The Warner brothers — Harry, Sam, Albert and Jack — were different from Hollywood’s other movie moguls in the industry’s early years. They were shrewd, brash, outspoken and passionate in ways that deviated from the industry norm. The most publicly consistent brother was Harry, a stoic businessman and proud immigrant. Sam was the technical visionary who was gone too soon. Albert largely avoided the public eye, although he served as a loyal ambassador to the family brand. Jack was the wild child, the entertainer, the sometimes unpredictable one.
Those talents served them well during a transitional time for what would become the filmed entertainment industry. The year 1903 marked that transition, moving from what historian Tom Gunning calls a “cinema of attractions,” based on simple spectatorship of an event, to narrative storytelling, which allowed audiences to get lost in what they saw onscreen. There was only one way to test the...
Those talents served them well during a transitional time for what would become the filmed entertainment industry. The year 1903 marked that transition, moving from what historian Tom Gunning calls a “cinema of attractions,” based on simple spectatorship of an event, to narrative storytelling, which allowed audiences to get lost in what they saw onscreen. There was only one way to test the...
- 4/4/2023
- by Chris Yogerst
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The Action Scene is a column exploring the construction of action set pieces, but it also considers “scene” in the sense of field or area: “action” as a genre and mode that spans different cultures and historical periods. By examining these two levels in tandem—one oriented toward aesthetic expression, the other toward broader contexts and concepts—this series aims to deepen appreciation for and spark discussion about action cinema. There is a moment during the climax of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) that captures an essential element of Buster Keaton’s brand of comedy. Buffeted by hurricane-force gales that are ripping apart the town around him, Keaton seeks cover in an empty theater (I will be conflating actor and character in this piece because the Keaton persona is so consistent across his films that individual roles become practically irrelevant). As he dashes indoors, his foot snags a length of rope, causing...
- 10/12/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSFor Vogue France, portraits of a stylish Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss home by Hedi Slimane. The full program for the 2020 Venice Film Festival, now revealed, includes films from Lav Diaz, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ann Hui, and Chloé Zhao. This year's impressive jury (selected in light of travel restrictions) will include Cate Blanchett, Christian Petzold, Joanna Hogg, and Cristi Puiu. Recommended VIEWINGPresented by the Maysles Documentary Center, "After Civilization" is a series featuring documentaries that "employ speculative techniques to reckon with ecological crisis and the ongoing material violences of dispossession." The films, from John Akomfrah's Afrofuturist essay film The Last Angel of History to Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil's Inaate/Se/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./], are available for free until August 15. Madrid-based La Casa Encendida also has an ongoing screening series, entitled "Some Letters Make the Night Last a Moment Longer.
- 7/31/2020
- MUBI
Vladimir Lenin at Smolny (1930) by Isaak BrodskyIf there exists a history of popular themes, then, there too must exist a history of unpopular ones. For every grand theme—good versus evil, man versus nature—there exists myriad small and minor ones. These sorts of thematic marginalia haunt the peripheries, sifting through the substratum, making far-off ideas warm to the touch.It is of no coincidence that some of the best film writers have written in defense of this sensation: Manny Farber’s “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” Claude Chabrol’s “Little Themes,” and Tom Gunning’s “Toward a Minor Cinema.” In his essay, Farber inveighs art aimed at Grand Themes that obsequiously fall in line with traditional notions of “densely wrought, European” masterpieces. In his rock-true manner, Farber writes how graceless, capital “A” art becomes antiseptic and stiff, citing Antonioni and Truffaut as promulgators. Chabrol’s essay makes the...
- 2/4/2019
- MUBI
Hard-media home video is making a comeback, and Kino Lorber shows its faith in the medium with an extravagant collection of its entire silent holdings of the Fritz Lang library. Mythical heroes, sacrificing heroines, criminal madmen and uncontrolled super-science are his themes; it’s a paranoid’s view of the first half of the 20th Century, expressed with fantastic innovations that literally re-write the rules of cinema.
Fritz Lang The Silent Films
Blu-ray
Kino Classics
1919-1929 / B&W / 1:37 Silent Aperture / 1894 min. / Street Date November 21, 2017 / “The Complete Silent Films of German Cinema’s Supreme Stylist” / Available through Kino Lorber / 149.95
Films: The Spiders, Harakiri, The Wandering Shadow, Four Around the Woman, Destiny, Dr. Mabuse The Gambler, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, Spies, Woman in the Moon, The Plague of Florence.
Directed by Fritz Lang
Kino Lorber has been a happy home for many marvelous discs of silent German classics. Thanks to their ongoing...
Fritz Lang The Silent Films
Blu-ray
Kino Classics
1919-1929 / B&W / 1:37 Silent Aperture / 1894 min. / Street Date November 21, 2017 / “The Complete Silent Films of German Cinema’s Supreme Stylist” / Available through Kino Lorber / 149.95
Films: The Spiders, Harakiri, The Wandering Shadow, Four Around the Woman, Destiny, Dr. Mabuse The Gambler, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, Spies, Woman in the Moon, The Plague of Florence.
Directed by Fritz Lang
Kino Lorber has been a happy home for many marvelous discs of silent German classics. Thanks to their ongoing...
- 11/21/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
The eighteenth entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi will be showing Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945) from December 30, 2016 - January 28, 2017 in the United States. In Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Scarlet Street (1945) it is never simply a matter of characters seeing or not seeing something important—although that can furnish the first, basic level of the intrigue. It is also a matter of what people really understand of what they see—which, in turn, has much to do with what they, consciously or unconsciously, project onto what is before their eyes. So, while the film is full of moments where its central figure, the ‘poor sap’ Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson), has his eyes averted, or doesn’t hear someone creeping behind his back, it also explores his willful blindness: he looks at Kitty (Joan Bennett) and sees an innocent angel where,...
- 1/13/2017
- MUBI
TV stalwart Paul Wendkos' biggest success in movies was as the director of the Gidget series. I'm Scottish so I don't know what that was. But it turns out he had a real gift for expressionistic noir, as demonstrated in his debut film The Burglar, which was scripted by pulp noir icon David Goodis, whose novels provided source material for Delmer Daves' Dark Passage, Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, René Clément's And Hope to Die, Beineix's Moon in the Gutter (the author was big in France) and Sam Fuller's Street of No Return.The movie, a low-budget affair, substitutes flair and vigor for production values, and stars lifelong noir patsy/creep Dan Duryea and up-and-coming sex bomb Jayne Mansfield, with the result that it always seems to be in the wrong aspect ratio. Duryea's cranium seems to have an extra story built...
- 11/8/2016
- MUBI
“Beauty, Love, Mother... And America”
By Raymond Benson
Filmmaker Terrence Malick has perhaps out-mystique’d the great Stanley Kubrick in terms of his public perception. Famously reclusive, Malick never allows photographs of himself to be used, and he never appears in “making of” documentaries about his films. A Rhodes Scholar and a Harvard graduate, he is obviously a brilliant man. Once he got into the film business, he worked as a script doctor until he made his first feature, Badlands (1973). It was critically acclaimed and established Malick as a hot addition to the “New Hollywood” movement. Next came Days of Heaven in 1978, also critically lauded.
And then... he disappeared. For twenty years.
In 1998, he appeared on the scene again, and Hollywood was more than ready to open checkbooks and fund his third feature film, The Thin Red Line.
It takes a lot of mystique for that scenario to happen.
Malick’s fourth picture,...
By Raymond Benson
Filmmaker Terrence Malick has perhaps out-mystique’d the great Stanley Kubrick in terms of his public perception. Famously reclusive, Malick never allows photographs of himself to be used, and he never appears in “making of” documentaries about his films. A Rhodes Scholar and a Harvard graduate, he is obviously a brilliant man. Once he got into the film business, he worked as a script doctor until he made his first feature, Badlands (1973). It was critically acclaimed and established Malick as a hot addition to the “New Hollywood” movement. Next came Days of Heaven in 1978, also critically lauded.
And then... he disappeared. For twenty years.
In 1998, he appeared on the scene again, and Hollywood was more than ready to open checkbooks and fund his third feature film, The Thin Red Line.
It takes a lot of mystique for that scenario to happen.
Malick’s fourth picture,...
- 8/2/2016
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
With a new restoration of Terrence Malick‘s exceptional historical epic The New World recently arriving on the Criterion Collection, remembrances and examinations are surfacing. In classical Malick form, The New World is at once beautifully sweeping and tactile and raw, painting broad themes and grasping intimate moments into a sensory experience that transports viewers to Jamestown, 1607, as worlds and cultures collide. Thanks to Criterion, a brief video of star Colin Farrell has been shared in which he recounts working with the legendary director and how these two styles came to pass.
“For Terry, there is this contradiction between how prepared he was — and how much I believe the vision of the film lived within him and how he can see it clearly,” Farrell recalls, “and [yet] also how he was moved by nature, and how he’d be moved by what he saw.” On this note, he tells a wonderful...
“For Terry, there is this contradiction between how prepared he was — and how much I believe the vision of the film lived within him and how he can see it clearly,” Farrell recalls, “and [yet] also how he was moved by nature, and how he’d be moved by what he saw.” On this note, he tells a wonderful...
- 7/28/2016
- by Mike Mazzanti
- The Film Stage
NEWSPortoThe late summer film festival lineups are starting to be unveiled. Toronto, partially announced, already looks massive (highlights include new films directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Jonathan Demme, and, yes, Nick Cannon), San Sebastien has announced the 14 films in its New Directors competition, including Notebook contributor Gabe Klinger's sophomore film Porto, and the Venice Days unofficial sidebar of the Venice Film Festival has its full lineup online.Speaking of lists, Filmmaker Magazine has picked its "twenty five new faces of independent film."A petition has been posted online to save the historic Rko studio globe in Hollywood.Recommended READINGThe Criterion Collection has posted King Hu's notes made for the Cannes Film Festival screening of his prize-winning wuxia classic, A Touch of Zen:But when I started working on the scenario, I discovered that translating the concept of Zen into cinematic terms posed a great many difficulties. Not long afterward, I...
- 7/27/2016
- MUBI
Outfitted with a new score and title sequence, reedited sans several scenes involving the woman, and rereleased in 1972, Charlie Chaplin’s first feature length film The Kid has finally made its way to home video in HD thanks to the Cineteca di Bologna’s gloriously meticulous restoration and 4k digital transfer. Originally released back in 1921 after about a half decade of acting and eventually directing wildly popular shorts for Keystone Studios, the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company and finally the Mutual Film Corporation, the film endured a year long production amidst personal and professional crisis. It was thought that Chaplin’s signature brand of comedic slapstick, which typically ran just two reels of film, could not support the length of a six reel feature, but as is evidenced within, the film perfectly fuses Chaplin’s penchant for melodrama with his masterful vaudevillian humor to create an astonishingly emotional comedy that plumbs...
- 2/16/2016
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
“Tramps And Orphans”
By Raymond Benson
The Criterion Collection continues its excellent re-issuing of Charles Chaplin’s major works with The Kid, the first full-length feature from the filmmaker. Released in 1921, Chaplin expanded on the two and three reelers he had been making (a “reel” at that time was approximately 10-15 minutes long) to the six-reels of The Kid (the original cut was just over an hour; Chaplin re-edited it in the early 70s to create the now standard 53-minute version). It’s still a short film, but longer than what were considered “shorts.”
The Kid received high acclaim on its release and was one of the writer/actor/director’s most popular pictures. This was in part due to the presence of young Jackie Coogan in the titular role. Coogan, who grew up to play Uncle Fester in The Addams Family television series of the 1960s, steals the movie...
By Raymond Benson
The Criterion Collection continues its excellent re-issuing of Charles Chaplin’s major works with The Kid, the first full-length feature from the filmmaker. Released in 1921, Chaplin expanded on the two and three reelers he had been making (a “reel” at that time was approximately 10-15 minutes long) to the six-reels of The Kid (the original cut was just over an hour; Chaplin re-edited it in the early 70s to create the now standard 53-minute version). It’s still a short film, but longer than what were considered “shorts.”
The Kid received high acclaim on its release and was one of the writer/actor/director’s most popular pictures. This was in part due to the presence of young Jackie Coogan in the titular role. Coogan, who grew up to play Uncle Fester in The Addams Family television series of the 1960s, steals the movie...
- 2/1/2016
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Bad Boys/Bad Boys II
Witten by Michael Barrie, Jim Mulholland, and Doug Richardson/Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl
Directed by Michael Bay
USA, 1995/2003
Say what you will about Michael Bay—and people have said a lot about Michael Bay—the man knows how to make an action movie. Bad Boys, from 1995, his first feature film, and its sequel, from 2003, which is making its Blu-ray debut as part of a 20th anniversary collection from Sony Pictures, are just two notable examples. These films are bursting at the seams with car chases, gunfights, explosions, and more, much more. There isn’t a whole lot beneath the surface, but there doesn’t really need to be. What these two films set out to do, they do very well, and what Bay does best, he does better than anybody. That may not always (hardly ever) be critically acceptable in terms of “quality cinema,...
Witten by Michael Barrie, Jim Mulholland, and Doug Richardson/Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl
Directed by Michael Bay
USA, 1995/2003
Say what you will about Michael Bay—and people have said a lot about Michael Bay—the man knows how to make an action movie. Bad Boys, from 1995, his first feature film, and its sequel, from 2003, which is making its Blu-ray debut as part of a 20th anniversary collection from Sony Pictures, are just two notable examples. These films are bursting at the seams with car chases, gunfights, explosions, and more, much more. There isn’t a whole lot beneath the surface, but there doesn’t really need to be. What these two films set out to do, they do very well, and what Bay does best, he does better than anybody. That may not always (hardly ever) be critically acceptable in terms of “quality cinema,...
- 11/17/2015
- by Jeremy Carr
- SoundOnSight
"To Save and Project: The 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation" runs from November 4-25, 2015 and features 74 newly restored masterworks and rediscovers including films by Chantal Ackerman, Dario Argento, Samuel Fuller, Orson Welles and many more. Read More: 10 Rare Gems MoMA Just Saved from Obscurity Special guests for the series include Oja Kodar, Stefan Droessler, Guy Maddin, Chris Langdon, Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako ("Timbuktu") and noted film historians John Canemaker, Tom Gunning and Eddie Muller. Maddin will introduce two films on the silent program including “Pan,” the 1922 film by Harald Schwenzen based on the novel by Knut Hamsun; and “Monsieur Don’t Care,” a 1924 comedy short starring Stan Laurel in his pre-Oliver Hardy days. Indiewire recently spoke to Maddin over the phone about why these two films matter to him and about the state of film preservation. Why these two films in particular? Although, I...
- 11/13/2015
- by Paula Bernstein
- Indiewire
Read More: 5 Key Takeaways from the Documentary Film Preservation Summit Starting tomorrow, November 4, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City will revive some of cinema's long-buried treasures for To Save and Project: The 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. The three-week program is a landmark event for cinephiles, as numerous films will be receiving their first American screenings since their original release decades ago, while others, in new restored versions, will be shown for the first time in New York. Films selected include everything from silent film comedies to European feminist films, Iranian New Wave classics and Cuban documentaries, many of which have been impossible to screen in any capacity here in the United States. Guest speakers include Guy Maddin, Babette Mangolte, and noted film historians John Canemaker, Tom Gunning and Eddie Muller, among others. To Save and Project runs November 4-25 at MoMA. Visit the event website for more.
- 11/3/2015
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
The Conversation is a new feature at Sound on Sight bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their inaugural piece, they will discuss Tom Tykwer’s film, Run Lola Run (1999).
Landon’s Take
Amongst the many films included in 1999’s “year that changed movies,” Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run seems an essential text. Fifteen years ago, the film blew through national and arthouse borders, presenting an exhilarating image of an approach to filmmaking free from formal restraint or linear narrative logic. An engrossing exercise in style, Tykwer’s breakthrough film seemed to simultaneously beat Hollywood at its own game of fast-paced entertainment, integrate music video aesthetics harmoniously into the machinations of feature filmmaking, and present an art film thoroughly interested in film as an art form looking toward the 21st century, free from the modernist concerns that previously united festival-friendly European exports.
Landon’s Take
Amongst the many films included in 1999’s “year that changed movies,” Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run seems an essential text. Fifteen years ago, the film blew through national and arthouse borders, presenting an exhilarating image of an approach to filmmaking free from formal restraint or linear narrative logic. An engrossing exercise in style, Tykwer’s breakthrough film seemed to simultaneously beat Hollywood at its own game of fast-paced entertainment, integrate music video aesthetics harmoniously into the machinations of feature filmmaking, and present an art film thoroughly interested in film as an art form looking toward the 21st century, free from the modernist concerns that previously united festival-friendly European exports.
- 1/10/2015
- by Drew Morton
- SoundOnSight
Jean-Luc Godard, and more specifically his 1965 film Pierrot le Fou, literally changed my life, and set me on a path toward intense and everlasting cinephilia. Since the first time I saw that film, it has remained my favorite movie of all time and Godard my favorite director. So when I finally had the chance to see Film socialisme in 2010, his first feature film in six years, I had high hopes that the old master was going to yet again bring something new to the table. Those hopes were assuredly met. I considered the film the best of that year and still believe it is an astonishing movie, rife with so much of what defines Godard in this is fourth(?), fifth(?), in any case, current, phase of his career.
The first words of Film socialisme, at least according to the “Navajo English” subtitles, are “money – public – water.” Literally, this refers to...
The first words of Film socialisme, at least according to the “Navajo English” subtitles, are “money – public – water.” Literally, this refers to...
- 10/25/2014
- by Jeremy Carr
- SoundOnSight
During the editing (which is when I really start to see the film), I saw that it was Hitchcock who had guided us through the writing and Lang who guided us through the shooting: especially his last films, the ones where he leads the spectator in one direction before he pushes them in another completely different direction, in a very brutal, abrupt way.
—Jacques Rivette on his Secret défense (1998), fro http://www.jacques-rivette.com/
Long before the much-vaunted, high-concept ‘mind-game movies’ like Memento (2000), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Inception (2010), there was Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1947). The film is like a broken puzzle at every level, virtually begging us to rearrange its pieces and find its key. Indeed, one almost needs to formulate a ‘hypothesis of the stolen film,’ Ruiz-style, since the movie we have before us is not quite the one Lang and his talented writer Silvia Richards (Possessed,...
—Jacques Rivette on his Secret défense (1998), fro http://www.jacques-rivette.com/
Long before the much-vaunted, high-concept ‘mind-game movies’ like Memento (2000), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Inception (2010), there was Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1947). The film is like a broken puzzle at every level, virtually begging us to rearrange its pieces and find its key. Indeed, one almost needs to formulate a ‘hypothesis of the stolen film,’ Ruiz-style, since the movie we have before us is not quite the one Lang and his talented writer Silvia Richards (Possessed,...
- 9/1/2014
- by Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin
- MUBI
By Søren Hough
Contributor
* * *
Television has apexed once again. If the Emmys have proven anything over the past few years, it is that we live in what celebrated filmmaker Steven Soderbergh refers to as “a second golden age of television.” The networks — cable and streaming, more than broadcast — are investing more than ever in smart, original and ambitious shows, and are consequently producing more high-quality material than ever before. So successful have these networks become that major figures in the film industry have begun to make the once-unthinkable jump from the big screen to the small screen. Indeed, everyone from Steven Spielberg to Kevin Spacey seems to be hopping on the bandwagon.
But at what cost? Has this shift in production value brought with it narrative strength? Maybe not.
Along with this resurgence in television has come a recurring and potentially sinister theme: the abrupt excision of the protagonist. Consider the Emmy-winning fantasy series,...
Contributor
* * *
Television has apexed once again. If the Emmys have proven anything over the past few years, it is that we live in what celebrated filmmaker Steven Soderbergh refers to as “a second golden age of television.” The networks — cable and streaming, more than broadcast — are investing more than ever in smart, original and ambitious shows, and are consequently producing more high-quality material than ever before. So successful have these networks become that major figures in the film industry have begun to make the once-unthinkable jump from the big screen to the small screen. Indeed, everyone from Steven Spielberg to Kevin Spacey seems to be hopping on the bandwagon.
But at what cost? Has this shift in production value brought with it narrative strength? Maybe not.
Along with this resurgence in television has come a recurring and potentially sinister theme: the abrupt excision of the protagonist. Consider the Emmy-winning fantasy series,...
- 12/6/2013
- by Søren Hough
- Scott Feinberg
Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: June 18, 2013
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
In its home country, František Vlácil’s 1967 historical drama-romance Marketa Lazarová has been hailed as the greatest Czech film ever made; for many U.S. viewers, it will be a revelation.
Based on a novel by Vladislav Vancura, this stirring and poetic depiction of a feud between two rival medieval clans is a fierce, epic, and meticulously designed evocation of the clashes between Christianity and paganism, humankind and nature, love and violence.
Vlácil’s approach was to re-create the textures and mentalities of a long-ago way of life, rather than to make a conventional historical drama, and the result is as harrowing as it is dazzling. With its inventive widescreen cinematography, editing, and sound design, Marketa Lazarová can best be described as an experimental action film—and we haven’t seen many of those!
Presented in Czech and German with English subtitles,...
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
In its home country, František Vlácil’s 1967 historical drama-romance Marketa Lazarová has been hailed as the greatest Czech film ever made; for many U.S. viewers, it will be a revelation.
Based on a novel by Vladislav Vancura, this stirring and poetic depiction of a feud between two rival medieval clans is a fierce, epic, and meticulously designed evocation of the clashes between Christianity and paganism, humankind and nature, love and violence.
Vlácil’s approach was to re-create the textures and mentalities of a long-ago way of life, rather than to make a conventional historical drama, and the result is as harrowing as it is dazzling. With its inventive widescreen cinematography, editing, and sound design, Marketa Lazarová can best be described as an experimental action film—and we haven’t seen many of those!
Presented in Czech and German with English subtitles,...
- 3/28/2013
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
The 9th annual Brakhage Center Symposium will be taking place this weekend at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where the legendary underground filmmaker Stan Brakhage taught for so many years. The symposium brings together filmmakers, scholars, critics, and curators to discuss the state of modern experimental film — and to show many awesome examples of it.
The event kicks off on Friday, March 15 at 5:00 p.m. with the debut of the video installation Answer Now by Jennifer Reeder at the Atlas Black Box theater.
This will be followed by an all-day event based on “Media Arts and Cinema Poetics” on Saturday, March 16 starting at 9:45 a.m. at the Visual Arts Complex (Vac) 1B20. The programmers leading the discussions and screenings include two major figures from Los Angeles: Glenn Phillips, a curator at the Getty Research Institute, and Mark Toscano, a film preservationist at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
The event kicks off on Friday, March 15 at 5:00 p.m. with the debut of the video installation Answer Now by Jennifer Reeder at the Atlas Black Box theater.
This will be followed by an all-day event based on “Media Arts and Cinema Poetics” on Saturday, March 16 starting at 9:45 a.m. at the Visual Arts Complex (Vac) 1B20. The programmers leading the discussions and screenings include two major figures from Los Angeles: Glenn Phillips, a curator at the Getty Research Institute, and Mark Toscano, a film preservationist at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
- 3/15/2013
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
For reasons not clear to me, Fritz Lang's an American Guerilla in the Philippines is almost totally unknown, at least in America, and most existent awareness is tainted by it having the worst reputation of the director's already generally undervalued (but superior) American period. I got a rare chance to see the film on 35mm at the Viennale and was unexpectedly moved by its vivid adventure. I feel like I've read for years that Lang loved adventure stories, and while he made many that were artificially constructed, I think one can sense in their ambition and grandeur a desire, in his focus on science and exoticism, to make a “real” one. (Perhaps much like how Alain Resnais has always giddily wanted to make a comic book movie.) What was so moving for me was the realization that this 1950 film seems to be the first and only time Fritz Lang...
- 11/4/2012
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Neil Ira Needleman is one of the most prolific and stylistically diverse filmmakers working in the independent and underground film worlds today. Yet, because of that diversity, his work tends to fly under the radar, catching audiences unaware at the dozens of film festivals he screens at every year.
Becoming familiar with Needleman’s films, one can at last start to piece together a consistency in his authentic documentation of a reality that may or may not exist. But, perhaps, an emphasis on “may not.” Although he began his career working with Super8, he now works exclusively in video, giving his films an immediacy and an air of authenticity that the filmmaker can completely subvert at will.
Drawing upon a broad range of personal experiences, such as his Jewish heritage and his long career working in advertising and marketing, there is always an element of emotional truth even when it...
Becoming familiar with Needleman’s films, one can at last start to piece together a consistency in his authentic documentation of a reality that may or may not exist. But, perhaps, an emphasis on “may not.” Although he began his career working with Super8, he now works exclusively in video, giving his films an immediacy and an air of authenticity that the filmmaker can completely subvert at will.
Drawing upon a broad range of personal experiences, such as his Jewish heritage and his long career working in advertising and marketing, there is always an element of emotional truth even when it...
- 1/30/2012
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
Second #1457, 24:17
The Yellow Man has come and gone. Dorothy’s full attention is on Jeffrey now. This first apartment scene is shot largely from Dorothy’s general angle of vision and in this frame she is dangerously close to the camera. In D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, Tom Gunning explores the subtle but important changes in camera distance in the early 1900s:
The basic camera distance for most shots in 1909 crept closer than the distant tableau found in some of Griffith’s first films. The full shot of the character from head to toe predominates over shots with plenty of space above the head and ‘six feet of boards’ below. Increasingly, characters stepped into the foreground, where they were framed between ankle and knee. The frame became an actor’s space rather than the extent of the set.
A movie still like this one from...
The Yellow Man has come and gone. Dorothy’s full attention is on Jeffrey now. This first apartment scene is shot largely from Dorothy’s general angle of vision and in this frame she is dangerously close to the camera. In D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, Tom Gunning explores the subtle but important changes in camera distance in the early 1900s:
The basic camera distance for most shots in 1909 crept closer than the distant tableau found in some of Griffith’s first films. The full shot of the character from head to toe predominates over shots with plenty of space above the head and ‘six feet of boards’ below. Increasingly, characters stepped into the foreground, where they were framed between ankle and knee. The frame became an actor’s space rather than the extent of the set.
A movie still like this one from...
- 10/19/2011
- by Nicholas Rombes
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Cutting off his ties to Hollywood with the blade-bare sinistry of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), Fritz Lang returned to Germany in the late 1950s to make the final two features of his career, both resumptions, updates and evolutions on subjects and styles that forged Lang's name in Germany. His last film envisioned what German society's arch (fictional) supervillain, Dr. Mabuse, would be up to in 1960, producing the terrifying The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Less internationally known but more extravagant than that film, whose taut black and white sparseness resembles Lang's late work in Hollywood, is the master's "Indian Epic," a two part, three plus hour revision of a Weimar-era superfilm directed by Joe May from a scenario by future Lang wife Thea von Harbou.
The epic, split into two features—The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (1959)—lacks the reputation of the director's known superfilms of the 1920s (the first Dr.
The epic, split into two features—The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (1959)—lacks the reputation of the director's known superfilms of the 1920s (the first Dr.
- 6/20/2011
- MUBI
The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present this two-part adventure epic directed by the legendary Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, etc) in the UK for the first time on home video. Widely regarded as one of the most beautiful colour films in the history of cinema, Der Tiger von Eschnapur / Das indische Grabmal (Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic) is released on DVD on 18 April 2011.
See synopsis and disc details below:
Synopsis:
Fritz Lang returned to Germany on the eve of the 1960s to direct this enchanted penultimate work, a redraft of the diptych form pioneered in such silent Lang classics as Die Spinnen; Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.; and Die Nibelungen. Although no encapsulating title was lent at the time of release to what is, effectively, a single 3-hour-plus film split in two, the work that has come to be referred to in modern times as “the Indian epic” (consisting...
See synopsis and disc details below:
Synopsis:
Fritz Lang returned to Germany on the eve of the 1960s to direct this enchanted penultimate work, a redraft of the diptych form pioneered in such silent Lang classics as Die Spinnen; Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.; and Die Nibelungen. Although no encapsulating title was lent at the time of release to what is, effectively, a single 3-hour-plus film split in two, the work that has come to be referred to in modern times as “the Indian epic” (consisting...
- 2/28/2011
- by Martyn Conterio
- FilmShaft.com
Above: Michael Snow’s Walking Woman (one of a series, 1960s)
On Sunday, I’ll be programming and, maybe, leading some sort of discussion in Brooklyn at UnionDocs about Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Joris Ivens’ Philips Radio (1931), and Michael Snow’s One second in Montreal (1969). I’m happy that I more or less managed to oppose my jobs as programmer and critic. As programmer, I put together three films from the Museum of Modern Art 16mm archive that I wanted to see and ostensibly have very little to do with each other, historically or generically: my programmer’s note on city symphonies defines exactly the sort of architectonic, gridded film these ambient, haiku-like movies are not. As critic, I’m stuck with three films whose only connections can be in the viewer’s eye, as Snow’s So Is This tells its audience, where they come in...
On Sunday, I’ll be programming and, maybe, leading some sort of discussion in Brooklyn at UnionDocs about Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Joris Ivens’ Philips Radio (1931), and Michael Snow’s One second in Montreal (1969). I’m happy that I more or less managed to oppose my jobs as programmer and critic. As programmer, I put together three films from the Museum of Modern Art 16mm archive that I wanted to see and ostensibly have very little to do with each other, historically or generically: my programmer’s note on city symphonies defines exactly the sort of architectonic, gridded film these ambient, haiku-like movies are not. As critic, I’m stuck with three films whose only connections can be in the viewer’s eye, as Snow’s So Is This tells its audience, where they come in...
- 2/19/2011
- MUBI
The traveling cinemas of Salim, Hanif and Feroz open up a world of imagination for children; make it more affordable to them, which the projectionists keep alive in part to make their own livelihood but in part to feed that hunger for creating the world for children, something we have assigned toys to do.
Dev Benegal’s (2009) Road, Movie is only the latest addition to a number of films that have been produced over the last decade and a half around the world. For some reasons, there is a renewed focus on a practice that has been in existence since the beginning of cinema, now being revived in all corners of the world. As one takes a panoramic look at these films, it is clear that there are quite a few from India. This does not seem to be only a numerical advantage but also an indication of how traveling...
Dev Benegal’s (2009) Road, Movie is only the latest addition to a number of films that have been produced over the last decade and a half around the world. For some reasons, there is a renewed focus on a practice that has been in existence since the beginning of cinema, now being revived in all corners of the world. As one takes a panoramic look at these films, it is clear that there are quite a few from India. This does not seem to be only a numerical advantage but also an indication of how traveling...
- 2/3/2011
- by Shekhar Deshpande
- DearCinema.com
Los Angeles Filmforum will present "D.W. Griffith in California," on Sunday, Nov. 15, at 7:30 pm. at the Echo Park Film Center. At the screening, film scholar Tom Gunning will discuss D. W. Griffith and his early Californian films. Six of those Griffith productions will be screened: Man’s Genesis (1912, 17 min); The New Dress (1911, 17 min.); The Massacre (1914, 20 min); The Unchanging Sea (below right, 1910, 14 min.); The Sands of Dee (1912, 17 min); and The Female of the Species (1912, 17 min). All in 16mm, with live musical accompaniment by Cliff Retallick. Among the early stars featured in those shorts are Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Arthur Johnson, Wilfred Lucas, and, [...]...
- 11/11/2009
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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