New York Times, "Looking Beyond Documentary to Face Truths"

"The Anthology series is an opportunity, not to be missed, to sample the work of a filmmaker who crossed and recrossed the documentary boundary long before established figures like Werner Herzog, Jonathan Demme and Spike Lee could do so without a second thought."  

Village Voice, "The Opposite of Vanishing: Documentaries by Shôhei Imamura"

 "One of the early and essential fact-fiction hybrids."

Time Out New York, "A Man Vanishes"

5/5 Stars!

Wall Street Journal, "Repertory Film"

"A MAN VANISHES, which enjoys a weeklong run, is the can't-miss...KARAYUKI-SAN: THE MAKING OF A PROSTITUTE might seem matter-of-fact, but it carefully builds to a concluding revelation. Sympathetic but unsentimental, Imamura lets the details speak for themselves."

Artforum, "Truth or Consequences" 

"Imamura made the film without access to the lightweight cameras and sound recorders and fast film stocks pioneered by Richard Leacock and his associates in New York in the mid-'60s, and the result is as astonishing as it is rough-and-ready. Imamura's genius in this period was to marry his political critique of Japanese society with his conceptual and technical innovations. He found himself rethinking the ontology of the film image." 

Slant Magazine, "A Man Vanishes" 

"An existential essay on elusiveness of identity, a self-debunking bit of directorial mischief, a vertiginous travesty of a procedural, and an influential merging of life and fiction...A Man Vanishes envisions life as a tangle of subjectively staged "dramas," each complementing and contradicting the other."

Waggish, "Abandoned People: Shohei Imamura's Documentaries at Anthology" 

"[The films] are stunning. Imamura’s genius for extracting and showing the overlooked and filthy parts of human existence is always at hand."

Tiny Mix Tapes, "A Man Vanishes"

"The last several minutes of A Man Vanishes are some of the most fascinating ever filmed, and functions as a sort of verité answer to the overblown fourth wall shattering of Jodorowsky in The Holy Mountain."  

Film Journal International, "A Man Vanishes" 

"If A Man Vanishes is entirely fictional, Imamura creates a world as actual as the one Jim McBride devised for his more humorous “mockumentary” from the same year, 1967, David Holzman’s Diary. Both films use the techniques of cinéma-vérité (in stark black-and-white). However, Imamura’s project stands out today as more ambitious—a true meditation on the medium with an increasing sense of unease as it slowly moves along (with echoes of Citizen Kane)"

On Monday, November 12, 2012, at 7 PM, Columbia University's Miller Theater will be screening our fall release MARX RELOADED. The film examines the renewed relevance of Karl Marx's thought in the wake of the global financial crisis. Written and directed by writer, lecturer and translator Jason Barker, MARX RELOADED features light-hearted animation sequences, as well as interviews with leading thinkers on Marx, pro and con, including Norbert Bolz, Micha Brumlik, John Gray, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Nina Power, Jacques Rancière, Peter Sloterdijk, Alberto Toscano, and Slavoj Zizek.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring director Barker, along with:

• Stanley Aronowitz (Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education, CUNY Graduate Center)
• Todd Gitlin (Professor of Sociology and Journalism, Chair of the Ph.D. program in Communications, Columbia University)
• Bruno Bosteels (Professor of Romance Studies, Cornell University)
• Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Director, Center for Study of Ethnicity and Race, and Associate Professor of Latino Studies and English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University)

The event is free and open to the public. Register here.

Labels: Columbia University, economics, financial crisis, Jason Barker, Karl Marx, NYC events, philosophy, screening