This coming Saturday, Not Coming to a Theater Near You presents Jia Zhangke's rarely screened 2007 documentary, Useless, at the 92Y Tribeca. Leo Goldsmith opens a new series, Jia Zhangke's Migrations, for which Not Coming contributors will be reviewing all of Jia's features:
Jia's vision of China is both a gritty appraisal of a lurching economy and massively destabilizing reconstruction projects, and a phantasmagoria of the intimate desires of its ordinary citizens. Documentary realism vies with the simulacra of contemporary life: cellphone daydreams explode in flash animation, UFOs rise above the Three Gorges Dam project, everyday banalities mix alchemically with the glimmering seductions of popular culture. Jia's is a cinema of contradictions, of fact against fiction, of bitter memory against the utopias of post-socialism. But most of all, it's defiantly a cinema of the present — not a forecast of the glories of the China to come, but an ode to a...
Jia's vision of China is both a gritty appraisal of a lurching economy and massively destabilizing reconstruction projects, and a phantasmagoria of the intimate desires of its ordinary citizens. Documentary realism vies with the simulacra of contemporary life: cellphone daydreams explode in flash animation, UFOs rise above the Three Gorges Dam project, everyday banalities mix alchemically with the glimmering seductions of popular culture. Jia's is a cinema of contradictions, of fact against fiction, of bitter memory against the utopias of post-socialism. But most of all, it's defiantly a cinema of the present — not a forecast of the glories of the China to come, but an ode to a...
- 5/24/2011
- MUBI
Flicker Alley will release the rarely seen 1929 Norweigan silent film epic Laila on DVD on May 17.
Alice O’Fredericks (l.) and Mona Mårtenson share a moment in Laila.
The romantic melodrama movie stars Mona Martenson as Laila, a young girl separated from her parents as a baby and raised by a wealthy reindeer owner Aslag (Peter Malberg) in the frozen tundra of Scandinavia. Though she is returned a year later, Laila grows into a young woman of two worlds, at home with both her settled and nomadic upbringings. Laila soon finds herself in a love triangle with her foster brother Mellet (Henry Gleditsch) and her cousin Anders (Harald Schwenzen), played out against the backdrop of an encroaching plague.
Directed by Danish-German filmmaker and noted cinematographer George Schnéevoigt, Laila was digitally restored by the Norwegian Film institute in 2006 and is now being presented in this new edition with the cooperation of...
Alice O’Fredericks (l.) and Mona Mårtenson share a moment in Laila.
The romantic melodrama movie stars Mona Martenson as Laila, a young girl separated from her parents as a baby and raised by a wealthy reindeer owner Aslag (Peter Malberg) in the frozen tundra of Scandinavia. Though she is returned a year later, Laila grows into a young woman of two worlds, at home with both her settled and nomadic upbringings. Laila soon finds herself in a love triangle with her foster brother Mellet (Henry Gleditsch) and her cousin Anders (Harald Schwenzen), played out against the backdrop of an encroaching plague.
Directed by Danish-German filmmaker and noted cinematographer George Schnéevoigt, Laila was digitally restored by the Norwegian Film institute in 2006 and is now being presented in this new edition with the cooperation of...
- 4/22/2011
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
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