CRUELLY, MADLY, DEEPLY

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Between 1969 and his death at age 37 in 1982, brilliant enfant terrible German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 30 films and numerous television productions, including the 15-hour mini-series BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ. Even as he averaged two to three films per year, his work maintained a meticulous, rigorous style, marked by stunning shot composition, laser-precision blocking and deep characterization ranging from bitterly crystal clear to hypnotically allusive. Fassbinder returned to the same themes and fixations again and again: money, sex, pride and cruelty. Postwar Germany is often his cinematic landscape - the place of drained, falsified dreams where his characters make the most of things and act with their own best interests in mind. Fassbinder himself was plain, drug-addicted and gay, and had much in common with the outsiders he created. He was notorious for the same cruel nature seen in his films, and behaved heartlessly toward those who loved and surrounded him. Still, over the course of his short, astonishing career, he collected a team of dazzling recurring players, including cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and actresses Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann. Whether the strain of working with the director was worth the staggering output is hard to say - Ballhaus “burned out” after The Marriage of Maria Braun and went to work with Martin Scorsese. But, as film critic and ardent fan Roger Ebert wrote, “Fassbinder was a genius. That much everyone admitted.” On the 30th anniversary of his death, the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles unveils a 16-film retrospective of the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder from May 31 to June 14.

Beauty Is Embarrassing

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Beauty Is Embarrassing is a funny, irreverent, joyful and inspiring documentary featuring the life and current times of one of America’s most important artists, Wayne White. Raised in the mountains of Tennessee, Wayne White started his career as a cartoonist in New York City. He quickly found success as one of the creators of the TV show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which led to more work designing some of the most arresting and iconic images in pop culture. Most recently, his word paintings, which feature pithy and often sarcastic text statements crafted onto vintage landscape paintings, have made him a darling of the fine art world. Beauty Is Embarrassingis currently screening is select cities.

Dollywood

As part of SHOWstudio's Fashion Fetish film season, Liberty Ross collaborates with photographer Polly Borland to create Dollywood, a subversively sinister view of eroticism. Liberty explains, 'I wanted to make a film that blurred the line of primitive sexual fetishism with naive and childlike play. To me the act of dressing up, tying up and fetishism has its primal urges in childhood.' Inspired by Borland's current artwork, the provocative work tackles the taboos surrounding fetish, questioning the extent to which sexual acts have their basic roots in youthful urges.

[REVIEW] Me @ The Zoo

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Me @ The Zoo is the first feature film from the visionary directors, Valerie Veatch and Chris Moukarbel, it made its New York City premiere at MoMA PS1 last week. Zoo mirrors the perilous journey of Chris Crocker to stardom with the initiation of our digital obsession, from the first YouTube video ever posted (from which the documentary gets its title), to the monthly checks paid to the creators of viral videos. This film is more than just a bio-pic about the world's favorite Britney Spears fan, it is also a reflection on our human desire to connect and extend our roots past the original pot we were placed in. Chris is from Bristol, Tennessee which Veatch and Moukarbel captured perfectly with poetic shots of Chris in drag, strolling down main street during the fourth of July parade. The viewer gets a feel for this restrictive environment, and can draw the connections between the spastic personality who honestly wanted us to "leave Britney ALONE" and the sensitive artist that loves his family but desires for something more. As Chris shares with us every bit of his kaleidescope sexuality, from Britney look-alike to male hunk star, he proves that at any point in time you can be whoever you want, as long as you get it on camera. Me @ the Zoo will make its U.S. premiere on HBO Documentaries. Text by Angelina Dreem

The Color Wheel

The much hyped about film The Color Wheel, which opens tonight in New York, is the story of JR, an increasingly transient aspiring news-anchor, forcing her disappointing younger brother Colin to embark on a road trip to move her belongings out of her professor-turned-lover's apartment. Problem is these grown up kids do not get along and are both too obnoxious to know better. Chaos and calamity are not far behind her beat up Honda Accord. Too bad that nobody else in the world can stand either of them. Not Colin's neglectful girlfriend, nor JR's former high school friends, nor strangers they clash with at pretty much every step of their hopeless and increasingly infuriating voyage of frustration, failure and jerks. It can only be a matter of time before JR and Colin arrive at the strangest and most unsettling of resolutions and put to rest their decades of animosity, half-baked sibling rivalry and endless bickering. Resting uncomfortably somewhere between the solipsistic, unrepressed id of late Jerry Lewis, the confrontational pseudo-sexual self-loathing of Philip Roth and the black and white motels, diners and loners of Robert Frank's America, The Color Wheel is a familial comedy of disappointment and forgiveness. The film opens tonight at BAMcinématek in New York and runs until May 24.

Agnès Varda in China

Agnès Varda is displaying her works at the Hubei Museum of Fine Arts  and the Museum of Fine Arts of Wuhan until May 6 2012. She is displaying several installations, including a portico in bright red in which she has installed her photographs. Agnès Varda is a visual artist and film-maker famous for films such as Cléo from 5 to 7 which made her a burgeoning member of the Nouvelle Vague film movement. However, in the eyes of the Chinese, where she is above all else is a photographer, the same photographer who travelled through the country under Mao, in 1957. The result of this trip is a collection of photographs which have never before been displayed: smiling families wearing Mao suits, female dockers bent under their burdens. The snapshots depict China before the repression.

Fashion Fetish - Poppy De Villeneuve

Alongside the 2012 SHOWstudio Shop exhibition Selling Sex, SHOWstudio launches Fashion Fetish, a series of fashion films, performances, multi-media pieces and accompanying essays by women in fashion. The latest addition takes us on a trip to the coastline, courtesy of acclaimed photographer and film director Poppy de Villeneuve.

The Shaping of New Visions

Valie Export, Einkreisung (Encirclement) from the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations). 1976.

The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, on view this month at the MOMA in New York, covers the period from 1910 to today, offers a critical reassessment of photography's role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements—with a special emphasis on the medium's relation to Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art—and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as "New Vision" photography bore the obvious influence of "lens-based" and "time-based" works. El Lissitzky best summarized its ethos: "The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary art from April 18 to April 29, 2013.

Homocult

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Bruce LaBruce music video for Gio Black Peter

Homocult and Other Esoterica is a group show of short experimental queer films focused on magick and the occult and art works curated by Daniel McKernan. Featuring films by Genesis P-Orridge and Bruce LaBruce and artworks by Christos Andres and George Keller. McKernan says, "[Homocult is a] collection of artists & filmmakers who have an affiliation to the Generation Hex era, a blend of old school and new school. Each individual has his/her own unique interpretation of the theme of the occult and esoteric. Jason Louv, in his introduction to Generation Hex (2006), states that the book is a snapshot of those 'who are not only delving into this art of magick and science of the future, but who are coming to magical consciousness at a time when it has never been easier to find and link up with people of like minds and experience.' This is a video survey of such people. As Scott Treleaven, in the final issue of This is the Salivation Army (1999), said: 'We are the new circus. And we are the envy of the fucking World.'" On view April 6 and 7 S&S Projects 3145 S. Morgan Street, Chicago, IL.

You Killed Me First

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Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses – the films of the Cinema of Transgression that were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witness to an extraordinary radicality. In the 1980s a group of filmmakers from the Lower East Side in New York went on a collision course with the conventions of American society. Transcending all moral or aesthetic boundaries, the low budget films reveal social hardship met with sociopolitical indifference. Sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the films contain strident analyses of life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess. On view at the  KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, until April 9, is the first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression.