By Gary M. Kramer. At this year’s AFI Fest, a quartet of international narrative features depicted the realism of everyday life, as various characters struggled with drama big and small. However, one film reversed that logic. The naturalistic approach of the filmmakers to their subjects and the remarkable performances by […]
Stranger by the Lake (2013)
November 26, 2013
By Mark James. Call it Le Cruising. French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie stages a stripped-down rendition of William Friedkin’s 1980 gay serial killer thriller, set by a lake in the French mountains. Awarded a directing prize at this year’s Cannes, Stranger by the Lake handles its subject much more ably than […]
The Invisible Cinema of Marcel Hanoun
November 24, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “With poor and derisory resources, with the help and goodwill of those who have worked with me, I have been able to make my films. I have stolen them, torn them from a place in the shadows rarely offered to the Public, forbidden. My films have […]
Viennale 2013 Festival Report
November 23, 2013
By Yun-hua Chen. Viennale 2013 is, as always, a feast of well designed program and an audience-friendly film festival, with events, talks, DJ-set and parties welcome to all audiences. There are well-acclaimed festival feature films such as Closed Curtain (Pardé, Jafar Panahi and Kamboziya Partovi), Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Nugu-ui Ttal-do […]
Colossal Youth (2006)
November 22, 2013
By Oana Chivoiu. Pedro Costa’s landmark is an aesthetic of austerity that resonates with the thematic content in his features dealing with poverty, slum life, and radical limitations. Colossal Youth is a film about loss, a theme that structures the disjointed narrative fluency of the film and anchors its visual […]
Peter MacDonald: The Man Who Failed to Change Rambo
November 20, 2013
By David A. Ellis. Peter MacDonald was born in London in 1939 and first worked with film for the advertising company Pearl and Dean as a clapper loader. After six months he became a clapper loader for TV, working on a number of productions including Robin Hood, a series […]
Interview with Agnès Varda, AFI Festival
November 20, 2013
By Gary M. Kramer. Agnès Varda was the guest artistic director at the AFI Festival this year. She screened two of her films—Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Documenteur (1981)—as well as programmed four other titles: Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959); A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes, 1974); The Marriage of […]
Interview with Bernardo Bertolucci, AFI Festival
November 20, 2013
By Gary M. Kramer. Bernardo Bertolucci presented a 3-D version of his Oscar-winning film, The Last Emperor (1987), at the 2013 AFI Fest in Los Angeles. At a roundtable at the festival, in which Film International‘s Gary Kramer participated, the director spoke about the film as well as issues of censorship. What […]
The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic Fatalist
November 14, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Max Ophüls, born Maximillian Oppenheimer on 6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany, was a director known primarily for his romance films, often with sweeping tracking shots, and often taking place in the past. Ophüls’ luxurious camera style is evident in such superb romance films as Letter from […]
Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (2013)
November 13, 2013
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. In recent years, theology has taken a growing interest in cinema, viewing it as both an effective exegetic tool and an intriguing cultural form worthy of the field’s attention, and this has brought with it the appearance of a number of stimulating works. However, […]