Behind the Scenes

Apr 13, 2021 — To fall deeply in love means to take a risk, and no romantic movie is riskier than History Is Made at Night (1937). Producer Walter Wanger came up with the very grand and suggestive title, but he had only two...

Oct 1, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 An artist, critic, and scholar highly respected in his native Iran but too little known in the West, Bahram Beyzaie is a gifted autodidact of traditional and modern theater and performing arts, and...

Feb 28, 2020 — Flashbacks Had Jörn Donner been born anywhere other than Finland, he would have been world-famous. As it was, he dominated the Finnish cultural scene for several decades. Prolific writer, film critic, director, and producer, as well as a politician and...

Oct 15, 2019 — Born in Denmark to a wealthy family in 1879, Benjamin Christensen dropped out of medical school to receive training as an opera singer, only to lose his singing voice to what was diagnosed as an incurable nervous illness. He then...

Aug 6, 2019 — Once, in 1977, Werner Herzog read a news item about a volcano that was supposed to erupt in Guadeloupe and one man living there who refused to evacuate with the rest of the island’s population. Herzog being Herzog, he immediately...

Feb 4, 2016 — Repertory PicksLast month, the International House Philadelphia, in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania, kicked off a series called Cinema, Censorship, and the Scandal of Sex, selecting four films that “have been seen as an outrage to decency, morality, religious...

Nov 23, 2015 — Our new release of Dont Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker's groundbreaking behind-the-scenes portrait of Bob Dylan and his famed 1965 tour, is out tomorrow on DVD and Blu-ray and features a new interview with celebrated artist Patti Smith, a lifelong...

Sep 22, 2015 — To celebrate the French New Wave’s eternal muse Anna Karina on her seventy-fifth birthday, here’s a behind-the-scenes image from her former husband Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie, which gave her one of her greatest roles.

Sep 2, 2015 — The cuddliest of the New American Cinema auteurs of the seventies was born on this day in 1929. Hal Ashby’s output from that decade never loses its ability to astonish; bookended by two of the era’s great social-minded comedies, The...

Nov 25, 2014 — More than just observational, Les Blank’s sensual documentaries are personal and participatory celebrations of American culture.