WordPress and I haven’t been besties, so please go to my Too Early, Too Late Tumblr, where I keep house these days.

from Zodiac (2007, David Fincher)

Robert Gardner

23 February 2010

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Early February (2010, 8 minutes 3 seconds, DV, sound)

Before humanity can come to grips with the cataclysmic loss of life in Haiti, there are many places where one can go to financially assist the devastated region. Here are some of them:

Doctors Without Borders

Partners In Health

Yéle

American Red Cross

In order of preference:

and one track for good measure:

Erik Satie, Je te Veux, from Pièces pour Guitare

Opening credits to Jacques Tati’s Playtime

If Beau Travail continues to be one of the most daunting examples of engagement in pure cinema in film history, 35 rhums, next to Claire Denis’ masterpiece, feels like an afterthought. In a good way. Consider it her Broken Flowers to Dead Man: deeply personal, evocative, and engaged, but overly mannered, precise, and visually specific. Indeed, when 35 rhums shoots for the stars, it does so in odd places: at a bar in a rainstorm, in the deep grass on the German coast, and in working class backdrops. If Denis proved anything with Beau Travail, it was her ability to be suggestive with her visual and aural ellipses, allowing more triumphant moments, such as the scenes in discos, thrust themselves at the audience in utter shock, moving the film to new, remarkable heights.

It’s seemingly impossible to not compare each successive Denis film with her greatest work, in part because it was so revealing and cinema is still reacting to it. Perhaps that isn’t fair to 35 rhums, which for all of its faults, namely its reliance on verbal communication to dictate action, is a truly wonderful and uneven film: smoky, slow-burning, and contemplative.

Broadcast and The Focus Group – Witch Cults.

The cover of Karen Dalton’s It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best.

In a week, I will be relocating from Upstate New York to lovely Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I haven’t used this space lately, part of which is due to my upcoming move, but mostly I haven’t felt the urge to write about film (or music or whatever) at all. Life in Binghamton has been less than inspiring, so I hope that with the change of scenery will push me back into posting on this thing regularly.

So, in the coming weeks, I will do my best to update this blog, write about what I see and hear (and maybe include photographs I take), and perhaps remake it as something a bit more interesting and constant. The NYFF this year is an embarrassment of riches, so at the very least I will post my thoughts on titles I see them, though I hope it expands after that. Until then…