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July 24, 2007
[LOOK] Jem Cohen's Little Flags (2000)
On Tuesday night, Filmmaker magazine and the IFC Film Center in NYC are presenting "An Evening with Jem Cohen," featuring the maker of Chain, Benjamin Smoke, and Lost Book Found as well as the New York premiere of his documentary Building a Broken Mousetrap, "a portrait of the Dutch band The Ex, which Cohen describes as "Concert film. City film. Protest film." With a stylistically unique but ultimately humanistic approach, Cohen has been documenting artists, musicians and urban culture for more than twenty years." At New York magazine, Bilge Ebiri previews, along with Cohen's 2000 short, Little Flags. When Cohen "shot footage of a rah-rah military parade in lower Manhattan sometime in the early nineties, it's more than likely he didn't quite know what he had," Ebiri writes. "When he finally edited it together, complete with a remixed Fugazi score, to make this short... in 2000, he probably still didn't quite know what he had. But today, watching Cohen's six-minute opus is an almost unbearably disturbing experience. From the World Trade Center towers looming in the background, to the errant bits of paper drifting through the air, to the spectators' ... matching 'Fuck Saddam' T-shirts... to the young woman sitting forlornly on the ground, seemingly overwhelmed, to the little American flags of the title that gradually become refuse, Cohen manages to say more about the desperate times we're living in than pretty much any other film of recent vintage, narrative, documentary, or otherwise." Cohen will talk about the work at the IFC Center's "Dialogue on Film" July 24, at 7:30pm.
Posted by Ray Pride at July 24, 2007 12:00 AM
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