Ross McElwee tonight

Ross McElwee will be presenting and screening his latest film Photographic Memory tonight at University of Pennsylvania:

Thursday, November 8, 2012
5:30pm
401 Fisher Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia Film Festival 2012 schedule

The Philadelphia Film Festival 2012 has posted its schedule online. They have a handy feature that organizes your screenings for you, or you can even download the entire schedule into iCal.

Tickets are currently on sale for Philadelphia Film Society members. General public tickets go on sale Monday, October 1.

UPDATE: As a follow-up on earlier news on free ticket vouchers for the Festival, the PFF website mentions the films eligible for the free tickets. They're all from the American Independents series, on first-come basis. Details here. I'm actually surprised the free tickets are not incentives for daytime weekday screenings, but hey, it's their promotion!

Plans for the Roxy?

It's all in the preliminary/rumor phase, but Molly Eichel of the Inquirer reports that the Roxy is planning both a renovation and a switch to a first run/repertory mix. If true, that would be an amazing addition to Philly's film offerings.

Complimentary Tickets to the Phila Film Fest

The Philadelphia Film Festival is coming up in October. They release the schedule on Sept. 27 and I will give an update then. In the meantime, they are offering a special promotion for complimentary tickets for those who register on their website (scroll to the bottom of this page). Only certain screenings will honor the comp tickets and it's on a first-come basis, but still, it's a great way to supplement your festival viewing or to see some of the festival on a budget.

Fringe Philadelphia events

PIFVA has updated their calendar and are listing the remaining media-oriented events in the Philly Fringe festival.

Africa, I Will Fleece You

The Cinémathèque Internationale of Phildalphia
presents in conjunction with The African American Museum in Philadelphia

Africa, I Will Fleece You! 

Directed by Jean-Marie Téno  

Cameroon/France/Germany 1993 

88 minutes 

French 

Thursday, September 20, 2012 
from 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

The African American Museum in Philadelphia
7th and Arch St, Philadelphia

Part of the Territories: Africa series

This documentary of repressive political realities in Cameroon begins with the 1990 publication of an open letter to President Biya calling for a national conference – and the immediate arrest of the letter’s author and publisher. The narration then examines the nation’s colonial history, beginning with the first German missionary in 1901.

Presented in partnership with The African American Museum in Philadelphia, Territories: Africa is a foreign film series featuring filmmakers and stories from Africa and across the Diaspora. The intention of these screenings is to expand the discussion surrounding international film language and to challenge and explore modern and historic representations of and by Africans around the world

Lecture on Media, State, and Power in Iran at Temple University's Center City Campus

Please join PCMS for our last event of the season, co-sponsored with Temple's Middle East and
North Africa Study Group:

War Cultures and Culture Wars: Media, State, and Power in Iran

Thurs., April 26, 5:00-6:30 pm
Room 308, Temple University Center City (TUCC)

Niki Akhavan is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The Catholic University of America. Her
research focuses on the relationship between digital technologies and Iranian transnational
political and cultural production. She has published on the Iranian blogosphere and trends in
discourses about Iranian media, and is currently completing a manuscript entitled "Electronic Iran:
The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution".

Screening of "Bed and Sofa" and perfomance with Psoy Korolenko

Moscow’s renowned troubadour, “wandering scholar” and “singing professor,” Psoy Korolenko, presents a film screening and performance of his live sound track and rap style-commentary to the Russian silent movie classic 'Tretya Meshchanskaya' ('Bed and Sofa') by Abram Room and Victor Shklovsky (1927; 75 min).

Saturday April 28th, 9:00pm
Doors open at 7:30pm
Fergie's Pub - 1214 Sansom St.
$10

For more information, check out the Facebook event page!

The Mark of Zorro with Live Score at Bryn Mawr

The Bryn Mawr Film Institute will be holding a screening of Douglas Fairbanks' 1920 The Mark of Zorro accompanied by a flamenco/tanjo/salsa/mariachi quintet playing an original score to the film.

The quintet is an unusual mash-up of players from many corners of the Philly music scene: the brass band The West Philly Orchestra, the tango group Oscuro Quintet, the avant-improv group Inzinzac, and the rock band Tj Kong and the Atomic Bomb.

When:
Tuesday May 22, 7:30pm
Bryn Mawr Film Institute
824 W. Lancaster Ave
Bryn Mawr, PA
$12

www.brynmawrfilm.org

Below are the links for the band rehearsal and a trailer for The Mark of Zorro with the new score.

Rehearsal:

Trailer:

Peter Greenaway at Slought

Penn Cinema Studies presents

Peter Greenaway in person

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

5:00pm & 8:00 pm
at the Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street
Screening: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and Rembrandt's J'accuse

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

6:00pm

University of Pennsylvania, B1 Meyerson Hall

Lecture: "Cinema is Dead, Long Live Cinema"

Thursday, April 12, 2012

6:30pm
at the Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street
Conversation with Jean-Michel Rabaté and Alan Singer: "Golitzius and the Pelican Company"

Presentation on Laura

Tonight at the County Theater and tomorrow at the Ambler, I will be giving a presentation on Laura (1944, Preminger) as part of their "Film 101: Inside the Classics" series. The film will not screen, but I will be showing clips.

Region Centrale showing tonight

The International House is showing Michael Snow's La Région Centrale, perhaps a magnum opus of structural experimental film. Be forewarned about the running time!


La Région Centrale was made during five days of shooting on a deserted mountain top in North Quebec. During the shooting, the vertical and horizontal alignment as well as the tracking speed were all determined by the camera’s settings. Anchored to a tripod, the camera turned a complete 360 degrees, craned itself skyward, and circled in all directions. Because of the unconventional camera movement, the result was more than merely a film that documented the film location’s landscape. Surpassing that, this became a film expressing as its themes the cosmic relationships of space and time. Cataloged here were the raw images of a mountain existence, plunged (at that time) in its distance from civilization, embedded in cosmic cycles of light and darkness, warmth and cold.

Michael Snow, Quebec, 1971, 180 min, 16mm, color

International House

Monday, April 2

7:00 pm

Cinematheque: Veronika Voss

Bryn Mawr's Homay King will be introducing this next meeting of the Cinematheque Internationale:

Veronika Voss

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
(1982, 104′, Germany, German with English Subtitles)

Wednesday, March 28

Doors open at 6:30pm
Films begins at 7:00pm
Discussion following each film.

Once-beloved Third Reich–era starlet Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) lives in obscurity in postwar Munich. Struggling for survival and haunted by past glories, the forgotten star encounters sportswriter Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) in a rain-swept park and intrigues him with her mysterious beauty. As their unlikely relationship develops, Krohn comes to discover the dark secrets behind the faded actresses’ demise. Based on the true story of a World War II UFA star, Veronika Voss is wicked satire disguised as 1950s melodrama.

Speaker: Homay King, Associate Professor at Bryn Mawr College - Department of History of Art

Homay King is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she also directs the Program in Film Studies and the Center for Visual Culture. Her book Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier was published by Duke University Press in 2010. Her essays on film, photography, and contemporary art have appeared in Afterall, Camera Obscura, Discourse,Film Quarterly, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Qui Parle, and edited collections. She is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective, and is currently working on a book about virtuality.

Cinémathèque screenings take place at L'Etage every 2nd Sunday and 4th Wednesday.
Please use the south entrance, located at 624 S 6th St in Philadelphia.

Strong! at Haverford

STRANGE TRUTH Documentary Film Series presents

STRONG!
A screening and conversation with Filmmaker Julie Wyman and Olympic Weightlifter Cheryl Haworth

Wednesday March 21, 2012
7:30pm

Sharpless Auditorium, Haverford College

Cheryl Haworth is a young woman with a big dream: to be the strongest woman in the world.
As the 300-pound Olympic weightlifter prepares for Beijing 2008, she struggles with injury, confidence, and her place in a world where larger women are not readily accepted.


Sponsored by the John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Leaves of Grass Fund, and Independent College Programs
Organized by Visiting Filmmaker Vicky Funari in conjunction with the Exhibitions Program

Screening and Q&A with director John Greyson

"FIG TREES"

Screening and Q&A with director John Greyson
Wed., March 14

7:00 PM

KINSC Sharpless Auditorium
Haverford College

Fig Trees is documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell in Toronto and Zackie Achmat in Capetown, as narrated by an albino squirrel, an amputee busker and St. Teresa of Avila. Organized at Haverford College by Farid Azfar (History Department) and Vicky Funari (Filmmaker, Independent College Programs).

The recipient of the 2000 Toronto Arts Award for film/video and the 2007 Bell Award in Video Art, John Greyson is a filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist and educator whose productions have won accolades at festivals throughout the world. In addition to Fig Trees, his feature films include Urinal, Lilies, Uncut, and The Law of Enclosures). As a televisor director, his credits include episodes for Queer as Folk, Made In Canada, Drop the Beat and Welcome to Paradox. Greyson is active in various anti-censorship, AIDS, peace and queer activist media projects. He has taught film and video theory and production in Canada, the United States, Cuba and South Africa. He joined the full-time faculty in the Film Department of York University (Ontario, Canada) in 2005.