Author: Doug Cummings

This past weekend, LACMA began its new film series–“Torn Curtain: The Two Germanys on Film”–impressively filled with a number of unusual and rare titles; I’m particularly excited about the inclusion of Straub-Huillet’s first film, Not Reconciled (1965). The series is also at the center of a web of fascinating links and events.

The first two titles of the series were key “rubble films,” The Murderers Are Among Us (Wolfgang Staudte, 1946) and the lesser known (outside Germany) In Those Days (Helmut Käutner, 1947), two of the earliest films shot on location in a bombed Berlin with the task …

I’ve recently enjoyed reading David Beronä’s book, Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008), which describes (with select examples) the work of early-20th century woodcut storytellers such as Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. Beronä makes glancing suggestions that these initially small publications (descended from block-books and playing cards) are the missing link between the cinema and modern day graphic novels. “When Thomas Mann,” he writes, “winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, was asked what movie had made the greatest impression on him, Mann replied, ‘Passionate Journey.’ Although Mann’s reply sounds like the title of a …

We’re lucky here in Los Angeles to have a major organization for the promotion of abstract animation–the Center for Visual Music, which restores and exhibits classic titles from an elusive genre, and releases excellent DVDs showcasing the work of filmmakers like Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson.

Last week, CVM and UCLA screened over a dozen films representing a half-century of animation and “visual music” from the 1920s to the ’70s, many of them recent preservations. Visual music is a genre that’s hard to define, but the best single book I know that summarizes its history (with hundreds of …