Peter Whitehead, via Occupy Cinema
"One of last year's best films, Ken Jacobs's Seeking the Monkey King is showing Saturday at Anthology as part of a program presented in support of Occupy Wall Street," writes J Hoberman in one of the last pieces he'll turn in at the Voice. "Covering 500 years of American history, this furious beatnik analysis makes a people's historian like Howard Zinn seem like a Chamber of Commerce booster, particularly as delivered amid [Jg] Thirlwell's industrial-strength rhapsodic noise drone, against the seething apocalypse of melting glaciers and crystallized lava that soon becomes an ongoing Rorschach test." See, too, David Phelps's essay. Seeking the Monkey King is "showing with several of Jacobs's short works (19th-century stereopticon slides treated as material for a cyclotron) and excerpts from his 3D footage of Zuccotti Park. Other films showing in the series are An Injury to One (2002), Travis Wilkerson's lucid,...
"One of last year's best films, Ken Jacobs's Seeking the Monkey King is showing Saturday at Anthology as part of a program presented in support of Occupy Wall Street," writes J Hoberman in one of the last pieces he'll turn in at the Voice. "Covering 500 years of American history, this furious beatnik analysis makes a people's historian like Howard Zinn seem like a Chamber of Commerce booster, particularly as delivered amid [Jg] Thirlwell's industrial-strength rhapsodic noise drone, against the seething apocalypse of melting glaciers and crystallized lava that soon becomes an ongoing Rorschach test." See, too, David Phelps's essay. Seeking the Monkey King is "showing with several of Jacobs's short works (19th-century stereopticon slides treated as material for a cyclotron) and excerpts from his 3D footage of Zuccotti Park. Other films showing in the series are An Injury to One (2002), Travis Wilkerson's lucid,...
- 1/7/2012
- MUBI
Dirk Bogarde is on superb form in Fassbinder's eerie adaptation of Nabokov's novel about a Russian émigré's breakdown
Vladimir Nabokov's novel is adapted by Tom Stoppard into an icy, psycho-melodramatic nightmare in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 film, now on rerelease in a restored print. Dirk Bogarde dominates the screen in superbly ironic, fastidious, self-lacerating form, variously appearing in clean-shaven, moustached and full-bearded guises. He plays Hermann, an émigré Russian businessman in 1930s Berlin, uneasy about his Jewish roots with Nazis on the rise, and living in a elaborately furnished apartment with his wife Lydia (Andréa Ferréol) with whose bizarre sex-kitten mannerisms and lack of refinement he is exasperated yet infatuated. This elegant Hermann is to end his career as a twitchy, dishevelled fugitive from the law in various lakeside Swiss hotels: in these film's final scenes, Fassbinder may have intended a droll reminder of Nabokov's own death, one year before this film was made,...
Vladimir Nabokov's novel is adapted by Tom Stoppard into an icy, psycho-melodramatic nightmare in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 film, now on rerelease in a restored print. Dirk Bogarde dominates the screen in superbly ironic, fastidious, self-lacerating form, variously appearing in clean-shaven, moustached and full-bearded guises. He plays Hermann, an émigré Russian businessman in 1930s Berlin, uneasy about his Jewish roots with Nazis on the rise, and living in a elaborately furnished apartment with his wife Lydia (Andréa Ferréol) with whose bizarre sex-kitten mannerisms and lack of refinement he is exasperated yet infatuated. This elegant Hermann is to end his career as a twitchy, dishevelled fugitive from the law in various lakeside Swiss hotels: in these film's final scenes, Fassbinder may have intended a droll reminder of Nabokov's own death, one year before this film was made,...
- 1/6/2012
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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