The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Patrice Énard Day

 

‘Patrice Énard was a French filmmaker, born on September 17, 1945 in Bordeaux, and deceased on June 1, 2008 in Paris. He was also a researcher/iconographer, theorist and film critic.

‘An avid patron of Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française, Énard developed a particular appreciation for Russian cinema — especially the work of Dziga Vertov — the Lumière school and the French New Wave. Those influences led him to conceive of an activist, subversive and deeply political form of cinema. Following studies at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français, he directed some industrial films and news reports on motocross. He completed his military service with the Cinéma des Armées in Baden-Baden.

‘Énard made his first short films in the mid-1960s. From the outset, his provocative style, stripped of all psychology, attests to the fact that he was part of the generation that launched the French protests of May ‘68. Invested in the dialectic of disobedience, his films constantly question their immersion in the ideological context of the time, in order to better escape it. It was as if the genetic codes of that artistic movement were programming the concept of a permanent on-screen revolution.

‘The filmmaker’s work was widely distributed within those circles, as well as in traditional movie theaters that were more open to innovation at the time. The numerous film festivals that had sprung up across Europe and North America also welcomed his films. In 1972, Patrice Énard was honored by the city of Belfort, and Joris Ivens presented him with the Grand Prize at the Hyères International Festival of Young Cinema in 1982.

‘Like all pioneers, Énard often traveled with his films to discuss them with audiences. He encouraged viewers to rely on their own strength and to take power by way of the movie camera. He liked to say, “There are no more filmmakers than films. That’s why the cinema exists.” (“Why Do You Make Films?” Liberation, special edition, 1987).

‘His name is sometimes associated with collectives like Ciné-Golem (with Philipe Bordier), which programmed a radically different form of cinema in the early years of the Sigma Festival in Bordeaux; Cinéma Différent (with Marcel Mazé); and the Independent Filmmakers Cooperative in Paris (with Patrice Kirchhofer). Yet, his career as a filmmaker advanced in opposition to all of those cliques. He rejected the systems and labels of all the trends and artistic movements he rubbed shoulders with — the counterculture, young filmmakers, avant-garde, experimental, etc. In fact, he was all of those things — simultaneously or in turn — but as someone who treasured freedom above all things, he preferred autonomy and continued to produce his films himself.

‘Énard’s cinematic expression evolved toward a fundamentally analytical and experimental form of cinema. Driven by his increasingly personal reflections, he developed his own language and perfected it through the prism of an atypical, radical esthetic. His discoveries and inventiveness were often a source of formal inspiration for commercials and music videos. His later films could be described as a form of cinema-poetry. He raised the bar higher and higher.

‘His deepest desire was always to incite curiosity, to elicit knowledge by way of the big picture. But as time went by, his field of action extended beyond the silver screen, devoting himself to the creation of a network of cinema bookstores (in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Montpellier). One notable example is the legendary bookstore Cinédoc, in Paris’ 9th arrondissement, which Énard crammed full of movie posters, photographs, magazines and books for its opening, to the great delight of cinephiles everywhere and his two bearded partners.

‘Beginning as a researcher/iconographer and special film consultant for Ciné Choc, Fascination, Polar, Cinématographe and Star System, from March 1975 on, Énard served as journalist and editor on several film magazines, including Sex Stars System, Star System, Ciné Eros Star, Ciné Girl, Star Ciné Vidéo, Ciné-Films, Erostory Film. His work as a journalist also testifies to his predilection for the most extreme cinematic forms, from 1970 to ‘80. For example, he applauded the rise of eroticism and the birth of pornography and gore. He shed light on those genres in magazines such as Sex Stars System and Ciné Eros Stars. Interviews by Jacques Rig, one of his pseudonyms, became famous. His critical approach would lead those popular rags, pummeled by censorship, to become cult favorites.’ — Collectif Jeune Cinema

 

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Stills



















 

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Further

Patrice Énard @ IMDb
Association Patrice Enard
Patrice Énard @ Collectif Jeune Cinema
‘Cinq films de Patrice Énard’
Association Patrice Énard Presents …
‘Le Pornographe’
Buy Patrice Énard’s complete works on DVD here

 

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HOMMAGE A PATRICE ÉNARD

 

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The cinema of Patrice Enard
from Association Démocraties Nouvelles

 

Master of education, Patrice could drive a car very quickly. He anticipated curves, turns, slowdowns and had a very elaborate mental setup, which, on circuits enthusiast, led him to surpass his competitors despite a smaller car. He was not at the service of a “bandwidth”, he built the best trajectories in the imposed sequence of each circuit. 12 08 14 09

What he imagined was not just a reproduction of the configurations of the track. The hazard of a latecomer could thus be integrated without causing discomfort, at most an event complementary to this construction of trajectories. This reveals Guy Debord’s cosmographic strolling as a practice insufficient to transform the old habitus: this ethic of film-editing, which was initiated by Jean-Luc Godard, noting the nihilistic outcome of the “situationist drift”. is clearly proposed, with Patrice, to bring the theory of drift to the critical elaboration of the derived meaning.

It is the phenofilm which inscribes us in the awaited continuation of the current plan and we remain ” in plan ” as for the enjoyment of the imaged events of the genofilm. Indeed, to obey the “logical” sequence of the visible crushes the swarming of the observable in favor of what we recognize, that is to say what we think we know, victims of the familyist empathy of food concessions, clan blackmail, class submissions.

Party of the deconstruction, in particular, of the impression of reality, Patrice Enard, like the great poet Paul Celan, works on the awaited continuation, it is to say that it questions the series and thereby wakes us on the contretype, mimetic plagiarism, of which Lacan, reopening the contribution of Jean Piaget and, periming the Catholic conception of the lie as sin, meant that to make it “pretend”, besides it is a fact of “the inscription of the subject in the chain of signifiers “, is not confused with the fact of performing or taking the other than its” spectacular “. The scene of the very long kiss, in Differences and Repetitions I (1970), implied us to see, by the subtle variations of clothing of the so pregnant Michele, that the furious pleasure of embracing, lived by the greatest number, can be to stereotype in “sad passion” and how much this “armored” emotion, covering all other perceptions like a small mental tsunami, can rob us of the multilateral knowledge of the plans of this surinvested scene. This overinvestment, a petty merchant capture of an affective commerce, also becomes a lie and thus a privation of a greater freedom, which would be that of integrating the social determinants to our reduced love affair, a little ridiculous – which is ready to smile – measured against the clashes of our species.

The intrigance is, in Krishnamurti’s way concerning the disabling psychological fear at every moment, made of “conditioning” which reduces our vital field to banal and impoverished repetitions. Patrice Enard, filming the human dependence – which deprives us to deepen our life and that of the other protagonists of the film of life – by its discrete and persuasive demonstration and not by a sterile denotation – this “denunciation” which directs the superego by his On the moralist side, according to the Nietzschean expression, we restore a psychic and sociological capacity for resistance, which is more sympathetic than the learned demonstrations of man. 12 08 14 07

Patrice shows us the everyday gestures we make without savoring the chance we have to be able to execute them fully, for we are small-imperialists even in this sufficient contempt. 13 11 03 11

Were gestures of speech, so daily trivialized, shown just as well as in The Word in Two (1973), to the point of making clear that acting out in our lives is more often empirical than practical that is to say, enlightened by scientific theorizations: if the people were revolutionary without having to practice the revolutionary theory, it would be noticed day by day; instead, a populism covering the consumer addictions of the people insinuates itself into the councilist conventions that had been embryoed to overcome the capitalist lifestyle. It is therefore necessary to break the fantasmatic knots of the conceptions of the people which remove these addicts and those ignorant from the Marxist theory, updated by the distributive or communal polyhumanist ethics. 14 01 04 08

If the passer-by seems to represent the positions and the trajectories, his ethic remains connotatively disposed to fatalism: “everything passes all broken all tired”. And when handing over corporate powers

 

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8 of Patrice Énard’s 13 films

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Parcours (1968, 10 minutes)
‘La folie du protagoniste capte l’œil de la caméra et l’entraîne dans son sillage. Ivre de liberté, celui-ci dessine une trajectoire inédite : la sienne. Elle n’est autre que le reflet de son scénario intérieur, à mi-chemin entre fantasme et réalité.’ — democraties-nouvelles.org


Excerpt

 

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Différences et répétitions I (1970, 20 minutes)
‘Le film interroge le spectateur sur sa dépendance au cinéma dominant. Il l’invite à démonter les mécanismes du système pour accéder à une compréhension à la fois différente et infinie des images et des sons.’ — cjcinema.org


Excerpt

 

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Différences et répétitions II (1971, 17 minutes)
‘Le son est entré en rébellion avec l’image. Il y a de l’infilmable dans ce qui est montré. Le film soulève une série d’interrogations sur des questions cinématographiques fondamentales – comment, pour qui, pour quoi filmer, qu’est-ce que le cinéma?’ — CJC


Excerpt

 

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Différences et Répétitions III (1971, 17 minutes)
‘Patrice Enard a mis un pluriel au titre de Gilles Deleuze. Car seul le cinéma pouvait réaliser – au sens de rendre réel – ce lien si étroit qui lie le même à l’autre. Le film est un fleuve d’images avec une bande-son de bruits d’eau. Emportées par les flots, les trajectoires se croisent et se décroisent, échappant à tout scénario. Les protagonistes pourraient être remplacés par d’autres puisqu’ils ne sont que les singuliers figurants de situations répétitives.’ — Le Nouveau Latina


Excerpt

 

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Le Cinéma en Deux, (1972, 7 minutes)
‘Claude Chabrol, très ouvert et intrigué par ce curieux gauchiste, chevelu en catogan et tout de noir vêtu, défie Patrice Enard : comment va-t-il pouvoir tirer parti du tournage de son « Docteur Popaul » ? Invité à porter sa caméra 16 de cinéaste différent sur le film, Patrice Énard, tout en jouant les figurants dans les scènes de cimetière, regarde autrement « l’autre » cinéma en train de se faire. Et il le défait. C’est sans doute là le premier making off, avec deux f, de l’histoire du cinéma!’ — Le Nouveau Latina


Excerpt

 

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La Parole en Deux, (1972, 12 minutes)
‘La mise en scène de la parole à l’écran est le sujet du film. Seul le premier plan est synchrone. Tout ce qui suit est une exploration systématique de la production d’un discours à l’écran. Pour unifier cela et pointer les questions de la prise de parole, il fallait un message politique fort, militant. L’un des deux groupes maoïstes de Bordeaux, celui des théoriciens non rattachés au Parti Communiste, se prête avec talent à ce difficile exercice de style.’ — Le Nouveau Latina


Excerpt

 

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La Vie en Deux, (1980, 15 minutes)
‘Erica Blanc, ou Erica White, ou encore Erica Bianchi possède déjà une filmographie européenne lorsqu’elle rencontre Patrice Énard. C’est l’une des reines de la série B. Elle rédige le texte du film où elle rejoue avec distance et humour sa fameuse « carrière », sa « vie de pellicule ». Au besoin, elle n’hésite pas à réendosser les costumes de ses rôles les plus déshabillés ! Ces scènes sont émaillées de photographies de films dont elle fut l’héroïne.’ — Le Nouveau Latina


Excerpt

 

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POURVOIR (1981, 90 minutes)
‘Le tournage a duré dix ans. Une fois dissipée la fumée des barricades, la libération sexuelle émerge – en particulier celle des femmes – et le discours freudo-marxiste prend le relais. Le bas du T-shirt de ces dames devient pour le spectateur un jeu de ligne obsessionnel qui à la fois montre et cache. Le style de Patrice Énard se radicalise en une sorte de poésie visuelle, répétitive. Cette musique pour les yeux met en valeur autant de charmantes différences qu’il y a de femmes pour se prêter à cet étrange divertissement en vert et blanc… couleur chair.’ — Le Nouveau Latina


Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Starting tomorrow, the blog will be going on vacation for a week, basically for the duration of my trip to NYC. New posts and p.s.es will return on Tuesday, the 11th. Feel free to leave as many comments as you like right here while the place and I are away, and I’ll catch up with everyone and everything come the 11th. ** Amphibiouspeter, Hi. Oh, yeah, that’s the problem when letting oneself rely on the internet to tell you the truth about clubs’ lifespans when you don’t know them personally. Thanks for the alert. Sunny here too, and happily not too, too. Enjoy yours, and take care, and I look forward to talking again in a week. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I don’t know Tamburlaine. I’ll hunt its remnant down. Thank you. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Yeah, sad about those clubs, especially The Palladium, which was kind of an amazing place. It was a few blocks from my NYC pad. NYU has a lot to answer for. Ah, totally understandable and got it about you not getting to New York for the PGL shebang. Maybe the film will show up near you if we get lucky. Very glad you’re enjoying ‘Locus Solus’ so far, obviously. Have a great week! ** Misanthrope, Thanks, and yes. About the ‘dead’ posts. Weird that, about the OMD concert’s youthful draw. I wouldn’t have imagined. Nice news somehow. Dang, nice of you to give up zzz’s to help Kayla. I assume the offending car is home now. See you in NYC, tall guy! ** Bill, Hi, B. No, I had never even heard of No Comment club ever before I searched for club corpses. I’m going ask around about it. I did a Schutt post, i.e. a spotlight on one of her books. It’ll be up once the blog is back in its saddle so to speak. I hope your weekend pulled off every trick, and have the least hellish week possible. ** Jay, Hi, Jay! Welcome back! Wow, that’s wild about your art teacher. I only went to The World once. I think I saw that kind of awful David Bowie hard rock band project Tin Machine there. It was a spooky place, in the plus and the minus sense. Nice thoughts about the club scene. I was living in NYC for some of the golden era, and I wasn’t a clubby guy by any means, but it was pretty charismatic in toto. Thanks! Everything good on your end? Have a great series of days until I get to talk with you next. ** H, Hi! Yes, NYC is imminent. See you in a shortie. ** Steve Erickson, People love that title. People have even asked me if I came up with it. So, is the Troye Sivan album going to be an actual hit, do you think? Maybe it already is. I think the last time I walked by the old Limelight, it was a gym of all things. The publication party for my very first fiction book, SAFE, was held there. Matt Pinfield! That’s a name I haven’t heard in forever. Memory tells me Utah Saints had one very catchy song/hit. I can’t … oh, wait. ‘Something Good’. It used a Kate Bush sample. I saw Ned’s Atomic Dustbin play at Limelight. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I wish I’d come across that Leeds dead club site. Your and Alex’s game plan sounds plenty effective. I hope that goes well and that you fully enjoy it. And that you sell some ‘Compendiums’. Will you accept credit cards? That might help. ** Chris dankland, Hey, Hey, Chris! We’re showing PGL on the 5th, so you have the right ticket. On the 6th I’ll be interviewed onstage about my work and film and will show a bunch of film clips from movies that were important to me or that I was in and a clip from LCTG. So I think the 5th is the preferable night. I’m so happy you’re coming! Things are good here, mostly/predictably preparing for the NYC trip, but, yeah, all is well. With you too, I hope. Great! See you soon! ** Corey Heiferman, Howdy, Corey. Oh, wow, what a great site/setting for a club: Dolphinarium. What a terrible ending. Yeah, I really look forward to seeing David’s show, less so to having to read in the related event, although it’s an interesting challenge to have to read David’s writing. A sold USA dip then. That’s good. Sounds good anyway. Fuck trauma. I don’t know Berlin well. I’ve been there a few times, but I still feel like I don’t get it. Let me ask the others and see if anything comes back. Everyone, Would those of you in the particular know be so kind as to give Corey some tips? Thank you! Here he is with his query: ‘My next big adventure travel wise is Berlin for a week in October, with a possible day trip or two outside the city. Does anyone here have any suggestions?’. Have a good week. ** JM, Thanks a lot, man. You busy and doing great? ** Right. So your final post before the blog falls asleep for a week is a look at the too under-known films of Patrice Énard, and I hope you will explore his goods and enjoy the exploration to at least some degree. I’ll see you guys a week from tomorrow. Have lovely times in between. And if you’re around NYC, come see the ‘Permanent Green Light’ events at Lincoln Center on Wednesday at 6:30 pm and Thursday at 7 pm, if you don’t mind. See you soon!

24 Comments

  1. David Ehrenstein

    Patrice Enard is a fascinating part of the French post-68 avant-garde.

  2. Misanthrope

    Dennis, A nice new post (read: totally new to me) for ol’ Labor Day. 😉

    I’m off today and will be getting tons more writing done. I’m happy about that.

    Yeah, you know, you just gotta do what you gotta do. We got the offending car back on the road. You should see the busted tire. Looks like Iron Man hit it or something. Just totally shredded. I have no idea how that happened.

    NYC! Yes, sir. See you there. I’ll be getting there Wednesday around 2:45 and leaving Friday around 11:30 a.m. I’ll text you. At worst, I’ll see you at the event(s). It’s going to be a great time. Soak it up and savor it. This is a big and good thing. So happy for you guys.

  3. Steve Erickson

    Pinfield published a memoir a few years ago, and I think he’s now DJing on satellite radio, after working at Columbia Records.

    Yeah, I remember the Utah Saints’ “Something Good,” whose hook sampled Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting.”

    The Sivan album is currently #5 on iTunes’ sales chart. That won’t necessarily match the upcoming Billboard top 200, which takes audio and video streaming into account, but I think he has the potential to be the male Ariana Grande. So far, he’s had more success in the American dance scene than with mainstream pop; as I wrote in my review, “My My My!” peaked at #80 on Billboard’s top 100 but topped their dance club singles chart.

    Hope to see you Thursday!

  4. Misanthrope

    Oh, and Big D: Safe travels, my friend.

  5. JM

    sharing unrelated words from a dear friend. enard is special but my friends are special-er, and this is something i feel either you and or your readers will benefit from, its long so if you dont read it today-night i understand.

    j

    “Dear Letterboxd:

    I am writing this because I would like to say that I am formally retiring from reviewing movies. I am not going to correct, edit or revise any reviews, even if my feelings regarding those reviews or those films have changed, I will leave them here as they are. I have been wrestling a lot with what and who I am, what drives me, what is important to me, what do I want to become, how do I want to be in the world. The person that I am becoming is not compatible with reviewing films and I will tell you why.
    I have come to distrust my response to films. I have come to question where those responses come from and why and how they are formed in me. This is a fundamental issue. I can no longer tolerate my own glaring critical blindspots, knowing I am overlooking things I have been conditioned to not see. I want to undo the not-seeing. In order to do that, I have to become a different person. My experience of viewing and responding to films is necessarily conditioned by trauma and engagement with trauma. What I engage with in a film is what engages my trauma, on the things, persons and events which formed me. Injury, emotional and spiritual violence, disability both obvious and not, estrangement from family from school from church from society is a hole. The things which engage me are violent, ugly, beautiful, transcendent. I realized early on in my film-reviewing that my response to films is visceral, personal and almost wholly amoral. I believe that the act of making art, of making a film of writing a review is an inherently moral act. It cannot be otherwise. I come from an immediate background of militarized white cishet male xtian supremacy. What I have internalized and, moreover, allowed myself to internalize, is an enormous reservoir of largely unexamined downriver hatred. I am in my embodied form, hatred made manifest. My parents hate each other and have forever. Theirs was a loveless marriage based upon lies and continual psychological abuse leavened only by absences. My home life growing up wasn’t the worst and I don’t mean for it to sound as if it was but in order to survive it I channeled the ugliness into myself, took it on and wore it. I have been wearing it ever since. I am not the person I want or need to be, for myself or for others. For years I have despised the person that I am, wanted nothing more than to tear myself from myself. For years I wore the skin of my father, torn, bloodied and ill-fitting, a living hex that smells like
    fear, anger, alcohol, awful 1980’s cologne hastily applied to cover up something else, worn as atonement, as punishment, as a sign of damage, mayday. The movies I like are rooted in trash exploitation, movies which say something about the nexus of desire and violence, movies by which i can effectuate at least temporarily, a form of annihilation, a while of not-being, of applying a relentless fight-or-flight panic to everything in the face of inexorable death. Justice is not real. Mercy is shown capriciously if at all. Love hurts. All of these things are true and real. There is no point in denying them. Trash cinema is where I grew up, where I became what I am today. I don’t want to be what I am now. This is not to repudiate trash cinema. It is my home forever. I need to leave home. I need to become something else. I am turning crone or hag, a third turning, to face the last years. I have spent the last two or more years in near isolation, surviving through induced trances, long-term cable news, art-making as the last talisman against spiritual or very real death. I am now exhausted. I want more than anything, in the collapse of any form of shared civic communion, to reforge that for myself, here where I find myself, in Central Pennsylvania. I am done running away from everything. Whatever I do I will do here, in this place. I like it here.
    I like the people here. I serve them every day at a big box store. I am a cashier. I like being a cashier except for the excruciating back pain. I like talking to people about how their day is going. I am mostly out as trans at work. I don’t dress en femme at work as I wear a shirt and slacks like everyone else but someday I am going to wear a skirt to work. I know a lot of people that I serve every day probably vote Republican, probably voted for Trump, would potentially be put off if they saw me as trans, if they knew me, but the thing is, they really do know me, every day, and they are polite and friendly, at least most of them. I like them. I care about them. I don’t want anything bad to happen to them or to anyone else I am friendly with. I see it as my duty to make everyone who comes into my cheerful extended nightmare of neoliberal capital overflow feel welcomed and seen by me if only for a routine interaction while purchasing some random items. This is the most meaningful thing I can do right now, be kind to everyone i meet or at least try. I am not naive. I know what is happening in this world. Since the electio
    n I have found it more and more difficult to immerse myself in film. My thoughts stray, my anxieties lurch. Part of this has to do with a 2018 unfortunately spotted with further brain injury which has left me not as cognitively sharp or verbally fluid as i once was. I am not what I was. I want to spend my last days as an old woman, active in her community to the extent that she is able, kind to those she comes across. I want to become a person I can live with. I don’t know what that is like. I want to thank everyone at letterboxd for being kind and good and welcoming to me, listening to what I had to say and taking their time to respond to it. Thank you for being a good community to me. I love all of you.
    In departure, I would ask something of you but you certainly do not need to listen. I would ask that you remain a multicultural, pluralist, open platform for people to engage with one another peacefully, to treat one another with kindness, with openness, with tolerance. This is not to say that viewpoints or statements or positions should go unchallenged, but please be aware that behind every name, every icon, there is a person who is here because they are looking for community, reaching out to others. Unless we ask, we cannot know what each other’s stories are, what people we are and who we want to be. Let this be a place where people can become who they want to be, who they need to become. It was that place for me.

    Thank You

    :heart: :heart: :heart: nathaxnne

  6. Damien Ark

    Hey Dennis. Hope my NY friend makes it to your movie. I reminded him of it again. Have fun!

    🙂

  7. _Black_Acrylic

    The This Much We Know, Now talk about Yuck ‘n Yum that I gave for Creative Dundee went down well and there’s a pic of it here. I was a bit nervous and rattled through the thing in about 5 minutes, despite having a potential 7 minutes to go at but still, it all went down well I think. That big stripey building you can glimpse through the window is the new Dundee V&A due to open next week with a Primal Scream performance, embarrassingly enough.

  8. Shane Christmass

    Fantastic images.

    I’m printing them out to stick on my wall.

  9. alex rose

    dennis, General of all Zombies

    i totally forgot you were in ny, have a great time there

    love,alex,x

  10. _Black_Acrylic

    I was at the DCA this morning to see the Mike Kelley – Mobile Homestead installation that opened last night. I stayed for about a half hour of the 3 hour
    films, and I’ll go back and see more some time soon. It shows interviews with Detroit inhabitants: bar workers, restaurateurs, tattooists, prostitutes, a cross section of society and the interviews are spliced with footage of the MK family home fixed to the back of a trailer making its way around the city.

    • _Black_Acrylic

      The films talk to some fascinating characters and there’s a remarkable community spirit there. There’s also a third film that documents the ‘christening’ and launch of the work as a permanent fixture back at the museum in Detroit, and I still need to go back and see that part of it. I’m so thrilled to have this monumental artwork come here to my doorstep in Dundee.

  11. Steve Erickson

    Here’s my interview with Grasshopper Film’s Ryan Krivoshey: https://read.kinoscope.org/2018/09/07/spotlight-on-grasshopper-film-an-adventurous-film-distributor/

    Also, my review of Troye Sivan’s BLOOM: https://www.gaycitynews.nyc/stories/2018/18/sivan-music-2018-08-30-gcn.html. I have a review of British singer Anna Calvi’s HUNTER in the pipeline.

  12. Bill

    Hope you and Zac are enjoying New York, and the screenings went great!

    Very intriguing images today; will definitely keep an eye out for Enard screenings.

    It’s the SF Electronic Music Fest this weekend, but I’m so worn out from work I may just skip the whole thing. Sigh.

    Bill

  13. Kyler

    Dennis, how can I describe how your film has affected me, still thinking about it several days after seeing it. So impressed with the acting (I guessed the pro actor was the main character, but I guessed wrong) the writing (loved it in French and glad to know you wrote the English!) and just all of it. I look forward to seeing it again. Writing this after a tooth extraction today. You’re not supposed to smoke for 24 hours (or drink alcohol or coffee) – what? My 3 vices! Not going to listen to the instructions…I’m smoking right now with gauze in the opening. Never seemed to bother my previous (3?) extractions. Pretty painless and enjoying my new freedom from that wicked tooth! Welcome back and again, really wowed by the film.

  14. Damien Ark

    Incoming word vomit. I apologize. My friend made it your movie and said that he enjoyed it. He made jokes about your punk friends in GBH shirts lol. I’m glad that I could get him there and enjoy his experience as a proxy, plus, he loves film and shit. One day I’ll meet you in person, hopefully, idk. I’ve considered writing either a loose biography or fictional novel based on that person. He’s an artist that was part of a very specific dark fetish gay sub-culture centered around eroticism of executions, via hanging, beheadings… And that’s super fascinating to me. But I really don’t know if I’d do it or how I’d do it and many other things. There’s a lot of bizarre secrecy in that community, which is mostly dead or very small now.
    Still editing, doing homework at the same time. Quit one of my two jobs to give me more time for all that shit.
    Idk if you’d find this funny or rude but my friend said in an email that you and Zac looked like you’d “BEEN DOING SOME LOW LEVEL PROSPECting in abandoned uranium-mine tailings.”
    Anyway, glad to hear the movie did well. Gotta mast– I mean, do home work and productive things. Hope you have a safe trip back!

  15. Nik

    Hey Dennis!

    How’d the screening go? I’m listening to your Dennis Lim interview right now, it’s cool to hear about how your relationship to art growing up. I am in a similar boat of having been obsessive over pretty mundane conventional art and then abandoning it for experimental stuff as a teenager, but I guess that’s a lot of peoples experience. Right now I’m reading Journey to the End of the Night, and for some reason I’m like 200+ pages in and just starting to get into the formal components of the whole thing. Not that I haven’t enjoyed it up to this point, but I definitely am in love with the book once he’s back from America. It feels like the bigger concept is coming into focus, whatever it is. I have no idea if this is the common experience, I haven’t finished so it’s hard to say. It’s kind of shocking this was ever a popular novel though, haha. I don’t mean to drone about this stuff, it’s just exciting stuff to engage with right now.
    Also, I have the John Fahey day relatively complete. I made it on a google doc, so the videos are just links right now, but I have the whole thing organized. I found out a lot of cool Fahey facts / really good buried songs that I’m excited to share with the blog!!
    How was the flight back to France? What are you up to this week?

  16. Jamie

    Ahoy Dennis!
    How are you and how was the trip? I hope it’s nice to be back in Paris.
    I’ve been home a couple of days and had a very nice week of swimming, tanning, writing, reading and eating. And I didn’t get sick, which is new and very much appreciated.
    Again, thanks for coming out and hanging out when we were in Paris. It was lovely to meet you. All your talk of you and Zac’s new new film got me super excited and inspired and on a new scriptwriting jag, so thanks also for that.
    I’ve got quite a few blog posts to catch up, which is nice. No internet for a week or so was surprisingly easy and pleasant, but it’s also good to be back online.
    What’s your plans now you’re back?
    May reading these words act as a magic jetlag remover and may your day be a dandy stroll down Groovy Avenue.
    Meat-free love,
    Jamie
    Jamie

  17. Quinn R

    Hey Dennis!

    Thanks a lot for your reply a few weeks ago, it made my week! First and foremost — please pass the message along to Corey that I’d love to hang out with him while he’s in Berlin & I’m happy to offer some advice on what to do. Corey, what sorts of stuff do you like to do? There’s lots to do in Berlin. Dennis you’re right about the city being a little hard to “get” — I’ve been enjoying it so far, but it’s not an aesthetically pleasing city. The architecture is very Brutalist, reminiscent of its Soviet history, kind of hard on the eyes. Being a tourist here isn’t that fun, but you’ll have lots of fun being a local — visiting the lakes and drinking beer by the canals and partying at the clubs, if clubbing is your thing. Everyone here speaks English, too. I hope you like Turkish food, because Berlin has the largest Turkish community outside of Turkey. Here the Doner Kebab shops are sort of like the taco trucks in LA or San Francisco.

    Dennis, once I make my way to Paris then I’ll let you know, would really love to meet you. I hope I don’t miss you, we should try to coordinate. My schedule is pretty flexible. I’m going to Amsterdam next week, actually, it will be cool to be in the city where you used to write.

    How is your New York trip? What have you been up to there?

    I don’t have any of my fiction published on the Internet yet. I have an essay about Bojack Horseman forthcoming on Fanzine, but as far as my fiction goes, I want to get my stories polished & revised before I send them out. The stories I’m focusing on atm are similar to the George Miles cycle, but they’re not formally innovative or avant-garde. I really admire experimental fiction & it informs my writing, but I think I work best in a conventional mode. Perhaps you could offer some guidance? I would of course be very flattered and grateful to have you read my fiction 🙂 I also have a goal in Berlin to begin a novel. I have the novel’s three threads already planned out & will spend my time in Europe writing those threads separately. Then if the material is any good I’ll find a way to braid the threads & tether them to an endpoint. Who knows what will happen?

    What’s the rest of your fall looking like? Anything fun/exciting?

    If you got a chance to read the Kevin interview then I hope you liked it! Kevin has been so generous to me. I forgot that I quoted you in the interview, too. The point you made about fiction being in a gentrified, economics driven state — it’s such a great insight, and very true of most things nowadays. Naomi Fry of the New Yorker wrote an essay about Elon Musk, and in the essay she makes a point similar to yours: “It’s often said that the line between mass and indie culture has completely collapsed…Now we can drop acid to discover our inner child while becoming tech billionaires, or, more modestly, listen to obscure music while watching the Kardashians.” She was referring moreso to culture’s relationship to political ideology, but I pasted the link to my comment in case you’re in need of some airport reading material.

    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-appearances/the-trouble-with-elon-musk-and-grimes

  18. Dominik

    Hi, Dennis!!

    Welcome back!!
    I can’t wait to hear about your NYC trip! How did the ‘PGL’ events go? I trust they made you and Zac proud! Every single comment I’ve read about the screenings and the accompanying interview(s) was very impressive! (And thank you so much for sharing that podcast!!)
    Did you get to spend some not-film-related time in the city too?

    Amsterdam was… Amsterdam was a dream. It’s such an inspiring and amazing place that it really outdid my wildest hopes and expectations. We were out and about all the time – all the names of the places and areas we’ve explored are a big blur in my head – I’m just full of the impressions and memories of the million things I’ve seen and felt and tried. So crowded there, in every sense of the word! All that street art too, my god…! I left most of my money in old bookshops and tiny, alternative clothing stores and hidden coffeeshops and pubs. One of my favorite places was this one: https://www.facebook.com/HillStreetBluesAmsterdam/photos/rpp.132555623467970/1985017478221766/?type=3&theatre
    I loved Zaandam too, it was like some fairytale setting, especially that it smelled like chocolate all the time there because of the cocoa factory nearby, haha.
    For the first time in my entire life, I didn’t want to come home (I always do otherwise – not because I love this place so much but because the safety of what I know tends to soothe my general anxiety). I felt like that’s just the place where I want to be, period. I’ll definitely go back and soon. This whole trip gave me so much. I feel like it set me in motion, in a way I really needed. As soon as I got back to Budapest, I told my boss that I’m leaving at the end of December, haha.

    After somewhat getting over the depression I felt upon returning, I went to a drag show on Saturday which was very, very far from the content and quality I’m generally looking for in the field but it was still a little uplifting to see some Hungarian queens at all.

    Have you managed to apply for that grant you mentioned in your previous letter? And also, have you heard back from ARTE already? I do hope – like… seriously – that the thing about the professional screenwriter remains an empty threat…!

    I hope your jet-lag isn’t in a murderous mood and that it’s good to be back home! (Even if just for a few days before you head to London for the weekend.) Have an amazing week, Dennis!!

  19. _Black_Acrylic

    I’ve had the reissued house classic Marcus Mixx – M+M Theme 12″ for a while, and I was playing it today when I found this insert with some nice evocative text inside. Not sure if it was MM who wrote the copy but it’s a nice surprise to find poetry hidden inside records.

  20. Steve Erickson

    That New Yorker article on Grimes & Musk is very good. Musk smoking weed with Joe Rogan was just gross. It’s OK for him to do it run front of an audience of hundreds of thousands, but Tesla drug tests its ordinary workers? But on the other hand, the sense that “obscure”/”indie” culture is available to anyone with an Internet connection constantly startles me, like when famous actors sing the praises of Tim Buckley albums that I spent years searching for when I was in college, but I wish I could’ve just headed to iTunes and been able to download every Can album when I was 15 (or hear them on Spotify for a $10 monthly membership.) Really, what makes my taste in music different from Michael Sheen’s, just because he’s a movie star and I’m not? Did liking underground music/lit/film/etc. ever genuinely mean you had leftist politics? I sense that a lot of tension among gay men right now stems from the fact that the connection between gayness and counterculture/leftism is rapidly being lost, but that connection stemmed from the difficulties centrists and right-wingers used to have coming out and their former lack of interest in doing so.

    Some of this is making its way into a new script I’m writing about a gay conservative talk show (on YouTube) host whose interview with the writer of a book about threats to free speech on campus is being interrupted by texts from someone trying to blackmail him with the threat of posting videos of him having kinky sex with a hustler on-line. It goes beyond that, into a general sense of fakeness about the media (eg., the talk show host lies on air both about being married and not taking drugs and while I agree with much of the dialogue I’m putting in the guest’s mouth, some of their interview is staged.) If you have any idea who Dave Rubin is, it’s somewhat inspired by him and his show THE RUBIN REPORT.

  21. Brendan

    Hey Dennis,

    Just read the piece on PGL in Art Forum. Love what you had to say about it. Can’t wait to see it again. I screwed up and missed the first part when you screened in LA. Ugh. Hope your trip to NY was good. I’m in a super productive phase and I’m making stuff like crazy. I’m even reading Art Forum again, so that should tell you something. Can’t wait to show you stuff when it’s showable. Love, B.

  22. h

    Dennis! Super star! Hope your flight was OK.

  23. GM

    Did I dream, or did you once upon a time write a post about Jean Giono (via Henry Miller)? (which I have more than once cited in my attempt to convert colleagues to worship also at his altar) I seem to be coming up dry.

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