Film Journey

This weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the American Film Institute’s Cinema’s Legacy program, which featured Paul Schrader and a screening/discussion of his favorite film, Robert Bresson‘s Pickpocket (1959). Schrader, whose claim to fame probably remains his screenplays for early Martin Scorsese pictures like Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), has directed a few films over the years with mixed results (American Gigolo, Cat People, Auto Focus).

However, many cinephiles remember him best for having written one of the few English studies of Bresson, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. The …

Photo by Piotr Jaxa.

Well, the latest issue of everyone’s favorite film journal is up, Senses of Cinema, No. 27. Published in Melbourne, Australia, it specializes in “serious and eclectic discussion of cinema” and contains a few years worth of challenging, invigorating essays. Visit the archives and enjoy.

This particular issue includes a career retrospective I wrote on the late Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, a typically fine summation of Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos by Strictly Film School‘s Acquarello (an ongoing participant in our Discussions), daily reports from the 52nd Melbourne International Film Festival, a variety …

In case you haven’t heard, on June 2, the Federal Communications Commission (the government agency charged with regulating media in the US) granted sweeping new freedoms to individual media companies–the most extensive in decades. Among the changes were the freedom to own a newspaper as well as multiple television, radio, and cable stations within the same market (city or town), and the freedom to own more television stations penetrating the national market, up from 35% to 45% of US households. In an era when media concentration offers Americans fewer broadcasting voices, the ruling was strongly supported by the major networks …

Movies compliment and critique the 20th century in such a way that one can almost trace world history through the aesthetic development of the cinema alone. One of the most pivotal movements in film, for example, was Italian neorealism, a style predicated on engaging the realities of postwar European life.

Born in antagonistic response to the polished “white telephone” films of upper class fantasy promoted by the Fascist Italian government of the ’30s and ’40s, neorealism exhibited eviscerated street locations, nonprofessional actors, natural lighting, and an intense social awareness. Its greatest successes (Open City, Shoeshine, Paisan, La Terra …

One of the pleasures of the Internet is getting access to companies and voices which one might otherwise have difficulty finding–in the electronic world, all websites are created equal. For those seeking documentary options (particularly films which address social, political, or environmental issues), Bullfrog Films offers an extensive catalogue at the click of a button. Never heard of them? Checkout their website and browse their hefty collection. Although many of their titles are sold or rented at institutional prices, they offer special discounts to nonprofit and activist groups.

Bullfrog was a major supplier of the titles I saw at the …

What will they think of next?

Giving new meaning to the phrase “an underground film festival,” Interfilm organizers in Berlin have come up with a genuinely new idea: exhibit a series of short films on monitors in Berlin subway trains and allow the passengers to be the jury.

The festival will run from January 29 to February 4, 2004. All the films will be no longer than 90 seconds and must be “free of extreme violence or obscene content.”

As exhibitors around the globe continue to think of ways of integrating artistically-minded films within the general populace, this idea sounds …