Jenny Conte

The festival is just a week away, and I’d like to share some great articles I’ve bookmarked that may excite your interest and aid in your selection of festival programs.

This article about the newly restored Burroughs: The Movie, a rare documentary made with the full creative participation of William S. Burroughs, contains a clip of Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs together that will whet your appetite for more.

The New York Times was very enthusiastic about Rumstick Road, Ken Kobland’s video of an early, legendary autobiographical performance by Spalding Gray (Swimming to Cambodia) with the Wooster Group. It deals with the suicide of Gray’s mother, an act that haunted Gray until he took his own life. The Wooster Group’s archivist, Clay Hapaz, is coming to HCAF to present and discuss the film.

Jonathan Demme’s film of Andre Gregory’s production of Ibsen’s A Master Builder, translated by and starring Wallace Shawn, has divided critics. I loved it, and will be forever grateful to Demme/Shawn/Gregory for exposing me to this amazing play. Wonder how Wallace Shawn translated a play whose language he does not know? Read this amazing interview with him to find out.

Joanna Hogg is one of the most exciting new directors at work today. One element that makes this British artist so exciting is the way she foregrounds architecture over character in her narratives. This is most apparent in her latest work, Exhibition, which she discusses in Artforum here.

I was knocked out by the short dance film, Angsters, starring the Revolve Dance Company of Spring, Texas. When I asked dance writer Nancy Wozny (whom I often consult about dance films I’m considering for the festival) if she knew anything about Revolve, she sent me this, evidence that the company was a cherished discovery of hers. Lucky for us and the viewers who attend Revolve on Camera, Revolve will be dancing live at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, accompanying our projection of Angsters and other short dance films directed by Benjamin and Heather Epps.

Speaking of dance, Elizabeth Streb, dance action hero, is actually coming with director Catherine Gund to present their explosive film Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity. Check out a dialogue between Elizabeth and Catherine here, then come to Sundance Cinemas to meet them.

While our feature film premieres (Wild, The Imitation Game, The Sound and the Fury, etc.) are grabbing most of the press coverage, festival regulars know that the short films are often our strongest selections. This year, the quality of the shorts we’ve gathered is pretty spectacular.

There are a couple of archival discoveries, neglected films by well-known filmmakers, I’m very excited to share. In 1990, Robert Frank made a film called C’est Vrai! that is a continuous 60-minute shot filmed on the streets of New York, during which staged fictional and unstaged documentary events transpire before the camera. I was not aware of this film at all, until Marian Luntz, who oversees the Robert Frank film collection housed at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, told me it might be the right film to show to celebrate Frank’s 90^th birthday and to tie in with our “Street Scenes” programming. Frank is, in the view of many, the greatest of American street photographers, but the street has not been a prominent milieu of his films. This film was a revelation to me, for both its content and its masterful photographic style.

Another surprise was the film Bronx Baptism, made in 1980 by our featured guest artist DeeDee Halleck with Babette Mangolte and, believe it or not, sculptor Richard Serra. It’s a neglected masterpiece, I believe, capturing a miraculous baptism ceremony in a Pentecostal church in the Bronx. Halleck is a well-known media activist, yet many of her admirers are unaware of her lifelong collaborations with important visual artists, including Serra, Robert Smithson, and Nancy Holt. These creations, including Bronx Baptism, will be featured in the Brandon Gallery free program DeeDee Halleck: Collaborations with Artists.  Coincidentally, another great artist Halleck assisted was Robert Frank, and she will talk about her work on his short film Keep Busy, on the same program as C’est Vrai!

Two of my favorite films of the year are short films about the cinema, and are jammed together in one program on November 16. Mati Diop’s 1000 Suns is about the star of her uncle Djibril Diop Mambety’s African classic Touki Bouki, and how he’s faring in the shadow of that film today, while Deborah Stratman’s Hacked Circuit is a tour-de-force reconstruction of the foley sound effects used in a scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.

If you like short narrative films, the most buzzed about one of the year, as you’ll see by the accolades on the film’s website, is Tim Guinee’s One Armed Man, adapting Horton Foote’s short play. Guinee, an accomplished actor who began his training at HSPVA, elicits phenomenal performances from his film actors, and will present his film twice during the festival, on November 13 and 16. You will find a few knockouts in this year’s Texas Filmmakers Showcase, including two films from women directors who are clearly going places– Annie Silverstein’s astonishing, beautifully observed Skunk, and Kat Candler’s electrifying Black Metal, which she is in the process of turning into an upcoming feature, following this year’s remarkable debut, Hellion. We’re showing the Showcase on November 14 and repeating it as part of our Spotlight on Texas section November 17-20, because it is, far and away, the best compilation I’ve seen from the Houston Film Commission’s annual series.

Finally, three of the most esteemed American experimental filmmakers are coming to our festival, and screening new and classic short works. I was familiar with James Nares’ amazing action paintings, and had heard about his films,  but had never seen them before this year. I believe now, as I do with Warhol, that the films, gems of often humorous, minimalist action, are as fine if not finer than the paintings. I particularly recommend the free presentation of Street (2012) and Pendulum (1976) on November 13 at the Menil, but that tantalizing pair should draw you back for Nares’s showing of thirteen more films on November 15 at the Brandon.

Inspired early in their careers by Helen Levitt, James Agee, and Janice Loeb’s 1955 classic In the Street, Ken Jacobs and Jem Cohen will present and discuss the film, and show their own works made under its influence. Both Jacobs and Cohen have broadened the horizons of street photography with their photographic and cinematic experiments on Polaroid (Cohen) and in 3D (Jacobs), all on view in the Brandon Gallery Street Scenes exhibition. Both have, coincidentally, applied their street photography skills to capturing, with their engaged, poetic, and idiosyncratic eyes, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, as will be seen in Jem Cohen’s Same Street, Different Worlds and Ken Jacobs’ Blankets for Indians, both at Sundance Cinemas.

Picturing you scanning this website, I feel sympathy for your plight. A film festival is a thicket of unfamiliar titles, many of which will become more familiar when the films are released in the months ahead. Several may get major award nominations, others will get great reviews that will spark your interest and then, inevitably, your regret: “Didn’t that play at HCAF a few months ago? Why didn’t I catch it then?”

So the purpose of my annual introduction is to help you navigate through the wilderness, like Reese Witherspoon in Wild (one of the films we’re showing, by the way, which is likely to rack up awards).

Our festival’s focus is, as always, films about the visual, performing, and literary arts; so the clearest way to navigate through the program is by following the art forms that most interest you. Some arts are touched upon, like architecture, whose ambassador is Joanna Hogg’s striking feature Exhibition, and fashion, beautifully represented by Dior and I with its director Frédéric Tcheng and the screening’s host, Lynn Wyatt. As I previewed films over the last year, three art forms — literature, photography, and theater — emerged with compelling stories and subjects that have grabbed healthy chunks of our 2014 program.

The focus on literature includes films about two of the most important writers of the twentieth century, William Burroughs (Burroughs: The Movie) and Susan Sontag (Regarding Susan Sontag). But the emphasis is on literary adaptation, and that includes inventive cinematic translations of Edgar Allan Poe (Man of The Crowd, presented by Brazilian director Marcelo Gomes), William Faulkner (James Franco’s The Sound and the Fury, with producer Lee Caplin), Wild (from the Cheryl Strayed memoir), and A Lesson Before Dying (by Ernest P. Gaines). The most creative literary adaptation I came across this year was a college sport I could hardly believe exists, called Quidditch, adapted from Harry Potter, and documented entertainingly in the film Mudbloods.

 The center of our literary focus, however, happens to be the most esteemed of cinema’s literary adaptors, our 2014 Levantine Cinema Arts Award honoree, James Ivory. The first feature film Ivory directed was an adaptation of a novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The Householder, which he and his partner Ismail Merchant convinced her to adapt as her own first screenplay. Ivory and Jhabvala collaborated 21 more times, including the three adaptations of modern novels Ivory will present here: The City of Your Final Destination, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, and The Remains of the Day. The City of Your Final Destination, Ivory’s most recent film, was Jhabvala’s final screenplay. Ivory and City’s novelist, Peter Cameron, will talk about the translation of book into film, and their memories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Photography is the second art form we’re emphasizing this year. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People features, of course, acclaimed talents like Gordon Parks, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson. But it also delves provocatively into vernacular family photography. Director Thomas Allen Harris is inviting Houstonians to show and tell Third Ward family photographs at the “Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow” that will follow the screening in the Eldorado Ballroom.

Most of our attention to photography this year is directed towards the genre of street photography. It is the 90^th birthday year of the great street photographer Robert Frank, and, with the help of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, we’ve excavated a rarely screened street masterwork by Frank, C’est Vrai! That film’s continuous, hour-long careen through the streets of New York is complemented by the dazzling Street, by James Nares. Nares stretches three minutes of high-speed photography to 62 minutes, capturing countless, wondrous images of street activity and portraiture. You can see Street in the Menil Collection lobby projected theatrically on Thursday night, or come to the Brandon Gallery, where it will be on view as an installation along with street videography and photography by Ken Jacobs, Jem Cohen, and Cheryl Dunn.

Theater is the third privileged art in this year’s program. Juliette Binoche , who appears as a photojournalist in 1,000 Times Goodnight, also represents the theatre arts by appearing as an actress returning to the stage in Olivier Assayas’ film, Clouds of Sils Maria.

The great Texas playwright Horton Foote returns to the screen through the beautifully directed film adaptation of his short play, One Armed Man. Visiting director Tim Guinee is an accomplished actor, director, and HSPVA alumnus, and is also Foote’s son-in-law.

Shakespeare is the playwright most people consider the world’s greatest, and the implications of that intimidating stature for actors and directors who tackle him, is explored in the lively and illuminating ‘Bardumentary,’ Muse of Fire. One of Shakespeare’s most imaginative directorial interpreters, Julie Taymor, who is interviewed in Muse of Fire, also graces our opening night with a new film of her recent, stunningly inventive theatrical production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Julie Taymor’s visit is the centerpiece of our particular focus this year on New York’s greatest avant-garde theater artists. You will also find here the recently completed video of The Wooster Group’s classic performance of Rumstick Road, a wrenching autobiographical work by Spalding Gray made well before Swimming to Cambodia, to be presented by Wooster Group archivist Clay Hapaz. The Mabou Mines theater company, including Joanne Akalaitis and David Warrilow, populate Robert Frank’s Keep Busy, which will be presented by one of that film’s crew members, DeeDee Halleck. (Halleck is coming to the festival to present not only the media activism for which she is widely known, but her important collaborations with artists, including Frank, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, and Nancy Holt). Finally, theater artist Andre Gregory is represented by Jonathan Demme’s film of his many-years-in-the-making theater work, Ibsen’s A Master Builder, starring Wallace Shawn.

Our focus on theater expands into a broader interest in performance, with a special appearance by choreographer and action architect, Elizabeth Streb, accompanying Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity. “Live cinema” performances abound in our programming this year, as always, with live dance and film with the Revolve Dance Company (Revolve on Camera: The Performances), video and performance art by Deke Weaver (Wolf), and a live Nervous Magic Lantern performance at the Aurora Picture Show by Ken Jacobs.

Jacobs, a legendary avant-garde filmmaker for over fifty years, also has 3D films screening at Sundance Cinemas and 3D street photography on view at the Brandon Gallery. So there is a Ken Jacobs “mini-festival” within the larger festival that I encourage you to seek out. His political, abstract expressionist cinematic art, first exposed to me when I was his student many years ago, has had a profound impact on my life, and I am thrilled to share it and all the films of this year’s festival with our audience in Houston.

Last weekend, a celebrated artist we had been pursuing for the past couple of weeks accepted our invitation for opening night. A great director who will receive our Levantine Cinema Arts Award had confirmed a few weeks earlier. Now, we all have to wait patiently for October 21, when I can spill their names at our annual launch event and on our beautiful new website, along with the full program of films, performances, installations, panels, and parties.

That’s a lot to spill at once (over 50 programs in the five-day festival and the “Spotlight on Texas” to follow November 17-20), and so we’ve released early announcements of our live performances and ten of our arts-themed films to the press and our attentive followers.

The “live cinema” performances are a hallmark of this festival. You see images on screen, and live performers interacting with them. These are fully theatrical performances, and have to be experienced live, with others, in a theater, during the one time they are scheduled to take place.

Thomas Allen Harris, after showing his powerful film about the history of African-American photography, Through a Lens Darkly, at the Eldorado Ballroom on November 13, will project family photographs brought in by Houstonians that illuminate the history of the Third Ward. His Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow has elicited tremendous audience participation all over the U.S.

Ken Jacobs will be carrying his projection apparatus, the Nervous Magic Lantern, to the Aurora Picture Show on November 14. Jacobs studied abstract expressionist painting with the artist Hans Hoffmann, and has been one of our most important avant-garde filmmakers since the early Sixties. This projector, his invention, produces uncanny three-dimensional moving images without film; they are abstract, but at times seem photographic. Seeing Jacobs generate these forms at a performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was one of the greatest art experiences of my life, and I cannot wait to share them with Houston audiences.

Deke Weaver is a performance artist who assumes various personas, including a forest ranger and various animals, in the latest multi-media performance in his “Unreliable Bestiary” series, Wolf. Weaver, a mesmerizing and hilarious storyteller, will spin his tales at the Rice Media Center on November 15.

Finally, on November 16, the Revolve Dance Company of Spring, Texas, will dance along with and between short films directed by the LA-based filmmaking team, Heather and Benjamin Epps. The filmmakers have created eight cinematic dances with Revolve, and the first of these, Angsters, deservedly won the Audience Award at the Dance Camera West festival.

You may have noticed that music plays a lesser role than in past festival performances, which emphasized live musical accompaniment. I’m fine with that, especially since we are inaugurating a series of new Musical Movies that will screen outdoors, for free, from November 13-16 on the Café Brasil Patio and at Miller Outdoor Theater. So, as a reward for reading this far down in my blog, here are four more titles in the festival program we haven’t officially announced yet:

• Jalanan Daniel Ziv’s film about street musicians in Jakarta;
• Stations of the Elevated, a restored version of Manfred Kircheimer’s legendary depiction of ‘70s NYC subway graffiti, scored by Charles Mingus;
• Living Stars, a Sundance sensation showing everyday Argentines dancing with abandon to pop songs (just try to sit still for this one);
• Sounds of the Soul (Sons de L’Ame)­ featuring pianist extraordinaire Lang Lang accompanying Stanton Welch’s choreography for Houston Ballet dancers. Its U.S. premiere will be at the Miller Outdoor Theater as one of our closing night events on November 16.

I am on my way to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). This is the 30th anniversary of my first visit there (and also of my marriage, since the 1984 TIFF was where my wife and I went for our honeymoon)!

I’ve returned nearly every year. The highly intelligent, cinephilic audience is what impressed me from the start; I actually make a point of eavesdropping on people’s movie conversations on line, since I’ve gathered great tips from these. The programming is excellent, and it’s vast. Some complain that the festival has been overtaken by too much glitz; this Friday, for example, has been dubbed Bill Murray Day. In fact, there is so much new and classic international, documentary, and experimental work to choose from, cinephiles’ griping about all the movie star coverage and gawking seems to me churlish. Having been a festival director for many years, I know the glitz generates attention and festivity, and helps raise the visibility of the film art that is a film festival’s true raison d’etre. Plus, I’ve had many star encounters there myself, including memorable Q&A’s with James Franco, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Philip Glass, lunches with Tilda Swinton and Roger Ebert when I was recruiting them for my festivals, and even elevator rides with Raul Julia and Gabriel Byrne, that I won’t deny were thrilling.

A big part of what I’m doing here is scouting some of the major new releases that can fill some of the prime evening slots I’ve held open in our schedule. I call them the “icing,” because the cake itself is mostly baked. Several of the most renowned and important independent filmmakers in the U.S., with some extraordinary films, live performances, and media installations, have already signed up to come to our festival November 12-16. Through a series of announcements you’ll find here and in the press, beginning September 10 and building towards our October 21 full program unveiling, you’ll get to judge whether the cake is as tasty and substantial as I believe it to be.

The “icing” will be drawn from an array of upcoming releases previewing here that relate to our arts theme, are made by accomplished directors, and feature well-known and respected actors. I’ll be checking out the second William Faulkner adaptation James Franco has directed, Sound and the Fury, having been impressed by his As I Lay Dying. I hope to get in to Mike Leigh’s Cannes sensation Mr. Turner on the great English painter, Julie Taymor’s adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Reese Witherspoon’s performance as writer Cheryl Strayed in Wild, and much more. I’ve already seen and loved Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, showing in Toronto and featuring a stunning performance by Kristen Stewart as the assistant to a movie star played by Juliette Binoche. When I like the films, I pursue them, and hope that their distributors are not holding them back for Sundance in January or later release, as is, sadly, often the case.

I’ve made great catches out of Toronto every year, including I Am Love with Swinton, Black Swan, and last year’s Nebraska, so I think the familiar optimism I’m feeling, en route to Toronto, is entirely justified.

I am on my way to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). This is the 30th anniversary of my first visit there (and also of my marriage, since the 1984 TIFF was where my wife and I went for our honeymoon)!

I’ve returned nearly every year. The highly intelligent, cinephilic audience is what impressed me from the start; I actually make a point of eavesdropping on people’s movie conversations on line, since I’ve gathered great tips from these. The programming is excellent, and it’s vast. Some complain that the festival has been overtaken by too much glitz; this Friday, for example, has been dubbed Bill Murray Day. In fact, there is so much new and classic international, documentary, and experimental work to choose from, cinephiles’ griping about all the movie star coverage and gawking seems to me churlish. Having been a festival director for many years, I know the glitz generates attention and festivity, and helps raise the visibility of the film art that is a film festival’s true raison d’etre. Plus, I’ve had many star encounters there myself, including memorable Q&A’s with James Franco, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Philip Glass, lunches with Tilda Swinton and Roger Ebert when I was recruiting them for my festivals, and even elevator rides with Raul Julia and Gabriel Byrne, that I won’t deny were thrilling.

A big part of what I’m doing here is scouting some of the major new releases that can fill some of the prime evening slots I’ve held open in our schedule. I call them the “icing,” because the cake itself is mostly baked. Several of the most renowned and important independent filmmakers in the U.S., with some extraordinary films, live performances, and media installations, have already signed up to come to our festival November 12-16. Through a series of announcements you’ll find here and in the press, beginning September 10 and building towards our October 21 full program unveiling, you’ll get to judge whether the cake is as tasty and substantial as I believe it to be.

The “icing” will be drawn from an array of upcoming releases previewing here that relate to our arts theme, are made by accomplished directors, and feature well-known and respected actors. I’ll be checking out the second William Faulkner adaptation James Franco has directed, Sound and the Fury, having been impressed by his As I Lay Dying. I hope to get in to Mike Leigh’s Cannes sensation Mr. Turner on the great English painter, Julie Taymor’s adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Reese Witherspoon’s performance as writer Cheryl Strayed in Wild, and much more. I’ve already seen and loved Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, showing in Toronto and featuring a stunning performance by Kristen Stewart as the assistant to a movie star played by Juliette Binoche. When I like the films, I pursue them, and hope that their distributors are not holding them back for Sundance in January or later release, as is, sadly, often the case.

I’ve made great catches out of Toronto every year, including I Am Love with Swinton, Black Swan, and last year’s Nebraska, so I think the familiar optimism I’m feeling, en route to Toronto, is entirely justified.