Thursday, November 7, 2013

The Longest Shot in Motion Picture History

Russian Ark will be screened tomorrow, 7:30, at Page Hall.

J. Hoberman, former film guru at the Village Voice, who visited the Writers Institute in December 2012, reviews Russian Ark as one of the key films of the dawning 21st century in his influential book, The Future of Film.

"The ultimate trip, a post-2001 space odyssey, Alexander Sokurov’s "Russian Ark" is the longest continuous take in the annals of motion pictures, a single ninety-six-minute tracking shot in which the invis- ible narrator (Sokurov) and a historical figure, the nineteenth-century French Marquis de Custine (Sergey Dreiden), accompany a lively group of dead souls across several centuries and through thirty-three rooms of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg."

Larger excerpt here:  http://www.indiewire.com/article/exclusive-excerpts-j-hobermans-film-after-film-or-what-became-of-21st-century-cinema?page=3

NYS Writers Institute Classic Film Series here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#russian

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Wednesday, November 6, 2013

The Literary Life Where You Find

An article in the TU in association with tomorrow's event:

THE LITERARY LIFE WHERE YOU FIND IT: an evening with WILLIAM KENNEDY and ELISA ALBERT
Thursday, November 7th, at 6 pm, at the Stair Gallery, 549 Warren Street, Hudson. For more information, contact the Hudson Library at 518.828.1792.


The TU's Amy Griffin writes:

In 2010, Patti Smith gave some advice to young artists: "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."

These sentiments were echoed more recently when David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, wrote for Creative Time Reports that New York City is becoming increasingly inhospitable to creativity and that "the cultural part of the city — the mind — has been usurped by the top 1 percent."

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