The “A” on The Third Man‘s official rating certificate is meant to stand for “Adult” and by 1949 no young people would be allowed into the theater, making The Third Man the British equivalent of an R rated movie. At the time there were only two ratings in the UK, Universal and Adult, but the British Board of Film Censorship (BBFC) would introduce Horror and EXplicit in the next few years. Filmmakers…

Herewith: the inauguration of “Still Dots,” a project entailing 102 blog posts written by the Walker’s Film & Video staff over the next 51 weeks. Inspired by Nicholas Rombes’ “Blue VelvetProject” at theFilmmaker Magazineblog, “Still Dots” will analyze a series of cinematic still images. Each Tuesday, Jeremy Meckler will post his analysis of a single frame fromThe Third Man, beginning with the very first still image from the film. Each Thursday, Matt Levine will post his analysis of one frame 62 seconds later. One of the most evocative and multilayered postwar British films,The Third Man(one of the holdings in the Walker Art Center’s Ruben/Bentson Film & Video Collection) is readily available on stunning Criterion Blu-Ray or DVD, and is also available to stream instantly on Netflix; we hope the first installment of this project is a valid enough reason to (re)visit this infinitely entertaining masterpiece. What happens when this 104-minute movie is extended to a timeframe of 51 weeks? How will our conceptions of time, composition, and visual readership transform over…

Of all the films I have seen throughout this “And Yet She Moves” series the documentary, Shulie was the most unique one for me. The first aspect of my unique experience of the film was the way in which it was produced. The discussion prior to the film made me believe that Shulie was an unintentional masterpiece. The mundaneness of the subject that is being filmed fascinated me because this must…

While Felix Gonzalez-Torres remains revered in the art world — he posthumously represented the United States at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and his work made up the thematic basis of the 2011 Istanbul Biennial — what may be starting to fade in our collective memory is the context in which he worked: the height of the AIDS crisis. Asked last year to do a talk on Gonzalez-Torres’ billboards, artist…

Wherever the diagnosis came from, numerous critics and writers have recently been responding to the proclamation that film is dead. As of late, A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, The Onion‘sScott Tobias, Salon.com‘s Matt Zoller Seitz, IFC’s Matt Singer, Jean-Luc Godard (about 40 years after his initial apocalyptic prophecy), director Peter Greenaway, cinematographer Roger Deakins, British artist Tacita Dean…

Martha Rosler’s 6-minute 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, opens with a medium shot in which Rosler is mostly hidden behind a title chalkboard, her expressionless eyes visible just above the board.  She blinks several times.  The camera backs up until we see that she stands in a kitchen behind a small table, which is laden with various kitchen instruments.  A stove and refrigerator are visible in…

Last night, at the local premiere of Women Art Revolution, the general feeling in the Walker Theater was not one of blissful nostalgia but rather one of an uncontrollable desire to move forward. Lynn Hershman Leeson noted in the post-screening question-and-answer period that the assembled footage was but a small fraction of what she had shot over a long period of time. Given the interest in…

Since this blog-post is about the last film we have watched in this series, many of the discussions that have happened during the last two weeks will find resonance here. The film form is an issue that has kept coming back in the discussions about all the films we have been viewing. And keeping that in  mind, it is only befitting that the last film we viewed in this series is a film that is as much…

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s documentary!Women Art Revolutionpremieres this weekend, November 18-20, at the Walker Art Center. (An installation based on material collected for the film is also on display at the University of Minnesota’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery until December 3.) Over the next week, three area female artists, all members of the local arts organization mnartists.org, will be contributing…