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The official website for the Masters of Cinema Series from Eureka Video in the UK is now online, featuring our first release, Arnold Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926). Unlike the Kino region 1 version, this 2-disc set contains the original German intertitles (subtitled), the complete three-hour 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (which Kino only sells separately), and a new essay by yours truly, which can be previewed here.

The film represents a key work of a pretty fascinating genre in German film, the “mountain film,” or Bergfilm, which did not survive World War II. …

One of the many pleasures of owning an inexpensive multi-region DVD player is being able to purchase DVDs from around the world and watch them at home. (Well, I suppose an expensive multi-region player would do the trick as well.) But one of the problems that sometimes occurs with European DVDs (or North American DVDs sourced from European tapes) is that they have been recorded in the PAL video format, which runs at 25 frames per second instead of the film-standard 24 frames per second. If care isn’t taken, the film simply plays 4% more quickly on video.

My friend …

I’ll admit that I’m torn by the trailer for the upcoming digitally-enhanced and restored version of George Lucas’ arty, dystopian exercize in style, THX 1138 (1971). On the one hand, the trailer is marvelously structured, and the film itself is such a radically incongruous debut for one of today’s most popular feel-good entertainers that it’s virtually a movie from an alternate universe. If the film had been a critical or financial success, who knows where it might have steered Lucas in subsequent years? As a true anomaly in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, it’s one of those fascinating, forgotten relics of …

Film critic, theorist, and writer Susan Sontag doing what Susan Sontag does best in the latest issue of New York Times Magazine, writing on the photographs from Abu Ghraib and what responses have said about deeper cultural and political truths:

Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets

The Internet is often characterized as being an ethereal jumble of opinion and interaction without consensus. And while this can be true–particularly in chat rooms or Usenet free-for-alls–I’ve enjoyed consistent interaction with people across the country and the globe over the past few years whose tastes in film are remarkably similar to my own, and who continue to suggest new films to discover with a genuine degree of certainty regarding shared cinematic values. Whether we all have similar tastes because we’ve spent so much time interacting online or whether we’ve spent so much time interacting online that our tastes have …

I don’t have cable TV, so I was surprised to discover an impressive collection of original trailers and movie clips provided by Turner Classic Movies on their website. Check out the tracking shots in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Robert Wise blithely justifying his recutting of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (“people were laughing at the film”), Robert Mitchum pursuing the children in Night of the Hunter, the charming repartee in The Philadelphia Story, or a featurette on one of my supreme guilty pleasures, George Pal’s The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, among scores of other clips. (Real …