Gearing up for TIFF 2012
I'm on sabbatical this semester, and will be able to spend a few more days at TIFF than usual. Here's what I'm planning to see:
Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
Penance (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan), a 4.5-hour TV mini-series
Far From Vietnam (Marker/Godard/Varda/Resnais/Ivens/Klein/Lelouch, France, 1967)
Far From Aghanistan (Gianvito/Wilkerson/Jost/Martin/Yoo, USA)
Passion (Brian De Palma, USA)
Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor/Paravel, France)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, Japan/France)
Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, USA)
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK)
All That You Possess (Bernard Émond, Canada)
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, UK, including an extended Q&A with Zizek)
The Last Time I Saw Macao (Pedro Rodrigues/da Mata, Portugal)
Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas, France)
Student (Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazhakstan)
differently, Molussia (Nicolas Rey, France)
Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz, France/Chile)
Lines of Wellington (Valeria Sarmiento, France)
Gebo and his Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan)
The Capsule (Athena Rachel Tsangari, Greece)
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, UK)
Crimes of Mike Recket (Bruce Sweeney, Canada)
Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, USA)
The Tortoise, An Incarnation (Girish Kasaravalli, India)
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, USA)
When Night Falls (Ying Lang, China)
English Vinglish (Gauri Shinde, India)
Nights with Theodore (Sébastien Betbeder, France)
The Girl from the South (José Luis Garcia, Argentina)
The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh, Israel)
Ginger and Rosa (Sally Potter, UK)
Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein, Israel)
The Fifth Season (Peter Brosens/Jessica Woodworth, Belgium)
Viola (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)
Birds (Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal)
Most of the above are features. I'll be looking to catch a couple of avant-garde shorts programs as well. Some films I'll regret missing at the festival: Bestiaire (Denis Côté, Canada); The Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap, India); Three Sisters (Wang Bing, China); Tower (Kazik Radwanski, Canada); Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, USA); In the Fog (Sergei Loznitsa, Russia); and Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico). I'll be saving Terrence Malick's To the Wonder and Michael Haneke's Amour for their US release, which I hope will be swift.
Here is a link to all the programs at the festival. Any suggestions or recommendations? I'd love to hear them.
Recent reads:
-- The Sight & Sound poll 2012.
-- At the BFI website: Thom Andersen's wonderful explanatory piece "Yasujiro Ozu: The Master of Time".
-- At MUBI, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has a must-read essay on Tony Scott; and Catherine Grant has put up a collection of links on "'acid aesthetics' and contemporary cinematic stylistic 'excess'" in tribute to Scott. Also: David Hudson's Tony Scott post.
-- J. Hoberman: "Is Cronenberg our most original director?" in the Los Angeles Times; "Where are all the new young movie stars?" in Esquire; "The Lost Futures of Chris Marker" in the New York Review of Books; and appearing in an interview on the "post-film movie era" for the Wall Street Journal. Related: Nathan Lee on Cronenberg at AltScreen earlier this year.
-- Jason Mittell: "Thoughts on teaching theory to undergrads".
-- Essays by Kent Jones at the Criterion website: on La Promesse and Rosetta.
-- Trevor Link: "Five Texts That Have Influenced How I Think About Gender".
-- Darren Hughes has redesigned Long Pauses and put up new posts.
-- At Moving Image Source: Thomas Doherty on "piracy, property rights and the digital revolution"; and Gregory Zinman on Oskar Fischinger's Raumlichtkunst, one of the earliest multimedia projects.
-- Justin Stewart on documentarian Les Blank at Film Comment.
-- In the Guardian: "Why Marxism is on the rise again".
-- An interesting negative take by Australian scholar Simon During: "How did Susan Sontag get to be so famous?"
-- Recent discovery: Christopher Small's blog, Cinema Over The Waters.
-- Aaron Cutler interviews Portuguese filmmaker Marcelo Felix, whose feature Eden's Ark both preserves and pays tribute to silent cinema.
-- The archives of Cinephile, University of British Columbia's film journal.
-- All the films by the Dziga Vertov Group (Godard & Gorin) are now available to watch online at ubuweb.
pic: The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata).