Eggleston's Southern Gothic Travelogue at Prospect 2

Whilst Los Angeles is in the heavy throes of the city wide art invasion known as Pacific Standard Time, New Orleans is hosting its own city wide site specific exhibitions and artists’ projects happenings called Prospect 2 on view through January 2012.  Now on view at the Old U.S. Mint, which is now the Louisiana State Museum, William Eggleston's 77 minute long groundbreaking, surreal Southern Gothic  travelogue Stranded in Canton, "a film that consistently teeters on the edge of dream and nightmare states. Its nocturnal visions of bar denizens, musicians (including Furry Lewis), transvestites and a variety of semi-crazies comes off like a Cassavetes all-nighter filmed by David Lynch at his most unsettling: faces loom out of darkness, shot in infrared, displaying pale glowing skin and deep black eyes." On view at the The Louisiana State Museum at the Old U.S. Mint, 400 Esplanade Ave. 

[Outlaw Cinema] Black Biscuit

"Bewildering, vague, self-indulgent, plot-less, risky, egotistical, limpid, raw, ugly, and imperfect are perfect," declares an edict in the manifesto of Pink 8, a burgeoning "gutter filmmaking" cineast movement founded by Nottingham based Fabrizio Federico.  "We're trying to give British film an adrenaline shot, and to make a film equivalent movement of punk and lo-fi music but with a mass inspiration appeal like Cool Britannia. We dont want no budgets, or actors. This is whats happened since UK Film Funding has been cut," says Federico. A new cult film, entitled Black Biscuits, which will premier on December 12 in London, is pure outlaw cinema made by a rebellious auteur: "I had to life model to come up with money to make my film Black Biscuit. The non-plot is about a guy who wants to be an artist but gets sucked up in the sex industry. I guess it's about not waving goodbye to your dreams."

STEVEN KLEIN: TIME CAPSULE

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture presents Time Capsule, a video installation by influential American fashion photographer Steven Klein, on view until December 4 2011. Time Capsule (2011) celebrates Klein as an artist whose work is equally suited to the pages of international fashion magazines as it is presented on the walls of some of the world’s most respected art galleries and museums. The installation continues Klein’s experimentation with moving image through the depiction of the stages of one woman’s life, played by model / actress Amber Valetta, until she reaches the age of 110.  Garage Center for Contemporary Culture – 19A Ulitsa Obraztsova, Moscow.

A SHADED VIEW ON FASHION FILM Festival at ART BASEL MIAMI

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Just over one month since its Centre Pompidou Paris launch, ASVOFF (A Shaded View on Fashion Film) 4 has already made its way across the globe to Tokyo, and will now travel West making its American debut at the 10th Edition of Art Basel/Miami Beach December 1st-4th, the most prestigious art show in the Americas. The ASVOFF 4 Miami screenings, in collaboration with the Morgan Hotel Group and ACRIA (AIDS Community Research Initiative of America), will take place at the Delano Hotel in an Art Basel/Miami endorsed event, ‘ART BASEL/MIAMI LOVES FASHION FILM’. Delano Hotel – 1685 Collins Avenue  Miami Beach, FL

[AUTRE TV] Beats Take the School

Beatniks take over a school in this collaboration by James Franco & Adarsha Benjamin. Shot in NYC.

Jeanne Moreau: Enduring Allure

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“I write my own rules day by day,” Jeanne Moreau once said, and few actresses of her generation can claim to have rewritten the rules of film stardom with as much conviction. After her provocative performance in Louis Malle’s The Lovers (1958), Moreau (b. 1928) was touted as the next Brigitte Bardot, but she was always something more than an object of desire. Whether cool and cunning or frank and free-spirited, each of her characters projects a worldly intelligence; behind her heavily shadowed eyes are depths of private knowledge. As she has said, “Beyond the beauty, the sex, the titillation, the surface, there is a human being. And that has to emerge.” An accomplished stage performer who had appeared in a few B movies, Moreau was nearly thirty when Malle persuaded her to star in his first feature, Elevator to the Gallows (1958). “It was,” she later said, “the decisive moment for the rest of my life.” By the time she played the captivating Catherine in François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1961), she was at the crest of the New Wave. Moreau’s talent drew the attention of many major directors: Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Demy, Orson Welles. All of these artists are indebted to a woman whom Welles, with his usual combination of hyperbole and insight, called “the greatest actress in the world.” Text by Juliet Clark. Jeanne Moreau: Enduring Allure is currently on view until December 11 at the Pacific Film Archive at the University of Berkley. 

Rita's Opening

Rita Lino is an unabashed, self exploratory photographer based in Porto, Portugal. Her work delves deep into the psyche of the feminine in a post-modern landscape where there is no curtain to hide behind.  Rita also makes brilliant short cinematic shorts that bring her photography to life. She just sent over her latest video, entitled Rita's Opening, which is a personal statement of sorts of her art and work.

Sweet Violence

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Sweet Violence is the first museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Sanja Iveković (b. 1949, Zagreb) covers four decades of the artist's remarkable career. A feminist, activist, and video pioneer, Iveković came of age in the post-1968 period, when artists broke free from mainstream institutional settings, laying the ground for a form of praxis antipodal to official art. Part of the generation known as the Nova Umjetnička Praska (New Art Practice), Iveković produced works of cross-cultural resonance that range from conceptual photomontages to video and performance. Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence is on view at the MoMA in NYC from December 18 to March 26, 2012.

KENNETH ANGER: ICONS

MOCA Los Angeles presents Kenneth Anger: ICONS, a showcase of the films, archives, and vision of one of the most original filmmakers of American cinema, on view at MOCA Grand Avenue from November 13, 2011, through February 27, 2012. A defining presence of underground art and culture and a major influence on generations of filmmakers, musicians, and artists, Anger’s films evoke the power of spells or incantations, combining experimental technique with popular song, rich color, and subject matter drawn equally from personal obsession, myth, and the occult.

Cinema Sex Sirens

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CINEMA SEX SIRENS, published by Omnibus Press, is a unique collection of photographs of female stars of the '60s and '70s. That period marked a new era of frankness in society and the movie industry lost no time in following suit after some 25 years of censorship and self-imposed regulations. The women who became the new erotic goddesses also became world-famous and defined a generation's view of sexuality. Dave Worrall and Lee Pfeiffer's gallery illustrates a luminous collection of idealized women and offers a fascinating insight into the movies' depiction of female sexuality during the '60s and '70s. From the indisputable legends to actresses whose used their beauty to gain fame in the short-term through exploitation movies, this book provides little-known insights into their lives and careers. Cinema Sex Sirens can be found through Omnibus Press.

Alexandra Grecco

With an unyielding desire to encourage women to play dress-up in their everyday lives, Alexandra Grecco created her eponymous womenswear line. The Brooklyn-based designer pays tribute to luxurious ladies of bygone days, drawing inspiration from silent film actresses of the 1920's and the burlesque dancers of the vaudeville stage. Grecco's pieces combine clean, ethereal and feminine elements while paying attention to practicality for today. Her line incorporates sumptuous silks, delicate tulle and birdcage veiling in a color palette of blush pinks, ivory and dusty cyan to conjure the old Hollywood glamour of an earlier age. Hand-sewn headbands and gowns embroidered with vintage millinery flowers and rhinestones showcase an attention to detail that creates a one-of-a-kind, custom feeling. The 26-year old FIT graduate is a former ballet dancer and painter and would not be surprised to discover she was a traveling circus performer in another lifetime.  For Alexandrea Grecco's Spring/Summer 2012 collection director and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall directs an eccentric, chic, and cinematic fashion film featuring Erika Spring of the band Au Revoir Simone. 

Dogtooth

A hyper-stylized mixture of physical violence and verbal comedy, Dogtooth, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, is a darkly funny look at three teenagers confined to their parents’ isolated country estate and kept under strict rule and regimen — an inscrutable scenario that suggests a warped experiment in social conditioning and control. Terrorized into submission by their father, the children spend their days devising their own games and learning an invented vocabulary (a salt shaker is a “telephone,” an armchair is “the sea”) — until a trusted outsider, brought in to satisfy the son’s libidinal urges, plans the seeds of rebellion by trading VHS tapes for sexual favors.