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

The industrious Adam Hyman of the Los Angeles Filmforum has organized an exciting collaborative event between various local film institutions (Filmforum, LACMA, REDCAT, UCLA) and the MAK Center: a week-long retrospective of German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz from April 6-13. Emigholz’s Schindler’s Houses was one of my highlights of last year’s Toronto film festival, so [...]

[Read more →]

AndrÈ Bazin once wrote, “Our melodrama in the last century has lost almost all its dramatic integrity and merely survives as a parody.” If that was true in the 1950s (with Sirk and Ray at the height of their powers), it’s definitely true today, when ironic detachment reigns supreme. Outside of contemporary Korean [...]

[Read more →]

Years ago, my brother and I were hanging out in the apartment we shared in Phoenix and a feeling of nostalgia arose. Something about the atmosphere of that spring day with its gentle breeze lapping at our blinds reminded us of our childhood in Missouri. “I don’t know why, but it feels like summertime,” my [...]

[Read more →]

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, [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

It’s unfortunate that Artur Aristakisyan’s 1993 documentary, Palms (Ladoni), has been a film cited more than seen; it’s an intensely poetic, provocative–even inspiring–account of the poor and destitute in Chisinau (formerly Kishinev), the capital of Moldova. Despite winning a slew of awards, it all but disappeared from sight, in no small part [...]

[Read more →]