One of the highlights for me of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival was hearing novelist Jonathan Lethem deliver the festival’s annual State of Cinema Address.
Lethem, an exuberant and insatiable cineaste, managed to cram mumblecore, the Occupy movement, and even neotony (you’ll find out), into a wildly adventurous, spirited discourse on cinema today. Full of diversions, this speech shows the writer comfortably at home, weaving together all the seemingly disparate threads of culture into a speech that affirms cinema is just as alive as ever. While you’re at it check out The Rumpus Long Interview with Lethem where he states, “Film in general is very nourishing to my writing.”
