"The Most Remarkable New Movie"-- Tomorrow 3/1

"If there's a tougher sell than a Romanian movie by a hitherto unknown director, it's a Romanian movie by an unknown director that takes two and half hours to tell the tale of a 62-year-old pensioner's final trip to the hospital. Does it help to add that The Death of Mr. Lazarescu was the great discovery of the last Cannes Film Festival and, in several ways, the most remarkable new movie to open in New York this spring?"

Read more by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, April 18, 2006:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-04-18/film/the-art-of-dying/full/

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J. Hoberman at the Movies this Friday

We invite you to attend our final event of the season, a special opportunity to view and discuss film clips and the future of cinema with major film critic J. Hoberman, a contributor at the Village Voice for more than three decades, and author of the new book about trends in 21^st century cinema, Film After Film (2012).

Among other films, Hoberman will be showing clips from animated adult feature, Waking Life, and the Polish-Japanese video game digital feature, Avalon.

 

J. Hoberman, film critic
December 7 (Friday)
Reading/Discussion — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

J. Hoberman, one of the most influential American film critics of recent decades, is admired for his wit, intellectual energy and incomparable knowledge of experimental, international, independent, and Hollywood cinema. His new book is Film After Film (2012), which argues among other things that the future of film is animation and digital-image-making, ending “the need for an actual world, let alone a camera.” Senior film critic at the Village Voice from 1988 to 2012, Hoberman started with the paper in the 1970s as a third stringer under critic Andrew Sarris. Jessica Winter of Time magazine praised his work as “elegant, erudite, ambitious, and wondrously droll arts and media criticism,” and credited him for teaching her generation of critics “how to think and write about popular culture.” A portion of the Writers Institute’s fall 2012 Classic Film Series was based on Hoberman’s list of his favorite 21st century films
(see Classic Film Series Listing).

 

For more information contact 518-442-5620 or writers@albany.edu, or visit us online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/ . You may also wish to visit our blog at http://nyswiblog.blogspot.com/, or to friend us on Facebook. 

 

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"An incredibly fluid film...."

Shawn Stone of Metroland reviews the silent film Lonesome (1928), which kicks off our film series  on Friday, September 21st.

Lonesome was suggested to us by our upcoming visitor, film critic J. Hoberman, senior critic of the Village Voice for almost a quarter century, who appears in Albany on December 7th.

From Shawn Stone's review:

"Lonesome, which was made on location in New York City (and on the Universal lot) in 1928, is the simple story of a couple of working-class young people who find each other at Coney Island, fall in love over an afternoon and evening, and then lose each other in the great mass of New Yorkers at play. Until . . .

"It’s an incredibly fluid film: the camera is constantly (but not distractingly) moving, tracking the lives of these two as they go about their day. We meet them before they meet each other; we know that they will meet each other (why else would the camera be following them so closely), but director Paul Fejos’ storytelling is so sophisticated that we are apt to miss a rather obvious point about Mary (Barbara Kent) and Jim (Glenn Tryon) that is right in front of us—and them. And the fact that Mary and Jim and the audience miss this point binds viewers even closer to the story."

More.

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