AFI FEST starts up today in Hollywood, and this year, I’m the Editor of the Festival blog, AFI FEST NOW, as well as an Associate Programmer. I’ll be introducing the screenings of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, A Screaming Man, Free Radicals, Kubrick’s Lolita, and the double feature of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 classic The Housemaid (which can be viewed for free in its entirety at MUBI, here) and Im Sang-soo’s new remake. I’ll also introduce the Hong Sang-soo double feature, HaHaHa and Oki’s Movie, and I’ll facilitate the Q/A with Hong.

All of these screenings are free, and if you haven’t already gotten your tickets, don’t forget that more tickets will be released online at 10:00 a.m. the day before each screening, and at the Festival box office the day of the screening. When not introducing films, I’ll be working at the Roosevelt Hotel’s AFI FEST press room. If you happen to see me, don’t hesitate to say hi.

I was invited to attend this past weekend’s 25th edition of “The Reel Thing,” the annual technical symposium for the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). The event offered an impressive line-up of some of the top film restorationists and preservationists working today, who presented their work and discussed problems and solutions they encountered. It provided a potent mix of film history, technology, and genuine concern for the past and future of the art form that was positively infectious.

One of the best aspects of the symposium was its cinematic egalitarianism, with attendees offering equally rapt attention to the finer details of classic studio films, foreign productions, independent films, television broadcasts, animation, live action, and more. The challenges of the craft were more unifying than any commercial or non-commercial definition; a 4K projection of The Sound of Music (1965) seemed as vital as a PowerPoint presentation of audio clips from Jean-Pierre Gorin’s essay film, Poto and Cabengo (1979).

Sony’s Grover Crisp, who organized the event with his colleague Michael Friend, presented the studio’s second 4K restoration, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and noted that previous restorations included “defects” caused by the production’s use of poorly-made opticals; a horizontal jitter in the original camera negative and subtle ghosting have now been corrected, and for the first time, the film’s original 2.55:1 aspect ratio has been resumed. (Crisp made everyone in the room cringe when he described how a previous editor had literally etched a scratch on each frame of the negative denoting what he or she felt was the “proper” 2.35:1 framing.)

Jack Theakston offered an encyclopedic, if at times bewildering, overview of the scores of stereo, widescreen, and 3-D formats developed between the 1910s and the 1950s. Among his assertions that took me by surprise: Edwin S. Porter worked with 3-D (and red/green anaglyph glasses) as early as 1915; theatrical screens until the 1940s only varied between 14 and 20 feet in width (with the latter reserved for the largest 3,500-seat auditoriums); intended aspect ratios often suffered during times of transition, such as in 1953, when films shot in Academy ratio, such as Shane, It Came from Outer Space, and 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, were released in widescreen.

Robert Heiber and Ralph Sargent talked about the challenges of digitally scanning optical soundtracks; they addressed variable-density formats such as Fox’s Movietone (used for films such as Murnau’s 1927 Sunrise) and explained why its AEO Light technology and “toe recordings” resulted in higher noise than Western Electric’s ERPI system and later variable-area formats.

Cinematographer John Bailey livened up the proceedings when he challenged the restoration of Bus Stop (1956), claiming it didn’t look like he remembered seeing it in the theater; like many digital restorations (and contemporary films in general), he felt the new print had poor gamma, showing too much mid-range detail and exaggerated contrast. Crisp conceded that this was a common critique of digital restorations, and acknowledged that it is impossible to make a film look exactly as it did in, say, 1956. Old prints were made on now obsolete film stocks using dye transfer processes that are simply no longer practiced. Modern restorations are more about getting things as close to original as possible.

Disney’s presenters proved to be the most polished–at times uncomfortably so for a technical symposium–as they showcased their first-ever digital restoration of Tron (1982), as well as their efforts to “fix” facial distortions in the close-ups of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). The latter is a work in progress; they plan to remove the visible wires of the famed squid sequence as well, once again blurring the line between restoration and makeover that haunts every digital decision.

One of the most impressive presentations was John Polito’s demonstration of the sound work he performed on Poto and Cabengo, Gorin’s first solo feature and an utterly fascinating exploration of the linguistic mystery posed by two young San Diego twins who appeared to have invented their own language. (The restoration has been touring, and plans are in place to release it as a Criterion DVD.) When standard de-essing software failed to correct sound distortions on the original master, Polito separated the sibilance and the vowels into separate tracks, processed them individually, and recombined them. Gorin (who was in attendance) emphasizes the dialogue by an ingenious use of intertitles and subtitles, inviting the viewer to listen closely and pick out the pidgin words, so optimal clarity was crucial.

Ken Weissman offered an overview of the Library of Congress’ state-of-the-art Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, which opened in 2007 and houses the national collection of audiovisual material (consolidated from seven previous locations). The center aims to provide wide access to its holdings, and it was exciting to hear Weissman describe a plan for a “National Jukebox” that will make tens of thousands of pre-1925 Sony (Victor and Columbia) sound recordings available for online listening, complete with personal playlists, guest curators and scholars, and social media applications.

As someone who saw the 2010 reconstruction of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) projected earlier this year, I can attest to the phenomenal power of its nearly completed length (with only about five minutes still missing). Thomas Bakels, the technical director for the film’s reconstruction in 2001 and 2010, was on hand to talk about the process. By now, everyone knows about the 325 shots (about 25-minutes of footage) that came courtesy of a 16mm print found in Buenos Aires in 2008, but the print was cropped and severely damaged, displayed variable focus, intense scratches and exposed oil splotches. Using special software, Bakels and his crew managed to make the 16mm footage watchable. I was surprised to learn that a handful of 2010 shots have been sourced from an archive in New Zealand, and newly inserted shots featuring lettering or signage were hand-painted in German to replace text on the Spanish print.

The reconstruction of Metropolis has been highly venerated around the world, but Bakels was equally enthusiastic about his work on Munich 1945, a documentary shot in the ruins of his hometown shortly after WWII. Software corrected a severe jitter problem with the film, which has subsequently been released on DVD by Edition Filmmuseum.

UCLA’s Ross Lipman, the filmmaker who has restored key independent works by John Cassavetes, Charles Burnett, Shirley Clarke, and others, presented his latest project, the searingly cinema-verité Wanda (1970). The only film directed by actress Barbara Loden, who tragically died of cancer in 1980 at the age of 48, it follows the small town exploits of a divorced female drifter who gets involved with an abusive crook. Loden saw the film partly as a critique of the false glamor of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and the grungy settings, natural light, and non-professional actors lend the film (originally shot on 16mm) potent verisimilitude. Lipman–who places it in the vanguard of American neorealist films that includes The Exiles (1961) and Spring Night, Summer Night (1967)–chanced upon the original A/B rolls at a local lab just one day before they were scheduled for destruction.

Lipman restored the film with a largely photochemical process, judiciously reserving digital tools for specific problems according to two general criteria: 1) Does the problem interfere with the intended aesthetic? and 2) Does the problem tell us something about the film’s making? Thus, an occasional hair might remain in order to “keep the film alive.” Grain was considered an important part of the film’s overall aesthetic, so Lipman left it intact. He focused on an awkward break in tinny choir music that accompanies a church event, noting that the producers of the American DVD opted to “fix” the sound, whereas Lipman believes it was an intentional ellipsis meant to suggest a faulty diegetic source.

Wanda will have its world premiere on September 2nd–its 40th anniversary–at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Critics Prize in 1970. Apparently conceived as a tax write-off with no intention of commercial success (it was purportedly released in just one New York theater), the film’s strong reception in Europe made it, in the words of Lipman, “a failure at being a failure.” Here’s hoping the new restoration joins the other titles and processes featured at the symposium to preserve and promote the accomplishments of cinema.

LACMA is halfway through its series devoted to cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, one of RKO’s prime cameramen in the 1940s and ’50s, and thus one of the key strategists behind the shadowy “noir” look in films such as Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943), Out of the Past (1947), and Clash by Night (1952). But for me, the big discovery has been Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a movie that has managed to completely escape my notice over the years despite the fact that it’s sometimes credited as being the first American film noir.

I write “American,” because as James Naremore argues in his excellent book, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, “film noir” was a 1930s French term applied to Popular Front movies such as Pépé le Moko (1936), Hôtel du Nord (1938), and Le jour se lève (1939) that was revived post-WWII when The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1944) opened in Paris. Borde and Chaumeton’s seminal book, A Panorama of American Film Noir (1955) dates American films noirs from 1941, which is pretty much what I’ve always accepted, but Stranger on the Third Floor–released a year earlier–is unquestionably a fully-formed American noir.

Contrary to journalistic convention, Naremore also argues there isn’t a very strong historic connection between German expressionism and film noir. But Pépé le Moko and Marcel Carné’s Popular Front films boasted German cinematographers Jules Kruger and Eugen Schüfftan, respectively; the latter was an UFA special effects guru who worked with Fritz Lang, and later as a cinematographer for Robert Siodmak and G.W. Pabst (though admittedly not on their most expressionist titles).

Stranger on the Third Floor was created by a Hungarian writer (Frank Partos), a Latvian director (Boris Ingster), and an Italian cinematographer (Musuraca), but it showcases a German heritage: Peter Lorre in fiendish makeup stars as a serial killer stalking the streets; shadowy, cramped rooms convey a clenching sense of Kammerspiel; and an expressionist dream sequence predates the graphic lighting in Citizen Kane the following year (both films share the same art director, Van Nest Polglase). A tribute page for the film offers an evocative selection of images.

There’s a psychological intensity to the movie that belies its awkward dramaturgy. (Nathanael West, who died in 1940, purportedly provided some ghost writing, but the screenplay is no literary achievement.) Though it begins with a witty play on mistaken identity–a man’s fiancee almost doesn’t recognize him after saving a seat for him–its story about a partial witness at a murder trial who suffers mounting self-doubt oscillates between earnest melodrama and absurd exaggeration. The trial features an absent-minded judge, a sleeping juror, and several comments about the inadequacy of the public defender: “I wouldn’t let him defend me if it was for stealing an apple,” groans one observer.

Steadily, the witness (John McGuire) questions not only the limits of his knowledge, but his own moral character; searching his memory for every offhand remark he ever made against a nagging and hypocritical neighbor, a series of flashbacks slide into a sweaty reverie as he imagines himself judged by his speech rather than his actions: “MURDER” proclaims newspapers in what must be 300-point type, and the sequence boasts a transfigured world with geometric shadows, echoing voices, and histrionic, leering faces.

Stranger on the Third Floor is a perfect example of a movie that likely would have been lost in the annals of film history if it wasn’t for the idea of “film noir” elevating and sustaining its reputation; hopefully the fact that it predates the official noir histories won’t diminish its appreciation, because its visual qualities are significant, showcasing Musuraca’s cinematography in its formative stages.

“I think Panahi’s refusal to cooperate with [the authorities] prolonged the case,” Jamsheed Akrami says in Godfrey Cheshire’s summary of events. “They just realized they couldn’t intimidate Panahi. I consider that to be a great moral victory for Panahi and people like him. We have a lot of them in Iran. But they are not as well known as Panahi, and are sadly paying much heavier prices.”

I’ve got an article in this week’s LA Weekly about the films of Ross Lipman, whom many readers will recognize as the UCLA restorationist behind classic films by independent luminaries such as Kenneth Anger, John Cassavetes, John Sayles, and Charles Burnett. However, his upcoming show at REDCAT on March 30 (a Tuesday event rather than the Theater’s typical Monday night film schedule) should expose more people to his own film, video, and performance work, and shouldn’t be missed.

Word is quickly spreading that the man whom many regard as the world’s greatest living animator–Yuri Norstein–is making a brief US tour, with visits to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Olympia. My 23-month-old daughter routinely requests viewings of Hedgehog in the Fog, but I’ve been an admirer of Norstein’s work for years (and wrote about Clare Kitson’s biography in 2005).

Norstein is renowned for his attachment to his Russian homeland and his refusal to work abroad, so I was shocked several days ago to stumble upon the announcement of his visit to the University of Southern California this week–initiated by two grad students, Elyse Kelly and Konstantin Brazhnik–which will culminate in a public screening of the filmmaker’s major works tomorrow. (The event’s RSVP system is already overbooked, but a standby line will form for anyone feeling especially lucky.) Fortunately, the event includes a website with video uploads, and it promises live feeds.

The first video on the site is about fifteen minutes of a seminar Norstein gave last night that I was graciously invited to attend. Soft-spoken but passionate (often interrupting his translator) he cited his inspirations and discussed his craft, beginning with clips from Jean Vigo’s beautiful 1934 L’Atalante (which, Norstein noted, was shot by Boris Kaufman, the brother of Dziga Vertov).

Norstein seemed especially taken by three shots: the riverside encounter with a one-man band (which he compared to Fellini); the apprehension of a thief (with its almost stroboscopic tracking shot alongside a fence); and, interestingly, the controversial shot of the male protagonist caressing a block of ice (that’s missing in newer restorations of the film). All three shots allude to the everyday eccentricity, technical virtuosity, and metaphysical touches that suffuse Norstein’s own work. He championed L’Atalante’s ability to “present a whole world” in its simple, archetypal story, and later suggested that a film should only be made if the filmmaker has properly imagined it, and can conceive it in the simplest terms, like a proverb.

Norstein also shared his love of painting, describing how he recently spent eight hours at the Art Institute of Chicago viewing such favorites as Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles. He said he likes to take a magnifying glass with him to art museums to study the brushstrokes: “It’s not just a great painting but a concentration of the artist’s life, layer by layer.”

“My biggest wonder in life,” he said, “was my childhood in the outskirts of Moscow,” and he described the two story communal flats he lived in as a child that are vital to the setting of Tales of Tales. “Simple things made impressions,” he recalled. Old walls would break down and the young Norstein would marvel at their construction, the rusty nails marking the passage of time; he would spend hours searching for patterns in molds and stains in the woodwork, and was delighted when–years later–he read Leonardo da Vinci promoting the same activity. One can easily see in Norstein’s films his attention to natural decay and detail, the old houses and dank woods providing a powerful sense of atmosphere and place.

The highlight of the evening, however, was seeing the roughly twenty minutes of footage Norstein has completed so far on his first feature, an adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat that has taken him nearly thirty years to produce. (Funding comes and goes, and production is sometimes interrupted by commercial projects or travels.) About half of the footage was recently included in a Japanese documentary that can be viewed below, but rest assured that even the DVD we screened last night revealed enormous amounts of subtleties lost in YouTube’s low-resolution.

The Overcoat at present is a supremely subtle representation of an impoverished St. Petersburg clerk as he comes home, undresses for the evening, and begins the process of transcription; Norstein uses hundreds of cutout elements to simulate the facial shifts, contortions, and evolving expressions that continually play out while the clerk is lost in a world of meticulous perfection. It’s an almost bewildering study of the human face–not slavishly realistic but obsessively attuned to each and every physical fluctuation–that is wholly remarkable. It’s easy to see why this has been a thirty-year project and counting: such evolving minutia of movement has turned the face into an animated study that borders on scientific illustration. Norstein told us that in addition to a huge amount of photographic references, his animation for the film is influenced by eastern (Chinese) as well as western (Duret) anatomical studies, medicinal books, patients at a psychiatric clinic, and Charlie Chaplin and the art of pantomime in general. He decided early on to resist the temptation to film actors and mechanically reproduce their images, because “this way is submissive,” noting that it would include a lot of unnecessary visual information as well.

“Adapting a known text must involve discovery,” he said, claiming that the most important thing to him is to show the things not written by Gogol that are nevertheless true to the text–a reading between the lines. And one can sense that Norstein’s film is an ongoing project of discovery for him, evolving a life of its own and taking the filmmaker places he has yet to explore or conceive. After the lecture, the sixty-six-year-old filmmaker told me he had a lot of material in place to complete the picture, but part of me wonders if he really intends to finish it, or if he sees it as an opportunity to indefinitely explore the riches of his subject while living a meager life funded by lectures, appearances, occasional commercial work, and print and book sales.

His new website offers several Russian books, Hedgehog in the Fog and Fox and Hare (based on his films), and two lavishly-illustrated studies entitled Snow on Grass; the first volume summarizes his career and the second, his creative process and references for The Overcoat. Norstein flipped through his own copy of these volumes–currently only printed in Russian although he has submitted them to a publisher in London in the hopes of making an English edition–to answer a question I posed, and they were clearly labors of love filled with hundreds of storyboards, sketches, collages, film stills, and frame-by-frame studies. If The Overcoat is an ongoing voyage for him, these books are a testament to the journey.

• “Cigarettes & Alcohol: Eight Films by Hong Sang-soo” (Sept. 11-19)
I’ve seen all of Hong’s films except for The Day a Pig Fell into the Well and his most recent two releases, which haven’t played in Los Angeles. LACMA is showing all three (Pig for free!) plus most of his other works; one of several fine examples of the kind of programming Angelenos will dearly miss if LACMA administration has its way.

• “African American Film Pioneers” (Sept. 11-Oct. 31)
UCLA Film & Television Archive screens films by Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams, and two starring Herb Jeffries.

• “A Tribute to Chick Strand” (Sept. 13)
The Los Angeles Filmforum begins its fall season with a tribute to films by Chick Strand, who tragically passed away in July.

• “Two Classics of Asian Cinema” (Sept. 25, 26)
LACMA’s 13-year veteran Ian Birnie has chosen Ozu’s swan song, An Autumn Afternoon (along with a new, 20th-anniversary print of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness), for what might be his Department’s final stand-alone screening, an exquisite choice for its serene evocation of the themes of loss and letting go.

• REDCAT Film/Video Events (Sept. 29-Dec. 14)
The theater has just announced a typically stellar line-up of fall screenings, including a projection performance by Bruce McClure, experimental animation, J. Hoberman on Flaming Creatures, and films by Ulrike Ottinger, Ken Jacobs, Joost Rekvel, and more.

• “The Classic Films of Alain Resnais” (Oct. 2-17)
A major LACMA series with a major highlight: Je t’aime, je t’aime, unavailable on video or DVD, on October 10.

• “Ken Jacobs in Person” (Oct. 15)
UCLA screens Jacobs’ most recent works.

• “Footsteps and Fog: British Film Noir” (Oct. 17-26)
“Though less well known, and with their own distinct sensibilities and variations, British filmmakers also made some fascinating contributions to the film noir genre.” (Of course, there are those who maintain that film noir is a style rather than a genre.)

• AFI FEST 2009 (Oct. 30-Nov. 7)
The best film festival for world cinema in Los Angeles continues this year, with a gutsy restructuring: complimentary tickets and patron passes for all screenings, and a centralized venue at Mann’s Chinese Theatre (with late screenings at AFM in Santa Monica). I can’t wait for its line-up announcement.

• As a final note, I’d like to highlight the fact that one of my favorite films from last year–Take Out–is getting a DVD release on September 1st by Kino Video.

Hayao Miyazaki made an appearance at AMPAS a couple weeks ago, and participated in a Q&A that included clips from his films. In general, he was soft spoken and not especially forthcoming with his answers (my wife assures me he was playing the part of the distinguished Japanese gentleman), but I found several of his comments illuminating, particularly on the subject of his multifaceted villains.

In most cases, Miyazaki’s films are notable for avoiding Good and Evil stereotypes, emphasizing instead the limited and selfish reasonings behind human conflicts. During the Q&A, he told us his primary reason for doing this was because in their efforts to visualize faces, animators often mimic the expressions of the characters they draw for days on end, and he simply didn’t want to create Evil characters who would plunge him into long periods of grimacing and frowning. I thought this was a funny but insightful position, especially if it inspired more nuanced stories. (For more coverage of Miyazaki’s California tour, check out Michael Guillen’s excellent round-up of links.)

Miyazaki’s latest film, Ponyo, opens in US theaters this week, and even though I found it a disappointment after the ambition and complexity of his most recent works–Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle–its release has occasioned VIZ Media’s English translation of the excellent Starting Point: 1979-1996, a compendium of Miyazaki’s writings and conversations. The book’s most notable feature is probably the diversity of sources (essays, lectures, interviews) and topics (history and aesthetics, reviews, memories, confessions) that offer a wide-ranging portrait of the animation master who studied economics and political science and worked his way up the ranks of Japan’s anime industry. Miyazaki is a thoughtful and eloquent writer, as passages like these reveal:

• Advice for beginners: “One of the things about drawing is that, if you put in serious effort, you will become good at it, at least to a certain extent. But that’s all the more reason to study a variety of things that interest you while you have time, before you enter the professional world, in order to develop and solidify such fundamentals as your own viewpoint and way of thinking. If you don’t do this, your life will be treated as just another disposable product.”

• “. . . when I talk with American animators, I sense that they tend to interpret objects in a very different way. They tend to want to look at the volume and the three-dimensionality of objects first. But we Japanese tend to think of the lines used to represent the objects.”

• “You may have to draw explosions when creating animation, but you have to draw a lot of other things too. The most important thing of all, it seems to me, is to have an interest in people, in how they live, and in how they interact with things. . . . But if you’re creating an animated work just to get the chance to draw explosions or airplanes, I have to say that your thinking is a bit warped.”

• Notes for The Man Who Planted Trees Japanese laserdisc: “In the cel animation production we are currently working on, we’ve found drawing plants to be very difficult. If we draw just the plants waving in the breeze, it looks formulaic. Plants exist in the weather and light rays that surround them–waving in the wind, shimmering in the sunlight. I am always puzzling over how to draw such things. . . . But Back has taken this problem head on and mastered it. For that alone, I say, ‘Hat’s off!’ His imagery is beautiful.”

• 1991: “I had thought that, thanks to us having lost the war, we Japanese might have finally become a little more skeptical about national claims of ‘righteousness’ and ‘just causes.’ Watching [George H. W.] Bush, I can only think he is possessed by the ghost of John Wayne, telling him that ‘this is the way a real man should act.’ Saddam Hussein’s sense of righteousness is the same.”

• For the Ikiru Japanese laserdisc: “There are many memorable scenes in Ikiru, but to me the essence of the film is composed in this single shot, of a man stamping a mountain of documents. If [this shot] had just been some silly way to ridicule working in a government office or leading a meaningless life, the scene would never have the emotional impact it does. . . . If you consider the scene to be meaningless, you have to consider how much difference there is between a life spent stacking up a mountain of documents and a life spent stacking up film cans.”

• “There is, first of all, the reality that I’ve been powerfully influenced by [Osamu] Tezuka. When I was in elementary and middle school, I loved his manga more than those of anyone else. . . . [However,] I found myself disgusted by the cheap pessimism of works like Ningyo (Mermaid), or Shizuku (The Drop) . . . What had once been imaginative for the creator between 1945 and 1955 had simply become another trick in his toolbox.”

• Project plan in 1986: “My Neighbor Totoro aims to be a happy and heartwarming film, a film that lets the audience go home with pleasant, glad feelings. Lovers will feel each other to be more precious, parents will fondly recall their childhoods, and children will start exploring the thickets behind shrines and climbing trees to try to find totoro. This is the kind of film I want to make.”

Despite his fame as an anime director, I believe Miyazaki’s greatest artistic accomplishment is his seven-volume manga, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which has been compared to such genre epics as Dune and Lord of the Rings. Miyazaki wrote, illustrated, and serialized the manga’s fifty-nine episodes from 1982-1994 (his classic 1984 film adaptation is only based on the first two volumes). Starting Point includes some surprising revelations, such as how much of the manga was improvised: “In the beginning, it was a work that I wasn’t sure I could complete. But since I had decided that I could stop working on it at any point, you could also say that I was able to create the story without worrying about the future. . . . I was always under the pressure of lots of tight deadlines; several times I didn’t realize until much later the true significance of what I had actually written.”

The manga’s darker and more complex tone might be attributed to his attitude in the early ’80s at the height of Japan’s economic success (“In addition to being upset by environmental problems, I was also concerned about where humanity was headed, and especially about the state of Japan; most of all, I suspect, I was angered by the state of my own self”), and his narrative was later informed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Bosnian War.

“I actually feel as though working on Nausicaä may have made it possible for me to create those films,” he says. “Of all these works, Nausicaä weighed the heaviest on my shoulders. Going back to the world of Nausicaa after stopping work on it was so difficult that I found myself not wanting to. . . . I won’t go so far as to say that because I had something as heavy as Nausicaä to work on, I deliberately created lighter works. I do think, however, that if I didn’t have Nausicaä to work on, I probably would have been floundering about, trying to incorporate somewhat more serious elements into the films.”

With its 2008 line-up unveiled yesterday, AFI FEST has become the preeminent film festival for world cinema in Los Angeles. This is a dramatic improvement over past years, when the Palm Springs or Los Angeles festivals seemed destined to carry the torch for movies common to the critical dialogue from major festivals around the world. In addition to titles I’ve already highlighted, a brief glance at the 2008 schedule promises a lot of noteworthy films, including:

• Two films by Jia Zhang-ke, 24 City and the short Cry Me a River, plus a new film by his cinematographer, Yu Wai (and the director of the fascinating All Tomorrow’s Parties), Plastic City.

• Three films by Arnaud Desplechin, A Christmas Tale, L’Aimee (2007), and La Vie des morts (1991); apparently, these films will be screened in conjunction with a Desplechin retrospective at LACMA.

• Not only Albert Serra’s Birdsong but Mark Peranson’s documentary on the making of the film, Waiting for Sancho. (This will only be the second time–after the Vancouver festival–that they will be screened together.)

• Paradise, a new documentary by the always interesting Michael Almereyda.

• Steve McQueen’s Hunger, the winner of the Toronto fest’s Discovery Award.

• Summer Hours and The Class, two films by respected French auteurs Olivier Assayas and Laurent Cantet.

• A focus on Argentine cinema, including Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool, and Albertina Carri’s La Rabia (which Robert Koehler described here as “sinewy and brave”).

• A focus on Kazhakstan cinema, including Darezhan Omirbaev’s Chouga and Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan.

• Götz Spielmann’s acclaimed Revanche.

• Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Sugar, from the makers of Half Nelson (2006).

• Two intriguing science fiction films from Spain, Before the Fall and Time Crimes.

• Animator Bill Plympton’s feature length Idiots and Angels.

Speaking of animation, one of the few disappointments here is the lack of an animated shorts section, one of the highlights of last year’s festival.

There are currently two fantastic art exhibitions in Los Angeles that cinephiles won’t want to miss, both offered by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I’ve already written about “Frédéric Back: A Life’s Drawings” in Hollywood (through November 1st). The second is “Akira Kurosawa: Film Artist” in Beverly Hills (through December 14th). The Kurosawa exhibition comes on the tenth anniversary of his death and includes two galleries, one devoted to posters and photographs from his productions, the other to “more than 100 of Kurosawa’s original pre-production drawings and paintings, art supplies, calligraphy materials, annotated screenplays, props and hand-painted costumes, correspondence and film clips.” Not to mention his trademark sunglasses. Including many pieces from the filmmaker’s 1994 Manhattan exhibition, it’s a genuine treasure trove of material that immediately conjures up images from a career spanning seven decades.

The exhibition also contains interactive displays taken from the handsome AK100 Project, a website devoted to Kurosawa’s 2010 centenary that is rife with information. For example, it describes his mounting passion for painting that he developed through childhood, but reveals that the 1933 suicide of his brother Heigo (who worked as a silent movie “benshi”) and the death of his older brother four months later coincided with his abandonment of painting. As Karl French notes in the UK coffee table book, Art by Film Directors, the claim that Kurosawa went to an art school that specialized in the Western style is a myth repeated by many reputable film reference books over the years. In 1936, Kurosawa switched vocations and entered the film industry as an assistant director.

But after Kurosawa’s own personal travails in the ’70s, including his inability to secure Japanese financing for his projects (despite great international acclaim), he returned to his first love–painting–as a way of pre-visualizing and promoting script ideas to producers, and also maintaining his creative productivity. Kagemusha (1980), Ran (1985), Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1991), Madadayo (1993), and even the non-Kurosawa-directed The Sea is Watching (2002) were all originally imagined as elaborate, multimedia renderings of pencil, watercolor, crayon, and markers. I have a hunch that this may partially account for the more sedate, picturesque, and remote tone of his late films, the early wide vistas and cosmic perspectives of humanity and the later dreamlike placidity and ensemble performances. Akira Kurosawa Drawings is a site that sells an array of prints and paraphernalia that feature these paintings. More information about the Academy’s exhibition can be found here.

Below are some examples of featured works:

Kagemusha: Takatenjin at Twilight

Kagemusha: Kawanakajima: A Memory of Uesugi Kenshin (Unscreened)

Dreams: Mt. Fuji in Red

Dreams: Village of the Watermills

Madadayo: Moon Over the Ruins