Film Journey – Page 47 – world cinema in Los Angeles and beyond

Our Times

March 22, 2006 Doug Cummings DVD review

A few months ago, Facets released Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Our Times (2002) on DVD. It’s a fascinating and revealing documentary–reportedly the first ever released in Iranian cinemas–about the 2001 Iranian presidential election that politicized record numbers of women and young people (70% of the country is under 30), who campaigned in the streets for the re-election of reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

The Iranian electoral process begins with open registration before many candidates are vetted and disqualified; campaigns run about a month. Bani-Etemad focuses on a group of teenagers (including her own daughter) who established a campaign headquarters for Khatami, and also …

BFI Dreyer & Master of the House

March 17, 2006 Doug Cummings 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 …

The Future of Food

March 16, 2006 Doug Cummings Film review

I’ve pretty much always been a blasÈ omnivore (blame it on my Midwestern roots), but in recent years I’ve developed more of an appreciation for underlying food concerns like nutrition, economics, and ethics. I’ve watched friends organize their lives around identifying food allergies or monitoring blood sugar or adopting new eating habits. As someone says in The Future of Food, one of the most informative and practical documentaries I saw last year (and again at UCLA last night), eating is one of the most intimate things we do.

Although the film is formally straightforward with interviews, illustrative graphics, and …

Moving Spaces

March 13, 2006 Doug Cummings Special event

Production design for Mon Oncle (1958)

Occasionally, I’ll check out the revolving exhibitions at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences here in Los Angeles, which often amount to a one-room setup on their fourth floor. Invariably, I’m the only person around whenever I attend, but the exhibitions do tend to run for weeks. So I visited their current exhibition, “Moving Spaces: Production Design + Film,” this weekend with modest expectations–which were wonderfully surpassed. The expo was originally curated by the Berlin Filmmuseum, whose official website is a treasure trove of information. (Including 48 pages of illustrated, free PDFs.)…

Oscar Shorts 2006

March 1, 2006 Doug Cummings Film review

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello

Major media outlets may be enthusiastically promoting Oscar dresses this week, but what they haven’t promoted much are the films in three of the event’s categories–short live action, short animation, and short documentaries. While the news of Wellspring’s folding last week can still register grief, the films in these categories represent genres so marginalized it has been decades since anyone has wondered why they can’t somehow be incorporated into the mainstream moviegoing experience.

So it’s nice that Magnolia Pictures is distributing the live action and animated shorts in commercial theatres (Apollo Cinema…

PSIFF Diary #4

January 14, 2006 Doug Cummings Film festival

Play (Chile, 2005)

“The times were hard, but they were modern,” reads the Italian proverb that begins Alicia Scherson’s magnificent debut film about love and loss in contemporary Santiago, my favorite discovery at this year’s PSIFF. Technically, I suppose it’s not my discovery–Scherson recently won Best New Narrative Filmmaker at the Tribeca film fest for it. But it’s a film I knew next to nothing about and took a chance on, and its formal ingenuity, infectious humor, and generous spirit dazzled me.

After an inventive credit sequence placing titles and names along the streets and buildings surrounding Cristina–a young, obsessively …