Category: 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 …

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, …

Darren Hughes has issued a blog meme, so here is my response:

1. Total number of films I own on DVD and video.

I’d estimate around 250, which I consider somewhat spartan compared to a lot of DVD aficionados I know. (By contrast, I own less than a dozen VHS tapes.) Most of these titles are imports or films I wouldn’t otherwise easily rent, although I realize online DVD providers are making such a criterion obsolete these days. Fortunately I have the luxury of living in a city with several independent, well-stocked video stores, and pretty much only purchase …

Given the result of the election this week, I’ve been feeling sporadically nauseous, hopeless, and angry. (I concur with Filmjourney discussion participant Michael Kerpan, who writes, “not even an Ozu film could possibly cheer me up.” But in a twist of irony, the Ozu retrospective in Los Angeles began this week.) The idea of four more years of neoconservative extremism both here and abroad fills me with despair, yet the most aggravating aspect of the election has undoubtedly been the mainstream media response to it–a desperate effort to squelch the last four years of dissent and deny that the country …