Category: Texts

BFI Dreyer & Master of the House

DVD review, Texts


Master of the House (1925)

The British Film Institute has Dreyer fever these days, having just released David Rudkin’s study of Vampyr (1932) for their Film Classics book series and several region 2 DVDs, beginning this week with Master of the House and Ordet (1955).

No complaints here, as I’m solidly within the ranks of cinephiles who place Dreyer in the upper echelon of film artists; given the little that has been published about his work in English, any new contributions would ordinarily be welcome. But Rudkin’s book isn’t exactly a definitive study of Vampyr, nor does it offer …

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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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Art by Film Directors

Texts


Preparatory drawing for The 39 Steps (1935) by Alfred Hitchcock

I’m always fascinated by the double artistic lives of established directors, people with a significant skill in an art form that requires the assistance of sometimes hundreds of technicians, artists, and actors. But what about their private, personal pursuits? A new book published in the UK, Art by Film Directors, is a glossy coffee table book that offers a taste of the non-film artwork by several notable filmmakers.

At 200 pages with large photos and plentiful use of white space, it’s not even remotely a comprehensive summary of the …

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Jonas Mekas’ Movie Journal

Texts

Browsing through a used bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday, I came across critic/filmmaker/curator Jonas Mekas‘ out-of-print Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, a partial compilation of his writing for the Village Voice during that period. Mekas was born in Lithuania in 1922, but after graduating from college, he was arrested by the Nazis during WWII and forced to work in a labor camp. After the war, he lived as a Displaced Person for four years before the United Nations dumped him in the US–he never officially immigrated.

In New York, Mekas began a love …

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