The good news is that blogger extraordinaire David Hudson has returned, and to the home of one of the best websites for world cinema, no less:
The bad news . . . upcoming in the next post (although if you’re a cinephile living in Los Angeles, you already know).…
Read moreHere are short responses to three of the films I saw at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival. I’ll be posting longer reviews of more films later this week. -Doug
A Week Alone (Celina Murga, Argentina)
Murga’s debut 2002 feature, Ana and the Others (miraculously available on DVD and Netflix instant play) is one of the most endearing films to have come from the New Argentine Cinema. It’s a naturalistic portrait of a young urban woman who visits the small town of her youth and explores–through an assortment of casual, Rohmerian conversations–the ways in which things have changed. Murga’s followup …
Read moreA couple of weeks ago, LACMA screened new prints of Sergei Eisenstein’s last film, Ivan the Terrible, parts I and II. I hadn’t seen it in years, so it was a special delight to view its baroque excess on the big screen. The film has been criticized for its pictorial bombast and lack of the kind of “dialectical montage” that made Eisenstein esteemed around the world; in his entry in Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Noël Burch grumbles, “the straightforwardness of the montage . . . underlines the kinship between this film and the most archaic …
Read moreAndrei Tarkovsky has achieved an unusually devoted following (even among film cultists) enticed by his public persona, which championed aesthetic perfection as a kind of mystical calling. It’s easy to reach into introspection when parsing his films, as two new documentaries demonstrate by adopting personal lenses to frame the way the filmmaker shaped his work on and off camera. Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (screening at the Lincoln Center as part of a Tarkovsky retrospective beginning today) is an essay film by Los Angeles filmmaker Dmitry Trakovsky that explores Tarkovsky’s legacy through interviews with the filmmaker’s colleagues and admirers. Rerberg and Tarkovsky: …
Read more“When I studied, I met a filmmaker who decided for me, in a way , what I was going to become. It was Armand Gatti who brought us together.” –Jean-Pierre Dardenne at his 2009 Cannes masterclass
“Film is a system that allows Godard to be a novelist, Gatti to make theater, and me to make essays.” –Chris Marker
The name Armand Gatti hovers in the background of many filmmakers today. One of the most acclaimed theater writer/directors of the 20th century, Gatti was originally a member of the informal Left Bank group of filmmakers that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, …
Read moreIf last week seemed like a windfall for Chris Marker, this week the torch has been passed to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Tuesday at Cannes, the Belgian filmmakers gave a truly fascinating two-hour masterclass that is already available online, which features extended discussions of key scenes in each of their films. The brothers’ filmography–including many of their rarely seen documentaries–is also screening at the Harvard Film Archive beginning this week, and the program begins at the Walter Reade Theater the following week.
In the US, Sony Classics isn’t releasing the Dardennes’ 2008 film, Lorna’s Silence, until August, but …
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