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The Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), with Pacific Design Center, and Charles S. Cohen present Counter Culture, Counter Cinema: An Avant-Garde Film Festival -- a three-day celebration of films focusing on the long-term alliance between experimental cinema and counter-culture activity. The festival will be held at the SilverScreen Theater at the Pacific Design Center (8687 Melrose Ave. in West Hollywood) October 14th through October 16th, 2010, and will cover the half-century from the early 1960s to the present, featuring films and videos that explore sexuality, politics, communal experiments, and transgressive appropriations. A set of guest speakers -- a vital part of the program -- will also be presenting panels.
Britain’s largest cinema spectacle, the London Film Festival, is for the 54th time “bringing the world’s best new films to London,” October 13 to 28, 2010. Unlike some of its competitors, the British Film Institute’s big Fall fest shows no signs of falling down.
Rumors continue to swirl that the axing of the UK Film Council could doom such regional beneficiaries as the Cambridge Film Festival. Yet LFF stands to gain from the reallocation of £’s in the Council’s wake.
Since its genesis in 1956, LFF has generally served as a “festival of festivals” mounting the UK premieres of favorites from Cannes, Toronto and Sundance. (Local lore has it that the BFI acted on the expressed belief of local film critics that “with Cannes and Venice having their festivals, as did Edinburgh, so surely London should too.”) Yet, as per Artistic Director Sandra Hebron, London also fulfills a discovery role.
One of this year's New York Film Festival Masterworks at the Walter Reade Theater, the primary retrospective sidebar of the Festival is Elegant Elegies: The Films of Masahiro Shinoda, devoted to the work of the famed 79-year-old Japanese film director. One of the key figures of the Nipponese "New Wave," notably celebrated by film scholar Noël Burch, Shinoda's films break with classical norms. Shinoda began his career at Shochiku
as did his more famous contemporary Nagisa Oshima and both became directors so they could appeal to the rising “youth market” of the time, one that was tired of conventional Japanese film.
The series runs throughout the length of the Fest -- which opens Friday, Sept. 24th, 2010, until Sun. Oct. 10th -- and includes a rare appearance of the director on Saturday, Sept 25 at the 7:30 pm screening of Pale Flower as well as on Sunday, September 26 at the 5:45 pm screening of Melody in Gray and at the 8:15 pm of Double Suicide.
Heading into its 48th campaign, New York Film Festival will once again carry the auteurist flag (from September 24th to October 10, 2010), , as it has since first mobilizing in 1963. The Festival, organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, prides itself on capturing the year's critical darlings in narrative fiction. So ticket buyers needn't brace for mediocrity when venturing beyond documentaries, as they’ve too often learned to do with NYFF’s downtown foil, the Tribeca Film Festival.