The Brooklyn Rail

GODZILLA VS. THE PREHISTORIC BISON
On Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams

By Marianne Shaneen

Hermetically sealed for 20,000 years by a fallen rock face until its discovery in 1994, Grotte Chauvet houses the oldest known cave art. Its 32,000 year old paintings of horses, bison, lions, panthers, bears, owls, hyenas, and rhinos, as well as abstract symbols and red handprints, exhibit extraordinary skill, dynamism, and compositional complexity.

SPINNING TOP
The Legacy of Dziga Vertov Keeps Moving

By Mónica Savirón

There will always be artists who absorb the power of Dziga Vertov’s films, and use it to bring refreshing, critical, and poetic perspectives into their work. This is evident in the list of renowned artists and filmmakers who introduce the screenings of the most comprehensive Dziga Vertov retrospective ever assembled in the United States.

In Conversation

JUSTICE ON TRIAL
REBECCA RICHMAN COHEN with Penny Lane

By Penny Lane

Rebecca Richman Cohen’s remarkable debut film War Don Don begins at the end of a decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone which has left a population devastated by mass murder, rape, and savage disfigurement.

Migrating Forms 2011

By Aily Nash

There are many niche film festivals in New York City. Be they region- or country-specific (the New York Polish Film Festival, the New York Asian Film Festival), neighborhood-friendly (the LES Film Festival, the Bushwick Film Fesival), thematic or cause-oriented (NewFest, Bicycle Film Festival), New Yorkers are both spoiled and overwhelmed by the cornucopia of fests this city has to offer.

THAI FUSION Uruphong Raksasad’s Agrarian Utopia and Stories from the North

By Colin Beckett

Whether by design or circumstance, this June has become Thai Cinema Month in New York, with an array of the city’s art houses and museums boasting otherwise hard-to-see gems from the Thai film renaissance that began in the late 1990s.