Monthly Archives: June 2010

Downtown Independent (Cont’d)

Posted in Film festival by

By Robert Koehler

(Click on thumbnails for larger pictures.)

The lobby of Downtown Independent, where the first New Media film festival played Friday through Sunday, June 11-13. The festival is one of the first to be located purely at Downtown Independent, 251 S. Main St., located on the west side of Main between 2nd and 3rd and the only independently run cinema in downtown Los Angeles.

As ImaginAsian, the venue struggled, but reconfigured as a home to a broad range of independent cinema wedged somewhere between a more commercial house like the Nuart and a microcinema like Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre, Downtown Independent has become a favored Los Angeles exhibition choice for alternative distribution entities such as Northwest Film Forum, which brought Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool to Downtown Independent in early March. Just finishing a week run on June 10, Oliveira’s sublime 2009 miniature feature, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl continued the century-old director’s incredible current streak, which continues with his new Cannes premiere, the sublime The Strange Case of Angelica.

DI will also serve as a key venue during the Los Angeles Film Festival starting this Friday. Essential viewing there during LAFF includes: Jaak Kilmi’s amusing and clever Cold War auto-doc, Disco & Atomic War (Fri June 18, 7:30p); the Larry Fessenden-produced Bitter Feast (Fri June 18, 9:45p, Sun June 20, 10p); Mads Brugger’s acclaimed “invasion” of North Korea, The Red Chapel (Sat June 19, 7:30p); Aaron Katz’ SXSW hit, Cold Weather (Sat June 19, 10p); and Amir Bar-Lev’s emotionally powerful look at the tragic murder/death of Arizona Cardinals star Pat Tillman, The Tillman Story (Sun June 20, 1:30p).

Beyond a spacious and pretty cool lobby, the DI has a terrific mid-sized auditorium, with a very good sound system (audibly on display during the Saturday projection of Double Take), ample stadium-style seating as well as standard rake seating near the good-sized screen. An upstairs balcony entrance leads to a back row that affords a great deal of privacy. Upcoming photos include the theater’s rooftop area, ideal for hanging before and after screenings, as well as views of various nooks and crannies in this distinctive downtown cinema space.

As promised, a view to the upstairs levels of Downtown Independent. These levels include an entry to the balcony, an office-meeting space, and access to the rooftop. Note that the predominant architectural style is Mid-Century Modern, the mode born and bred in Southern California and all too suitable for a Los Angeles cinema.

A kind of latticework view through the modernist railing from the stairs back to the Downtown Independent lobby….

Another view from the stairs of the DI, looking at both the lobby below and the meeting room above, ideal for (among other things) festival needs.

A view from the top of the stairs in the DI to the lobby area and the large Main Street lobby window. There’s a cafe atmosphere in the lobby when there’s a crowd, while street parking, especially on the weekends, isn’t too difficult. Besides, there are several lots nearby.

A view from the rooftop party area of the DI. Here, we’re looking north up Main toward 1st and 2nd, where you can catch dramatic vistas of old downtown (St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, the original home of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese) and new…

Another view from the DI rooftop, here looking west to a great gaze of downtown’s forest of skyscrapers, with some of the older (and now preserved) Spring Street buildings in the foreground….

Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take

Posted in Film review by

By Robert Koehler

Following the New Media Film Festival screening last night at Downtown Independent in downtown Los Angeles, festival programming director Noel Lawrence (center) moderates a very new media panel discussion on Johan Grimonprez’s fascinating film on Hitchcock, doubling, paranoia, the Cold War and catastrophe culture, Double Take. In the foreground to the right is co-editor Tyler Hubby, who discussed the process of working for five solid months with Grimonprez during his residency at the Hammer Museum, where they culled UCLA Film Archive footage of everything from episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, rare promotional footage of The Birds (which becomes the key filmic reference point, shot during the October Missile Crisis), Folger’s Coffee commercials, and a forest of Cold War and early Space Race newsreel footage (among other things).

Grimonprez was also on the panel and is actually in this photo….on the laptop on the left side. Currently in Basel (presumably for the art fair, though I couldn’t confirm this), Grimonprez spoke on Skype audio and mic’ed through the laptop. This proved fascinating and valuable, since his thoughtful and voluminous answers to questions from the panel and the audience became perhaps more coherent and digestible by being on audio. The effect was doing a panel discussion via radio, and it concentrated the mind.

This was especially useful in the case of Double Take, which my Cinema Scope colleague (in the best and longest interview in English with Grimonprez in the summer 2009 issue available here) Mark Peranson refers to as “a post-Internet film.” I asked Grimonprez to expand on this notion; he noted that the complex ways in which the film adapts fiction (two Borges stories inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Double and adapted by novelist Tom McCarthy), edits fact and history in a kind of “drama,” and how the central theme of Hitchcock encountering his double who wants to kill him is given a hall-of-mirrors treatment that has the rapid, fractured sensibility of what one experiences on the web.

This webby viewing experience also has its doubling, since Grimonprez deliberately simulates the viewing effect of watching TV with a remote control; Hubby noted that those Folger’s ads were inserted every ten minutes in the film to create the illusion of watching TV. In the film, TV is viewed as a weapon of control, both seductive and as a tool of technological dominance: Hitchcock himself understood this, ironically commenting on the medium as host of his own show, while the film gauges the growth in nuclear weapons, space exploration milestones and steps forward for (Western) TV. Double Take may be some kind of masterpiece of cinematic history storytelling, media analysis and the “in-between” film–in between fiction and non-fiction, between cinema and television, between journalism and music. This is a key to its vitality and importance, and why it’s a film that must be seen.