CHIVERZ.COM February 2011

Matinee | Brooklyn

2011-02-06T22:51:00.002-05:00

J.D. Walsh at Matinee. St. Cecilia's Gallery

notre jour viendra

2011-02-02T21:29:00.001-05:00

vicki leakx ncrypted

2011-01-08T00:48:00.004-05:00

Carlos Rigau at LMAKprojects

2011-01-06T12:58:00.004-05:00

Carlos Rigau's Friends don't have sleepOVerS opens tonight at LMAKprojects. The exhibit will feature a new video, photography, and painting. January 8th to February 13, 2011

De La Cruz Collection

2010-12-08T12:47:00.009-05:00

Fighting - Kissing - Dancing
Curated by Carlos Rigau | November 30, 2010
Artists: Nancy Garcia, Justin Long, Jillian Mayer, Martin Murphy, Sleeper, and Bryan Zanisnik
De La Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space

Rio de Janeiro

2010-12-06T15:18:00.012-05:00

Lagoa Lake

Ipanema Beach

The Saccadic Eye in Deception

2010-10-09T15:46:00.012-04:00

In 1993, researchers at Washington University conducted a study to investigate the relationship between eye blinks and lying. The resulting publication (Baker, Goldstein, and Stern) suggests an increase in blink rate, fixation time, and saccadic movements in lying subjects. The test has a strange parallel to the Voight-Kampff test featured in Blade Runner 11 years prior.

Mania and Artistic Impulses Induced by DBS

2010-09-28T09:56:00.004-04:00

Haq et al. (2010) reported on the adverse events experienced by a patient receiving DBS in the ALIC and the nucleus accumbens for severe OCD. The 29 year old woman started experiencing OCD symptoms in early childhood.

Following this initial adjustment of DBS stimulation, the patient spent most of the night awake, alternating between cleaning the adjoining room, obsessively rubbing her legs, and counting. She felt a strong urge to produce paintings, and she was provided the supplies to do so (see Fig. above). Her painting and speech were notable for their hyper-religious content. She also reported that her OCD symptoms were more troublesome than in her previous state.

In the introduction of the publication (Haq et al. 2010), the authors were remarkably honest about how the choice of DBS stimulation parameters can be hit or miss. DBS...too soon?

Calling the Shots

2010-09-26T18:14:00.010-04:00

Are the video artists of the 1990s leading the way in experimental cinema? Gillian Wearing recently completed her first feature film "Self Made" as a result of a UK Film Council / Arts Council initiative to encourage artists to make the switch into feature film making.

Istanbul

2010-09-18T20:07:00.000-04:00

Prayer announcement at Taksim Square

Passages. Travels in Hyperspace

2010-09-01T17:25:00.037-04:00

Passages. Travels in Hyperspace
October 6 2010 - February 21 2011

Pictured above is Jeppe Hein's Reflecting Object. The chrome ball rolls around aimlessly, presenting new views of the spectator caught in the middle of the seamless gallery space. With the displacement of the perspective comes a change in perception – both of the architecture as well as of the institution space.
www.laboralcentrodearte.org

Perception of Multiple Images

2010-08-08T17:38:00.009-04:00

The Perception of Multiple Images: by E. Bruce Goldstein (1975)

"Multi-screen projection tends to end the story line...That is, multiple screen in creating a simultaneous syntax eliminates the literary medium from film." (McLuhan, 1969)

2010-07-13T00:34:00.006-04:00

Colder Than Reality

2010-07-12T22:07:00.007-04:00

New Jump Cut on Michael Haneke

Tommy Hartung

2010-06-07T16:23:00.015-04:00

Tommy Hartung presents an animated homage to The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski’s 1973 BBC documentary about human development. Hartung's video uses handmade models and in-studio detritus to present a strange and surreal picture of humanity.
Greater New York | P.S. 1

Explosion from Inception

2010-05-31T16:59:00.008-04:00

Nolan filming Inception in Paris

RIP Dennis Hopper

2010-05-29T19:08:00.003-04:00

Dennis Hopper: 1936 - 2010

The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei

2010-05-17T15:06:00.015-04:00

12 October 2010 – 25 April 2011

Ai Weiwei scheduled to create an installation for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall

Carlos Rigau at Dimensions Variable

2010-05-17T13:19:00.003-04:00

May 8th -June 19th 2010
171 NE 38th St. Miami, FL

Dimensions Variable

Kulturflitzer

2010-05-12T13:20:00.005-04:00

wienlive.tv

Enter The Void

2010-04-24T22:36:00.006-04:00

Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void opens May 5th in France

The Killer Inside Me

2010-04-17T14:38:00.025-04:00

Adapting from cult pulp author Jim Thomson's novel, director Michael Winterbottom explores moral bankruptcy and the criminal mind.

Bill Pullman, Kate Hudson, Elias Koteas, Jessica Alba, Casey Affleck

Tribeca Film Festival

Teus, April 27th, 7:00 PM

SVA Theater, NYC

Curated by Vienna | Art & Film

2010-04-13T23:04:00.036-04:00

Lapsed Cinematic | Curated by Tony Oursler

Erik Aalto, Martin Murphy, J.D. Walsh

Eschenbachgasse 4, A-1010 Wien
+ 43 (0) 1 512 87 59

May 6 - June 5, 2010

Curatedby.at
Galerie Steinek

Exhibition PDF

Arrival/Departure

2010-03-31T00:10:00.057-04:00

Arrival/Departure: La Esquina, 1000 W. 25th St, Kansas City, MO. April 2-May 22

Curators: art historian/professor Maria Buszek and artist Jonah Criswell

Charlotte Street

fazebook
PDF

Miami heat

2010-03-24T01:42:00.005-04:00

Flickr

Making Deep Forest

2010-03-06T12:25:00.001-05:00

Don't Forget to Crash

2010-02-24T11:41:00.009-05:00

Martin Murphy | Don't Forget to Crash
March 13, 2010 - April 3, 2010

Opening reception Saturday, March 13, 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

151 NW 24th Street, Miami, FL 33127

Phone: 305.576.1278

Dorsch Gallery

Beijing 2010

2010-02-11T15:47:00.010-05:00

enter the dragon

Auto-Kino!

2010-01-18T10:26:00.009-05:00

Auto-Kino!
presented by Phil Collins
02/05/2010-03/14/2010

February 4, 2010, 9 pm until February 5, 9 pm | Opening
24 Hour Psycho, Douglas Gordon, 1993, 24 hrs

British artist Phil Collins transforms the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin into an indoor drive-in cinema. A fleet of second-hand cars installed in the space offers the audience an intimate setting from which to enjoy a rotating program of artists' videos and film classics.

The Directory of World Cinema: Japan

2010-01-14T12:45:00.013-05:00

The Face of Another, 1966

The Directory of World Cinema provides an insight into the cinema of Japan through reviews of significant titles and case studies of leading directors, alongside explorations of the cultural and industrial origins of key genres.

Rubber

2010-01-10T21:33:00.017-05:00

Dupieux filming in California for Rubber

New movie from Quentin Dupieux Starring Stephen Spinella and Roxane Mesquida. Soundtrack by SebastiAn, Gaspard Augé and Mr Oizo.
Coming 2010.

Das Weisse Band

2009-10-11T20:52:00.009-04:00

Movie of the year

Near Bregenz

2009-10-08T17:51:00.000-04:00

perspectives on microsound

2009-10-07T11:55:00.004-04:00

Diapason Gallery presents current perspectives on the idea of "microsound"- a technical term and also a musical genre - in honor of the 10th anniversary of the .microsound.org mailing list (founded by Kim Cascone). 10ms features multi-channel installations, sound objects, performances, lectures, texts, and other media.

Microsound is a term that encompasses explorations of sound on a time scale "shorter than musical notes." It includes and overlaps genres such as glitch music, granular synthesis, lowercase sound, etc.

Participating artists: Brett Ian Balogh, Riccardo Benassi, Kim Cascone, Thanos Chrysakis, Rob Curgenven, Taylor Deupree, Ian Epps, Patrick Franke, Heribert Friedl, Richard Garet, Sarah Karp, Kenneth Kirschner, Thomas Köner, Tomas Korber, Damian Marhulets, Mamoru Okuno, Kamran Sadeghi, Erik Schoster, Phillip Schulze, Bernd Schurer, Keiko Uenishi and Tamara Yadao. Curated by Daniel Neumann.

Join us for a special celebratory dance party with djs showcasing microhouse through the past decade and live acts playing contemporary microsounds for the dancefloor.

Diapasongallery

Weiwei in Sichuan

2009-10-05T20:01:00.000-04:00

Ai Weiwei with Zuoxiao Zuzhou when taken in custody by the police,
Sichuan, China

The Red Book of C.G. Jung

2009-09-17T12:54:00.026-04:00

The infamous Red Book of C.G. Jung will be shown publicly for the first time next month. In this work, Jung outlines his theories of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation, in a free form style of writing and painting created between 1914 and 1930.

Creation of a New Cosmology - October 7, 2009 - January 25, 2010

Rubin Museum of Art

Jonze at Moma

2009-09-03T22:50:00.015-04:00

Thursday, October 8
8:00 In Cahoots: Maurice Sendak and Spike Jonze
Spike Jonze had been friends with Maurice Sendak for more than five years before he and Dave Eggers began working on their adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, recognizing in Sendak a passionate, daring, truthful, and, yes, wildly imaginative artist, and a fellow imp of the perverse. In these short films, made while Wild Things was in production, a sometimes melancholy but always wickedly funny Sendak reflects on his Depression-era childhood in the Brooklyn shtetl, a joyous day at the World's Fair, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, his books In the Night Kitchen and Higgledy Piggledy Pop!, his two beloved Hermans (Melville, and his German-shepherd namesake), and a long-buried secret.
Program 100 min. Introduced by Jonze. Followed by onstage conversation with curator Joshua Siegel.

Pirate Bay is back

2009-08-25T20:02:00.009-04:00

When The Pirate Bay was shut down yesterday, many believed that this was the end of the Internet’s largest BitTorrent tracker. A mere three hours after it went offline, the site reappeared from a different location with the tracker soon to follow. After Pirate Bay servers were raided in 2006, several measures were taken to ensure that the site could come back online from a new location in hours. This is the first time the backup plan has been executed.
www.thepiratebay.org

Avatar screening

2009-08-21T01:48:00.009-04:00

Last month James Cameron presented 25 minutes of his new 3D film Avatar in San Diego

The music of Alan Silvestri

2009-08-19T22:49:00.036-04:00

Alan-Silvestri.com

Sony Says 3D Broadcasting Possible In 2-3 Years

2009-08-11T11:20:00.007-04:00

High-Def Digest:
SIGGRAPH’s 2009 conference is wrapping up, but not before a serious amount of talk about bringing 3D to the home, as reported by The Sun Herald. The Special Interest Group on Graphic and Interactive Technologies invited Peter Lude, Sony’s senior VP of systems engineering to speak on the subject of 3D video, and where it realistically stands as a possibility in the market.

While one of the primary issues is the matter of agreeing on a standard, Lude says that’s the last thing that Sony wants to deal with. “We'd sure hate to see that ... It's costly and slows everything down.” He stated that he could see an agreement on standards happening within the next few years.

3D presentation presents a problem in the home, since viewing angles can change an experience in a way not intended by the creator. “You actually can see several different views of the same object, as if you're walking around it in real life. This is good for advertising, but not for cinematic storytelling, where the director had a very specific viewpoint that he intend viewers to see.”

There are a few outlets for 3D material at the moment, including a Tokyo satellite service and an upcoming channel on Sky TV, but for 3D to take foothold in mainstream America, it’ll take some time.

Lynch on volume

2009-08-05T11:10:00.005-04:00

Merce Cunningham

2009-08-04T19:37:00.011-04:00

Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg

Roy Andersson retrospective

2009-07-26T14:19:00.011-04:00

Mr. Andersson will visit New York in September for a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, which will include many of his short films and commercials as well as his feature-length productions. In the meantime he is planning a new project.

Ulrich Seidl

2009-07-21T12:01:00.021-04:00

In anticipation of the week-long run of his most recent feature film, IMPORT EXPORT, Anthology presents a retrospective of the work of Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl, one of contemporary cinema's most accomplished artists, and one who has consistently explored the line between fiction and documentary. Unblinking in the face of the grim realities of the modern world, yet ultimately a profoundly humanistic filmmaker, Seidl is among the most perceptive and important cinematic chroniclers of 21st-century life.

Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Ave (at 2nd St.) New York, NY 10003
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

Infinity mp3

2009-07-19T16:20:00.022-04:00

Nauman in Venice

2009-07-16T15:48:00.012-04:00

Bruce Nauman won't speak after receiving the Golden Lion award at the 2009 Venice Biennale

2009-07-13T23:56:00.027-04:00

Opening Reception: Tuesday, August 18, 6 – 9

Viewing Hours: Tues – Fri, 10 – 7, Saturday, 1 – 4
August 18 – October 4, 2009
Huson Guild Gallery
441 West 26th St. NYC

Last Words

2009-07-12T13:12:00.014-04:00

The Last Words of deathrow inmates

Dan Graham Retrospective

2009-06-30T14:46:00.007-04:00

The photographer and art historian Jeff Wall has written that while many other conceptual artists “abjured, apparently for good, any involvement with the world” outside of their methodologies, Mr. Graham’s aim has always been “to remain involved with the wider world as a subject and occasion for art, but to structure that involvement in the rigorously self-reflexive terms” opened up by conceptualism.

Stating it more simply, Philippe Vergne, the director of the Dia Art Foundation, calls Mr. Graham’s work “elitism for everyone.”

“For Graham,” he writes in the show’s catalog, “enjoyment is central, but it is never a commodity; rather it is a channel for amused skepticism.”

Typically Mr. Graham disagrees vehemently, for several complexly interrelated reasons, calling Mr. Vergne a Paris-educated elitist himself, one who understands nothing about America.

“But I know that he knows a lot about rock music and likes it,” Mr. Graham conceded. “So I guess he’s not all bad.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 28, 2009, on page AR1 of the New York edition.

Shawn Gnandt: Alaska Airlines

2009-06-17T21:18:00.016-04:00

Jejune Institute

2009-06-15T19:19:00.017-04:00

are you Jejune?
www.Jejune.org

virtually better

2009-06-15T17:55:00.013-04:00

http://www.virtuallybetter.com

Dan Graham talks about Damien Hirst in Miami

2009-06-04T19:20:00.014-04:00

Hunter MFA thesis show

2009-05-24T00:12:00.019-04:00

Austin Willis, Carlos Rigau, Michael Johnson

huntermfathesis.org

Shawn Powell paintings

2009-05-23T23:53:00.008-04:00

Detournement: The Last Day of Magic

2009-05-08T14:24:00.021-04:00

The Last Day of Magic at the 53rd Venice Biennial's Detournement Project

curated by: Jan Van Woensel

June 4 - 26 2009

ScalaMata Gallery

Ghetto Vecchio 1236

Cannaregio 30121 Venezia, Italy

Michel the fish

2009-04-16T22:33:00.008-04:00

.HBC Berlin

2009-04-03T21:53:00.016-04:00

Demolition Show

Today's Face

2009-02-09T16:40:00.013-05:00

Gallery Crawl

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit

2009-02-05T12:33:00.015-05:00

loosing clip from the ACE competition.. in very lo res

My Bloody Valentine 3D

2009-01-21T18:12:00.015-05:00

Comical acting, C+ storyline, and amazing visuals

a unique cinematic experience

MBV3D

Virtual Globetrotting

2009-01-11T18:18:00.013-05:00

Virtual Globetrotting

Free Will

2009-01-05T12:10:00.020-05:00

Free Will: Image and Linear Sequence, Paragraph Gallery, 23 East 12th Street, features the work of Cortney Andrews, Adam Cruces and Martin Murphy - all three graduates of Kansas City Art Institute now working in New York. Curated by CSF Programs Manager Jared Panick, the exhibition features photographs, digital prints, video, sculpture, and multi-media works that employ non-linear approaches to the conveyance of time, place and narrative in order to evoke and invoke the complex manner in which humans process information and attempt to make sense of the world

charlotte street

midwest museum

2008-12-29T23:02:00.008-05:00

Janine Antoni

Nauman

Bjorn Melhus

Times Square ad by Dan Murphy

2008-12-28T22:08:00.007-05:00

I'm a PC

montreal

2008-12-28T22:05:00.004-05:00

for the devil

shawn powell halloween

2008-12-28T22:03:00.002-05:00

SMS shoot

2008-12-24T20:16:00.016-05:00

______Gerrard Adimando_______________Theodore Bouloukos

SMS

big catch

2008-12-23T04:36:00.002-05:00

Today's Face at Art In General

2008-12-23T04:30:00.007-05:00

Art In General

New York, NY
January 16 — March 7, 2009

Scope

2008-12-23T04:20:00.012-05:00

------------------------Dorsch Gallery

------------------------Miami, FL
------------------------December 3 — 7, 2008
------------------------come say hello!

Please Relax audio installation

2008-12-23T04:11:00.008-05:00

Everything Must Go

Shapeshifter

2008-12-23T04:08:00.004-05:00

vernissage.tv

dorsch gallery

Miami, FL
November 29 — December 31, 2008

Dorsch Gallery

WET

2008-12-23T04:03:00.002-05:00

Carlos Rigau Peter Demos Shawn Powell

WET opening-- times square

Charlie is a new yorker

2008-12-23T02:33:00.009-05:00

Charlie Rose

Hunter College Open Studios

2008-12-23T02:05:00.004-05:00

http://www.huntermfaso.org/

2008-12-23T01:55:00.002-05:00

Watching You

2008-07-20T19:57:00.005-04:00

Gran Canaria

2008-07-16T20:10:00.011-04:00

Madrid

2008-07-16T19:57:00.011-04:00

ETDEATH.CO

2008-07-16T19:51:00.002-04:00

Abandoned Room experiment

2008-07-16T19:37:00.008-04:00

Sarah Karp views a perceptual experiment

Paris

2008-06-27T20:29:00.023-04:00

Prescience

2008-06-27T20:26:00.005-04:00

June 14 - July 12, 2008

Prescience
A group exhibition of New York Artists featuring; Martin Basher, Thomas Beale,
Katherine Behar, Catherine Czacki, Michelle Hailey, Kristine Moran,
Martin Murphy and Allison Read Smith.

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 14, 2008, 7 - 10 PM

Dorsch Gallery
151 NW 24th Street
Miami, FL

Miami

2008-06-27T20:21:00.003-04:00

Tenerife

2008-06-27T19:37:00.007-04:00

Experiment 1: Lateral Stitch

2008-03-25T02:12:00.005-04:00

The animation above illustrates the effect of filming the motion of an object from consecutive camera positions located along the path of the object. The coloured squares on the left show the viewpoint of a series of cameras as the black ball moves in front of them. On the right, we see the resulting film produced by editing together shots from the chain of cameras as the ball moved in and out of their field of view. This type of shot, which I will term a "Lateral Stitch", occurs every time an object, typically a character, walks out of shot (e.g. out of a doorway) only for a new camera to continue filming their action from a new vantage point (e.g. outside of the doorway).

You will see from the animations that the action being filmed is continuous but, due to the fact we have to cut between static cameras to continue filming the action, the object appears to jump from one side of the screen to the other in the resultant film. This occurs because the action is filmed in accordance with the 180° rule of continuity editing. This dictates that an action should always be filmed from one side of the principle line of action or the line joining the principle characters involved in the action (e.g. a line joining the two characters involved in a conversation). By doing this the direction of motion and screen-relative positions of the characters always remains the same. If a camera was to film the action from the other side of the line then screen positions would reverse. This is believed to lead to perceptual confusion in the viewer and should therefore be avoided.

d'Ydewalle, Desmet, and Van Rensbergen, J. (1998) showed that "crossing the line" (cutting between camera shots filmed from opposite sides of the principle line of action) leads to an increase in visual search believed to be evidence of perceptual confusion. Frith and Robson (Perceiving the language of films, 1975, Perception, 4:97-103) had previously shown that "crossing the line" had negative effects on memory for the visual sequence: poor recall of the entire visual sequence but improved recognition of discontinuous shot (probably as a result of visual search). These experiments have shown that there are cognitive benefits to following the 180° rule but they do not increase our understanding of how the rule functions:

How does adhering to the rule minimise perceptual disruption during the edit?

How should an action progress between camera shots for the viewer to perceive it as continuous?

Do viewers have any expectations about how an edit of this sort should occur? Do these expectations manifest themselves in their viewing behaviour?

Given that the eyes must jump (saccade) from one side of the screen, what occurs to attention during the edit and how does this effect the perceptual reconstruction of the scene?

These questions were investigated by operationalising properties of the edit in relation to the motion of the principle object. These properties controlled when a cut occurred, where the next camera would be located, and how much of the action would be omitted or overlapped. An experimental suite was created that could control these factors in real-time and generate a complex animation. Subjects watched the animation under different viewing conditions and their attention was measured using reaction time cues superimposed onto the moving object. In this way we were able to record the distribution of visual attention across an edit and show how it varied according to the way the edit occurred and how predictable it was.

Several interesting attention effects were found during this experiment. In general it was concluded that the editing conditions that create optimum continuity of attention across an edit are those that clearly cue the onset of the edit and accommodate the duration of the eye movement needed to refixate the target after the edit. The eye movement can be accommodated by either replaying a period of the action equal to the period of attention suppression during the eye movement, or moving the camera ahead of the object so that it takes time to appear on the screen. These different approaches affect the perception of temporal continuity across the edit. This was explored further in the next experiment.

Haneke has a white beard

2008-03-23T23:13:00.001-04:00

Interactive Cinema Game

2008-03-22T01:22:00.003-04:00

Funny Games

2008-03-14T19:00:00.004-04:00

The New York Times
By A. O. SCOTT
March 14, 2008

A Vicious Attack on Innocent People, on the Screen and in the Theater

It is customary to describe film directors who keep a tight rein on their audience’s responses, who coldly and meticulously manipulate emotion, as sadists. Not necessarily in a bad way; filmmaking is to a large degree an art of control. Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg can all, with some justice, be accused of sadism, a charge that hardly detracts from — indeed, that helps to explain — the way they provide entertainment.
More About This Movie

Michael Haneke, an Austrian auteur who has worked for many years in France, has always been more interested in punishing his audience than in entertaining it. His scrupulously constructed, skillfully made films, many of which have won prizes at leading international festivals, are excruciatingly suspenseful and also, more often than not, clammy and repellent.

It is likely that Mr. Haneke would take the last two adjectives as praise — it’s fine with me if they show up in advertisements — or at least as the acknowledgment of fulfilled intentions. His is an especially pure and perverse kind of cinematic sadism, the kind that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism. We will endure the pain he inflicts for our own good, and feel bad about it in the bargain.

“Funny Games,” Mr. Haneke’s first English-language film — and a compulsively faithful replica of his notorious 1997 German-language feature of the same title — subjects its viewers to a long spectacle of wanton and gratuitous brutality. So, of course, do countless other movies, though few of them can claim this one’s artistic pedigree or aesthetic prestige. And indeed, the conceit of “Funny Games” is that it offers a harsh, exacting critique of vulgar, violent amusements, a kind of homeopathic treatment for a public numbed and besotted by the casual consumption of images of suffering. That the new version takes place in America is part of the point, since Americans — to a European intellectual this almost goes without saying — are especially deserving of the kind of moral correction Mr. Haneke takes it upon himself to mete out.

Our problem is that we think violence is fun. Well, the fun stops here, people. Ann and George (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) drive out to the country with their young son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), towing their lovely wooden sailboat behind their Land Rover and listening to opera CDs. As they settle into their tasteful, gated vacation home, the family is confronted by two well-spoken young sociopaths, who in the course of the following night torment them with a knife, a gun, a golf club and impeccable prep school manners. These fellows variously address each other as Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry and Beavis and Butt-Head (Leopold and Loeb would have given the game away), and they are played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet.

Mr. Pitt, blue-eyed and baby-faced, appears to be the calm, ironical alpha predator, while Mr. Corbet, acting skittish and high-strung, looks like the weaker, crazier one. But that might just be part of the game they and Mr. Haneke are playing, since the whole point of Peter and Paul is that they function without identifiable motive or affect.

When asked by George — his leg smashed, his hands tied, his eyes wide with terror — “Why are you doing this?,” Mr. Pitt’s character responds with answers that parody the kind of facile back story usually applied in cases like this: unhappy childhood; sexual instability; class resentment; bad education. All of it is facetious, and none of it explains anything.

In his better movies — I admit to a qualified admiration for “Code Inconnu” (2000), “The Piano Teacher” (2001), “The Time of the Wolf” (2003) and “Caché” (2005) — Mr. Haneke uses extremity and shock to illuminate social and psychological realities, or at least possibilities. His ideas are often facile encapsulations of chic conventional wisdom about the terrible consequences of sexual repression, economic privilege or racial hypocrisy, but his formal dexterity gives these films a creepy power nonetheless.

You may try to dismiss what they are saying (which is basically that you, bourgeois cultural prestige-monger that you are, should congratulate yourself for having purchased a dose of Mr. Haneke’s contempt), but their unsettling effects are not so easy to shake.

To some extent, the same is true of “Funny Games,” which efficiently induces a state of panic and dread, and which features some fine bits of acting, especially from Mr. Pitt and Ms. Watts. The images Mr. Haneke puts on screen (they are shot with crisp, glossy-magazine elegance by Darius Khondji) are shocking, but they don’t unfold with the usual slasher-movie jolts of grisliness. The camera frequently stands still as the horror unfolds just beyond its range, and when a bloody event takes place, we are likely to be shown the face of a passive witness rather than that of the perpetrator or the victim.

“Why don’t you just kill us and get it over with?” George whimpers. His would-be killer’s reply — “What about entertainment?” — carries beyond the screen, where the voyeuristic masses are implicated in the gruesome spectacle of senseless cruelty. Are we, though? What if the guilt trip never takes off? Or, even worse, what if the American audience, cretins that we are, were to embrace Mr. Haneke’s vision not for its moral stringency but for the thrill of, say, watching Ms. Watts, bound at the ankles and wrists, hop around in her underwear? Who will be implicated then? I started out by calling Mr. Haneke a sadist, but it seems to me that he may be too naïve, too delicate, to merit that designation, which should be reserved only for the greatest filmmakers.

At least with the remade “Funny Games,” Mr. Haneke shows a certain kinship with someone like Eli Roth, whose “Hostel” movies have brought nothing but scorn from responsible critics. (If Mr. Haneke wanted to break into the American market, rather than take solace in the ambivalent embrace of the intelligentsia, he should have undertaken not a remake but a sequel.) The “Hostel” pictures and their ilk revel in the pornography of blood and pain, which Mr. Haneke addresses with mandarin distaste, even as he feeds the appetite for it.

Like Peter and Paul, who wear immaculate white gloves as they go about their awful business, “Funny Games” tries to insulate itself from its own awfulness in the fine cloth of self-consciousness. On a few occasions Mr. Pitt turns to address the audience directly, mocking us for rooting for Ann and George’s survival, deriding our desire for neat resolutions. At these moments, using techniques that might have seemed audacious to an undergraduate literary theory class in 1985 or so, the film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.

Alain Robbe-Grillet is dead

2008-02-20T13:30:00.013-05:00

This extraordinary novelist and filmmaker has passed -
Best to avoid the embarrassing work he did for David Hamilton.

Fireside Chat

2008-02-19T23:30:00.007-05:00

Dan Murphy gets caught enjoying his drink forever

Shawn Powell | Hunter College

2008-02-18T02:18:00.006-05:00

Shawn Powell presents his new installation