(Dave Kehr) New York Jewish Film Festival (Saturday through Thursday) The 22nd annual edition of this popular festival, which mixes new and archival films, narrative works and documentaries, runs through Jan . 24
The first relies only on published sources; the second is a tour de force of archival research, clear narrative and probing analysis, particularly about the history of the anarchist movement; and the third is an ambitious attempt to bring the story to dramatic life.
General tendencies are hard to discover: I think the only moment when I've had a real sense of what was of interest to the English-language novel was the year I read 130 novels to judge a prize, and was struck (this was 2001) by how many alternated present-day archival study and historic narrative, influenced by AS Byatt's Possession and Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library.
Dutton's work, like James's and like Keene's, serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhaps always already been: provoking and serious fantasies, convincing reconstructions, true fictions.
(Dargis) Film Series 'An Evening With Jean-Gabriel Périot' (Monday) The French artist and filmmaker will be present to introduce a selection of his short films, which use digital techniques to combine archival images into stylized narratives, often with political or historical themes.
Adopting a comparative approach, I use archival and ethnographic material to explore narratives of policy makers, bureaucrats and urban planners in two settler-colonial cities: Karmiel in Israel/Palestine and Townsville in northern Queensland, Australia.
A collage of poetry and short narrative, stream of consciousness, fake archival photos and imagined conversation, Billy the Kid is a hypnotic take on the legendary wild west gunfighter.
Rappaport's devotion to uncovering these instances, whether issuing from academic papers, museums, interviews or memoirs, and her care with narrative structure, locating the rare archival images and using them generously throughout, is truly magnificent.
These patterns have been congruous with the inferences of many, but not of all historians using more traditional tools such as archeology, archival records, linguistics, comparative analysis of religious narrative, liturgy and practices.
A compelling first-person narrative, the book draws on much archival research.
