By Christopher Weedman. The haunting enigmatism and visual beauty of Woman in the Dunes (1964) has not diminished since its premiere over fifty years ago. Shot on a budget of $100,000 over four months in Tottori City, Tottori-ken, this Japanese art-house classic was released during the wave of modernist filmmaking […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Spotlight on Patricia Riggen
By Anna Weinstein. Patricia Riggen has directed five features in the past decade. Her first feature, Under the Same Moon (2007), was a critical and commercial success, telling the story of a mother working illegally in the U.S. in the hopes of providing a better life for her son in […]
Entertaining Mr. Klein: Eclipse Series 9 – The Delirious Fictions of William Klein
By Tony Williams. Although this special Criterion three film DVD set has been available since 2008, it is only recently that I have discovered the work of William Klein. I first came across the name associated with the French anti-Vietnam War film Mr. Freedom which at the time of co-editing […]
The Social Misfits of Kikujiro
September 19, 2016
By Yun-hua Chen. Made by Takeshi Kitano in 1999 and having entered the Cannes Film Festival in the same year, Kikujiro was subsequently remade into a Tamil-Indian film Nandala (2010) by Myshkin. After more than one and a half decades, it still seems timeless both in terms of aesthetics and […]
At Your Door: Ashley McKenzie on Her Debut Werewolf
By Tom Ue. Ashley McKenzie is an emerging writer-director from Cape Breton Island, Canada. Her 2015 short “4 Quarters” screened at TIFF, VIFF, Stockholm IFF, Festival du nouveau cinema, and won Best Atlantic Short at the Atlantic Film Festival. With her previous work, “Stray” (2013), “When You Sleep” (2012), and […]
Film Scratches: Negotiations of the Bicameral Mind – Ward of the Feral Horses (2015)
September 13, 2016
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Orit Ben-Shitrit’s absorbingly strange and powerful 20 minute film Ward of the Feral Horses begins with a young man (Maxwell Cosmo […]
Film Scratches: Wacky Lyricism – Grandma Opera (2008)
September 13, 2016
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Grandma Opera is a charming and kooky 6 minute mini video opera by director Kenneth Hughes and composer Mark Hart. Hart’s […]
What Shall Remain Unseen?: Hidden Hitchcock by D. A. Miller
A Book Review by Tony Williams. A DVD player now lets everyone scrutinize Hitchcock’s esoteric images, but the desire to engage the game of hide-and-seek latent in them – a game just barely visible during theatrical projection – is born with the films themselves. (Miller, 167, n.14) I suspect that […]
Let the Muckraking Begin: When Two Worlds Collide
By Elias Savada. Investigative documentaries have been a cranky, yet effusive growth industry (thank you, Michael Moore) over the last couple of decades, more so with the improvements in technology that allow anyone to become a self-designated filmmaker. While these films still comprise a subgenre in search of a wider […]
The Law of Capital: The Measure of a Man
September 11, 2016
By Sérgio Dias Branco. Thierry Taugourdeau, factory worker, was fired along with more than 750 of his colleagues. He is 51 years old and has been unemployed for almost two. In the first scene of The Measure of a Man (La Loi du marché, 2015; “The Law of the Market” in […]