HISTORY LESSON and sapphic legend Natalie Clifford Barney - 1962 in her 90's her mind is sharp and she opens up

Barbara HAMMER career retrospective lecteur @ Lesley Lomen MUSEUM

 Barbara Hammer, The Hidden Hammer
Visual artist working primarily in film and video. She has made over 80 moving image works in a career that spans 40 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. Here she is LIVe and in person .. this is the Q&A that followed her lecteur

CHANTAL AKERMAN HAS DIED

Sad sad news for the entire film community The filmmaker Chantal Akerman died  a suicide  suicide at the age of 65. Her most recent  film   No Home Movie is at the New York Film Festival right now and will have an encore screening on the last day of the festival, Oct 11th, 2015

Chantal Akerman changed the landscape of film history in the same way Godard did with her rigorous filmmaking technique which forced the eye of the viewer to actual look into the entire of a frame, each frame and see what was actually in the frame. Hers was not an easy entertainment viewing pleasure. But for me it was richly rewarding and widened  my understanding of how cinema can bring life and reality alive as a light flickers across a screen in a darken room full of strangers sharing a human experience

I found NO HOME MOVIE  deeply moving as she documented her relationship with her mother as her mother moves to the final year of her life. What could have been merely sentimental becomes an almost quiet epic of how mothers and daughters negotiate the essentials of family, responsibility and mutual compassion None of this is on the surface but the reward is so rich if one one is willing to submit to Akerman's cinematic discipline ...

No Home Movie clip

Here is a primer from the British Film Institute on how to watch Chantal Akerman's films Chantal Akerman for Beginers

Chantal Akerman's death is  a great loss today to  the world of cinematic art . Thank you Chantal for the pleasure you have given me.. and to the young critics at Locarno .. how do you feel today?

#NYFF, #filminc

Tribeca Recommendation: : Regarding Susan Sontag

Tribeca Film Festival recommendation #3 REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG 
Susan Sontag was a fierce, aggressive public intellectual and one of the few woman in the 60's taken seriously by the male intellectuals of her day, Her image was everywhere for over 20 years and her name remains a touch stone for feminist role models. But little was actually know bout her private life. For the last 8 years the documentary film community knew that Nancy Kates was attempting to make public the private life of Susan Sontag and her son author David Reif was fighting her tooth and nail .. he refused to talk with her and even attempted to stop anyone of Susan's friends to cooperate with Nancy. He failed and we have a beautifully nuanced film that will surprise and even shock some of the public who only know Sontag from her independent thinking contained in books, plays an movies . Whew ...all praise to the documentary film maker who does not give up despite the difficulty and time it takes .by the way her private life sizzles with passion and is a tribute to hoe she not only managed her lovers but disciplined her self to creative work.