Latest Posts

Hourigan on Bresson

Uncategorized

One of the pleasures of doing websites devoted to specific filmmakers is meeting people who come out of the woodwork (or cyberwork or something). Not long after starting Robert-Bresson.com, Trond Trondsen and I were contacted by the UK writer-director Jonathan Hourigan, who had assisted on L’Argent (1983). Jonathan has been a great encouragement to us ever since, and we are proud to announce a new interview with him conducted by Colin Burnett that we have just co-published with the film journal Offscreen. It details Jonathan’s friendship with Bresson and his experience on the set of what was to …

Read more

L.A. Korean IFF

Uncategorized

This weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the Los Angeles Korean International Film Festival at the American Cinematheque. (Why the word “international” was included, since it only featured Korean films, is beyond me.) LAKIFF screened recent films by two of Korea’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Hong Sang-soo’s Woman is the Future of Man (part of the upcoming NYFF line-up in October) and Kim Ki-duk’s Samaritan Girl–both films are already available as Korean region 3 DVDs. Hong was actually supposed to attend his screening and offer a Q&A that I was very much looking forward to, but he was held …

Read more

TIFF update 3

Film festival


The Holy Girl

Here’s my latest batch of reviews for the Toronto International Film Festival. Stay tuned for another collection of commentary in the next day or two…

La Noire de… (1966)

81-year-old filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene is known as the “father of African cinema” and is surely one of the most poorly-distributed world masters. New Yorker Films owns the rights to his films in the US, and they haven’t even seen fit to release them on VHS. Invariably, the Pan-African Film Festival here in Los Angeles screens a film of his every year or two, and completely by …

Read more

Updates…

Uncategorized

While I’m finishing my TIFF notes, I thought I’d mention a few unrelated, but exciting tidbits.

ï The films ofCarl Dreyer are currently airing this month on TCM, and it’s always fun to make new converts; on Monday, a coworker came into my office and asked if I’d ever heard of a silent film called The Passion of Joan of Arc, a movie she glimpsed on TCM and is now planning to buy her first DVD player simply so she can own the Criterion disc. And Image Entertainment has just released Dreyer’s The Parson’s Widow on DVD this …

Read more

Toronto Cont’d, L’Intrus

Film festival


L’Intrus

Well, I arrived back in Los Angeles this afternoon, and I’ll be posting comments on all of the films I watched in Toronto in the next couple of days. The festival was a truly whirlwind experience, particularly since I stayed with some friends outside the city in Mississauga, which ensured a nasty combination of late nights and early mornings. Large doses of coffee, increasingly blustery weather, and sheer enthusiasm propelled us through the week despite only getting five or six hours of sleep a night. At the same time, as Darren pointed out, the car-pooling and shared accommodations also …

Read more

TIFF update

Film festival


Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow


One of the pleasures of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival for me personally has been the opportunity to spend time with friends I rarely get the chance to see (J. Robert and Robert Davis as well as folks from Alberta), finally meeting friends I’ve known online for some time (Darren Hughes and Girish Shambu), and generally enjoying the city’s unique ambience, sights and sounds. This morning, I even ran into Jonathan Rosenbaum in a crosswalk, an encouraging Masters of Cinema supporter and a favorite critic, and I expressed my admiration in the …

Read more