THE CYNEPHILE » kenneth anger https://www.cynephile.com "The cinema is cruel like a miracle." -Frank O'Hara Fri, 17 Jul 2015 21:18:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.37 Thomas Beard Goes to the Movies https://www.cynephile.com/2012/03/thomas-beard-goes-to-the-movies/ https://www.cynephile.com/2012/03/thomas-beard-goes-to-the-movies/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:36:13 +0000 http://www.cynephile.com/?p=1378

Note: Thomas Beard, co-curator of the Whitney Biennial and co-founder of Light Industry, was kind enough to sit down with me for an interview in Joan’s Digest. You can read the full piece here. I also asked him to name the films that would make up his “essential cinema” list, to which he responded: “Oh my God. You would think that in my whole life of showing films and thinking of them that I would have an answer to this question, but I am always utterly unable to decide.” All true cinephiles are faced with this dilemma. Here are two films that make his cut:

This is Not a Film [Jafar Panahi, 2011]
This is Not a Film that stayed with me in a way that few films ever have. There’s a real moral and political imperative to the act of filmmaking itself.

Puce Moment [Kenneth Anger, 1949]
This I can say with metaphysical certitude (to borrow the McLaughlin Group’s phrase) but I have seen Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment more times than any other film. For years I saw it on an old Mystic Fire VHS tape, but the I saw it on film at Anthology and it was a totally different experience. I was quite literally seeing it for the first time, and I had seen it a hundred times before.

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