Viva's a lazy bitch over the summertime. Really she is! But then, New York is one of the few places in the world that allows for such indulgence - 2 months away from the hurly-burly until Labour Day (how apt) kicks us all back into metropolis gear grind. I'm even missing the hurricane - nailing myself to a friend's roof-garden exploring the true forces of nature against our puny mortal existence.! But more, perhaps, of that later. Just wanted to mention two films that were quietly slipping under the summer radar.

Last April 2009, film director John Sayles gave an animated reading of his novel Some Time in the Sun (yet unpublished) at City University of New York's Gotham Center. In the meantime it became the powerful film Amigo about the long-forgotton 1900 Philippine–American War. Below is me co-interviewing Sayles at last year's London Film Festival (it still hasn't a Brit release slated).


Chilean-born Raúl Ruiz' Mysteries of Lisbon (last year's New York Film Festival and released a month ago) said that this film just might be his swan-song and alas, indeed it was. He died a few weeks ago. At 4-and-a-half hours it may initially seem a cinema of another time so removed from the instantaneous twitterings and internet flashings of today as to be hermetically sealed. And yet: any narrative worth its human salt is never instantaneous, easily grasped, immediately consumed. Ruiz' early catalogue was rare enough to find on video let alone DVD. Below is a post-screening Q & A with the film's producer, again from last year's London Film Festival. The film's cinematography is just stunning and one's amazed at how giving someone, André Szankowski, who'd barely done anything but some TV such an opportunity, can achieve these results.


Than That: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson (runs thru Sept. 18 at the Whitney) for those who missed him at Migrating Forms. And the wonderful world of Lyonel Feininger: At The Edge of the World (who? -shame on you;)is there too (thru Oct 16). There's a parallel show of his equally (if not more so) beautiful watercolors and prints at Moeller Fine Art (around the corner, sort of).

Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever (thru Sept. 3) at MoMA PS1
And Dialog in the Dark (mounted in 35 countries since 1988) is at South Street Seaport Exhibition Center. The concept was originated by a German journalist and filmmaker Andreas Heinecke, who was trying to help a friend who was recently blinded.


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