Following the wildfires that recently rampaged through Bastrop, Texas—leaving more than 1,550 homes destroyed in this small community—director Richard Linklater, actors Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey, and producer Ginger Sledge held a special fundraising premiere for their new film Bernieat Austin’s Paramount Theatre on Sunday, September 18. Co-presented by the Austin Film Society (along with…

George was born 1 hour after his twin brother Mike in Manhattan NY in 1942, and he grew up in the Bronx. When he was 12, inspired by their father’s prolific porno collection, George and his twin brother Mike made their first film. Shot on 8mm with a camera they got for their birthday, the twins fell in love with filmmaking. George and Mike worked together through the 60′s (and some beyond) making 15…

While the main screenings of Location:MN wrapped up last month, one key historical work continues to play for free in the Walker’s Lecture Room through this weekend. Hampton Alexander was shot around the former Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul and grew out of the work of the Inner City Youth League. Bobby Hickman, a leader of the Inner City Youth League, was inspired by the lessons spelled out by his…

As a form of late introduction (or internduction) we took a swing at interviewing each other. See below for Matt Levine’s interview of Jeremy Meckler, and Jeremy Meckler’s interview of Matt Levine (or vice versa). 1. What was the last film you saw in theatres? I saw Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (Welt Am Draht) at the Trylon. It’s a 3 1/2 hour made-for-tv film by the notorious New German…

On August 25 1977, the Walker Art Center screened two films as part of its tribute to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Sam Peckinpah’s second feature film, Ride the High Country (1962), and John Boorman’s trippy actioner Point Blank (1967), starring Lee Marvin in what may be his most iconic role. (Point Blank also played, incidentally, as part of the Walker’s Summer Music & Movies series in 1999.) A double-feature that…

Earlier this week, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody posted an article online entitled “Camus, Car Crashes, Cinema.” A piece as multivalent and stimulating as its title suggests, Brody uses the recent hypothesis that Albert Camus’ 1960 death was not an accident but a meticulously staged assassination by the KGB as a springboard to ponder the intersection of Camus’ life with the legacy of French cinema (and…

Avant Garde Animator, Robert Breer, died on August 11 at 84 in his home in Tuscon. A painter, filmmaker and animator, Breer worked with such luminaries as Claes Oldenburg and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and developed an intensely formalist aesthetic, focusing on the minutest detail of the moving image. Working mostly with hand drawn images on 4 x 6 index cards, Breer invented his own style of animation in…

In addition to the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies series(which, as it happens, featured a retrospectiveof director Billy Wilder’s works back in 2002), the month of August will provide Twin Cities moviegoers with a handful of Billy Wilder films screening throughout Minneapolis. Bona fide classics like Some Like it Hot and Sunset Boulevard will be playing this month at the Heights, but lesser-known…

A little over a week ago, the 16 Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival wrapped up at the Castro Theatre, providing moviegoers not only with the opportunity to see some of the most invigorating visions ever put to celluloid (the festival’s typically stellar programming this year included F.W. Murnau’s inimitable Sunrise; Yasujiro Ozu’s sublimely bittersweet I Was Born, But…; and the bristling…