MORE THAN A FEW filmmakers have plotted a career path or artistic journey from documentary to fictional cinema. For some, it’s a fairly straight path. Krzysztof Kieślowski shot a doc on the Polish court system, where he met a lawyer who became his screenwriter and the rest was less history than art. Other journeys are […]
THIS MAY BE LESS A REVIEW than a reflection, on 2011 Cannes favorite Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, now available on DVD — from varied angles of view, ranging from the objectively-technical to the subjectively-personal. First, a technical primer, or refresher, for some– on focus. Recall that in bright light, the camera opening is […]
By the third time out or so, you realize that a filmmaker you’ve only been vaguely or even just accidentally keeping up with clearly deserves more particular notice – and so you sit up and pay attention, remember the name, start looking for it on festival schedules, indeed, choose that name over others, becoming attuned […]
FLATLAND IS A 19TH CENTURY inter-dimensional head-trip, still popular with math and computer geeks, a fantasy of a two-dimensional being whose mind is blown by his encounters with other dimensions. (Among other things, he discovers that the elite of his own world knew about the existence of a third-dimension, but hid that knowledge from the […]
I’ve had my good ear away from the ground of late so I missed the news that New Yorker Films is back online! Maybe you’re a little fuzzy on the landscape of the film distribution universe beyond your local art house but, believe me, this is big news. Let’s just say the cosmos of quality […]
“When Subtitles Go Wrong” at Huffington Post.
Finally, the Criterion Collection has brought out Rossellini’s World War II triptych in a lavish box set.
“Is American cinema imperialist? In a word, YES,” says Facets Multimedia founder Milos Stehnlik in his regular commentary this week for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview program. Over-simplified characters and cartoonish plot-resolution lead to an eye-for-an-eye philosophy where conflict is resolved by the gratuitous use of excessive force. In the tried and true good-guy versus bad-guy […]
It’s easy to see why John Huston wanted so badly to make a film of this story, and why he treated it as sacred text. Another filmmaker who seemed to treat his sports car as sacred and not much else, Roberto Rossellini, gleefully pilfered The Dead and wove it into a film which, unlike Huston’s, translates Joyce’s epiphanous power into cinema.