Author: Doug Cummings

Longtime readers of Filmjourney.org may have noticed a decisive lag in posts of late, and the reason is quite simple: my first child, Alexandra Anne Cummings, entered the world two weeks ago, and has been pretty greedy with my time. But we’re settling into a life pattern and the blogging here should resume with more frequency shortly. (Expect a lot of DVD reviews for a few months!)

In the meantime, enjoy Robert Koehler’s exciting posts (as time permits) from the Guadalajara International Film Festival, and feel free to check out a series of short posts on animation I’m publishing over …

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926)

“Now that rampaging dinosaurs, epic catastrophes, and superheroes have become ubiquitous in movies, animation seems as commonplace as news footage. But animation is as old photography itself; it predates ‘motion pictures’ through a variety of Victorian contraptions. And its practitioners were often the most solitary and obsessive filmmakers–visionaries who painstakingly granted the illusion of life to an astonishing array of materials, and devoted years of labor to producing a few moments of flickering movement. Animators are cinemaís original Frankensteins. . . .”

The new issue of the Utne-nominated ads-free indie …

It’s always nice to see one’s name in print–from the latest Film Comment:

“Launched in 2001, Masters of Cinema is run by an eclectic group hailing from the U.S., Canada and England: Jan Bielawski, Doug Cummings, R. Dixon Smith, Trond S. Tronsen, and Nick Wrigley. So which masters tie this collective together? Many celebrated auteurs, but from the beginning it seems there was one sanctified quartet: Ozu, Bresson, Tarkovsky, and Dreyer. Check out the eminently useful worldwide DVD release calendar posted on the sharply designed home page and explore four years’ worth of DVD of the Year readers’ polls. …