http://blog.johnmenick.com Art, film, prose, and politics Wed, 21 Jul 2010 02:02:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2010/02/rip-torn-norman-mailer-maidstone http://blog.johnmenick.com/2010/02/rip-torn-norman-mailer-maidstone#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:28:54 +0000 John Menick http://blog.johnmenick.com/?p=305 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2010/02/rip-torn-norman-mailer-maidstone/feed 0 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/07/rip-antonioni-and-bergman http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/07/rip-antonioni-and-bergman#comments Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:30:06 +0000 John Menick http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/07/rip-antonioni-and-bergman http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/07/rip-antonioni-and-bergman/feed 0 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/07/john-carpenter-the-thing-bfi-anne-billson-outpost-31 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/07/john-carpenter-the-thing-bfi-anne-billson-outpost-31#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:11:20 +0000 John Menick http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/07/john-carpenter-the-thing-bfi-anne-billson-outpost-31 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/07/john-carpenter-the-thing-bfi-anne-billson-outpost-31/feed 0 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/02/just-published-poetics-of-cinema-2-by-raul-ruiz http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/02/just-published-poetics-of-cinema-2-by-raul-ruiz#comments Fri, 23 Feb 2007 18:37:13 +0000 John Menick http://localhost/johnmenick/blog/2007/02/23/just-published-poetics-of-cinema-2-by-raul-ruiz Following his research in Poetics of Cinema, 1 on new narrative models as tools for apprehending a fast-shifting world, Raul Ruiz makes with Poetics of cinema 2 an appeal for an entirely new way of filming, writing and conceiving the image. “Eleven years separate these lines from the first part of my Poetics of Cinema. Meanwhile the world has changed and cinema with it. Poetics of Cinema, 1 had much of a call to arms about it. What I write today Poetics of cinema 2 is rather more of a consolatio philosophica. However, let no one be mistaken about this, a healthy pessimism may be better than a suicidal optimism. ‘Light, more light,’were Goethe’s last words as he died. ‘Less light, less light,’ Orson Welles cried repeatedly on a set—the one and only time I saw him. In today’s cinema (and in today’s world) there is too much light. It is time to return to the shadows. So, about turn! And back to the caverns!”. R.R Available from Amazon.]]> http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/02/just-published-poetics-of-cinema-2-by-raul-ruiz/feed 0 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/02/jean-luc-godard-in-wim-wenders-room-666 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/02/jean-luc-godard-in-wim-wenders-room-666#comments Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:14:59 +0000 John Menick http://localhost/johnmenick/blog/2007/02/23/jean-luc-godard-in-wim-wenders-room-666 ]]> http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/02/jean-luc-godard-in-wim-wenders-room-666/feed 0 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/02/werner-herzog-the-secret-mainstream http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/02/werner-herzog-the-secret-mainstream#comments Wed, 14 Feb 2007 13:34:06 +0000 John Menick http://localhost/johnmenick/blog/2007/02/14/werner-herzog-the-secret-mainstream Werner Herzog talk this Friday to get tickets, but in the meantime there's Tom Bissell's The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog.]]> http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/02/werner-herzog-the-secret-mainstream/feed 0 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/01/david-lynch http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/01/david-lynch#comments Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:58:39 +0000 John Menick http://localhost/johnmenick/blog/2007/01/03/david-lynch DV and TM.]]> http://blog.johnmenick.com/2007/01/david-lynch/feed 0 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2006/12/the-case-of-the-grinning-cat-opens-at-film-forum http://blog.johnmenick.com/2006/12/the-case-of-the-grinning-cat-opens-at-film-forum#comments Wed, 20 Dec 2006 16:03:22 +0000 John Menick http://localhost/johnmenick/blog/2006/12/20/the-case-of-the-grinning-cat-opens-at-film-forum The Voice and indieWIRE have reviews for the Film Forum screenings. Complete photos by tofz4u.]]> http://blog.johnmenick.com/2006/12/the-case-of-the-grinning-cat-opens-at-film-forum/feed 0 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2006/12/herzog-in-antarctica http://blog.johnmenick.com/2006/12/herzog-in-antarctica#comments Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:32:55 +0000 John Menick http://localhost/johnmenick/blog/2006/12/20/herzog-in-antarctica he said. “Now you have got a cafeteria, you have got the barber shop and the TV station. You've got the ATM machine, so what else can you ask for?”]]> http://blog.johnmenick.com/2006/12/herzog-in-antarctica/feed 0 http://blog.johnmenick.com/2006/12/another-bunch-of-random-links-and-quotes http://blog.johnmenick.com/2006/12/another-bunch-of-random-links-and-quotes#comments Wed, 20 Dec 2006 02:04:03 +0000 John Menick http://localhost/johnmenick/blog/2006/12/19/another-bunch-of-random-links-and-quotes he wrote in his popular, long-running Village Voice column, "and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema." * "The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be "shot" in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio's script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul's interest, or Steven Soderbergh's... A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I'd collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven's computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We'd know the ruins and we'd know how much that area was bombed out and all that." More... * "My first exposure to the subject came in a book by another medical anthropologist, Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the heart is stopped and the organs harvested." * "What, he wondered, did we want to do? Did we want to eat, to drink, to fuck? Uh, dinner sounds cool." * And last, but not least, the Athanasius Kircher Society 2006]]> http://blog.johnmenick.com/2006/12/another-bunch-of-random-links-and-quotes/feed 0