Celebrating Resilience: Houston Cinema Arts Festival 2017
Houston Cinema Arts Festival, one of the few festivals in the US that focuses on films about the arts, takes over several Museum District venues from Nov. 9-13, with a streamlined program.
Film
History, Poetics & A Party: Dance Films at HCAF
Every year a cluster of dance films make the Houston Cinema Arts Festival line-up, Nov. 9-13. This year they run the gamut, where dance and dancers are the central focus (Rebels on Pointe and No Maps on my Taps/About Tap), to films where dance is used sparingly, in a more poetic realm (Pendular).
Make Austin Weirder: John Bock’s “Uncanny Musical” Does Its Part
“Keep Austin weird,” the bumper-sticker admonition goes, but German filmmaker John Bock—the latest of many European artists to take a cinematic crack at Texas, has envisioned a weirder Austin in Dead + Juicy, an exhibition combining an “uncanny musical” with an installation of transformed versions of the film’s props and sets.
Jazz on/in/and Film at the MFAH
In a year, a very small number of “jazz films” can or will be released — there’s just (unfortunately) not that many to be made. So, during Jazz on Film, a yearly festival curated by Peter Lucas, now in its fifth year, there are some repetitions from previous years.
Full Surround Cinema: Adventures at the 2016 HCAF
Houston Cinema Arts Festival artistic director Richard Herskowitz mentioned early on in the festival that immersive cinema may be the one of the few ways to get away from our habit of constant distraction. Two days after the election, I needed all the distraction that I could get, which is perhaps why the VR Gallery became my go to refuge during the 2016 HCAF, which ran Nov. 10-17, 2016.
Dancing Bodies Wake Up Space: Third Coast Dance Film Festival at Aurora Picture Show
I'm convinced that most spaces can be improved by the presence of a few dancing bodies.
Six Straight Hours of River of Fundament at MFAH
Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s River of Fundament is, according to them, a “nontraditional opera with a series of one-time-only live acts performed across the American landscape.”
Big Things in Small Films: The Rush Process at Aurora
On Saturday Aug 27, walking out of the second night of Rush Process, a film festival highlighting handcrafted animation, my friend said, “it was v inspo,” which in millennial poetics, means “very inspiring.”
A History in Fragments: Jazz on Film at MFAH
If there is a history of jazz, it’s forever incomplete, like archeologists finding fragments of text buried in the sand.
The Sears Effect: Kelly Sears at Aurora Picture Show
When the lights came up after an hour of Kelly Sears' shorts I felt like an extra from The Manchurian Candidate, with a mild case of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, complete with the eyeball spinning.
Bold Cinema: Houston Jewish Film Festival Highlights Family, History and Comedy
The Evelyn Rubenstein JCC of Houston presents the 12th Houston Jewish Film Festival, with 27 films over 16 days, March 5-20, 2016, at various venues, including the Evelyn Rubenstein JCC, the MFAH, Holocaust Museum Houston, Sundance Cinemas and Congregation Beth Jacob in Galveston.
Merging Music & Literature: A Proust Sonata at Da Camera
Sarah Rothenberg, artistic director of Da Camera and Houston’s great maestro of performances that blend music, literature and art, believes that to encounter the works of the great French author Marcel Proust is to begin a life long relationship.