For most of the year, New Yorkers craving avant-garde films must go to the Lower East Side (Anthology Film Archives or the Film-Makers’ Cooperative) or Brooklyn (Light Industry or UnionDocs) to get their fix—save for that one time every when the avant-garde comes to midtown. The Views from the Avant-Garde series, co-curated by Mark McElhatten and Film Comment editor Gavin Smith and comprised of 17 programs showing now through Sunday night, looks especially formidable this year, with works by James Benning, Thom Andersen, Phil Solomon, and Jean-Marie Straub, among others. If you haven’t heard of any of these filmmakers, then you’ve got extra incentive to go. A particular treat looks to be a restoration of 101-year-old Manoel de Oliveira’s 1963 passion-play film Rite of Spring, showing on Sunday just a few hours before his lovely and amazing new masterpiece in the main slate, The Strange Case of Angelica.
The series began last night with films shot by Pierre Clémenti, who played the nasty, love-struck thug in Belle de Jour and who programmer-critic Michael Chaiken has called a punk with a prince’s hands. The program, following a Chaiken-organized Clémenti retrospective at Anthology in June, showcased three works Clémenti filmed between 1967 and 1978 that looked like the most aesthetically conscious home movies ever assembled—Mekas and Brakhage aside.
Souvenir, Souvenir, with its sharp, rapid edits between faces and bursts of sudden color, delights in dissolving people over animals and vice versa, as a tiger walks straight through a naked boy, whose image then fades to make way for an upright growling polar bear and a slew of friendly oxen. Positano opens with guys and a girl on a motorbike, with lots of gauzy red, blue, purple, and green soaking in around the edges of the frame. It’s a good-looking movie with naked people and comic books. The problem with these kinds of handmade films, though, is that they usually don’t add up to much more than the sum of their images, and both films offer beautiful imagery without giving that much more.
La Deuxième Femme, though, offers plenty. Beginning with a close-up of a wide-open eye over a black-and-white costume picture, the 48-minute film goes on to cram in as many media references as it can probably manage. A man walking toward the camera dissolves into TV footage of Nixon; Bob Marley in concert gets replaced with an angry, shirtless white man holding a mic. As Karloff’s Frankenstein and I Dream of Jeannie clips ensue with a bit of wit dropped in (the semi-visible shapes on TV look like sheep, until you realize they’re protesters), your mind keeps drifting back to an early shot of a man filming himself in a mirror. Moments like that make you remember an actor made this movie. The more you watch, though, the more you realize that he was a pretty good cameraman too.
The New York Film Festival runs from September 24—October 10.
This article was originally published on The House Next Door.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
