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Five Years of Let’s Play House: With evocative and emotive productions showcasing a stripped back, classic feel, Urulu’s sounds are a throwback to the lost generation of smoother groove-makers. Resident Advisor best describes him as someone with “an impressively complete grasp of what makes a classic house cut.“
roughtradenyc.com/event
Friday, July 11
9pm – 4am at Rough Trade NYC, free before midnight
64 N 9th Street, Williamsburg
“Car at Sunset” (ink on paper) 2012, by David Kramer.
By David Kramer
When I was a young artist back in school, I remember telling friends that I didn’t trust the work of young artists. I was an admirer of so many artists whose careers seemed to blossom in the second or even the third phase of their lives. I remember specifically singling out the careers of certain heroes as prime examples of greatness coming through the long haul of perseverance.
ALL OF THE FILM YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE IS REAL. NOTHING HAS BEEN STAGED.
So begins the 1982 shockumentary THE KILLING OF AMERICA, a film that, even among its mondo movie contemporaries, stands out as one of the grimmest and most infamous films ever produced. So much so, in fact, that to this day it remains effectively unreleased in The United States.
La Pirogue, 2012, 87 mins, Directed by Moussa Touré.
An absorbing drama of 30 men (and one woman) who set out on an illegal 7-day voyage from the coast of Senegal to Spain – making the perilous journey in a pirogue, a boat resembling a vastly oversized dinghy. The men hail from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, sharing a common desire to build a better future. This compelling tale says as much about the universal nature of courage and perfidy as it does about the economic realities faced by so many of the world’s people. Not Rated. Programmed by Film Forum.
“A remarkably clear-eyed, quietly ambitious film.”
– A. O. Scott, The New York Times
The Driver’s Seat, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1974, digital projection, 102 mins / Introduced by Eric Banks / Screening at Light Industry on Tuesday, July 8
There have been great adaptations of weak novels and poor versions of powerful books. The Driver’s Seat was strangely neither. The 1970 Muriel Spark novella that the film was based on struggled to find support among the critics and at the cash register; the 1974 adaptation, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, seemed to drop off the face of the earth. Its Italian producers couldn’t even settle on a title, releasing the film in Europe as Identikit, with its Sontag-y, Death Kit overtones (it would later be put out as Psychotic).
Right now there is a revival of interest in Spark’s work, and The Driver’s Seat warrants a second look. For all the campy pleasures of Italian art-house cinema in the early 1970s, this intense look at the death drive of an unmarried English woman on the verge of middle age——played to an over-the-top hilt by Elizabeth Taylor, herself undergoing a very public divorce from Richard Burton as the filming began——cloaks itself in mystery, much as the novel did.
