f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

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 [...]

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From the Guardian: Tarkovsky’s polaroids.

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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 [...]

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Film critic, theorist, and writer Susan Sontag doing what Susan Sontag does best in the latest issue of New York Times Magazine, writing on the photographs from Abu Ghraib and what responses have said about deeper cultural and political truths:

Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are [...]

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This essay is part of full review posted at www.robert-bresson.com. –Doug
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It’s perhaps a bit ironic that New Yorker Video is releasing DVDs of Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974) and A Man Escaped (1956) simultaneously–Lancelot was originally the film Bresson hoped to make after Diary of a Country Priest (1951). [...]

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I’m finally getting caught up on my writing projects. The following essay is part of a full review of New Yorker Video’s new A Man Escaped DVD (to be released on May 25) posted at www.robert-bresson.com –Doug
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Robert Bresson’s 1956 masterpiece, A Man Escaped (Un condamnÈ ‡ mort s’est ÈchappÈ), is [...]

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The Internet is often characterized as being an ethereal jumble of opinion and interaction without consensus. And while this can be true–particularly in chat rooms or Usenet free-for-alls–I’ve enjoyed consistent interaction with people across the country and the globe over the past few years whose tastes in film are remarkably similar to my own, [...]

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Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic novel, Frankenstein, is not only one of the finest works of literature in the English language, critiquing the dark limits of ambition at the height of Enlightenment positivity, it’s also considered to be the first science fiction novel. Its tale–a gruesome fiend cobbled together from dead bodies and cruelly abandoned [...]

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I don’t have cable TV, so I was surprised to discover an impressive collection of original trailers and movie clips provided by Turner Classic Movies on their website. Check out the tracking shots in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Robert Wise blithely justifying his recutting of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (”people were laughing at the [...]

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