by the stream. Straub’s suggested he thinks metaphors are useless—his films, particular to particular times and spaces, show events that only represent themselves—but he’s still a panegyrist: out to show off Nature’s imagination and ideas. The last shot, which moves and stops, shows a tree stuck in space and a river free from it, resituates the film’s underruning dialectic between immortals and mortals, statues and nature, art (Circe’s the original artist) and life (even Circe’s art, like Kane’s, only gets a brief claim over it), between shadows and light, still shots and pans, theater and movies, bodies and souls, love and sex: stasis vs. movement in all of them. The immortals are planted like trees. Odysseus was as passing as a stream or flood of light. Nature has ten million times the imagination of the most imaginative artists, but it takes an artist to show it. Really funny, really sad, Streghe‘s got to be Straub’s masterpiece, or one of them; like Circe, he’ll move on, and won’t… (read more)

Also: Daniel Kasman on Le Genou d’Artemide and Itinéraire de Jean Bricard in The Auteurs