Helmut Newton Retrospective
16 June - 4 September 2016. Very interesting retrospective of Helmut Newton's (fashhion and beyond) photography at Foam Gallery in Amsterdam.
Mehcanical Ecstacy by Club Guy & Roni
Nema Aviona Za Zagreb
On May 31 2016 EYE Institute Netherlands organized a special screening of Nema Aviona Za Zagreb, the last film of Louis van Gasteren who passed away on May 10, 2016. Below the introduction to this original and unique film (in Dutch). See here for more information about the book Filming for the Future: The Work of Louis van Gasteren. The book comes with 7 films, including Nema Aviona Za Zagreb (with English subtitles).
Post-Cinema and 21st Century Film
Shane Denson & Julia Leyda (eds), Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016). Online at: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/
If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflecte our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical
engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” Contributors explore key experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic
to a post-cinematic media regime and articulate both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries.
The Revenant & The Hateful Eight
The Revenant (Alejandro Iñárritu, 2015) and The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015) revise the western genre. Where The Revenant takes us back to the real pioneering beginnings of the nation, The Hateful Eight looks at the 'Wild West' from a contemporary perspective and current gun violence. The Revenant is sublime in making us feel the bare life of the pioneering beginnings of the American West. No saloons to have a drink after a shoot-out, just the harshness of nature full of enemies of all sorts. Breathtakingly filmed; Leonardo DiCaprio deserves an Oscar.
After his revisionist western Django Unchained (2012) with The Hateful Eight (2015) Tarantino gives again a biting commentary on the racial relations in the US. While Django Unchained is empowering, in The Hateful Eight there is no redemption of revenge (as is also the case in Kill Bill and Inglorious Bastards). The fetishistic Lincoln letter that the Samuel Jackson character keeps in his pocket, containing a promise for the nation, has appeared to be worthless. Only hate remains. Not even the love for cinema’s widescreen can compensate for this tragic message of violence.
Eigenlicht
Another gem from the International Film Festival Rotterdam: Melvin Moti's Eigenlicht (2012), part of the programme Out of Sight: People are generally blind to their own way of looking. These short films heighten our attention to light, darkness, flickering, mechanical rhythm and imaginary projections. About Eigenlicht: Certain minerals convert absorbed UV light into visible colours of unearthly beauty. Shown in sacred, cosmic silence. Eigenlicht (intrinsic light) refers to the visual interference the human eye sees in complete darkness.