Author: Doug Cummings

New documentaries

Film review

This weekend, the International Documentary Association began screening its DocuWeek program (not “festival,” they were quick to emphasize) so the films could qualify for Oscar nominations next year by playing in a commercial theater in Los Angeles. Whatever, I’m just glad the films are being shown even if there have been less than a dozen people at each of my screenings. The first two documentaries are stylish, engrossing pieces about art and artists, and the third is one of the best films I’ve seen all year, a sober look at global economics and third world devastation.

Touch the Sound…

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Love Eterne

Film review

UCLA Film and Television Archive’s ongoing Festival of Preservation screened Li Hanxiang’s charming Love Eterne (1963) last night, one of the most popular Hong Kong films of all time. It’s a romantic musical of the accessible huangmei opera genre derived from folk songs, consisting of short stanzas and choruses that are often sung by non-professionals. The movie is a colorful, widescreen Shaw Brothers production; the famed King Hu (1966’s Dragon Inn) is credited as having directed the “action scenes,” but what those might be are anyone’s guess–everything but the final scenes is a placid and cheerful costume drama. Nevertheless, …

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Grizzly Man

Film review

Werner Herzog has long obsessed over grandiose imagery and unusual documentary subjects (Kuwait’s burning oil fields, the Loch Ness monster, a lost tribe in the Amazon). So I expected his latest documentary–about a man and his girlfriend who were killed by a grizzly bear after the man spent years living with the beasts for months at a time–to be an exercise in style that would milk the eccentricity of its story. Fortunately, Grizzly Man is much more than that; it offers a humane and multifaceted portrait of an individual whose emotional makeup probably wasn’t all that different from the rest …

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Hiroshima footage

Commentary

I listened to an interview with Hiroshima in America co-author Greg Mitchell last weekend on FAIR’s radio program, Counterspin. Mitchell talked about how documentary footage taken by both Japanese and American film crews in the days and weeks following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been suppressed by US authorities for decades. When the Pentagon released the footage simultaneously to the National Archives and the Japanese government in 1968, film scholar Erik Barnouw (1908-2001) assembled a portion of it into a 16-minute film entitled Hiroshima-Nagasaki August, 1945 (1970). He then screened the film at MoMA (which will …

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Avant-garde cinema

Commentary

I’ve been going through the excellent new 2-DVD release from Kino this week, Avant-garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s (which I’ll review shortly), but I’m also reminded of Image Entertainment’s much larger 7-DVD box set, Unseen Cinema: Early Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941, to be released in October.

Before collapsing in a mass of consumerist tension, however, I should point out that the two sets are fairly distinct. Some of the films on the two sets overlap, like Man Ray’s Le Retour ‡ la raison (1923), Fernand LÈger’s Ballet mÈcanique (1924), Slavko Vorkapich’s The Life and Death of 9413, …

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Yuri Norstein: Tale of Tales

Film review, Texts

This week, I just received UK author Clare Kitson’s new book, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey. To my knowledge, it’s the first book-length study of Norstein, one of the world’s best living animators, and it largely recounts his life as it’s reflected by his impressionistic masterpiece, Tale of Tales (1979), a 28-minute film that has been voted the greatest animated work of all time. In many ways, it’s a painterly equivalent of Tarkovsky’s Mirror–both are opaque and multilayered memory films, with textures and sounds assembled in non-linear, evocative ways.

Kitson was the animation …

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