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	<title>Screen Machine</title>
	<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv</link>
	<description>Film criticism and cultural commentary based out of Melbourne, Australia.</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:17:26 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Forgetting devices: An interview with David Blair</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Matthew O'Shannessy speaks with the creator of the first narrative film put on the internet.]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/10/25/forgetting-devices-an-interview-with-david-blair/</link>
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		<title>Cowboys and Aliens and Rise of the Planet of the Apes</title>
		<description><![CDATA[We can imagine an alternate ending to Cowboys and Aliens: The film would end with the alien proleteriat revolting against their masters and cooperating with the Apaches to throw the white men off their land.]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/09/30/cowboys-and-aliens-and-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/</link>
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		<title>Week starting Thursday 22nd September: TABLOID, CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, World Cinema Now Conference, Lucrecia Martel, Malick, LA DANSE</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Week starting Thursday 22nd September
New movies opening this week:
TABLOID is Errol Morris&#8217; latest documentary, utilising his method of direct-to-camera interviews, he explores the bizarre story of a former beauty queen who pursued her Mormon lover to Britain leading to the famous &#8220;sex in chains&#8221; story that dominated tabloid newspapers.
CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (3D) is Werner Herzog&#8217;s documentary about the Chauvet Cave which features the earliest known cave paintings. Somewhere in the film there are mutant albino alligators.
Special events:
WORLD CINEMA NOW is a conference organised by Monash University including key note speakers such as Nicole Brenez, Meaghan Morris and filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux . In addition to dozens of lectures, ACMI will be holding three public screening-lectures as part of the program including Elena Gorfinkel on American sexploitation films, Vinzenz Hediger on trailers as art and Nicole Brenez with Philippe Grandrieux on the political avant garde. Full program available at worldcinemanow.com.au. Details for ACMI events available here. Conference running September 27-29.
Special seasons:
The Melbourne Cinematheque presents TROPICAL MALADIES: THE CINEMA OF LUCRECIA MARTEL, a retrospective of the Argentinian filmmaker who has directed only three features. This week concludes with the 2008 THE HEADLESS WOMAN about someone who runs over something with her car and becomes dislocated from reality as she tries to piece the events together. The film will be followed by THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET from director Pedro Almodovar who produced Martel&#8217;s film.
FIRE IN BABYLON is a documentary about the West Indian cricket team in the 1970s and 80s and their&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/09/21/week-starting-thursday-22nd-september-tabloid-cave-of-forgotten-dreams-world-cinema-now-conference-lucrecia-martel-malick-la-danse/</link>
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		<title>Week starting Thursday 15th September: FIRE IN BABYLON, Lucrecia Martel and Terrence Malick retrospectives, DREADNAUGHT, 70s sci-fi</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Week starting Thursday 15th September
Special seasons:
FIRE IN BABYLON is a documentary about the West Indian cricket team in the 1970s and 80s and their journey to becoming one of the greatest sporting teams in history. At ACMI, September 15-October 5.
The Melbourne Cinematheque presents &#8216;Tropical Maladies: The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel&#8217;, a retrospective of the Argentinian filmmaker who has directed only three features. This week&#8217;s films are THE HOLY GIRL (2004) about an adolescent girl who undergoes a sexual awakening and a simultaneous Catholic awakening, focusing her attention on her mother&#8217;s lecherous boyfriend; and LA CIÉNAGA (2001) about two families who retreat to a shabby country home during the summer  and the repressed family mysteries and tensions that become exposed.
The Astor presents a complete retrospective of the films of Terrence Malick. This week&#8217;s film is the war film THE THIN RED LINE (1998). At the Astor on Mondays, September 12-26 (except for THE TREE OF LIFE which screens on Saturday, October 1).
Old films:
CineCult303 presents DREADNAUGHT, a 1981 action film from martial arts legend Yuen Woo-ping (director of Drunken Master and fight choreographer for The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). At Bar 303 in Northcote, September 20.
A double bill of classic seventies sci-fi with LOGAN&#8217;S RUN about a future in which people are only allowed to live to the age of 30 (a concept that Andrew Niccol is adapting in his upcoming Justin Timberlake-starring In Time) and SOYLENT GREEN about a detective investigating a murder in an overcrowded dystopic Manhattan. At&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/09/14/week-starting-thursday-15th-september-fire-in-babylon-lucrecia-martel-and-terrence-malick-retrospectives-dreadnaught-70s-sci-fi/</link>
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		<title>Week starting Thursday 8th September: 13 ASSASSINS, SUBMARINE, Malick retrospective, Korean FF, Bunuel, DRUGSTORE COWBOY</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Week starting Thursday 8th September
New films opening this week:
13 ASSASSINS is Takashi Miike&#8217;s colourfully violent samurai film about a band of assassins sent to kill the murderous Shinzaemon who threatens to plunge the country into violent darkness. The extended fight scene that closes the film is particularly amazing.
SUBMARINE is a remake of Harold and Maude or maybe of Rushmore. In any case, it&#8217;s a coming of age story about a precocious teenager with whimsical affectations who falls in love with an enigmatic girl. Could be fun or could be terrible.
Special seasons:
The Astor presents a complete retrospective of the films of Terrence Malick. This week&#8217;s films are BADLANDS (1973) starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a young couple on the run; and DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) about another young couple toiling in the fields of a wealthy but sickly man. At the Astor on Mondays, September 12-26 (except for THE TREE OF LIFE which screens on Saturday, October 1).
RITA, SUE AND BOB TOO is an adaptation of the comedic play by Andrea Dunbar about two teenaged schoolgirls who have a fling with a married man. Andrea Dunbar was the subject of the recent film THE ARBOR that recently screened as part of the Melbourne Writers&#8217; Festival. At ACMI, September 8-11.
Festivals:
The KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL runs over four days. Highlights include THE MAN FROM NOWHERE, Korea&#8217;s highest-grossing film last year, starring Won Bin (Mother) as an ex-special agent who returns to action to protect a young girl; and THE SHOW MUST GO&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/09/07/week-starting-thursday-8th-september-13-assassins-submarine-malick-retrospective-korean-ff-bunuel-drugstore-cowboy/</link>
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		<title>DOSSIER: Unseen Films</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In an interview with David Walsh a few months ago for the World Socialist Website, Joseph McBride, film historian and author of a recent biography of Steven Spielberg, remarked scathingly:

"A great deal of the academic writing in the 1970s on film was just appalling. The field was taken over by people … it’s difficult to characterize them in one sentence … but, for example, I remember reading one book on film theory that after thirty pages hadn’t mentioned a single film yet. I stopped reading the book. In the introduction of another book on film theory the author said, more or less, 'I don’t have time to go to movies anymore because I’m spending all my time writing about them.' Film studies became a field populated by people who were not particularly interested in films, they were interested in something else, a fact that was not especially healthy for film studies."

The statement intended by our publication of this series of papers on unseen films is, quite simply: Bring back those great, unhealthy days! In these five essays we explore the notion of the unseen film, and how questions of not seeing, seeing nothing (as in Dorian Stuber's essay), writing without seeing (as in the essays by myself, Daniel Fairfax and Goda Trakumaite) or the unseen films that seen films produce (as in the essay by Josefina Garcia Pullés) allow us to pose new questions both of the cinema and of its others, the latter encapsulated in McBride's scorned "something else": the others of cinema, the thoughts it provokes, creates, distorts or obfuscates, whose pursuit may finally be of greater value than 'seeing'.]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/08/29/dossier-unseen-films/</link>
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		<title>On not seeing films: Experience and Ideas in Criticism</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This paper is concerned with a gesture in film criticism so unabashedly perverse as to be perhaps difficult for us to take seriously: I’ll be talking about what it might mean for a critic to write about a film they haven’t seen. In considering some instances of this peculiar phenomenon in criticism, I hope to introduce a discussion of the (often untheorised) notion of experience as it is given to us in criticism, and to think about what it is that we do when we call upon this vaguely theological concept – for, the most immediately striking thing about the kind of criticism that writes without having directly encountered the object of analysis is its displacement of experience (the experience of having seen the film) from its position as the necessary origin and centre of the critic’s thought.
I’ll begin by considering a remarkable essay by the French critic Serge Daney, from 1992, called “The Tracking Shot in Kapo,” which raises this question of writing and not seeing quite starkly.
Among the many films I’ve never seen there is [Gillo Pontecorvo’s] Kapo. Am I the only one who has never seen this film but has never forgotten it? I haven’t seen Kapo and yet at the same time I have seen it. I’ve seen it because someone showed it to me — with words… I know it only through a short text: the review written by Jacques Rivette in Cahiers du Cinéma… entitled On Abjection.  
Rivette didn’t recount the film’s narrative&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/08/29/on-not-seeing-films-experience-and-ideas-in-criticism/</link>
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		<title>Watching the Clock</title>
		<description><![CDATA[First things first. This is not a piece about watching The Clock. Or rather, it is a piece about not watching The Clock. Or rather still, it is a piece about watching clocks. Let me explain.
Having carved out a couple of days free of in-semester duties at Yale, and with a number of engagements further enticing me, I had decided to embark on one of my regular (though not as regular as I would sometimes like) weekend trips down to Manhattan. Riding the Metro-North train from New Haven’s Union station – a 90-minute commute to Grand Central – I idly leafed through the pages of the copy of the New York Times I had picked up at the station’s newsstand, while the Connecticut countryside cascaded past me. Perusing the arts pages, I came across an article by Roberta Smith on a video work which had just commenced screening at the Paula Cooper gallery in Chelsea.[i] Smith was positively gushing over Christian Marclay’s The Clock, and – although I could hardly be said to be an ardent disciple of her art criticism – by the end of her review Smith had convinced me it was worthwhile to squeeze a trip to the West 21st Street gallery into my schedule, in order to see this intriguing work for myself.
The premise of Marclay’s piece is simple, and carries on from earlier works of his such as Telephones and Video Quartet. The video consists of an intense montage of found-footage, culled from the history&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/08/29/watching-the-clock/</link>
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		<title>Seeing Nothing: Lanzmann, Godard and Sontag’s Fantasies of Voluntarism</title>
		<description><![CDATA[About the extermination strictly speaking there is nothing.
—Claude Lanzmann
o how marvelous
to be able to watch what one can’t see
—Jean-Luc Godard
Less than ten years separate the births of Claude Lanzmann (b. 1925), Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) and Susan Sontag (b. 1933), three of the twentieth century’s most significant theorists of the image.  Each was a child or adolescent during the war who avoided, by accident of circumstance and birth, its worst depredations; each would be profoundly affected by images—real and imagined—of the Holocaust.  Each describes that experience by using the term “nothing”—not, however, as we might expect, to designate absence but rather to indicate presence.  For these thinkers, in other words, something comes from nothing; that something, I argue, is a notion of individual agency that we might have supposed destroyed forever by the very events that prompted the images to which these thinkers respond.
I begin by considering a debate between Godard and Lanzmann over the value of something that is straightforwardly nothing, in that it does not exist:  hypothetical footage of the so-called “Final Solution” in operation. The imagined film would show what happened in the gas chambers in the Nazi extermination camps.  In a version of the hyperbolic rhetoric that characterises the debate, one critic has named this hypothetical footage la pellicule maudite (the damned film/footage) [Delfour qtd. in Saxton 53].[1] Godard is convinced that this footage exists:
I have no proof of what I’m saying, but I think that if I got to work on it with a good&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/08/29/seeing-nothing-lanzmann-godard-and-sontag%e2%80%99s-fantasies-of-voluntarism/</link>
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		<title>From the East</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Chantal Akerman’s D’Est (From the East) opens with a dark blue nighttime shot of a street lamp and some power-lines, an empty road underneath them. The title appears in the centre of the screen in bold white letters, some kind of simple and elegant font. This is followed, a few still minutes later, by a shot of another street, this one in daylight, framed by a window with a green or yellow curtain slowly flapping in the wind. Through the window I can see a street sign, a light green and white bus, some cars passing by. The curtain keeps flapping, calmly. The walls around the window are wallpapered, again in yellow and green, maybe some red, tones. And from here it continues, for another two and a half hours, in a similar manner – languidly moving between solidly framed stable views of, or, as the title stresses, from, Russia.
People appear in D’Est only in passing, as merely another part of some larger choreography of objects, never singled out as characters or actors or as otherwise being in any way distinct from the other things that appear on screen. Since I don’t see any of them for long enough to begin to feel any sense of identification, the entity I feel most closely aligned with in D’Est is instead the camera – I can imagine sitting still, just as this camera sits still, in front of the window, silently observing. Just as my presence by that window would most likely&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2011/08/29/from-the-east/</link>
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