Above: Polish poster for The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1965). Designer: Jerzy Flisak.As the 55th New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, I thought I’d look back half a century at the films of the 5th edition. That 1967 festival, programmed by Amos Vogel, Richard Roud, Arthur Knight, Andrew Sarris and Susan Sontag, featured 21 new films, all but three of which were from Europe (six of them from France, 2 and 1/7 of them directed by Godard), all of which showed at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. (They also programmed Gance’s Napoleon, Mamoulian’s Applause and King Vidor’s Show People in the retrospective slots). The only director to have a film in both the 1967 festival and the 2017 edition is Agnès Varda, who was one of the directors of the omnibus Far From Vietnam and was then already 12 years into her filmmaking career.It will come as...
- 10/13/2017
- MUBI
35 Cows and a Kalishnokov
What is the bond between a tribe of Ethiopian cattle farmers, dandy gentlemen parading themselves on Brazzaville streets, and the Kinshasan fetish wrestlers who appear in 35 Cows and a Kalishnokov in the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s (Idfa) competition this year? To propose a documentary about such a bond, an act of synthesis would be necessary, one which first deconstructs the rites and peoples exhibited, creating a web of meaning that would link the rituals.
Or, as in 35 Cows and a Kalishnokov, one could make a purely aesthetic film whose theoretical basis is but a shared continent, exotic landscapes and black skin. What director Oswold von Richthofen’s documentary offers up to its (inevitably) Western viewers is an image of Africa that is all color and form—rippling musculature, exotic hues, pierced faces, wild cries—regurgitating as always the same Western myth of Africa, a...
What is the bond between a tribe of Ethiopian cattle farmers, dandy gentlemen parading themselves on Brazzaville streets, and the Kinshasan fetish wrestlers who appear in 35 Cows and a Kalishnokov in the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s (Idfa) competition this year? To propose a documentary about such a bond, an act of synthesis would be necessary, one which first deconstructs the rites and peoples exhibited, creating a web of meaning that would link the rituals.
Or, as in 35 Cows and a Kalishnokov, one could make a purely aesthetic film whose theoretical basis is but a shared continent, exotic landscapes and black skin. What director Oswold von Richthofen’s documentary offers up to its (inevitably) Western viewers is an image of Africa that is all color and form—rippling musculature, exotic hues, pierced faces, wild cries—regurgitating as always the same Western myth of Africa, a...
- 1/27/2015
- by Yaron Dahan
- MUBI
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