By Anders Åberg. [This review of the Criterion editionof Vilgot Sjöman’s films I Am Curious – Yellow and I Am Curious – Blue was originally published in Film International 5, vol. 1, no. 5, 2003. We now republish it online in memory of actress Lena Nyman, who passed away on […]
Collectivized Creativity: The Rediscovered Films of the CNT
January 31, 2011
Interview with Richard Prost and Andres Garcia-Aguilera by Christiane Passevant. Richard Prost has made four documentary films on the history of left libertarian movements in Spain. The focus of his work is the period of the Spanish civil war and its importance. The outbreak of revolution in July 1936 transformed […]
Chance, Chaos, Confusion and the Marketing of The Wicker Man
By Linda Hutcheson. ‘Incredibly, in many European countries, the attitude still exists that a good film shouldn’t really have to be marketed at all, that the public will somehow instinctively find and appreciate artistic quality without the assistance of a vulgar marketing campaign.’ (Puttnam 1997: 314, emphasis in the original) […]
Beyond Saul Bass: A Century of American Film Title Sequences
By Deborah Allison. Back in 1928, Herbert C. McKay wrote a filmmaking manual which offered the following advice: ‘The main title group with the first title may be made as elaborate as one desires as few spectators stop to read them anyway aside from the simple title of the film’ […]
The Strange Career of Tamango: From Prosper Mérimée’s 1829 Novella to its 1958 Film Adaptation
January 29, 2011
By Raphaël Lambert. Prosper Mérimée’s 1829 novella Tamango is a simple case of a biter being bit: Tamango, an African slave dealer, is captured along with the people he has just sold to a French captain. Once in the hold of the slave ship with his former victims and now […]
‘What circus are you from?’ A Round Table Discussion with Alex de la Iglesia
Christiane Passevant
January 29, 2011
Presented by Christiane Passevant. Alex de la Iglesia has a unique role in contemporary Spanish cinema. His work simultaneously encapsulates its major tendencies while defying classification. From his first feature film, Accion Mutante(‘Mutant Action’, 1992) to his recent A Sad Trumpet Ballad (Balada triste de trompeta, 2010), and passing through […]
Russia 88: ‘The purer the blood, the more dramatic the degeneracy’
A Brief Interview with Filmmaker Pavel Bardin by Amy R. Handler. Considering Russia’s role in taking Hitler down during WW2 and that its soldiers liberated death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Monowitz-Buna, and Majdanek, it’s questionable how and why Hitler has risen again in that part of the world, where neo-Nazism seems […]
‘For foreigners the Japanese toilet really must be something amazing’: An Interview with Ogigami Naoko
By Doris Lang and Johan Nordström. Of the Japanese female directors active in recent years, Ogigami Naoko (b. 1972) is among those who has garnered the most attention, both at home and abroad. In 1994, after graduating from Chiba University’s Image Science program, she went to the United States to […]
In Memoriam: Robin Wood
By Michael Tapper. When thinking about Robin Wood, his book Personal Viewsalways comes to mind. He published it in 1976 – a transitional period between what he called his life as ‘an ideal bourgeois man’ and his coming out as a gay, feminist and socialist in his manifesto ‘Responsibilities of […]
Exodus collides with the Kedma
By Robin Wood. This article discusses (ultimately!) two films about the founding of modern Israel: Otto Preminger’s Exodus(Hollywood, 1960), and Gitai’s Kedma(2002). Both titles are also the names of the ships from which the Israelis land in Palestine – legally, in Exodus, illegally (by just four days!) in Kedma. It […]