29Jul10
Criterion designer extraordinaire Eric Skillman used a distinctive drawing style of his own devising for our release of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (and blogged about it here and here). Sitting across from him in a meeting the other day, we noticed that his phone bears an image from The Steel Helmet that he’s given the same treatment—he had his file made into this skin here. If only he’d start a sideline in making these (he won’t); our mouths are watering at the possibilities.
Categories:
On Five
29Jul10
Whenever a major international film festival announces its lineup, we keep our eyes peeled for fresh projects from our favorite filmmakers. New titles by two Criterion-embraced guys will be in competition at the sixty-seventh annual Venice Film Festival, it was revealed today: the first feature by Two-Lane Blacktop’s Monte Hellman in more than two decades, which bears the very Hellman-esque title Road to Nowhere and is reportedly a noirish tale of murder and moviemaking; and Abdellatif Kechiche’s much-anticipated follow-up to The Secret of the Grain, Black Venus, a biography of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, a South African woman who became a freak-show attraction in nineteenth-century Europe.
Of course, as with any festival, selections outside of the main competition are just as promising: Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) introduces her latest fairy-tale interpretation, Sleeping Beauty; Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket) returns with Sorelle Mai; Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones present their documentary on Elia Kazan, A Letter to Elia; and Hard Boiled’s John Woo blasts back with Reign of Assassins, an action epic set in ancient China and codirected by Chao-bin Su. Coming soon: New York and Toronto!
Categories:
News
29Jul10
A compelling reason to check out the splendid comedies in our new Eclipse Series 22: Presenting Sacha Guitry, from DVD Town’s Christopher Long: “The appeal of Sacha Guitry´s cinema in one word: wit,” he writes in a review of the set. “Whether he was born with it or cultivated it, Guitry was blessed with wit in spades.” Long goes on to laud the way the director, who started in theater, took to the fledgling film medium: “Guitry not only embraced the visual possibilities of cinema, he practically squeezed the stuffing right out of them.
More from the Los Angeles Times’ Dennis Lim, who praises these “dazzling comedies,” and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who calls the films in the set “effervescent, extroverted,” adding “Partisans of the long take may marvel at those that Guitry uses to preserve the performances: he routinely lets the camera run for two or three minutes at a stretch in the service of the actors’ theatrical virtuosity and, above all, his own.”
UPDATE: Nicolas Rapold peeks at this "quartet of playful 1930s works" for Artforum.
Categories:
Press Notes
29Jul10
Arthur Agee, the basketball hopeful whose rise to NBA prominence was chronicled in the thrilling 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, is beginning a “Hoop Dreams tour” across the United States. Along with the basketball marketing company Hoop Connection, the thirty-seven-year-old Agee will visit cities from Sacramento to Orlando to find young people eighteen or older who aspire to play basketball and help them realize their own dreams. In a USA Today story, Agee is quoted as saying “This platform will speak for those people. It’ll give them a voice.” The Hoop Dreams tour will be filmed, and the organizers hope it will make its way onto television in one form or another.
Categories:
News
28Jul10
He’s quested for the Holy Grail, dived headfirst into Hunter S. Thompson’s sixties excess, turned La jetée into a Hollywood action epic (a good one!), and created what is probably cinema’s greatest Orwellian dystopia—what could Terry Gilliam do that would surprise us? How about a concert webcast? Gilliam will direct a live stream of the Arcade Fire’s August 5 performance at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden that will be available on YouTube. This is the first in a planned series of streamed shows called Unstaged and backed by American Express, Vevo, and YouTube. Check back here at 10 p.m. the night of the show to see whether the director plays it straight or has some of his characteristic tricks up his sleeve.
Categories:
News
27Jul10
Photo courtesy of Posteritati.
Categories:
Posters
27Jul10
Americans got The Secret of the Grain. In France, they got La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet)—basically, “Couscous and Fish.” Depending on whose table you eat dinner at, the French title can seem as elemental as “Water and Air” or “Heaven and Earth.” If the movie was a tough sell in the United States, it was not because of poor distribution or because no one wanted to see two and a half hours of French Arabs eating and talking and eating and crying and eating and dancing but because that title made the movie sound like a documentary about the keys to harvesting wheat. This bursting drama is something else entirely, a gripping, multigenerational saga that brings you as close as you could hope to get to an aching, dreaming extended family. It begins like Ken Loach and ends like Tolstoy (and thus clearly deserves a title that puts you somewhere other than aisle seven at Trader Joe’s).
But The Secret of the Grain it is. And what a primal sneak attack. You couldn’t know from the serene opening minutes, set on a tourist ferry headed toward the French resort town of Sète (whose screen lineage dates back at least as far as Agnès Varda’s 1956 La Pointe Courte), that we’d end up where we do 150 or so intense minutes later, engulfed in bad news that feels like good news. Locationally, it’s not far from where we began. Emotionally, it’s another universe. Read more 
Categories:
Film Essays
26Jul10
THE STORY OF A CHEAT: BREAKING THE RULES
While most filmmakers arrive at their profession already possessed of a vigorous love of cinema, Sacha Guitry saw the form, at least at first, as a necessary evil. Paris’s most popular and prolific playwright of the 1920s, Guitry felt that the medium was inherently compromised, that it lacked the finesse and excitement of live theater, and that, even in the sound era, it was limited by too many technical and systematic strictures. Yet having reluctantly embraced film after concluding that it would allow him to reach the widest audience possible, Guitry refused to play by the rules, creating a cinema that was not just verbally witty but visually daring—one that would influence artists as aesthetically diverse as Orson Welles, François Truffaut, and Alain Resnais.
A theatrical lineage was a trait Guitry shared with many of his film contemporaries, from Julien Duvivier to Raymond Bernard. He first appeared onstage at age five, for Czar Alexander II (his godfather); his matinee idol father, Lucien Guitry, was then under contract to Saint Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Theatre. Back in Paris, Guitry struggled with school (chronically expelled, he never got his baccalaureate), family (he had a falling out with his father), and his health (he suffered from rheumatism) before finding his calling as a boulevard theater playwright and performer; his sophisticated, clever plays, from romantic comedies to biographical dramas, made him a sensation. And though he had been vocal in his condemnation of film—he told the newspaper Candide in 1933: “The cinema is lifeless spectacle, conserved theater”—as talkies took off in the 1930s, he thought it wise to jump into the game. Read more
Categories:
Film Essays
23Jul10
Hey, Brooklyn: Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights is kicking off a new kind of book party tonight with a screening of Godard’s A Married Woman accompanied by a discussion with film writer Richard Brody (see his essay for the Criterion release of Pierrot le fou here) about that film and his Godard book Everything Is Cinema, which came out last year. This will be the first in a series of book/screening events at the store, which has issued the following rallying cry:
When they come out, books have parties. Over the first months of their release they’ll get a few parties in a few different regions. After that, nothing. What about those books still good past their appointed shelf life? Maybe they should get a party now and then too.
But this is a CINEMA series. So we’re showing films, and celebrating books related to the films, and bringing in the authors to talk about the books AND the films . . . years after that initial tiny birth-death cycle of publishing. And we’ll be drinking wine.
As fellow disdainers of disposable culture (and enjoyers of wine), we’re on board!
Categories:
News
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