Filmmaker, curator, author and LGBT film historian Jenni Olson will be receiving the 35th special Teddy Award at the 71st Berlinale on Friday, June 18. An award dedicated to outstanding work in queer filmmaking that improves the social and political condition of the LGBT community, Olson will be joining past recipients such as Tilda Swinton and Cheryl Dunye in holding the honor. Known for her stylistically unique 16 millimeter films depicting urban landscapes with voiceover essays, Olson is responsible for The Blue Diary, which premiered at the Berlinale in 1998, and whose The Joy of Life (2005), and The Royal Road […]
The post “By Reconnecting Us to Our Humanity, I Believe Nostalgia Could Be the Very Thing That Saves Us”: Jenni Olson on Receiving the 35th Special Teddy Award first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
The post “By Reconnecting Us to Our Humanity, I Believe Nostalgia Could Be the Very Thing That Saves Us”: Jenni Olson on Receiving the 35th Special Teddy Award first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
- 6/17/2021
- by Sally McGee
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Filmmaker, curator, author and LGBT film historian Jenni Olson will be receiving the 35th special Teddy Award at the 71st Berlinale on Friday, June 18. An award dedicated to outstanding work in queer filmmaking that improves the social and political condition of the LGBT community, Olson will be joining past recipients such as Tilda Swinton and Cheryl Dunye in holding the honor. Known for her stylistically unique 16 millimeter films depicting urban landscapes with voiceover essays, Olson is responsible for The Blue Diary, which premiered at the Berlinale in 1998, and whose The Joy of Life (2005), and The Royal Road […]
The post “By Reconnecting Us to Our Humanity, I Believe Nostalgia Could Be the Very Thing That Saves Us”: Jenni Olson on Receiving the 35th Special Teddy Award first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
The post “By Reconnecting Us to Our Humanity, I Believe Nostalgia Could Be the Very Thing That Saves Us”: Jenni Olson on Receiving the 35th Special Teddy Award first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
- 6/17/2021
- by Sally McGee
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.
- 10/11/2016
- MUBI
Jenni Olson begins The Royal Road, her latest emotional excavation of Hollywood nostalgia via Benning-esque 16mm landscape portraiture, by self-referentially quoting Michel Chion on the shadowy pretext of off screen voiceover after reflecting in her own dryly articulated voiceover on the monologue that opens Billy Wilder’s classic allegory of broken La dreams, Sunset Boulevard. Though Olson’s film revolves around another stretch of California highway, the 600-mile El Camino Real strip, the cinematic reference leads us down a winding poetic path on which Hollywood history, the neglected record of the Mexican American War and Olson’s own unrequited romantic pursuits come together with the same sort of mannered meditation that won her San Francisco Film Critics Circle’s Marlon Riggs Award for The Joy of Life back in 2005.
Pitting rigorously composed images of modern day Los Angeles and San Francisco against her own gender dysphoric voice, she explicates an...
Pitting rigorously composed images of modern day Los Angeles and San Francisco against her own gender dysphoric voice, she explicates an...
- 10/26/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Jenni Olson’s latest film, The Royal Road, weaves through seemingly unrelated subjects, including a lesbian woman’s search for love, the Spanish colonization of California, the Mexican-American War, and Hollywood cinema. These subjects are connected by El Camino Real—the Royal Road—which originally linked Spanish missions from San Diego to Sonoma in Northern California. Fractured by hundreds of years of urban development, El Camino Real now runs through some of California’s most iconic and populated locations. The Royal Road meditates on these locations, the steady 16mm camera lingering on graffitied buildings, Edwardian apartments, historical statues, and San Francisco’s Mondrian-like cacophony of telephone lines. Olson’s narration bridges the apparent chasm between the contemporary landscape, the region’s past, and her own experiences. Two hundred and fifty years of history converge poetically and almost seamlessly. The Royal Road traces the residue of colonization and war and gestures...
- 4/27/2015
- by Matthew Harrison Tedford
- MUBI
Leonard Bernstein titled a book 'The Joy Of Music'. The first time I attended a New York Pops concert with Steven Reineke at the helm that's the first thing I thought of. By the time the last note was played I realized the Pops new music director was much more than that. Steven also represents The Joy Of Life. Then, Steven met Eric, an equivalently matched person with whom to travel on life's journey.
- 8/5/2014
- by Stephen Sorokoff
- BroadwayWorld.com
Fresh off the whirlwind opening weekend of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, here are my admittedly skewed impressions of this years cinema extravaganza which seemed queerer than ever despite (or perhaps because of) my being unable to see many of the Lgbt films on view. Fear not. I have a well-developed facility for chiming in relevant commentary on films Ive never seen, and at least one worthy observation on the presentation of the Lgbt films at this notoriously queer straight festival. So here from the perch of January is a glimpse at the queer year in film ahead.
On the Queer with a capital Q end of the spectrum sits Madeline Olneks spectacularly titled Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (which caused great philosophical reflection amongst one group of lesbians at this years Outfest Queer Brunch who concluded that, truly, arent we all space aliens when you really think about it?...
On the Queer with a capital Q end of the spectrum sits Madeline Olneks spectacularly titled Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (which caused great philosophical reflection amongst one group of lesbians at this years Outfest Queer Brunch who concluded that, truly, arent we all space aliens when you really think about it?...
- 1/26/2011
- by JenniOlsonSF
- AfterEllen.com
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