Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Star Trek, “Vengeance Trails,” Ashes and Diamonds and Criterion’s “New York Stories”: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Since the moment 4K discs hit the market, the Star Trek movies have been among sci-fi fans’ most eagerly anticipated titles. This week the first four have finally arrived on the format in the “Star Trek: The Original 4-Movie Collection” set, and I’m happy to say it was worth the wait – the transfers on all four titles, particularly the original, are immaculate. Revisiting them back-to-back, the most interesting thing about the films is how different each one is from the one that came before it; there’s a surprising degree of trial and error as the filmmakers apply varied methods […]
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Memoria, on the Collapse of Cinema (a Book Review)
Memoria Giovanni Marchini Camia and Annabel Brady-Brown, editors Fireflies Press, 2021 The book begins with the word “memoria” handwritten in gold on the blue cloth cover. The word appears again on the book’s first page, alone, black type on the white page, suggesting with its flourish of vowels a portmanteau of memory, history and cinema and calling to us from another language. “Memoria” is also the second word on the second page, just before the type slips into description: of glimmers, a window, boats, darkness, the cinema. There is a bang, a snap, and the snap of a picture, and […]
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Haunted, One Crazy Summer, Bugsy Malone and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
British director Lewis Gilbert is largely forgotten today, but in his heyday he helmed a number of classic films ranging from comedy (the 1966 Alfie, which made Michael Caine a star) and war films (Sink the Bismarck!) to franchise action (three James Bond movies including one of the series’ finest, The Spy Who Loved Me). Though his later career was devoted mostly to character-driven dramedies like Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine, Gilbert’s penultimate effort Haunted (1995) is one of the smartest and eeriest horror flicks of its era. Executive produced by Francis Coppola and photographed by Merchant-Ivory stalwart Tony Pierce-Roberts, […]
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“Every Shot Has a Beginning, Middle and End”: Conversations With Cinematographers: The Eye Behind the Lens
Conversations With Cinematographers: The Eye Behind the Lens Jacqueline B. Frost Routledge, 2021 “I’m attracted to edgy things,” explains cinematographer Maryse Alberti in a matter-of-fact response to a question posed by Jacqueline B. Frost in a new collection of 23 interviews titled Conversations With Cinematographers: The Eye Behind the Lens. The statement is part of a longer, quite charming commentary by Alberti, who also recalls her arrival in the US as a 19-year-old au pair with almost no exposure to moving images, early work photographing bands for New York Rocker magazine, and eventually shooting Stephanie Black’s 1990 documentary H-2 Worker, […]
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“The Truth is Lost As Well”: Andreas Koefoed on his Art Documentary The Lost Leonardo
When I saw The Lost Leonardo at the Tribeca Film Festival, I expected a documentary about art history, restoration techniques and how paintings are authenticated. I was vaguely aware of the film’s subject—the painting “Salvator Mundi,” a portrait of Jesus discovered in a New Orleans estate sale in April 2005 and later deemed a lost work by Leonardo da Vinci. What I was unaware of was the controversy over the painting’s authorship, its journey through the world of high finance and unfettered capitalism and how this made it an object of desire, a status symbol, for political actors like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed […]
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“Theaters, Distribution and Craziness”: Ira Deutchman on Searching for Mr. Rugoff
A film for cinephiles generally and New York theater dwellers in particular, Ira Deutchman’s documentary, Searching for Mr. Rugoff, brings attention to the late Donald R. Rugoff, head of influential East Coast theater chain and distribution company Cinema 5. An intimidating figure, Rugoff was responsible for bringing much of the best in international arthouse cinema to audiences on the Upper East Side via his moviehouses, including the the Gramercy, the Cinema I and Cinema II, the Paris and the Sutton. When he later opened the company’s distribution wing, their acquired films collected a combined 25 Academy Award nominations, lead by […]
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With a New Charles Burnett-Intro’d DVD, DEDZA Films Raises Voices of Young, Emerging Filmmakers
In June Dedza Films and Kino Lorber announced their first collaborative release, an anthology picture, Who Will Start Another Fire, containing nine independent short films by young emerging filmmakers hailing from underrepresented communities. Dedza’s first curatorial and distribution project, the film has already been released through Kino Lorber’s virtual cinema platform, playing day-and-date on TVOD and in select arthouse theaters. And this week there’s physical media: a DVD that features an introduction by Charles Burnett. All told, it’s a robust roll-out that augurs well for the vitality of this new voice in discovery and distribution. The filmmakers included in the […]
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Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations: Jakob’s Wife, Visions of Eight, The 5th Man, Who Will Start Another Fire and Alias Jesse James
Barbara Crampton has been acting in horror movies for almost 40 years now and has classics like Body Double and Re-animator on her resume (alongside more recent cult favorites such as Lords of Salem and You’re Next), but she’s never had a part that utilizes her talents as thrillingly as the title role in Jakob’s Wife. An insightful meditation on the precarious difficulties of maintaining a marriage that also manages to deliver the horror movie goods with terrifying and often hilarious gusto (imagine Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage crossed with early Sam Raimi), Jakob’s Wife tells the story of […]
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Take Two: A Movie About Heartbreak, Helping and Vulnerability
After the spiritual teacher Ram Dass suffered a stroke in 1997, he said, “Up until now my life has been dedicated to helping people. I even wrote a book called How Can I Help?, but now I’m confined to a wheelchair and my life is filled with people taking care of me. If I wrote it now it would have to be called, How Can You Help Me?” I love Ram Dass for his brilliance and vulnerability. His teachings on acceptance and loving awareness have been a lifesaver for me and so many. But in the wake of his stroke, it […]
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Parody Pilgrimmage: Five Notes on Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity Hallway
1. After 15 months in pandemic NYC, with no trip out of town longer than six hours during that time, it was imperative to leave and go elsewhere—anywhere—as soon as possible. The easiest way to do this was to pay a visit to James Hansen, a friend who teaches experimental film at Alfred University, logically located in the previously-unknown-to-me town of Alfred, NY. Getting to Alfred, however, is not super simple, so I needed a ride to get from the halfway point of Binghamton to my final destination. Because I try to maximize the value of every visit I take, it […]
