Film Journey

“Increasingly some of the greatest international film archives–currently the CinÈmathËque franÁaise and Britainís National Film and Television Archive–are under acute threat from official economic cut-backs and the incursion of ill-informed new bureaucracies.

The most acute current crisis is the threat to the National Film and Television Archive. The British Film Institute, the body currently entrusted with its administration, has drawn up an ill-considered ìPlanî for financial cut-back and reorganisation of the Archive.”

Click FilmArchiveAction.org for more information and to sign a petition in support of the Archive.…

The official website for the Masters of Cinema Series from Eureka Video in the UK is now online, featuring our first release, Arnold Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926). Unlike the Kino region 1 version, this 2-disc set contains the original German intertitles (subtitled), the complete three-hour 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (which Kino only sells separately), and a new essay by yours truly, which can be previewed here.

The film represents a key work of a pretty fascinating genre in German film, the “mountain film,” or Bergfilm, which did not survive World War II. …

One of the many pleasures of owning an inexpensive multi-region DVD player is being able to purchase DVDs from around the world and watch them at home. (Well, I suppose an expensive multi-region player would do the trick as well.) But one of the problems that sometimes occurs with European DVDs (or North American DVDs sourced from European tapes) is that they have been recorded in the PAL video format, which runs at 25 frames per second instead of the film-standard 24 frames per second. If care isn’t taken, the film simply plays 4% more quickly on video.

My friend …

I’ll admit that I’m torn by the trailer for the upcoming digitally-enhanced and restored version of George Lucas’ arty, dystopian exercize in style, THX 1138 (1971). On the one hand, the trailer is marvelously structured, and the film itself is such a radically incongruous debut for one of today’s most popular feel-good entertainers that it’s virtually a movie from an alternate universe. If the film had been a critical or financial success, who knows where it might have steered Lucas in subsequent years? As a true anomaly in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, it’s one of those fascinating, forgotten relics of …