Image courtesy of Bushwick Film Festival

7th Annual Bushwick Film Festival 
October 2-5, 2014
Multiple locations
Brooklyn, NY
bushwickfilmfestival.com

The post 7th Annual Bushwick Film Festival appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Courtesy of the artist.

As an artist, working in various projects, I mainly focus on video art and paintings. Although I have a series of artwork based on a specific concept, the final artwork is abstract so it can be interpreted differently by each viewer. For my paintings I use plastic colors because they allow me to intervene directly in my artwork. I use the adventitious act so that my instinct can prevail over my academic knowledge of art. Therefore, I like the balance between these two elements. I get inspired by my colleagues when working together in team projects and by directors like Quentin Tarantino.

artiagallery.com

The post Dina Hasiakou appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

The films feature actors, often the artist himself or Jean-Luc Verna, dressed as women, playing characters from films such as Psycho and Dressed to Kill. What may come across as humorous at first glace—actors with bad wigs and imperfect editing, such as tapping feet and scribbling pens that don’t quite match the film’s audio—raise questions surrounding narrative, film theory, and gender identity. Clearly, Dellsperger’s versions are not finessed objects, like their Hollywood doppelgängers. The films in “Body Double” are evasive art objects, straddling the line between appropriation and creation. Although these works are nearly copies of the original versions, the films take on new meaning and unique significance in a larger conversation surrounding the depiction of nontraditional identities in popular media.

The works in “Body Double” subvert the traditional male gaze of feminist film theory. It’s not quite clear who is the intended viewer of Dellsperger’s films. In Body Double 13 (After Saturday Night Fever), the artist is dressed as two different characters, both women, who look amorously into each other’s eyes and spin around one another while the Bee Gee’s “More Than a Woman” plays in the background. The film’s effect is bizarre and ironic, bordering on kitsch. The original narrative is disrupted, and it no longer matters whether you are familiar with the source material or not. Dellsperger is challenging tropes that pervade Hollywood cinema and shape the way that we view film. “Body Double” uses humor as a vehicle to confront broader issues of representation and identity in popular media. These are provocative works disguised as satire.

The post Body Double: Brice Dellsperger at Team Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Loop Barcelona
June 5-7, 2014
Enrique Granados 3
Barcelona
Spain
loop-barcelona.com

The post Loop Barcelona appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

NAB: What do you look for in movies that you see?
AOS: I like to be surprised. I like to feel some human reality has been illuminated.

NAB: Who would you say has had the biggest influence in the field of film?
AOS: Thomas Edison

NAB: What is the state of film now?
AOS: The state of film is that it is almost no longer “film” in the technical, photochemical sense. At the same time, moving pictures are everywhere, and there is more cinema in our daily lives that would have been imaginable even a generation ago.

NAB: Where do you see the field of film headed?
AOS: Film has been dying since the introduction of sound. It kept dying through the rise of television, home video, and now the Internet. I expect it to continue its death spiral for another 100 years or so.

NAB: What is your favorite movie genre, along with your favorite movie, and why?
AOS: I don’t have a favorite genre, unless “Italian” counts. I love just about anything made in Italy between 1945 and 1970, and also anything that shows the influence of those films. I like the naturalistic look, the theatricality of the post-synch sound, the sound of the Italian language. If I had to single out a favorite it might be “La Dolce Vita.” “La Dolce Vita” presents both a distillation of history–the West in a moment of what would turn out to be a perpetual, slow-moving, terminal crisis—and also a beautiful cinematic world. I have never been able to resist the desire to live in the world, or the fantasy, on some days, that I already do.

NAB: Who is your favorite actor and why?
AOS: At the moment I like what Joaquin Phoenix is doing. In his last few performances—thinking of “The Immigrant,” “The Master,” “Her”—he has completely resisted playing his characters as types. That is not easy to do—most actors slide back into familiar, pre-made ideas of the kinds of people their characters are, and in each of these cases he could have done that. There’s a way of playing an unstable alcoholic, a suave deceiver, an anti-social nerd, but the characters are none of those things. They are unpredictable, original and volatile in ways that are very rare in screen acting.

NAB: Who is your favorite actress and why?
AOS: Marion Cotillard. She is an actress of limitless bravery and supernatural poise, who is both beauty and beast.

NAB: Who is your favorite director and why?
AOS: This past year it was the Coen Brothers, among active American directors. The Coen brothers just now seem completely free to do what they want to do, and utterly confident in their story-telling and visual powers. “Inside Llewyn Davis” is by far the most perfectly realized movie of 2013.

NAB: What do you most enjoy about your job?
AOS: I love the variety of movies I get to see, and the way that movie permits me to travel to places I would otherwise never go, and know them in a way a tourist never could.

The post Nicholas Alexander Boyd Opens The World of A.O. Scott appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

CM: There is a palpable emotional force that is present, a back story to your work that is very connected to your psyche, even when the narrative is clear, there is ambiguity, you are still leaving a lot to the audience.
OH: Basically it’s about my Dad, my relationship with my father. My father is always present in my life and work. He was a truck driver and when I was five years old he had a truck accident that left him paralyzed from his chest down. I have no memory of him walking, for me he was always in a wheelchair. Eventually I became interested in art and I had this vision of lifting him up and put him up on an unexpected spot just for a photograph. I wanted to place him on a big rock, a building, a ladder—an inaccessible platform and look up toward him. When I grew up I grew taller and taller and he always stayed the same height because he was in a wheelchair. So, my idea was to lift him up and look up at him, changing the angle of looking. This film has developed from this childhood longing.

CM: You went to great lengths. Your father wasn’t able to be physically available in your life since you were five. That physical burden made visible or manifest in 50 Blue with not only your brother assisting him by wheeling him across the Israeli landscape, but you include your family and the community to raise him up the platform you had built. You physically pushed those limits. 
OH: Right, when you growing up with an un-walking Dad you think of accessibility all the time. You think of motion, you see everything as a physical feat. Motion and accessibility became major issues in my life. The simple action of climbing the stairs becomes a huge challenge. I started to look at the world through my father’s disability. Its not just any person, its my dad—the person that set the example for me as a little boy. So it became a major issue, the burden, the hardships, the incapability. I think it’s also present in the situations that I develop in the films. Everything is awkward and heavy and cumbersome. People push big wheels uphill, they carry huge poles, it all comes from this primordial desire of mine to see my invalid dad on top of an inaccessible spot.

Film still from The Tractor, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

CM: The mind-body connection somehow was disrupted or interrupted for you. There is a physicality that you are questioning always. The hoisting of the rope—it doesn’t take one person, it takes many people to make this happen. 
OH: I think that’s another context story, I grew up in a kibbutz. It’s a small community, everybody knows each other, everybody depends on each other. It’s an ideology driven organization that is based on communist ideas of social equality and sharing. The community is like a big family that provides for its members, it creates living conditions of great dependence.

CM: That is in complete opposition to being here in America.
OH: Of course it’s a magnificent contrast. I think my work tries to explore the boundaries where the individual ends and the community begins. I seek the tension between the private and the collective. There is a theme that repeats in several of my works in which the entire society is being recruited to rescue one of their sons, this is where I manifest this tension. I also play with how much the identities are obscured, because the participants are usually covered.

CM: They are anonymous. 
OH: Yes, they look and act like an ant farm, everyone fills their role silently.

CM: You make collaboration happen in Israel from here. You have this ability to get everyone involved in your films, and you are about to go and physically make work with people again in the Ein-Harod museum in Israel. How are you able to make that happen in Israel from here?
OH: Maybe because I am in between, an insider, and an outsider at the same time. I left the Kibbutz and live in New York now, it gives me the opportunity to create these kind of spectacles. Since I come with the title of an artist, people actually go along with me. It’s really rewarding. In Nothing New I had a 90 year-old member, his name is also Oded. He came to me while filming and said that he hadn’t seen so many people together working in the field in 25 years. This is something I will remember forever. It’s very hard to convince people to participate, but with every production it becomes easier because the circle grows bigger and bigger. I started with ten people in my first film and it became 25, then it became a couple hundred. It’s a powerful experience to see all these people actually doing something together, and there is no incentive other than the pure idea of making art together.

CM: You are touching on another important component of the work though. In the kibbutz lifestyle community is first, this is key to the work you are doing.
OH: Yes, definitely. The context of my personal background, where and how I grew up, this is the junction where the community and the individual intersect and become present in my work. I try to create that equation.

CM: Even though there are no words but still a narrative, you have developed a strong visual language.
OH: Yes, in a way when you work with people in the field it’s exactly that. You don’t have to communicate with people verbally. As a worker in a factory you know your role in the assembly line and you know that each one must just do his job. There is no need for unnecessary distractions. You work together as an integral organized group that functions as a body together. For me talking is a distraction, there is no need for it in my films.

There are so many things that are being communicated without saying a thing, so many visual codes. Everything is something that tells the story of who you are. It’s the same in the kibbutz, but in a very different way. The codes are different, for example how dirty your clothes are, how rugged your hands, how strong your grip feels when you shake hands.

CM: The visual language is tied to who the person is and what they do with their day, which makes the mind-body connection so present in the work.
OH: There are many visual codes. I think that what makes the mind-body connection is the strict authenticity. The participants are Kibbutz members, not just random actors, and they really work hard out there to create those spectacles. In my last piece I had a 75 yr old who broke his back on set, it wasn’t nice. I went to visit him in the hospital and he was so happy for the opportunity to participate. He is OK now. People work hard and you can sense it in the intensity of the actions that are being performed. For the short time of filming it’s a mini-scale utopia in a bubble. I think there is art that can bring people together, I try to integrate that notion into the visual language that I continue to develop and work on.

odedhirsch.com

The post Community Organisms: Charlotte Meyer talks with Oded Hirsch appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

In the events of WWII Belarus lost a quarter of its population and many villages still remain wastelands. There are still some gaps left over between what can’t be said and what hasn’t been understood or properly reflected on. Sergei Loznitsa, Belarus born, tries to bridge those gaps and makes us do exactly what we don’t want to do—be enclosed in a nightmarish existential reality where human nature is examined and stripped down to bare bones.

Similar to some of the most important historical films, which have often not been very pleasing or comfortable, Loznitsa’s In the Fog is hard to swallow. Based on the novel by Belarusian writer Vasil Bykov, the film takes place in German occupied Belarus during the year 1942. A wrongly accused man, Sushenya (Vladimir Svirski) accepts his doomed fate and readily takes on a journey with his would-be executioners Burov (Vlad Abashin) and Voityk (Sergei Kolesov). Walking forlornly through the woods, they are looking for a place to carry out the sentence when Burov is suddenly shot and Voityk flees for safety.

Fate, humanity, and free will are being questioned throughout the entire film in which Sergei Loznitsa seems to relate war as an external factor produced by internal conditions. In the beautiful visual choreography of Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, the vastness of the forest with all its hidden dangers and thickening fog only reflect the uncertainty and helplessness of characters’ position. It is at this point that Sushenya chooses to stay with wounded Burov and carries him on his shoulders, making a vivid allusion to Christ carrying his cross.

Unlike most war films that would incorporate battle scenes and crowds of actors, Loznitsa manages to reveal a humanistic tragedy set to the background of war, using only three main characters. With occasional flashbacks to their past, the director penetrates into their human behavior in a Dostoevsky-like fashion. Sushenya, who fails to persuade anyone, including his wife of his innocence, is left with a single question; “how is a human being able to change so fast?” All the fever of hesitation, unease, and suspicion in the air make the choices of Loznitsa’s characters ever more poignant and dramatic.

By Masha Froliak

Masha also had a chance to conduct an interview with Sergei Loznitsa about the film:

Masha Froliak: War, or outer and inner destruction are common subjects for many of your works. Why?

Sergei Loznitsa: There is something personal in it and perhaps it doesn’t only concern me, but others as well. Something very significant was broken and it is sad. I want to get back to that point of rupture, to understand what happened or at least to re-live that experience.

MF: How important is a re-thinking of the past in your work?

SL: I wouldn’t say re-thinking, I would say understanding of the past. Then the question is–is it important to understand anything at all about ourselves? Everything that connects us to the past exists in our present. Time doesn’t move linearly towards the events in our lives. Certain problems freeze unresolved; and even though the situation itself belongs to the past it may still trouble us with its uncertainty in the present. In order to understand what happens in the present we need to look again at those events of the past where our current condition stays still, awaiting that resolving effort.

MF: Do you think that the whole tragedy of war can be portrayed with just three actors?

SL: The whole tragedy of war can’t be portrayed with any film. One can only portray a short personal evidence in the background of this larger catastrophe.

MF: Your documentaries are so visually beautiful that they seem staged and your feature film In the Fog seems almost too realistic. Where is the boundary between history and fantasy?

SL: Everything in cinema is a fantasy. And what is most interesting is that it is a fantasy of the viewer. You say it is too realistic however it is not clear what that means exactly. Any film is staged. I chose a location, a subject, and I place a camera. Everything the camera records is evidence of what happens in front of it. After which begins a fantasy and a variety of interpretations, which creators of the film think they are able to control.

MF: Please tell your thoughts about the last scene when the main character makes his final decision.

SL: I don’t have thoughts regarding the last scene. It is a story, a story that ends that way. Why does it end this way? What is the story about? That’s what a viewer should think about.

MF: Are you fully satisfied with any of your films?

SL: So far I have been lucky. I have always been satisfied with my works. Sometimes this feeling comes with time. As Volodya Golovnitskyi, a sound producer I work with said, “If you don’t like the film, watch it again.”

MF: Are you currently working on a new film and what is it going to be about?

SL: At the moment I am working on a short documentary and preparing for a feature film. It will be called “ Babyn Yar.“  It is a film about the tragic events that happened in the fall of Kiev in 1941.

The post Loznitsa’s In the Fog and an Interview with the Director appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

In her series of photos Women of Allah and The Book of the Kings, she tackles the delicate subject of her cultural heritage – a certain emotional and intellectual commitment in which Iranian women make to honour their great civilization, while at the same time rebelling against that tradition. We see a similar kind of attitude in Marjane Satrapi’s work, primarily in her book and subsequent film Persepolis. Her paintings are dark and expressionistic, but extremely sophisticated. Neshat takes a different approach, imposing a more severe, black and white approach to the world where she came from. Her stance is even more traditional or nostalgic, as she left Iran at the age of 17 for the United States, and as such has maintained a complicated relationship to her native country.

Neshat combines in her images a mixture of slick western imagery with the letters in Farsi. She is aware of her rich tradition, but she never blatantly speaks of her anxiety nor makes an overtly political commentary. As she remembers ancient battlefields, warriors enraptured in the games of chess and strategy, and soldiers with their hearts pierced and bleeding, we are made highly aware of her outlook in this contemporary moment. Neshat is acutely aware of the fact that Iran is composed of different nations and various religions. As she depicts ancient rites of the Zoroastrians, we feel that she is close to that Tower of Silence where the dead bodies go to rest. The profound questions in regards to life and death are always at the center of her work. Her understanding of the complexities of this diverse international life are what keep her work at the forefront, positioning her amongst an elite group of contemporary artists.

The post Close to the Tower of Silence: Shirin Neshat by Nina Zivancevic appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.