Film Comment is proud to be a media sponsor for the 2005 LA Film Festival. If you live in the Los Angeles area, you may be lucky enough to win tickets courtesy of your favorite film magazine!

** Be one of the first 5 people to respond to this email to win a pair of tickets to a film at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival, June 16-26 **

Subject to availability – films include 2046, Last Days, You and Me and Everyone We Know, Junebug, La Sierra, Mad Hot Ballroom, and more…

TO ENTER: email marketing@filmlinc.com, subject line: LAFF tickets.

Winners will receive a confirmation email with a list of available showtimes – tickets are limited, so email your choice back quickly. Showtimes fall on dates ranging from June 17 through 25, at venues across LA, including Laemmle Sunset 5, Directors Guild of America, the Ford Amphitheatre, and California Plaza Downtown.

Tickets On Sale Now
to the 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival (June 16 – 26)

Over 200 films and events, including:
• New films from Jacques Audiard, Kirby Dick, Greg Harrison, Lodge H. Kerrigan Sally Potter, Gus Van Sant, and Wong Kar Wai, among many others
• A tribute to Ossie Davis, hosted by Elvis Mitchell, featuring a screening of “Gone Are The Days”
• A storytelling evening with the legendary Robert Towne
• New films starring Joan Allen, Maggie Cheung, Michael Ealy, James Franco, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Allison Janney, Lisa Kudrow, Nick Nolte, and Edward Norton
• A spotlight on Japanese, Iranian, African, and Disney animation
• Five under-the-stars evenings at the Ford Amphitheatre, including RIZE, David LaChapelle’s documentary on the South Central-born dance style known as “krumping”
• Poolside Chats with Joyce Carol Oates, Ron Shelton, Bill Condon, Steve Erickson, and Karyn Kusama
• The favorite films of Guest Director Sydney Pollack and Artist in Residence THE RZA.

For the complete Festival line-up, visit www.lafilmfest.com

To purchase tickets and passes, visit www.lafilmfest.com or call 1-866-FilmFest

If you’re on the other coast, the next Film Comment Selects screening at the Walter Reade Theater in New York is the long-awaited 2046, with Wong Kar Wai in person!

Special admission:
$15 general, $12 Film Society of Lincoln Center members

2046 is many things at once — the year when mainland China assumes absolute control of Hong Kong; the number of the hotel room across from Tony Leung’s Mr. Chow, inhabited by a parade of women he pursues and discards with impunity; and the place where disappointed lovers escape to in Chow’s erotic sci-fi novel. Starring Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Carina Lau, Gong Li and Ziyi Zhang.

This screening of 2046 is currently SOLD OUT, but there will be a standby line on the evening of the show.

Click here for more information on the Film Comment Selects screening of 2046

In the May/June 2005 issue:
JEAN ROUCH The anthropologist as auteur by SAM DiIORIO

By creating a dialogue between those on either side of the camera, ethnographer and cinéma vérité godfather Jean Rouch pioneered the merging of fact and fiction.

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Two interviews with Rouch from the Fall/Winter 1967 issue of Film Comment by Jacqueline Veuve & James Blue

JEAN ROUCH IN CONVERSATION WITH JACQUELINE VEUVE
(Appeared in the Fall/Winter 1967 issue of FILM COMMENT)

JV: People say that you and Godard have had a bad influence on young filmmakers: ever since you began using unorthodox methods and materials, just about anyone thinks he is capable of picking up a camera and making a film without having first learned the craft.

JR: I think that charge is idiotic. If people are, in fact, making films, and if we have enabled cinema to slip out of the stranglehold of ridiculous rules and industrial patterns that films have been buried in until now, then it's a very good thing. But if we have opened the door to a lot of mediocrity because every amateur is making films, then what of it?

Click here to read the full interview online

JEAN ROUCH IN CONVERSATION WITH JAMES BLUE
(Appeared in the Fall/Winter 1967 issue of FILM COMMENT)

JB: Leacock has told me in an interview (FILM COMMENT, Spring 1965, Vol. 3, No. 2) that we don't have the right to use "reality techniques" in telling fiction stories.

JR: I understand Leacock's idea very well. As soon as you begin to use these techniques for fiction, the spectator, when we show him reality, will say that it, too, is fiction! But we've known that for a long time! This feeling of "authenticity" to an image, there is no reason why it should not be applied to fiction… As soon as a director has the honesty not to pretend that he is showing me a filmed reality - as they attempt to do in “Paris-Secret” or in “Mondo Cane,” which are pure invention passed off as being real then I see no reason why the director should not use any technique he wishes. There is nothing wrong with attempting to give to a story the greatest realism possible. The cinema has always been a reconstitution of a reality in a time and in a space which are not those in which it was made. A western shot in this technique could be fascinating. So to condemn, as Leacock does, the use of those techniques from a philosophical standpoint seems to me absurd. It's a question of professional honesty, nothing more.

Click here to read the full interview online