Author: Doug Cummings

Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been slowly sampling one of the most entertaining–and important–DVD releases of the year, the National Film Preservation Foundation‘s More Treasures From the American Film Archives box set of (mostly) silent films from 1894 to 1931. (A previous collection was released in 2000.) It’s 50 films totaling over nine hours of material spread out over three discs, and each film contains a very informative, multi-screen essay, a new score, and typically an audio commentary by one of the 17 participating critics, historians, and preservationists.

While a number of silent features …

Last week, It’s All True (1993), a documentary about Orson Welles’ “failed” 1942 documentary of the same name, was released on DVD. On the heels of filming his second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons, 26-year-old Welles was asked by the State Department to film a Technicolor documentary in South America in the hopes of strengthening international relations and deflecting potential Nazi influence in the Southern Hemisphere. (“It was never meant to be a commercial venture,” Welles’ co-producer Richard Wilson states, “more a cultural exchange.”) Welles’ studio, RKO, promised to send him editing equipment so he could finish Ambersons in Rio …

Gearing up after the holiday, I find that a couple of recent DVD releases keep interacting in my thoughts, Zeitgeist’s Ten by Abbas Kiarostami and Facets’ Voyage in Time (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra (who has written several scripts for Antonioni and Angelopoulos). I’m always fascinated by the creative process, and Zeitgeist’s disc comes with Kiarostami’s 10 on Ten (2004), his master class lecture I first saw at TIFF, in which he drives around his favorite location in Tehran, a mountainous road featured in Taste of Cherry, and elucidates his approach to directing. Tarkovsky’s documentary presents his …