Author: Doug Cummings

I’ve written about Grigori Kozintsev before, the Russian film and theater director whose career began in the ’20s but climaxed with three sophisticated literary adaptations: Don Quixote (1957), Hamlet (1964), and King Lear (1969). Many film scholars place his adaptations at the top of the form (at least in the ranks of Welles’ adaptations), but Kozintsev’s films continue to elude popular summaries; the dubious Ruscico has distributed fine all-region DVDs in the last couple years, but Facets Video has finally released Hamlet in North America.

Kozintsev was more than a director; he was also a scholarly Shakespearean aficionado who …

On the surface, Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s Who’s Camus Anyway? (2005)–recently released on DVD by Film Movement–is a breezy, playfully cineliterate account of a group of Tokyo university students making a movie. And while it’s chock full of film references (Altman, Tarantino, the French New Wave), colorful characters, and social eccentricities, its true sophistication emerges gradually, posing complex questions about the roles of fantasy, identity, and volition in modern life.

The film is Yanagimachi’s first after a ten-year hiatus; in the interim he taught a university course for three years, an experience that informs the sociological fabric of the film. And while …

Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001)

The news is spreading that DaniËle Huillet–the personal and filmmaking partner of Jean-Marie Straub for over half a century–passed away this week, ending one of the most acclaimed filmmaking teams of the New German Cinema (though Huillet and Straub were both French and lived in Rome). If you’re unfamiliar with their work, you can be forgiven–only their first feature, the exquisite Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) is available on DVD in North America, and co-director Huillet isn’t mentioned once in its liner notes by Armond White or the excerpts from Richard Roud’s …

The following reviews cover the films included on Disc Two of the Polish region-2 DVD release of documentaries by Krzysztof Kieslowski. (Disc One reviews and other relevant info can be found here.)

First Love (1974)

Of the twelve films included on this DVD release, this is among Kieslowski’s most emotionally compelling works, and also an early hint of his strong intuition for narrative. The film follows the lives of two youths–Jadwiga, pregnant at the age of 17, and her boyfriend, Romek (19)–as it carefully reveals their struggles (finishing school, getting married, finding an apartment in a city with multi-year …