Quote:
This film was originally shot by Father Norbert Weber (1870-1956), head of the Missionary Benedictines, during his second visit to Korea in 1925 on some 15,000 meters of raw film. Fr. Weber was abbot of the archabbey of St. Ottilien in Germany and made the film in order to show the country, its culture, and the order’s activities to people back in Germany. It was first screened there in 1927..Read More »
Quote:
The great Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, whose Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible stand as masterpieces of world cinema, is the subject of this eccentric and puzzling production. Though based on memoirs Eisenstein wrote before his death in 1948, most of this film is barely a documentary at all, but rather a composite of images, many of which are fascinating and arresting. Eisenstein himself was known for startling and memorable images (perhaps the most famous of which is the shot of the baby carriage rolling down the steps in Potemkin), so memorializing him with clips from his own films interspersed with readings from his memoirs seems somewhat appropriate. But the voice-over in Russian (with English subtitles) is quite sparse, and at times the images onscreen, which include clips from Buster Keaton films and Hollywood musicals from the 1930s, are utterly mystifying.. –Robert J. McNamaraRead More »
Portrait de l’écrivain Albert CAMUS à travers des témoignages de ses confrères, de ses familiers et de ses compagnons de résistance : Louis Guilloux, Jean Pelegri, Mouloud Mammeri, Edmond Charlot, Jacqueline Bernard, Jules Roy, Jean Daniel, Francis Jeanson, Suzanne Agnelli . La vie de l’auteur est retracée et les principaux thèmes de son oeuvre sont évoqués : la Méditerranée et l’amour de la nature, le divorce entre l’homme et le monde, la révolte contre l’oppression et la revendication de liberté. Lecture de réflexions de Camus sur l’art du comédien par Catherine Sellers, extraits répétition des “Justes” par Ludmilla Mikaël, Yves Fabrice, Niels Arestrup.Read More »
Photographer Frantisek Drtikol
The documentary film “The Photographer Frantisek Drtikol” by the director Jiri Holna (28 min, 2002) drawn from Drktikol’s diaries and private correspondence, includes the recollections of Drtikol’s daughter Ervina Bokova, as well as part of a short film by Drtikol from 1920.
“Man can never be lazy and indifferent to flashes of beauty:
he must collect them, keep them and treat them well,
because in a while they disappear as footprints in sand.”
This documentary is about world-famous Czech photographer, painter and philosopher Frantisek Drtikol (1883-1961).Read More »
SYNOPSIS: The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, Pensees et visions d’une tete coupee / Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.
The museum designed to house the painter’s work is like a great multi-roomed barn, displaying paintings as small as a counter, or as big as a three-storey building. Inside the museum, Smolders stages a tour for arriving guests: nattily dressed dwarves who accentuate the painter’s mad visions and ego that bleed from the more disturbing works dealing with suicide, infanticide, piles of baby bodies, and monsters opening up their innards while half-naked humans are torn apart by tentacled monsters…Read More »
Dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the director. The film uses unique materials related to the years Tarkovsky spent in Italy: Florence, where he lived, and where his museum now exists, at a place called Banja Vignoni, where “Nostalgia” was filmed in the house of the Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra.
The film will include rare unique images: young Tarkovsky on the set, fragments of the documentary “Time of travel”, which was filmed in Italy by Andrei Tarkovsky with Tonino Guerra. For the first time viewers will see the location of filming of “Stalker” in Estonia…Read More »
Two young filmmakers decide to make a documentary on the old hospital building just outside of town, a former asylum that has been plagued by rumours of hauntings, exorcisms and strange occurrences for years. They assemble a team that includes a medium, a researcher and experts in audio and video to document an entire weekend at the site.Read More »
At the world premiere of “Gertrud” in Paris, December 1964, Dreyer is greeted by many celebrities of the French cinema: Clouzot, Langlois, Truffaut, Godard, Anna Karina. Afterwards Dreyer delivers short comments on the style of each of his films. Already in his first film, from 1920, he strove for simplicity, especially in the set design. He started from the idea that each apartment gives an impression of the owner’s personality. By removing all superfluous details of the furnishing, the remaining, simplified scenery gives a heightened sense of authenticity. An authentic setting creates, according to Dreyer, a genuine style. To find this authenticity he often studies paintings from the period in which the story takes place. In his later films he brings this simplification process even further. He removes everything from the film that is not related to the story. He also simplifies the dialogue to find a more concise form, whereby he comes closer to the style of tragedy. (imdb)Read More »
Quote:
In 1958, Rogosin tackled the subject of Apartheid by filming the pioneering “Come Back Africa” on location in Johannesburg, unbeknownst to South African authorities who believed Rogosin was filming a benign musical travelogue. The film focuses on the tragic story of a Zulu family trying desperately to stay together and survive. Instead, they are caught up in the contradictory laws of Apartheid. Bringing together some of South Africa’s best known radical intellectuals Rogosin shot the film combining documentary footage and fiction. Come Back Africa is an indictment on the brutality which the system created. It was selected by Time Magazine as” one of the Ten Best Pictures of 1960” and launched the career of the unknown Miriam Makeba. “I’m a political filmmaker, and the effect of the film on people who see it is still strong today as when I made it” said Rogosin.Read More »