Viewing, Selecting and Writing: Criticism and Programming as Essay and Critical Exploration
A conversation with Dennis Lim
Dennis Lim writes books, reviews and short texts for catalogs and other related platforms. He also curates films. He has done so for the Lincoln Center and continues to do so for the New York Film Festival. His onstage conversations with filmmakers at that festival are remarkable, because those who know how to ask questions also understand the material deeply—and help others express themselves clearly. So, what should we ask Dennis Lim? He will likely have something to say about the relationship between taste and analysis, or between aesthetic judgment and a film’s relevance to its time. He will have something to say about how a festival proposes a vision of cinema—one that reaches into the present, the past and even the future. He will likely reflect on how the films within a festival are arranged and interrelated, almost like a work of montage. And since Lim has written two outstanding books on David Lynch and Hong Sang-soo, we will talk about both—returning to an old staple of criticism: the politics of authorship.
Moderator: Roger Koza
The Present of a Myth: Cahiers du Cinéma in the 21st Century
A conversation with Marcos Uzal
Few can step into the shoes once worn by André Bazin, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Serge Daney and so many others. Perhaps Marcos Uzal didn’t foresee such a path, but a few years ago, when the magazine was prematurely declared dead, the young critic—who had previously made his mark at Traffic and Libération—took the helm of that literary myth that once reshaped the way cinema is written about and understood. More than 70 years later, what does the magazine represent in the digital age? What is the state of auteur theory? What kind of cinema does Cahiers defend today? How does it relate to the heterogeneous tradition that gave rise to it—and to its current moment? The questions are many, but one stands out: how does it now answer the question of what cinema is, in an era when the image no longer has an intrinsic relationship with reality?
Moderator: Roger Koza
Disobedience
A conversation with Albertina Carri
Argentinian filmmaker Albertina Carri can rightly describe herself as Pasolinian: from her very first frame to the latest, a spirit of nonconformity pulses through all that she films. Her refusal to reconcile with the state of things has defined her work—always varied and experimental, open to scandal if needed, to opacity if the material calls for it, and to provocation when necessary. She films without concessions or softening. Carri has captured desire, political violence, society’s deepest taboos, and history itself. Whether in fiction or essay form, her cinema practices a politics of form that is also a form of politics—demanding us to think about images and the consequences they bear on body and soul. She recently remarked on her position toward the world: “Not only am I an antagonist of the petty bourgeoisie that universalizes subjects by gazing at its own navel, but I also stray in color, in the joy sparked by a chorus of crickets on a soundtrack, in the tenderness that bodies transmit when they feel at ease, and in the trust in both the human and non-human that cinema can convey.”
Moderator: Roger Koza