Jamie Stuart: Once More, With Feeling

By S.T. VanAirsdale

Continuing his role approximating a postmodern James Boswell to the New York Film Festival's Samuel Johnson, filmmaker Jamie Stuart is back today with another of his NYFF video chronicles/diaries/shorts. You know the drill: Stuart broods, narrates something about how hard it is to get from Astoria to Lincoln Center, throws in a couple 3/4 shots of someone from a press conference... But wait, there's more.

I've always thought that at least one of the three or four videos to emerge from Stuart's annual NYFF "coverage" is as good as any of the shorts programmed in the festival itself, and while his recent Wes Anderson interlude seemed a little sterile, the latest video is hands-down the best dispatch he's ever turned in. Impressionistic, moody, inventive and even kind of breathtaking (check out Nicole Kidman's crazed exit from last Friday's Margot press conference, or Roxane Mesquida in the car mirror), this compels me to believe that Stuart's work could be as compatible with a fest-concurrent gallery show as any of the muggy, gauzy Henny Garfunkel snapshots lining the Lincoln Center walls this year. If Stuart's patrons at Filmmaker Magazine want to get serious, they'll work with the Film Society to rig up some hi-def monitors and loop the last four years' worth of videos in 2008.

And meanwhile, if Stuart's serious, it's time to go narrative. You know people who know people; make it happen.

Posted at October 9, 2007 7:59 AM