Tomorrow evening at 92Y Tribeca, Not Coming to a Theater Near You will present Philippe Garrel's J'entends plus la guitare (1991), reason enough for Leo Goldsmith to look back on Garrel and Nico's ten-year romantic and artistic relationship, which produced "only about a half-dozen films, some threadbare Warholian portraits, shot without sound and on old film stock, others mythopoeic allegories of creation, destruction, and revolution, shot in exotic locales from Iceland to Morocco." It "was this young Garrel who first captivated French cinephiles like Henri Langlois, who hailed Garrel's 1972 film La Cicatrice intérieure as a masterpiece, and Gilles Deleuze who, in 1985, praised Garrel's 'cinema of revelation' in his second Cinema book. Deleuze's reading of Garrel, derived almost entirely from the 60s and 70s films, describes a 'liturgy of bodies,' a devotional, if not exactly pious cinema. For the young Garrel, cinema serves as a vehicle for prophecy and vision, as a religious experience that intersects the French New Wave's near-monastic affinity for the Cinémathèque with the late-60s notion of Christ as the first hippie revolutionary." [Update, 2/8: An Alt Screen roundup.]
Also in New York, a double feature tonight at Light Industry: "Loosely based on episodes from the filmmaker's own life, Jennifer Reeves's Chronic [1996, 16mm, 38 mins] tells the story of Gretchen, a Midwestern punk teenager institutionalized for her, as Reeves puts it, 'so-called mental illness.' … Like Chronic, Sadie Benning's Flat is Beautiful [1998, video, 50 mins] presents a lushly lo-fi coming-of-age tale, here told from the perspective of Taylor, a 12-year-old latchkey tomboy being raised by a single mom in run-down 1980s Minneapolis." Tomorrow night, Light Industry screens Trinh T Minh-ha's Naked Spaces—Living Is Round (1985, 16mm, 135 mins), which "surveys the integration of ritual and work, the home and the world, culture and nature, in the traditional villages of six West African countries (Senegal, Mauritania, Togo, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Benin)."
Jean Renoir's The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), "a Popular Front polemic that also plays as an office sex comedy" (Steve Macfarlane at the L), screens tonight at the French Institute Alliance Français as part of the series Carte Blanche to agnès b.
Berlin. Tomorrow at Kino Krokodil, Mila Turajlic will be on hand for a Q&A following a screening of her Cinema Komunisto (2010), a documentary chronicling the rise and fall of Yugoslavian president Tito's "Hollywood of the East."
A Trip to the Moon, Lindsay Seers, Extramission 6 (Black Maria), 2009
Stockholm. A Trip to the Moon, an exhibition on contemporary art's relationship to film, opens tomorrow at Bonniers Konsthall and will be on view through April 8. A companion conference, Before and After Cinema, will be held on March 9 and 10.
Reading. The Paris Review excerpts a conversation between artist Josh Melnick and editor, sound designer, amateur astronomer, translator and author Walter Murch that appears in full in Melnick's forthcoming book, The 8 Train. For the 2009 work of the same name, Melnick and cinematographer Max Goldman filmed New York subway riders in extreme slow motion, creating portraits with, as Art in General has it, "an ethereal sense of suspended time somewhere between photographic stillness and cinematic motion."
Offscreen presents the first of two issues on popular Italian cinema, this one focusing on the filone, the Italian term for genre "which identifies flexibility to mutate or incorporate 'neighboring' filoni as one of its defining qualities."
"It has never made much sense to to speak of the cinema as capable of being alive or dead." Evan Calder Williams in the New Inquiry.
In the works. Philip Seymour Hoffman is in final talks to star in A Most Wanted Man, Andrew Bovell's adaptation of John le Carré's 2008 thriller to be directed by Anton Corbijn, reports EW's Adam B Vary.
Oren Moverman, whose Rampart opens this week (roundup), will direct an adaptation of Joe Lansdale's novella The Big Blow, reports the Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth.
And FirstShowing's Alex Billington reports that Amy Adams will produce and star in an adaptation of Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty.
Obit. Bill Hinzman, who played the cemetery zombie in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), has died of cancer, reports the BBC. He was 75.
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