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

“Back to that balcony at the place de la RÈpublique where all huge demonstrations have always started or ended. I manage to frame again the top portion of my old photograph. In between I have been in Japan, Korea, Bolivia, Chile. I have filmed students in Guinea-Bissau, medics in Kosovo, Bosnian refugees, [...]

[Read more →]

Before heading off to the Palm Springs film festival, I thought I’d post a collection of links I’ve amassed inspired by a book I recently received: Animation Unlimited: Innovative Short Films Since 1940. It’s a large, glossy paperback published in the UK in 2003 that features short write-ups on 50 animators, over 500 color [...]

[Read more →]

Master of the House (1925)
The British Film Institute has Dreyer fever these days, having just released David Rudkin’s study of Vampyr (1932) for their Film Classics book series and several region 2 DVDs, beginning this week with Master of the House and Ordet (1955).
No complaints here, as I’m solidly within the ranks of [...]

[Read more →]

I received UK author Clare Kitson’s new book, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey, this week. To my knowledge, it’s the first book-length study of Norstein, one of the world’s best living animators, and it largely recounts his life as it’s reflected by his impressionistic masterpiece, Tale of Tales (1979), a [...]

[Read more →]

Preparatory drawing for The 39 Steps (1935) by Alfred Hitchcock

Sketch for Ran (1985) by Akira Kurosawa
I’m always fascinated by the double artistic lives of established directors, people with a significant skill in an art form that requires the assistance of sometimes hundreds of technicians, artists, and actors. But what about their private, personal [...]

[Read more →]

Browsing through a used bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday, I came across critic/filmmaker/curator Jonas Mekas‘ out-of-print Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, a partial compilation of his writing for the Village Voice during that period. Mekas was born in Lithuania in 1922, but after graduating from college, he was arrested [...]

[Read more →]

From the Guardian: Tarkovsky’s polaroids.

[Read more →]