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Dan bids farewell with his favorite films
Everything is coming to an end: The semester, the school year, the spring, and my tenure as the Daily Cardinal's film columnist. With finals right around the corner and, for some of us, graduation just down the hall, now seems as good a time as any to reflect upon the cinematic year that was. What better way to wrap things up than with a list of the top ten films of the past school year?
Absence of avant-garde film needs to be avoided
You might not know it unless you keep up with the politics of Madison's film scene, but avant-garde cinema is presently caught in a curious position. This semester was one of the best in recent memory for local lovers of experimental filmmaking, but the end of Starlight Cinema threatens to make avant-garde films less available to UW students than ever before.
Two Badgers selected in the NFL draft
While most outgoing Badgers have played in their final competitive football game, at least three members of the 2009 Wisconsin football team have the chance to play professional football in the National Football League, as tight end Garrett Graham, defensive lineman/linebacker O'Brien Schofield and safety Chris Maragos have hooked up with NFL teams.
Costa's films worth the difficult watch
The worst that one can say about the 2010 Wisconsin Film Festival is that it nearly overshadowed what was arguably the year's most important DVD release: ""Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa,"" released by the Criterion Collection March 30. The trio of movies—none of which has received U.S. distribution beyond short runs in major city art houses—contained in this four-disc box set are three of the most aesthetically significant works of film art produced in the last two decades. For anybody who gives half a damn about cinema as an art rather than as an immersive distraction, laying eyes on all three is absolutely essential.
Wisconsin Film Festival provides five days of cinematic bliss at local theaters
For Madison cinephiles, this is the most wonderful time of the year: The 2010 Wisconsin Film Festival (WIFF) has arrived. The annual cinematic extravaganza will feature 192 films screened over five days; while this monumental amount of cinema undoubtedly contains a wealth of established masterpieces and hidden gems, it can also be pretty daunting to try to determine what, if anything, one should go see. Thus, it's no surprise that the question everyone's been asking me over the last few weeks is ""What's worth seeing?""
New exhibit stimulates
""Boys draw, girls color"": This is the dubious belief that UW-Madison seniors Ella Bainton and Meg Lord Fransee interrogate through their respective bodies of work. At once visceral and contemplative, their new tandem exhibit at the Good Style Shop on East Washington Avenue, ""New Miracle Pale in Drone,"" serves as tangible evidence that Madison's art scene is more challenging and stimulating than most likely realize.
Schmuck-fueled film scores, shows reality
It didn't take long for 2010 to yield its first great film: ""Greenberg,"" the sixth feature by writer/director Noah Baumbach, is an awesome achievement on many levels. The movie isn't a must-see due to its prickly tenderness or its stealthy hilariousness; rather, it would work in even without those commendable qualities.
The Internet improves accessibility of cinema
The Internet age has created a period of unprecedented openness in the arts. Works that were previously impossible for the masses to check out are now readily available, at least as reproductions. This proliferation of artworks is by no means a uniquely contemporary phenomenon—just ask Walter Benjamin, whose ""The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"" first published in 1935, remains the definitive text on the confrontation between the arts and popular technology. Indeed, most of Benjamin's arguments from that essay are today regarded as axiomatic, most notably his thesis that as technology gets more sophisticated, the arts get sluttier.
Exploring this weekend's Romanian Film Festival
Today, tomorrow and Saturday the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art will host an event that, despite being an annual occurrence, has a relatively small profile amongst even the film-savviest Madisonians: The Romanian Film Festival. The emergence of the so-called Romanian new wave, a young cinema born nearly 30 years after similar movements popped up throughout eastern Europe, is one of the more curious developments in recent film history. Whether ""new wave"" is the best name for this movement remains open for debate; the first film screening in the festival is a French documentary, ""The New Wave of the Romanian Cinema"" (screens 6:30 p.m. Thursday), whose title seems to imply that the movement itself has embraced its contentious moniker.
of Montreal documentary shines in Madison debut
The infamous 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner developed the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk (commonly translated as ""total work of art""), a multimedia form of artistic production that, he argued, was more effective and affecting than any of the arts on their own. For Wagner, it wasn't enough for the arts to be siblings: They had to become full-blown kissing-cousins. Of all the venues I've been to in my four years as a Madisonian, it's the Project Lodge that most reminds me of Wagner's incestuous conception of art.
Cinematic creations are collaborations
Madison movie theaters are being bum-rushed by recent releases from filmmakers commonly considered to be auteurs—directors whose distinctive artistic personalities are inscribed all over their respective oeuvres. Werner Herzog's ""Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,"" Michael Haneke's ""The White Ribbon,"" Martin Scorsese's ""Shutter Island,"" Roman Polanski's ""The Ghost Writer,"" John Woo's ""Red Cliff"" and Noah Baumbach's ""Greenberg"" will all enjoy runs on local screens this month. But before we can say whether these aforementioned movies are truly ""by"" their directors, it'd be worthwhile to take a look at the history of the auteur theory.
Herzog's style free of conventions
What to make of the mystical and suspicious German filmmaker Werner Herzog? His oeuvre is as diverse as it is reliant upon the ineffable power of found images. For each precisely staged and framed composition there's a shot whose effectiveness is largely a product of the essential strangeness of the natural world.
The cinephile's never-ending quest to see it all
These days, few people would admit that they can't stand movies. Cinema continues to offer the most seductive blend of the spectacular and the contemplative. Almost any film can be approached as a dazzling distraction or as material for intellectual heavy lifting; those familiar with the Freudian-flavored analyses of the Slovenian philosopher/psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek or the writings of Madison's own David Bordwell know that no movie is out of bounds for theoretical scrutiny. The pluralistic appeal of cinema is especially curious when one considers how unpopular literature is today as a leisurely pursuit. Movies remain attractive to both the attention-deficit and attention-surplus crowds. However, this isn't to suggest that film audiences of the world stand united.
Exhibit exemplifies U.S.
The late Studs Terkel, an American author, had the amazing ability to extract histories from people. He acted as a conduit for rich history to flow through, unabated by conventional media filters. Through Terkel we saw a different America, one overflowing with humility, honesty, misery and unbridled joy. It was an America that we all could identify with. The newest exhibit at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, ""Apple Pie: Symbols of Americana,"" engages this same America largely via the Midwest.
Movies to check out in Madison this weekend
Anybody who partakes in the relatively vibrant film scene in Madison knows that last weekend was an especially rowdy and diverse few days of cinematic activity. Wes Anderson's ""Fantastic Mr. Fox,"" my personal favorite film of 2009, went over exceptionally well with audiences at Memorial Union's Play Circle, provoking laughter with its unrelentingly pithy writing and awe with the rigorousness of its compositions.
Reading foreign films, with or without subtitles
It's been almost a month now since the renowned French filmmaker Eric Rohmer died. Rohmer's legacy is more or less uncontested: The consensus opinion is that he was responsible for some of the smartest, subtlest and, above all else, talkiest films ever made.
Defining cinematic experiences: the line between art and trash
What does it mean to see a film? To me, these types of questions are much more interesting and fruitful than the more widely posed ""Does all cinema count as art?"" As I see it, the point of talking and thinking about art is not to make art an an elite club to which the contents of the Louvre, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, ""Madame Bovary"" and ""Citizen Kane"" belong but ""Hot Tub Time Machine,"" R. Kelly, Lady Gaga and Jackson Pollock do not.
WUD Film Committee offers students opportunity to see quality foreign films
It's really too bad that, at some indeterminate point in American cultural history, having a taste for world cinema became a signifier of either one's sophistication or one's pretentiousness. Equally unfortunate is the categorical division between American films and non-American films: To speak of works such as Fritz Lang's ""M"" as being strictly ""foreign"" is to downplay the influence they have had on movies made right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. With that said, major kudos are due to WUD Film Committee for providing UW students with the opportunity to see four canonical masterpieces of world cinema on 35mm this weekend.
WUD Film Committee offers students opportunity to see quality foreign films
It's really too bad that, at some indeterminate point in American cultural history, having a taste for world cinema became a signifier of either one's sophistication or one's pretentiousness. Equally unfortunate is the categorical division between American films and non-American films: To speak of works such as Fritz Lang's ""M"" as being strictly ""foreign"" is to downplay the influence they have had on movies made right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. With that said, major kudos are due to WUD Film Committee for providing UW students with the opportunity to see four canonical masterpieces of world cinema on 35mm this weekend.