Month: November 2006

I’ve written about Grigori Kozintsev before, the Russian film and theater director whose career began in the ’20s but climaxed with three sophisticated literary adaptations: Don Quixote (1957), Hamlet (1964), and King Lear (1969). Many film scholars place his adaptations at the top of the form (at least in the ranks of Welles’ adaptations), but Kozintsev’s films continue to elude popular summaries; the dubious Ruscico has distributed fine all-region DVDs in the last couple years, but Facets Video has finally released Hamlet in North America.

Kozintsev was more than a director; he was also a scholarly Shakespearean aficionado who …

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On the surface, Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s Who’s Camus Anyway? (2005)–recently released on DVD by Film Movement–is a breezy, playfully cineliterate account of a group of Tokyo university students making a movie. And while it’s chock full of film references (Altman, Tarantino, the French New Wave), colorful characters, and social eccentricities, its true sophistication emerges gradually, posing complex questions about the roles of fantasy, identity, and volition in modern life.

The film is Yanagimachi’s first after a ten-year hiatus; in the interim he taught a university course for three years, an experience that informs the sociological fabric of the film. And while …

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