A cemetery mound initiates a conical motif in Oshima’s Boy.
The new retrospective of Nagisa Oshima–widely regarded among experts as the most important filmmaker of the Japanese New Wave–is currently poised between its Los Angeles hosts, the American Cinematheque and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; LACMA begins its half of the series tonight with [...]
Entries Categorized as 'Film review'
Oshima: Death by Hanging (1968) and Boy (1969)
May 8th, 2009 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
Categories: Film review
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
April 15th, 2009 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
Last weekend, LACMA screened the new print of Chantal Akerman’s riveting portrait of life as a series of imprisoning rituals, Jeanne Dielman: 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a film that charts the actions of a matronly widow (Delphine Seyrig)–and covert prostitute–as she performs house chores and errands over a three day period. [...]
Categories: Film review
Days in Buenos Aires: Miguel Gomes
April 13th, 2009 by Robert Koehler · No Comments
Robert Koehler has sent in a few final updates from his recent trip to BAFICI; next stop: Cannes. -Doug
Miguel Gomes, writer-director of Our Beloved Month of August, is seen here answering audience questions after a screening of his brilliant, Lewis Carroll-like first feature, The Face You Deserve–which he thinks is better than August. (I would [...]
Categories: Film festival · Film review
Days in Guadalajara: Day 4
March 27th, 2009 by Robert Koehler · No Comments
Juntos
By ROBERT KOEHLER
I’m not going to devote any more moments than they deserve to Guadalajara’s Mexican competition. It was universally deemed bad (by everyone, critics, programmers, sales company reps alike), much worse than last year’s crop, which at least yielded Fernando Eimbcke’s Lake Tahoe and, in its modest way, Rodrigo Pla’s The Desert Within. [...]
Categories: Film festival · Film review
Days in Guadalajara: Day 3
March 27th, 2009 by Robert Koehler · No Comments
By ROBERT KOEHLER
In the last post, I had promised some thoughts on Philippe Grandrieux, the director of Sombre, Un vie nouvelle and his newest, Un lac. Well, more precisely, I noted that I hoped to discover Grandrieux. On my third day in Guadalajara, I was able to see the first screening of Un [...]
Categories: Film festival · Film review
Days in Guadalajara: Day 2
March 20th, 2009 by Robert Koehler · No Comments
By ROBERT KOEHLER
With the happy sights today of one of my favorite comrades in cinephilia, critic-programmer Roger Koza (see his Spanish-language site, ojosabiertos.wordpress.com); the always convivial Screen International critic from Tel Aviv (via Paris) Dan Fainaru; veteran Latin American cinema programmer Denis De La Roca; Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix critic (and maker of the new [...]
Categories: Film festival · Film review
Days in Guadalajara: Day 1
March 20th, 2009 by Robert Koehler · 1 Comment
By ROBERT KOEHLER
Being told that you’re the first member of the press to check in at a film festival and get a badge produces strange feelings. Beyond the automatic response—“Where is everyone else?”—is the lurking sense that you’re the only one of your kind within earshot or cell phone signal. And in a city [...]
Categories: Film festival · Film review
Two Germanys on Film
February 2nd, 2009 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
This past weekend, LACMA began its new film series–“Torn Curtain: The Two Germanys on Film”–impressively filled with a number of unusual and rare titles; I’m particularly excited about the inclusion of Straub-Huillet’s first film, Not Reconciled (1965). The series is also at the center of a web of fascinating links and events.
The first two [...]
Categories: Film review · Texts
Woodcut Novels and Berthold Bartosch
January 29th, 2009 by Doug Cummings · 10 Comments
I’ve recently enjoyed reading David Beronä’s book, Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008), which describes (with select examples) the work of early-20th century woodcut storytellers such as Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. Beronä makes glancing suggestions that these initially small publications (descended from block-books and playing cards) are the missing link between the [...]
Categories: Film review · Texts
Visual Music
January 27th, 2009 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
We’re lucky here in Los Angeles to have a major organization for the promotion of abstract animation–the Center for Visual Music, which restores and exhibits classic titles from an elusive genre, and releases excellent DVDs showcasing the work of filmmakers like Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson.
Last week, CVM and UCLA screened over a dozen films [...]
Categories: Film review · Texts