The visual record of the civil rights and black power era has not been significantly expanded in recent years, which makes the recent discovery of hours of documentary footage captured by Swedish television journalists all the more special.

A two-hour visit to “Dance with Camera” neither exhausts a viewer’s patience nor leaves one with the sinking feeling of having missed great swaths of what was on offer. The exhibition successfully presents dance as a profitable frame of reference through which to understand anew collaboration, narrative propulsion, the body, and other topics artists wrestle with today.

The fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission offers an opportunity for reconsideration of the Apollo program; even Buzz Aldrin has gotten into the act, publishing Magnificent Desolation, his second memoir. Criterion has contributed to the effort by releasing on DVD and Blu-Ray Al Reinert’s magnificent 1989 documentary For All Mankind. To make the film, Reinert, a journalist with no prior filmmaking experience, trolled through millions of feet of official Apollo 16-mm footage, then combined his selections with audio recordings extracted from hundreds of hours of interviews with astronauts.

One of the virtues of Jia Zhang-ke’s recent film 24 City (2008) is that he focuses on particular losses: the psychological and physical wounds inflicted upon the employees of Factory 420 in Chengdu, first under Mao’s regime in the 1960s and 1970s, and then during the shift from a planned economy to a market economy, the effects of which are still being felt today.

My severest disappointment in not attending this year’s Venice Biennale is missing the premiere of Steve McQueen’s new film Giardini. McQueen, to my mind one of the best artists of his generation, shot the half-hour-long film in the public garden that houses the national pavilions used during the Biennale. What he depicts, though, is the [...]

“Every culture needs its Vogels,” says Lawrence Weiner near the end of the documentary Herb and Dorothy (2008). “They’re friend collectors, not collector collectors,” clarifies another artist. Not long after they purchased a small, untitled sculpture by John Chamberlain in 1962, the pint-size duo recognized that what they were buying was better than what they themselves were making as “wannabe artists.” So they lived frugally on her librarian’s salary, bought art with his earnings at the post office, and spent all their time in artists’ studios, galleries, and museums.

A shopping mall is “a place where idealism, passion, and greed can come together, all under one roof,” intones the voice-over narrator near the outset of Canadian filmmaker Helen Klodawsky’s Malls R Us (2008), her latest work. The seventy-eight-minute documentary chronicles what these feelings provoke in a diverse cast of characters [...]

Notes, links, and additional information pertaining to my review of Sharon Lockhart’s newest films, screened at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. [...]

Sharon Lockhart’s latest films depict employees at the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. Lunch Break (2008), the longer of the two, is notable first for the artist’s decision to set the camera in motion, something she has not done in any of her previous films. [...]

Rene Daalder’s documentary, Here Is Always Somewhere Else: The Disappearance of Bas Jan Ader (2007), is a useful if pedestrian addition to the spate of exhibitions and publications honoring the artist, and its flaws highlight why we may never come close to understanding Ader’s fateful decision to sail across the Atlantic in the Ocean Wave.

Not long after I moved to New York in 2001, I was hired by a gallery on far west Twenty-second Street. At the time the curator (and now Greene Naftali Gallery director) Jay Sanders and the artist Richard Aldrich were working on the same block, and we comprised an unofficial Bas Jan Ader fan club. [...]

  Last Thursday afternoon I had the pleasure of seeing Gomorrah, director Matteo Garrone’s sixth feature film and winner of the Grand Prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. It plunges viewers directly into the vicious lives of the Neapolitan mafia (the Camorra) as they unfold in and around an oversize, crumbling modernist apartment block. [...]

Director Lance Hammer’s debut feature film, Ballast, won awards for dramatic directing and excellence in cinematography at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. It opened on October 1, 2008, at Film Forum in New York and on October 17 in selected theaters nationwide. Interview, in the subject’s voice, published on Artforum.com on October 1, 2008. To [...]

Artist Sara VanDerBeek, who, with her brother, Johannes VanDerBeek, and Anya Kielar, owns Guild & Greyshkul gallery, is the daughter of experimental filmmaker and animator Stan VanDerBeek, who died in 1984. Guild & Greyshkul presents an exhibition of Stan VanDerBeek’s work from September 13 to October 18. Interview, in the artist’s voice, published on Artforum.com [...]

Published on Artforum.com on August 12, 2008. To see the review in context, click here. Much of Tacita Dean’s recent work in film has been portraiture, and her scrupulous attention has brought forth a range of engrossing characters, many of them older men. Poet and translator Michael Hamburger gave Dean a chatty tour of his [...]

Published in Artforum, May 2008. “Someone with historical sense sees reality differently: in four dimensions,” notes historian Gordon S. Wood. “If it is self-identity that we want, then history deepens and complicates that identity by showing us how it has developed through time.” Artist Matthew Buckingham clearly possesses this historical sense, and his nuanced understanding [...]

Published on Artforum.con on October 22, 2007. Steve McQueen’s Gravesend, 2007, which premiered at this year’s Venice Biennale and is currently on view at the Renaissance Society, charts a return of the repressed: Capitalist economies may have moved into an “information age,” but this seventeen-minute 35-mm film proves that their machinations still make demands on [...]

Published in Paper Monument issue one, September 2007. There is no establishing shot. Kodak begins with an image of four elegantly curved metal ducts, from which extend cables sheathed in accordion-fold sleeves. The film unfurls from there. Ribbons of semitransparent blue film stock scroll left-to-right, fluttering like small waves or sheaves of wheat buffeted by [...]

Published on Artforum.com on September 14, 2006. To see the review in context, click here. Those who have seen this Chinese artist’s earlier films will find familiar imagery scattered throughout No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006: a freeze-frame tableau in which seven young men and women, dressed in a haberdasher’s finest, look outward from [...]

Still from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9. There is little new to be said about Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, which was released a few weeks ago and is now screening at the IFC Center in the West Village. There were, of course, reviews in all of the major media outlets—the New York Times and [...]

Published in Artforum, May 2005. For more information, visit the artist’s website. London-based artist Mark Lewis distills complex ruminations—on film as a medium; on the social and economic character of specific places; on the relationship between observer and observed—into deceptively simple films that marry Hollywood’s high-end production values to Andy Warhol’s dazed gaze. These reflexive [...]

Published on Artforum.com on November 25, 2003. To see the review in context, click here. Matthew Buckingham’s A Man of the Crowd, 2003, is a formally elegant, conceptually rich 16 mm film installation that mimics the structure of Edgar Allan Poe’s similarly titled short story of 1840. Poe’s London is now contemporary Vienna; Buckingham’s camera [...]