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

Although La Marseillaise (1938) or The Elusive Corporal (1962) may be the best films in the astonishingly well-packaged (and priced) 3-disc Jean Renoir Collector’s Edition released earlier this year by Lionsgate, The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1959)–based on the Jekyll and Hyde story–is undoubtedly the most Halloween-friendly. It’s also a pretty fun and fascinating film, [...]

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Raymond Bernard has been described as a forgotten director, and judging from the references I’ve checked (a handful of film encyclopedias, newspaper archives, and several English books on early French cinema) it certainly appears to be true. A few mention him in passing, conceding that he was a critical and commercial success in France at [...]

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Edition Filmmuseum is a Munich-based, joint project of film archives in Europe (mostly German-speaking) that is publishing a fantastic series of films of “artistic, cultural and historical value” on all-region DVDs; their latest release is Straub and Huillet’s masterful Class Relations, and aside from the film itself, the DVD offers a bounty of significant, archive-quality [...]

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For many of us who have seen it, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) remains this year’s best distributed film. Although it was his thesis project at UCLA and one of the first movies chosen for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1990, it wasn’t until this year that the music rights [...]

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When the Day Breaks
This week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its annual animation tribute. It was devoted to five Canadian animators, all of them women, and it screened some of their definitive works produced at the National Film Board: Janet Perlman (The Tender Tale of Cinderella Penguin, 1981), Caroline Leaf [...]

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Last weekend, I caught the West Coast premiere of George A. Romero’s latest zombie allegory, Diary of the Dead, and judging from memory, I think it’s my favorite installment since the 1968 original (which is the only one I’ve seen more than once). It’s got all the ingredients you might expect–slow moving and ravenous [...]

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In years past, the Los Angeles AFI FEST has proven to be a lot like many American Film Institute events–big, glitzy, and not especially exciting in terms of world cinema. This year, however, its line-up–just announced today–is an improvement. In addition to some of my own TIFF favorites (The Duchess of Langeais, Persepolis, [...]

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Not unlike replicants who treasure photos as tokens of their past, seeing Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007) this weekend provoked a flood of memories related to my own history. I recall avidly reading about the film’s production as an 11-year-old special effects buff (despite the fact that I’m not a collector, I still [...]

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This is the second part of an article exploring the first two DVD releases of the Center for Visual Music. Part 1 can be found here.
“This is a different kind of DVD,” Cindy Keefer, the director of CVM warned me, adding that she and Belson were wary of reviewers who 1) might expect something [...]

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This is the first part of a two-part posting that will explore the first DVD releases of the venerable Los Angeles-based Center for Visual Music: Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films (2006) and Jordan Belson: 5 Essential Films (2007). CVM is a nonprofit film archive, library, research and education center devoted to “visual music.” It’s [...]

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