John Gianvito's Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007) is showing November 3 - December 2, 2020 on Mubi in the Rediscovered series.Let’s start with the title—a shotgun marriage between two omnipresent yet far from equally featured players in these unremarked, meditative spaces: an abstract impulse that supposedly keeps our American republic healthy and vital (while producing a lot of junk along with more helpful items) and a concrete force that softly caresses everything in its path, keeping us alive and alert. More specifically, an encounter between the cause of many of the deaths that are being commemorated in John Gianvito’s film—especially those relating to the genocide of Native Americans and many of the massacres occasioned by slave revolts and labor protests—and what D.W. Griffith lamented he found missing from modern cinema, the wind in the trees, found in the vicinity of most of the dozens of gravesites visited.
- 11/13/2020
- MUBI
I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.
- 10/11/2016
- MUBI
The New STYLEThis is the second year that the New York Film Festival has presented Projections, its extensive showcase of experimental film and video that for years had been called Views From the Avant-Garde. The name change (or "rebranding," in the parlance of our ugly times) corresponded, of course, to the departure of longtime programmer Mark McElhatten. Under his stewardship, Views became one of the premiere experimental film festivals in the world, a long weekend of high caliber dispatches from established masters, alongside bracing discoveries by up-and-coming makers whose work somehow caught Mark's eye. His programming partner, Film Comment's Gavin Smith, often brought along selections that complemented Mark's, even as they were out of his usual bailiwick.The Views era was not without its dissenters. Some complained that McElhatten rounded up the usual suspects year after year, sometimes without regard to the relative quality of their latest offerings. Others, most prominently Su Friedrich,...
- 10/2/2015
- by Michael Sicinski
- MUBI
Sixty years ago a team of radical, blacklisted filmmakers made Salt of the Earth, a powerful representation of the agency of Us workers. Sukhdev Sandhu celebrates a talisman of the American left
Demonised and hounded off screen on its release, Salt of the Earth, released in almost impossible circumstances 60 years ago, has a strong claim to being the most ambitious American film ever made. According to its director Herbert J Biberman and screenwriter Michael Wilson, it was the "first feature film ever made in [the Us] of labour, by labour, and for labour". More than that, it was "a film that does not tolerate minorities but celebrates their greatness".
Biberman, Wilson and producer Paul Jarrico had all been exiled from Hollywood for their politics. Biberman had worked in theatres in Moscow and co-founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League before being jailed for six months for refusing to testify before the House Committee on...
Demonised and hounded off screen on its release, Salt of the Earth, released in almost impossible circumstances 60 years ago, has a strong claim to being the most ambitious American film ever made. According to its director Herbert J Biberman and screenwriter Michael Wilson, it was the "first feature film ever made in [the Us] of labour, by labour, and for labour". More than that, it was "a film that does not tolerate minorities but celebrates their greatness".
Biberman, Wilson and producer Paul Jarrico had all been exiled from Hollywood for their politics. Biberman had worked in theatres in Moscow and co-founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League before being jailed for six months for refusing to testify before the House Committee on...
- 3/11/2014
- by Sukhdev Sandhu
- The Guardian - Film News
Looking back at 2012 on what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2012—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2012 to create a unique double feature.
All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2012 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch in that perfect world we know doesn't exist but can keep dreaming of every time we go to the movies.
How would you program some...
All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2012 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch in that perfect world we know doesn't exist but can keep dreaming of every time we go to the movies.
How would you program some...
- 1/9/2013
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Noble in theory, erratic in execution, the omnibus documentary "Far From Afghanistan" is a classic case of too many cooks in the kitchen. The sprawling concept, overseen by John Gianvito ("Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind"), draws together the considerable talents of five established non-fiction filmmakers and several Afghan journalists for an essayistic exploration of the war's debilitating impact on both the local population and U.S. citizenry. It's also a far-reaching treatise against all acts of war, with detailed observations that are alternately provocative and obtuse. As with many anthologies, there's just too much stuffed into a single package. At best a stirring look at the inherently destructive impact of any incursion, the movie suffers from frequent didacticism. Numerous segments use onscreen text to share figures and quotations that often distract from the sheer power of the footage. This tendency to complicate the material with...
- 8/7/2012
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
I want to bang the drum a bit for Far From Afghanistan, a project inspired by the 1967 omnibus film, Far From Vietnam. The roster of contributing filmmakers is impressive to say the least: John Gianvito (Profit motive and the whispering wind), Jon Jost (All The Vermeers in New York), Minda Martin (Free Land), Travis Wilkerson (Distinguished Flying Cross) and Soon-Mi Yoo (Dangerous Supplement). You can read about each of their new films here, but overall, the goal is "to contribute to the international effort to redirect Us policy away from military and political intervention toward true humanitarian and developmental care-giving." If that strikes a chord, you might consider chipping in to the Kickstarter campaign. For one week, starting on October 6, you can watch the works-in-progress.
Isabelle Marinoni's essay "Surrealism in the Service of the Fantastic: Jean Rollin, a 'Parallel' Director in Libertarian French Cinema" makes for a nifty supplement to Arena,...
Isabelle Marinoni's essay "Surrealism in the Service of the Fantastic: Jean Rollin, a 'Parallel' Director in Libertarian French Cinema" makes for a nifty supplement to Arena,...
- 9/23/2011
- MUBI
• In Hong Sang-soo’s Oki’s Movie you always know the temperature outside because of the clothing people are wearing. It’s so cold that no one takes off their parkas and scarves inside; in fact, everyone seems to wear the same clothing inside and out—it's that damn cold. A real mark, too, to the warmth felt in the unusually chaste (for Hong) sex scene between Lee Sun-kyun (who plays a promising young filmmaker) and Jung Yumi (who plays the titular Oki, in one of the best female performances in a Hong film), a simple little close up of two bodies cradling one another in bed. The “warmth” is not one of tone but of temperature: the previous shot was of a freezing Lee having spent the night outside Jung's apartment (in his parka of course). Jump cut to them nude in bed under the covers and you’ll feel warm too.
- 9/30/2010
- MUBI
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