Film

COMING ATTRACTIONS For thirty years El Pasoan Willie Varela has been best known for his avant-garde super 8 films. This month, however, the 52-year-old debuts his other artistic undertakings. On October 31 the El Paso Museum of Art and the UT-El Paso Fox Fine Arts Center open a two-part exhibit, “Crossing Over: Photographs and New Video Installations by Willie Varela.” The former venue will display thirty- by forty-inch photos dating from 1981 to 2001 (top, San Francisco, CA, 1994 and bottom, El Paso, TX, 1996), and the latter will show multimedia works. And mark your calendars: John G. Hanhardt, the senior curator of film and media arts at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, who oversaw Varela’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994, will give a talk about the artist at the Fox Fine Arts Center November 13. For the movie-starved, the Capital City lights up its theaters for the Texas premiere of Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie (a remake of the Stanley Donen classic, Charade) October 9 and the Austin Film Festival, which will provide audiences with more than eighty movie screenings from October 10 through 17. (See Austin: Other Events; and El Paso: Museums/Galleries.)