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“Cornell combines vaudeville and animal acts, circus performers, children eating and dancing, science demonstrations, mythical excerpts, and crucial freeze-frames of faces into a timeless structure, totally unconcerned with our usual expectations of “montage” or cinematic progression. It’s a delight to anyone whose soul has not been squashed by the heavy dictates of Art” —Larry JordanRead More »
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“One of the livelist of Mary Ellen Bute’s abstract films, DADA was intended to be part of a Universal Newsreel segment, showing Bute and her partner Ted Nemeth at work in their tiny New York studio. No copies of the newsreel itself are known to exist at this time.” – Cecile StarrRead More »
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The first and greatest American Surrealist, Joseph Cornell is best known for his boxes. The best of his mysterious assemblages of dime-store tchochkes and paper ephemera in little hand-made cabinets perfectly realize the elusive sublime at the heart of Surrealism, while avoiding the juvenile theatrics of his European colleagues.Read More »
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If you’ve read the book, this film version comes as a surprise – how does it manage to make so little of so much? Or is it so much of so little? Döblin co-authored the screenplay, which compresses his sprawling novel into a breathless eighty-eight minutes. Of course, much is sacrificed, but the skeleton plot still compares favourably to that of many modern movies. Technically, too, this flick has aged magnificently – considering this is one of the first German films with sound, what we see and hear is a lot smoother than I’d expected. The cinematography is astonishing by the standards of the decades that followed…Read More »
An animated Soviet look at black-white race relations in America, about the very brief rebellion of a black sugar plantation worker against a white “Sugar King”.
Only the final 7 minutes of the originally 20-minute cartoon have survived to our day. It is an adaptation of a poem written by the famous Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky on July 5, 1925, the day after he spent a day in Havana, Cuba, because his passenger line “Espagne” made a stop-over there.Read More »
“Mary Ellen Bute’s first color film tells a story in abstraction of an orange/red triangle imprisoned behind a grid of vertical and horizontal lines under a sky-blue expanse, perhaps representing freedom. J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fuge in D Minor adds dramatic tension to the visual variables in motion.” – Cecile StarrRead More »
Synopsis:
Carey Wilson attends a party where he knows no one. Among those at the party is the young and gay Mary Dosier. But he learns from another guest that a year earlier, Mary was in the deepest despair. This phase of her life started three years earlier. She had just gotten married to her husband, the gifted but shy concert violinist and composer John Dosier. No one was happier for them than John’s mother, who gave them a year long vacation as a wedding gift. On their first anniversary in Venice, John played for her “A Sonata to a Kiss”, a composition he wrote dedicated to her and which has since become a worldwide sensation. The sound waves from that private performance shattered a champagne glass in their room, which Mary felt to be an ominous sign. Indeed, John was shortly thereafter stricken with an illness and died. Mary could not overcome her grief, but an incident while she listened to a recording of “A Sonata to a Kiss” played by John may have saved her life and given her new…Read More »
Gascon D’Artagnan joins the Musketeers in Paris, battling Porthos, Aramis, and Athos to save France and a lady’s honor from Cardinal Richelieu’s machinations.Read More »
Carefully constructed in Tourneur’s typical style – akin, as Chris Fujiwara put it, to a Chinese-box structure – this first in the series What Do You Think? (Tourneur directed the third as well) plays on one of his favorite themes: the attempt to rationalize a series of extraordinary things that happen to the main character.Read More »