I'm wholly against inviting or invoking political discourse into this platform, but there are certain instances when I feel avoidance of comment is tantamount to cowardice, especially as a proud New Yorker, who both loves and fears every one of his other New Yorkers. Respectfully so. So I'll simply offer this; film has often been defined as a medium that lies, once upon an antiquated time as one that lied at 24-frames per sec. It manipulates context. It manipulates actuality. It manipulates to the point that any objectivity is impossible.
Sometimes though, film, in whatever form it has technologically morphed into, provides enough information to count as evidence, evidence enough to warrant a trial. Not a conviction, not a lynching. A trial. By our peers. In the best attempt to divine the truth from the unreliable muck that is our collective witness testimony, the forensic evidence, the dead man who should still be breathing. Film, even the kind recordable and accessible by the average smartphone, can still nudge our pessimism and our apathy toward a desire for justice. Today I am more convinced than ever that film, the kind we record with our point & shoot cameras, with our iPhones and Androids, with whatever device we routinely employ to freeze time indelibly, that film should put the system on trial, and not the other way around.
Polemic finished.
Continuing series this day include the Mario Monicelli trib at Film Forum, the dual fawn for actress Joan Bennett and filmmaker Robert Altman at MoMA, Sunshine Noir at BAM Cinématek, Celluloid Dreams at IFC Center, Screenwriters and the Blacklist; Before, During and After at Anthology Film Archives, and Chelsea Classics at the BowTie Chelsea Cinemas. The repertory rambunctiousness be thus;
