Left: Colgate University. Right: Pawel Wojtasik, Autopsy, 2008, still from a color video in HD, 23 minutes.

AN ANNUAL WEEKLONG MARATHON of thematically connected screenings and discussions, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, which held its 55th edition at Colgate University from June 20 to 26, has a long and storied history as a testing ground for filmmakers and a battle zone for ideas about their work. But it is also not what most people think it is. Despite its namesake, the seminar is not devoted solely to documentaries (Flaherty, best known for Nanook of the North [1922], is generally considered the father of documentary filmmaking); narrative filmmakers have been spotlighted over the years, even though the emphasis is on nonfiction and experimental work. Despite the intensive screening schedule, it differs from almost all film festivals in privileging ideas and debate over novelty and buzz. And despite the abundance of academics, it’s more rambunctious—and less removed from the real world—than the average scholarly conference.

Founded in 1955 by Frances Flaherty, Robert’s widow and collaborator, who used to host the event at her farm in Vermont, the seminar adheres to a cardinal precept of “non-preconception.” Although some guest artists are announced ahead of time, program details are withheld from the 150 or so participants, a mix of scholars, programmers, critics, and filmmakers (some of whom are presenting work), all housed in university dorms. Each highly regimented day features six or seven hours of screenings and four or five hours of discussions (much more if you count the conversations over cafeteria meals and late-night drinks). At the seminar’s beginning, discussions tend to meander and sputter, but hot spots and fault lines eventually emerge. Alternately invigorating and infuriating, the Flaherty is, above all, a truly collective experience. By midweek, you realize that the group, as if by some alchemical process, has become its own living, breathing (and increasingly sleep-deprived) organism.

This year’s guest programmer, Irina Leimbacher, the former artistic director of the San Francisco Cinematheque, brought together more than forty works, ranging from shorts to features to installations (and even documentations of those installations), under the rubric “Witnesses, Monuments, Ruins.” (Full disclosure: I will be serving as the guest programmer for the 2010 seminar.) Leimbacher’s charged theme ensured that historical trauma was a constant. All week, questions surfaced about the responsibility and reliability of the filmmaker as witness; the power and pitfalls of direct address and the first-person form; the loaded notions of culpability, victimhood, and forgiveness. Many works revolved around what often remains unseen and unheard: the joys and trials of daily life in occupied Baghdad (Kasim Abid’s moving, if somewhat shapeless, two-part domestic chronicle Life After the Fall); the Indian subcontinent’s history of sexual violence against women (Amar Kanwar’s immersive eight-channel video installation The Lightning Testimonies); the hidden recesses of the human body (Pawel Wojtasik’s wondrous, Brakhage-referencing memento mori Autopsy).

Heavy on overlooked and underappreciated artists, this year’s seminar afforded plenty of opportunities for discovery and rediscovery. It was a treat to see the all too rarely screened film-poems of the veteran avant-gardist Chick Strand (suffering from terminal cancer and unable to attend) and the lyric documentaries of Saint Petersburg’s Pavel Medvedev, whose almost Tarkovsky-esque sensibility would likely have made him a festival darling by now if he worked in the feature-length format. At the Flaherty, of course, discovery means not just new films but also new connections, sparks that come from provocative juxtapositions and from encountering relatively familiar and established filmmakers, like the Paris-based, Mali-born Abderrahmane Sissako, in an unexpected context. Sissako’s 2006 feature, Bamako, a fantastical polemic that puts the World Bank and the IMF on trial for Africa’s economic woes, crystallized many of the seminar’s bubbling concerns. An act of testimony and of symbolic justice, here was a film that affirmed the power of the spoken word even as it revealed the limits of language.

“Flaherty at MoMA: The Films of Abderrahmane Sissako” runs at the Museum of Modern Art through July 2. The monthly Flaherty NYC series, featuring selections from this year’s seminar, begins in September; for more details, click here.

— Dennis Lim

Aki Kaurismäki, The Match Factory Girl, 1990, still from a color film in 35 mm, 70 minutes.

THE YEARS-LONG DENOUEMENT of May ’68 was at least as storied as the climax itself. As such, it’s hardly a surprise that, following the fortieth anniversary of “les évènements,” we now find commemorations of the events that trailed in their wake. As “69,” a series running through December at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum, amply demonstrates, it was the year after the manifestos and scuffles in the streets that saw some of the most radical films.

It was off-screen, at the level of festival organization, that May ’68 had its most immediate impact on cinema. Following Godard’s cry of “A la Grande Salle!” filmmakers took over the Palais in Cannes and brought the festival to a halt. An indirect result was the foundation of the Film Directors’ Society and, the very next year, the inaugural edition of a new sidebar, the Directors’ Fortnight. In Berlin, the 1968 edition of the International Film Festival, which took place in June, was no less rowdy, but the Germans couldn’t get themselves organized to effect any definitive change. The Berlinale limped unsteadily from one edition to the next, and it wasn’t until 1970 that the International Forum of New Cinema, a “parallel event on equal footing” with the main competition, became a going concern.

But there was just enough to it in 1969 to warrant a celebration this year. From July 1–5, “Dialogues with Films: Four Decades of the Forum” will present a slew of screenings, panels, and exhibitions to Berliners, though the life of the party can be experienced, at least to a limited extent, vicariously. The Forum has invited a few filmmakers with whom it has had close ties over the years to each select a film from the archives that has influenced his or her own work; they’ll present their selections along with a few (or in some cases, many) words of introduction, some of which can be read online.

This invitation inspired some intriguing match-ups: Angela Schanelec on Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself, 1980), for example. Also Jasmila Žbanić on Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl (1990); Aditya Assarat on David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000); Bradley Rust Gray and So Yong Kim on the first two films in Bill Douglas’s childhood trilogy; and Sabu on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind (1986).

For years, cinephiles have counted on the Forum to present a challenging and wide-ranging selection of films at the Berlinale. Revisiting some of the highlights of nearly forty years of programming through the eyes of filmmakers reveals not only the Forum’s breadth but also its depth.

“Dialogues with Films: Four Decades of the Forum” takes place at the Arsenal–Institute for Film and Video in Berlin July 1–5. For more details, click here.

— David Hudson

Left: Cover of Cinemad: Almanac 2009. Right: Bruce Conner, Valse Triste, 1977, still from a black-and-white film, 5 minutes.

A DECADE AGO, Cinemad was one of a small handful of publications chronicling new directions in visionary filmmaking—defined in the broadest sense by that staple-bound Xerox zine as anything on the fringes of independent cinema that struck the fancy of intrepid editor and writer Mike Plante. He espoused an unruly blend of sensibilities, equally indebted to the avant-garde and to the VCR-era cult, using little more justification than his own tastes to frame generously chatty interviews with artists and off-the-cuff videotape reviews. A few years back, Cinemad shed its paper identity, transmuting into a website and then a blog, while Plante became a programmer for Sundance.

Now, Plante has released what one hopes to be the first in a series of DVD compilations, Cinemad: Almanac 2009, which comes with a thick booklet of director chats reprinted from the original journal. Almanac includes works from years past by some Cinemad favorites, like Stephanie Barber’s 16-mm letters, notes (2000), a collage of lost communications told in found texts and photos; Kevin Jerome Everson’s Midwest tornado interlude Pictures from Dorothy (2003); James Fotopoulos’s distressed Brakhage-cum-Romero enigma The Sun (2000); and an excerpt from Jennifer Reeves’s penetrating post-9/11 interior drama The Time We Killed (2004). Deborah Stratman contributes something of a triptych: two atmospheric found-footage videos and a discerningly shot study of a fellow filmmaker’s home, The Magician’s House (2007); Stratman’s works are situated on the other end of the emotional spectrum from quasi-inappropriate appropriators Animal Charm’s Edge-TV with Animal Charm (2008), a montage of ’90s video wrongness punctuated by a tragically absurd segment from the talking-animal drama Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1992). Though the DVD era has recently been a boon to those engaged in reviving classic experimental fare, the Almanac instead focuses on exhibiting some of the most compelling contemporary artists—a welcome curatorial project that continues where Cinemad left off.

Cinemad: Almanac 2009 is now available through Microcinema International. For more details, click here.

— Ed Halter

Paul D. Miller, Rebirth of a Nation, 2008, stills from a color film, 100 minutes.

SINCE ITS RELEASE IN 1915, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation has met with outrage, protest, and riot. As a gallant creation myth, the Civil War epic swiftly revived a defunct Ku Klux Klan—a recruitment film for generations of hatemongering. Griffith’s blithering mammies, jittering slaves, and impudent freedmen promoted an image of black depravity that continues to haunt America. Nearly a century later, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) tackles the revisionist narrative as historical object and living mantra. Applying “turntablist” techniques to cinema, Miller’s ambitious Rebirth of a Nation (2008) extends beyond the original’s racial implications to highlight how Griffith’s film defined the parameters of propaganda in moving images.

In silent film, music provides the most salient emotional framework. Enlisting composer Joseph Carl Breil, Griffith created a magniloquent score for The Birth of a Nation that, in part, manipulated popular standards. By 1915, songs such as “I Wish I Was in Dixie” and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” were inextricably linked to white American selfhood, facilitating viewers’ identification with Griffith’s heroes and ideals. For his Rebirth, Miller eschews the familiar and communicates largely through absence. His replacement sound track, an electronic drone peppered with bluesy harmonica, rolling cymbals, moaning violin, and plodding drum, alludes to the African-American cultural contribution previously ignored, but more important, the underlying threat in Griffith’s imagery—the crowd as wrathful bees or brewing storm.

True to DJ form, Rebirth of a Nation was commissioned as a live performance for the Lincoln Center Festival in 2004. From behind laptop computers, Miller mixed audio and video on three screens, overlaying his heavily edited, though still chronological, footage with computer animations and contemporary video clips. Without the thrill of improvisation and multimedia barrage, however, the subsequent single-channel theatrical release, which screens this week at MoMA, feels lukewarm; the new sound track, its most notable remaining intervention.

In this version, an external narrator draws parallels to the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, finally asking the obvious question: Could the film’s story and our history have ended differently? Miller does not go far enough in suggesting these alternate possibilities; his appropriation remains too close to the object of his critique to be truly effective, leaving the nagging sense that there was more that could have been done. Maybe the onus of change can only rest on the viewers.

Paul D. Miller’s Rebirth of a Nation plays June 22–28; D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation plays June 25 and 27; both at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. For more details, click here.

— Cameron Shaw

John Boutling, Brighton Rock, 1947, stills from a black-and-white film, 92 minutes. Left: Richard Attenborough. Right: Richard Attenborough and Carol Marsh.

THE TITLE OF THE SUPERB British thriller Brighton Rock (1948) derives from a long, hard, sticky pink candy. With the word BRIGHTON imprinted across its length, the confection is a kind of civic talisman sold at the seafront of the southern English town that was once a mecca—part regal, part seedy—for London day-trippers. Graham Greene and the playwright Terrence Rattigan wrote the screenplay, though Greene said his original treatment was the basis for the film. It was based on his metaphysical 1938 novel, in which it’s implied that an informer is killed when a stick of the phallic candy is rammed down his throat.

Given the censorious climate of the time, Greene, the director, John Boulting, and his producer brother, Roy, naturally had to avoid the blatant double entendre, but the fraught sexuality of the novel crept into the film’s story. Repulsed by physical intimacy, the sadistic young gangster Pinky (Richard Attenborough) twitches with disgust when his besotted bride, Rose (Carol Marsh), embraces him.

Tense and puritanical, Pinky was probably influenced by the gynophobic priest and writer Baron Corvo and informed by a boy who tormented Greene at school. Having inherited a gang of inept racetrack “spivs,” Pinky murders the informer and spends the rest of the movie trying to avoid a blowsy middle-aged entertainer, Ida (Hermione Baddeley), who has pledged to bring him to justice. Learning that Rose, a waitress, stumbled on evidence that could convict him, Pinky marries her—they’re both Roman Catholics, both underage—and leads her toward hell. Although the movie depicts Brighton’s masses at play in the sun, its true world is that of film noir—of shadowy staircases, of a rain-swept pier at night, of a racetrack where thugs cut Pinky’s face and try to kill a harmless old member of his crew.

Brighton Rock was the first novel in which Greene wrestled with Catholicism. He achieved this through a dialectal examination of good and evil, represented by Rose and Pinky, on the one hand, and right-over-wrong, which steadfast Ida recognizes as the only moral truth, on the other. But the film censors weren’t prepared to allow even a subtextual morality play, and the script was “slashed to pieces,” Greene later complained, before production. The notion of “mortal sin” is present, however, and the petrified Rose uses that phrase when Pinky insists she commit a damning act.

The most famous change from the novel was the softened ending, which Greene wrote himself. “I am completely guilty,” he later said of the scene in which Rose is led to believe in Pinky’s love. There’s an ambiguity in that moment, as the farsighted viewer will perceive. Is Rose granted salvation, or is the “worst horror of all,” as Greene wrote in the book, merely suspended?

Brighton Rock opens at Film Forum in New York on Friday, June 19. For more information, click here.

— Graham Fuller

Left: Kanji Nakajima, The Clone Returns Home, 2008, still from a color film in 35 mm, 111 minutes. Right: Sion Sono, Love Exposure, 2008, still from a color film in 35 mm, 237 minutes.

ALTHOUGH THE NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL’S program notes are adamantly populist, the festival, now in its eighth year, has become most valuable as a showcase for maverick work like Jang Sun-woo’s Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002), a Taoist response to The Matrix (1999), and Kôji Wakamatsu’s New Left docudrama United Red Army (2007). Japanese director Kanji Nakajima’s The Clone Returns Home (2008) fails to strike the same sparks as the festival’s past, more inspired, sci-fi choices. Doggedly solemn, the film conflates gravity with depth, using slow pacing and an avoidance of close-ups to keep its charged subject matter—the emotional and spiritual ramifications of cloning—at a distance. Although beautifully photographed, Pang Ho-cheung’s Exodus (2007) squanders an intriguing premise about a misandrist conspiracy on increasingly unfocused storytelling. By contrast, Min Kyu-dong’s Antique (2008) is a breezy delight. Set in a cake shop, the film offers up homoerotic tension with a tale of kidnapping, telling a complex story with graceful cinematography.

Sion Sono hasn’t yet found the kind of cult following enjoyed by, say, Takashi Miike or Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but if he continues to make films as exciting as Love Exposure (2008), it’s only a matter of time. The nearly four-hour-long film focuses on a teenager who photographs women’s panties to please his father, a priest who constantly prods him to offer up sins for confession. At times, Love Exposure, which is told from the perspective of several characters, feels like an elaborate teen comedy, one with a keen satiric eye for fraught subjects like spirituality and sex. Until the genuinely moving finale, it comes across as a goofy—albeit bloody—lark. For the moment, the film’s length seems to have scared distributors away, but it could be Sono’s American breakthrough; the hours, anyway, pass surprisingly quickly.

The New York Asian Film Festival runs at the IFC Center June 19–July 2 and the Japan Society July 1–5. For more details, click here

— Steven Erickson