Month: May 2005

Hollywood will re-cut, delay, or undersell its films if it suspects they’ll pose economic or political risks, but it rarely shelves productions entirely. But unfortunately, this is exactly what it did with Samuel Fuller’s White Dog (1982), a movie about a canine trained to attack black people. Paramount has never domestically released the film outside of festivals, but the American Cinematheque screened it last night as part of its “Movies Not Available On Video” series. And Fuller’s film is a powerful, inspired critique of racism, tapping into the relationship between humans and animals in a way that places it within …

After extended runs in New York, Chicago, and London–among other places–Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) has finally opened in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque. Of course, this bit of irony is completely in tune with one of the documentary’s central theses, that despite being the host city for the film industry, Los Angeles–its people, places, and character–is virtually absent in the movies. Multimillion dollar productions by “tourist” directors, absurdly over-privileged and removed from the realities of the majority of Angelenos (less than 3% of whom actually work in the industry), continue to perpetuate myths about America’s second largest …

The UCLA Film and Television Archive is one of the nation’s premiere film restoration institutions, and they’re currently screening a series of restored films. Last night, they showed one of the most renowned of American independent films, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, completed in 1973 but unreleased until 1977. Burnett made it while he was a student at UCLA, shooting on 16mm with nonprofessional actors on weekends for an entire year, and edited it with a fine assembly of classic musical recordings.

Accordingly, music rights have kept it from being commercially released, making it a film that has been …