Dallas Arts
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What Should You See at This Year’s Dallas Video Festival?
Tonight, the Dallas Video Festival kicks off at the Angelika Film Center. For 23 years, Bart Weiss and his cohorts have been pulling together innovative and challenging programming for the festival that always makes this one of the most fascinating movie-watching weekends of the year. What I’ve always enjoyed about Video Fest is its efficiency. What you don’t get at the festival are the kinds of mid-budget, mediocre feature films that clog the programming of most full-fledge film festivals. Video Fest’s movies are nearly always medium-conscious, and as a result, no matter what screening you walk into, what’s on screen will be something entirely fresh in either form or content or both. Sometimes the experimental, self-conscious fare doesn’t quite work, but rather than a shortcoming, this makes the festival feel like a breeding ground for ideas, an arena of experimentation that keeps the festival relevant. There are a number of excellent films at this year’s festival. Jump to find out which selections are not to miss.
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Why The Meadows’ El Greco Exhibitions Are About So Much More Than the Pentecost
To read the story behind the Meadow Museum’s partnership with the Prado, read this piece from the September D Magazine. The experience of seeing a famous painting in person can feel like a celebrity street sighting. You’re familiar with the image – the form, the content – you’ve seen it replicated dozens of times, printed on bulletins, pamphlets, and posters. When you finally encounter the actual painted object, there is a kind of initial disconnect. Ascending the main staircase at the Meadows Museum, El Greco’s Pentecost greets you as you turn and enter the gallery. The bottom of the tall painting is just below eye level, forcing you to look up at it as you enter the gallery. Move closer and you see what reproductions can’t show: the texture of the brush strokes, the richness of the tones, a sense of movement – the upward thrust of the action which you can recognize in a reproduction, but which is all the more palpable when looking at the actual canvas.
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What Happens When Artists Claim a Derelict Warehouse in the Shadow of the Trinity?
In many cities, there is a common urban principle that if there is a worn-down and crumbling part of town where rent is cheap and the architecture is at least utilitarian, maybe even interesting, to say nothing of habitable, than at some point a pack of wily and resourceful artists will stealthily move in, take over a few joints, make them throb with life, and cause, by the very fecundity of their presence, a revival or repurposing of the block, the street, the whole damn so-incredibly-ripe-for-something-better-than-demise neighborhood . And though we love to hate it, but love it when it’s hated, Dallas isn’t any different than all those other cities. Even though it’s young by comparison to those other places, Dallas is old enough to have vast swathes of thoroughly neglected patches of the grid all falling to veritable pieces and dying for attention. Last weekend, in just such a patch, a takeover such as I describe took place.