Film Journey

I work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and last night was the second week of our film club’s summer series. The night air cooled with a comfortable breeze and the screening was held outdoors in a small amphitheatre with a simple setup comprised of a video projector, a projection screen, and the ubiquitous popcorn machine.

The film screened was Under the Skin of the City (2001), a powerful Iranian feature by Rakhshan Bani-Eternad about a working class family and its travails in contemporary Tehran, which only recently acquired theatrical distribution in the US. Like many films of the …

After what seems like an eternity of hand-wringing and navel-gazing, Woody Allen‘s protagonist in Stardust Memories (1980), a burned-out movie director, suddenly finds himself face-to-face with a descending spacecraft. As super-intelligent extraterrestrials greet the human race for the first time, the filmmaker blurts out his abiding angst: “If nothing lasts, why am I bothering to make films, or do anything, for that matter?” “We like your films,” the aliens intone, “Particularly the early funny ones.”

As has often been noted, there is a marked difference between Allen’s pre- and post-Annie Hall (1977) career. The former delights in absurd, …

Although I’ve long included classical Hollywood in my realm of cinephilia, I’m somewhat new to the films of Nicholas Ray (1911-1979), the director of such classics as Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life. An intensely personal filmmaker who worked within the studio system, Ray is known for his attention to setting, architecture, colors, and investigations of psychological torment. His work initially attracted critical attention with the early Cahiers du CinÈma writers, as can be seen by FranÁois Truffaut’s 1955 remarks:

“We discovered Nicholas Ray about seven or eight years ago with Knock on Any Door. Then,

Every now and then I have an irresistible urge to travel long distances on my bicycle, partly to explore new areas that speed by too quickly and abstractly in a car, and partly to give myself time to mentally process assorted life issues that weigh in my thoughts. The holiday weekend provided me with such an opportunity, so I rode from my home in Pasadena, California to the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles and back on Saturday. The 50-mile roundtrip (including diversions) allowed me to visit Koreatown for lunch, where I picked up DVDs of the Korean films My …

Some assorted viewing updates…

Christ in Concrete (Give Us This Day) (1949)

All Day Entertainment seems to be a company with its act together. Not only do they intentionally distribute films on video that have slipped through the cracks of history (a more common fate for movies than one might realize), they also lavish their polished DVD releases with plenty of supplemental material. Their multi-volume collection of films directed by Edgar G. Ulmer is one such example. The unsung German filmmaker who emigrated to the US in the ’30s–along with directors like Fritz Lang (Metropolis) and …

One of the pleasures of a regular regimen of video watching is the unexpected tributaries and whirlpools that gather around commonalities which might otherwise go unnoticed. This last week, for example, I watched the Region 2 DVD of 11’09″01 as well as the Criterion Collection’s latest DVD releases, Alain Resnais‘ Night and Fog (1955) and Hiroshima mon amour (1959). In general terms, these films address three significant human tragedies: the killing of US civilians in New York and Washington, the Nazi extermination of Jewish civilians, and the US atomic bombing of Japanese civilians. Watching all three films, I couldn’t …