Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Continuous City, a part of BAM’s Next Wave festival, might provide a fairly good primer on what “21st century storytelling” actually looks like. Providing a very of-the-moment commentary on the way the internet is not only changing artistic expression, but also basic human interaction, the production made me think about Antonio Campos’s NYFF selection Afterschool. Both projects employ the vernacular of user-generated video in all its artlessness, but, as it turns out, to very different ends.

What was so enlivening about Continuous City was how it enlarged three distinct traditions: that of film, theater and installation art, in the service of telling its three intersecting stories. J.V. (Rizwan Mirza) is a familiar character, an internet mogul with a can’t-lose pitch: his Xubu will connect the inhabitants of a increasingly fragmented world via videophones.

But this story really belongs to J.V.’s globe-trotting chief evangelist Mike. It’s through Mike’s video dispatches to his daughter Sam that the production finds its central means of commenting on how the internet both defines and facilitates communication. That these videophone dispatches played so convincingly as document was a real testament to Harry Sinclair’s performance. I truly never expected to encounter such documentary-style verisimilitude in this kind of environment. But the fact is, Continuous City probably owes more the tradition of cinema than to theater. The use of video screens allowed the three story to unfold in a kind of kinetic montage that borrow from cinema while transcending even those limitations, because the spectator here is free to select his or her own lens on the spectacle in the way they divide their attention between the live action and the video footage.

I came away from Continuous City impressed by the way the production tweaked all of these traditions and managed to challenge the viewer. Just as with Afterschool, I think I was probably less impressed with what was said than how it was said; the medium really is the message here. Still, by showing how fresh, vital and genre-bending the theater can be, Continuous City provides living proof that the heart of “story” still beats in fresh new forms.

Continuous City will be performed tonight through Sunday as part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival.

True to the form they appropriate, the production invites regular internet denizens to become a part of Continuous City.

Photos courtesy of The Builder’s Association.

Moving Pictures will be an occasional series on the far reaches of film as art in the city and beyond.

-Franklin Bruno, writing in the Believer

Do you have what it takes to join their ranks? New Directors/New Films is now accepting submissions.

Space and design elements were, of course, vital to Farber, but the point of fascination for me in revisiting his work over the past week was his attention to the behavioral tics and psychological peculiarities (and excesses) of individual actors. He was no fan of the “New York films” in which Kazan, Lumet, and Strasberg-influenced thesps like Paul Newman strutted their talent in the mid ’50s. For him, the histrionic, tormented, propulsively quick-paced style of portraiture to be found in films like The Sweet Smell of Success or A Face in the Crowd “sweats too much around the edges.” Simple naturalism had given way to hysterical realism; showboating conceit had overtaken the anonymity of finely etched characterization. “The actors,” Farber wrote in 1957, “don’t chew their roles so much as storm past them.” Nearly ten years later, in his essay “The Decline of the Actor,” he had identified a new mode of inauthenticity imported mainly from foreign films (Kurosawa, Antonioni): the arrest of movement, in which the actor “is hardly more than a spot,” “a body on display,” or landscape features “stuck like thumbtacks into a maplike event” (Lawrence of Arabia). On one hand, acting had become too heightened, too self-aware and exhibitionistic (Angela Lansbury’s “helicopterlike performance in The Manchurian Candidate, in which every line begins and ends with a vertical drop”); on the other, films had become so suffused with inertia that actors were increasingly enveloped by mood and milieu (Monica Vitti in Eclipse), or made to carry the weight of the film’s entire stylistic construction at the expense of character exposition. All of this leads him to conclude, in “Pish-Tush,” that “Something died in the movies when TV, wide screen, and the New Wave film made the bit player expendable.”

Whether or not one agrees with Farber’s assertion, there is something irrefutable in the idea that an actor’s personality is too often a distraction to the task at hand, that brief moments with a bit player or a skilled “sideliner” (John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Mickey Rooney in Requiem for a Heavyweight) make a deeper, more lasting impression than a well-known entity’s star turn. If it was true then, it’s even truer now, when Us Weekly, TMZ.com, and anything-goes celebrity (and sublebrity) news coverage drive an ever-intensifying public interest in the minutest details of Hollywood actors’ private lives, from baby making to bust-ups to run-ins with the law or a fellow cast member. Regardless, Farber focused on what was onscreen, and developed an iconoclastic, uproariously funny shorthand for describing the traits and personas of particular actors, sometimes in as few as two words. Jimmy Stewart had “a harassed Adam’s apple approach to gutty acting.” Orson Welles, with his “flabby body and love of the overpolished effect make any flow in his performance seem a product of the bloodiest rehearsing.” Brigid Berlin, in Warhol’s Tub Girls, is “a hippopotamus of sin,” while Edgar Kennedy is fondly remembered for his “mad wounded-bull heavings.”

The point was not to anoint new heroes or drub unfocused, underwhelming players (though he did crabbily scorn Jeanne Moreau, “always a resentful wailing wall”) or even evaluate a specific role, but to isolate those “magical, intimate” moments when actors revealed something unusual and uniquely true about themselves: “quirks of physiognomy, private thoughts of the actor about himself, misalliances where the body isn’t delineating the role, but is running on a tangent to it.” Farber judged movie performances on their own terms, apportioning praise and disdain scene to scene, moment to moment. It is a standard that, while wholly personal and inimitably subjective, is sensible and instructive, and one that applies equally well to his own writing.

-Damon Smith, FilmCatcher

The latest issue of Film Comment sports the still gorgeous visage of Catherine Deneuve. Besides the cover story for which Christmas Tale director Arnaud Desplechin interviews Ms. Deneuve, inside, you’ll find in-depth commentary on two of the most interesting films you’ll see all year (IMHO), Wendy and Lucy and Waltz with Bashir.

Plus, in-depth reporting on three major festivals, new DVD reviews, and a story that explores the making of Sam Fuller’s  White Dog, of which legendary producer Don Simpson once said: “I should have thrown my body over barbed wire to stop White Dog from being made.”

The November/December 2008 edition of Film Comment can be found on newsstands now, or you can subscribe.

Be Like Others director Tanaz Eshaghian

The moment cineastes have been waiting for is now here: a whole range of eclectic classics begin screening tonight as part of the Manny Farber series. See Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties at 6, or Alain Resnais’s Muriel at 8:30.

PLUS! Listen to Kent Jones talk to WNYC’s Leonard Lopate about the series.

PLUS! Read a vintage Film Comment interview with Farber from 1977!

PLUS! Check out Nathan Lee’s take on the series on the Art.Cult blog.

PLUS! See Taxi Driver scribe and celebrated director Paul Schrader introduce one of his short films on Sunday during the series!

See the whole line-up of Farber films.

Name the four movies–but more importantly–explain the similarity between the four images.

Post your insights in the comments and earn our undying admiration (and a certain amount of bragging rights).

Good luck, film lovers.

[Download the MP3]

Listen closely; there may be a pop quiz!

Check out the films in the eclectic, essential Manny Farber series.

From our friends at FilmCatcher, please check out this video interview with director Tanaz Eshaghian.

Buy tickets: Thu Nov 13: 6:30