Serge Bromberg, the former artistic director of Annecy International Animation Festival, is facing a four-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter.
Bromberg was put on trial earlier this week at the Court of Creteil, near Paris, due to his role in a fire involving nitrate film reels that caused two deaths in August 2020 during a heatwave, according to TV5 Monde.
The well-respected film professional has stocked film reels in the basement of a building near Paris that didn’t have a fire alarm. During the heatwave, the reels burst into flames. A person living in the apartment above the basement was burnt alive while another person died after jumping from the fourth floor to escape the fire.
The prosecutor, Missiva Chermak-Felonneau, has requested a four-year sentence, three of them suspended, and a 150,000 fine for Bromberg’s company Lobster Films.
Bromberg, who headed the programming of Annecy festival from 1999 to 2012 and has focused on film restoration since then,...
Bromberg was put on trial earlier this week at the Court of Creteil, near Paris, due to his role in a fire involving nitrate film reels that caused two deaths in August 2020 during a heatwave, according to TV5 Monde.
The well-respected film professional has stocked film reels in the basement of a building near Paris that didn’t have a fire alarm. During the heatwave, the reels burst into flames. A person living in the apartment above the basement was burnt alive while another person died after jumping from the fourth floor to escape the fire.
The prosecutor, Missiva Chermak-Felonneau, has requested a four-year sentence, three of them suspended, and a 150,000 fine for Bromberg’s company Lobster Films.
Bromberg, who headed the programming of Annecy festival from 1999 to 2012 and has focused on film restoration since then,...
- 11/25/2022
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
Serge Bromberg, a former artistic director of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, is facing a four-year prison sentence for his role in a deadly fire involving nitrate film reels.
The case, which was tried in the courthouse of Creteil on the outskirts of Paris this week, relates to a tragic fire in August 2020, when nitrate film reels he was stocking in the basement of an eight-story apartment block on the outskirts of Paris burst into flames during a heatwave.
One person living directly above the site of the fire was burned alive while another person died when they tried to jump to safety from the fourth floor. The building was relatively empty at the time because it was the height of the summer holidays.
Bromberg, who was tried on charges of committing involuntary manslaughter and injury as well as putting others in danger, took full responsibility for the tragedy at the trial.
The case, which was tried in the courthouse of Creteil on the outskirts of Paris this week, relates to a tragic fire in August 2020, when nitrate film reels he was stocking in the basement of an eight-story apartment block on the outskirts of Paris burst into flames during a heatwave.
One person living directly above the site of the fire was burned alive while another person died when they tried to jump to safety from the fourth floor. The building was relatively empty at the time because it was the height of the summer holidays.
Bromberg, who was tried on charges of committing involuntary manslaughter and injury as well as putting others in danger, took full responsibility for the tragedy at the trial.
- 11/25/2022
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Cinematography retrospectives are the way to go—more than a thorough display of talent, it exposes the vast expanse a Dp will travel, like an education in form and business all the same. Accordingly I’m happy to see the Criterion Channel give a 25-film tribute to James Wong Howe, whose career spanned silent cinema to the ’70s, populated with work by Howard Hawks, Michael Curtz, Samuel Fuller, Alexander Mackendrick, Sydney Pollack, John Frankenheimer, and Raoul Walsh.
Further retrospectives are granted to Romy Schneider (recent repertory sensation La piscine among them), Carlos Saura (finally a chance to see Peppermint frappe!), the British New Wave, and groundbreaking distributor Cinema 5, who brought to U.S. shores everything from The Man Who Fell to Earth and Putney Swope to Pumping Iron and Scenes from a Marriage.
September also yields streaming premieres for the recently restored Bronco Bullfrog, Ang Lee’s Pushing Hands,...
Further retrospectives are granted to Romy Schneider (recent repertory sensation La piscine among them), Carlos Saura (finally a chance to see Peppermint frappe!), the British New Wave, and groundbreaking distributor Cinema 5, who brought to U.S. shores everything from The Man Who Fell to Earth and Putney Swope to Pumping Iron and Scenes from a Marriage.
September also yields streaming premieres for the recently restored Bronco Bullfrog, Ang Lee’s Pushing Hands,...
- 8/22/2022
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Leo McCarey’s beloved 1939 romance “Love Affair” starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer as star-crossed lovers who meet cute on a luxury liner. Since they are both attached to others — Dunne is actually a “kept” woman — they agree to meet six months after they land in New York at the Empire State Building. For years, “Love Affair” was near impossible to see after the rights of the Rko production had been sold to 20th Century Fox for Carey’s scene-by-scene 1957 remake “An Affair to Remember” with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.
But in 1977, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s film department lead by the late great Ron Haver presented a months’ long Rko festival featuring every film from the studio that still existed including “Love Affair,” which had earned six Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best...
But in 1977, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s film department lead by the late great Ron Haver presented a months’ long Rko festival featuring every film from the studio that still existed including “Love Affair,” which had earned six Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best...
- 2/28/2022
- by Susan King
- Gold Derby
“This picture is perfect, end of review.” That may not be 100 true, but Leo McCarey’s unabashed leap into romantic Nirvana really hasn’t been bettered, although his color & ‘scope remake is very good. Never was smart adult dialogue this winning — Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer’s cinematic courtship is a highlight of the Big Studio years. And Maria Ouspenskaya’s performance will send you out to pamper the nearest grandmother. The restoration for this one is a revelation, as the show has looked terrible for sixty years- plus. Serge Bromberg and Farran Smith Nehme make the extras especially valuable.
Love Affair
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1114
1939 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 88 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date February 15, 2022 / 39.95
Starring: Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya, Lee Bowman, Astrid Allwyn, Maurice Moscovitch, Ferike Boros, Scotty Beckett, Bess Flowers, Harold Miller, Dell Henderson, Frank McGlynn, Sr., Joan Leslie.
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art Director: Van Nest Polglase,...
Love Affair
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1114
1939 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 88 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date February 15, 2022 / 39.95
Starring: Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya, Lee Bowman, Astrid Allwyn, Maurice Moscovitch, Ferike Boros, Scotty Beckett, Bess Flowers, Harold Miller, Dell Henderson, Frank McGlynn, Sr., Joan Leslie.
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art Director: Van Nest Polglase,...
- 2/26/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Guest reviewer Matt Rovner delves into the cultural riches of ethnic films specially made for speakers of the Yiddish language. Some were filmed in Poland and others in New Jersey (according to Edgar Ulmer!)… and if they seem obscure they’re nevertheless culturally significant as a record of a language that’s fast disappearing. Among the gems is a significant folk-horror tale and an original non-musical drama about Tevye the Milkman’s problems with his daughter and the oppressive laws of the Czar.
The Jewish Soul: Classics of Yiddish Cinema
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber Repertory
The Dybbuk, American Matchmaker, Her Second Mother, Mir Kumen On, Tevya, Overture to Glory, Eli Eli, Jewish King Lear, Motel the Operator, Three Daughters
1935-1940 / all B&w / 1:37 Academy
750 min. / Street Date November 24, 2020
available through Kino Lorber
Starring: Avrom Morewski, Leo Fuchs, Moishe Oysher, Maurice Schwartz, Maurice Krohner, Chaim Tauber, Max Badin, Charlotte Goldstein,...
The Jewish Soul: Classics of Yiddish Cinema
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber Repertory
The Dybbuk, American Matchmaker, Her Second Mother, Mir Kumen On, Tevya, Overture to Glory, Eli Eli, Jewish King Lear, Motel the Operator, Three Daughters
1935-1940 / all B&w / 1:37 Academy
750 min. / Street Date November 24, 2020
available through Kino Lorber
Starring: Avrom Morewski, Leo Fuchs, Moishe Oysher, Maurice Schwartz, Maurice Krohner, Chaim Tauber, Max Badin, Charlotte Goldstein,...
- 12/15/2020
- by Matt Rovner
- Trailers from Hell
To mark the release of George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, out now, we’ve been given George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon Blu-ray & Autobiography to give away to 1 winner.
Georges Méliès was not just a pioneer of early cinema, he was central to what we know as film today. An illustrator, magician, filmmaker, and inventor he paved the way for animation and multi-media filmmaking.
Of all of Méliès films, his boldest and most well known is certainly A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la Lune], loosely based on the writings of Jules Verne. A Trip to the Moon follows a group of travellers who jet off to the moon from earth on an exploration mission only to end up in peril and captured by the local inhabitants, the Selenites. Featuring a who’s who of theatrical cast from the era, with Méliès himself taking a lead role, this is one...
Georges Méliès was not just a pioneer of early cinema, he was central to what we know as film today. An illustrator, magician, filmmaker, and inventor he paved the way for animation and multi-media filmmaking.
Of all of Méliès films, his boldest and most well known is certainly A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la Lune], loosely based on the writings of Jules Verne. A Trip to the Moon follows a group of travellers who jet off to the moon from earth on an exploration mission only to end up in peril and captured by the local inhabitants, the Selenites. Featuring a who’s who of theatrical cast from the era, with Méliès himself taking a lead role, this is one...
- 9/21/2020
- by Competitions
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
I.Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (1964) is one of the most tantalizing unfinished projects in cinema history. If completed, it would have told a story of extreme jealousy and obsession. The plot is simple—a hotel owner, Marcel (Serge Reggiani), begins to suffer from nightmarish visions in which his young wife Odette (Romy Schneider) appears in various lascivious poses and sometimes erotically interacts with another man. Marcel gradually descends into madness and may, in the end, be driven to kill his wife. Generously backed by Columbia (via the French production company Orsay Films), Clouzot shot in black and white as well as in color, employing three separate film crews, no less than 12 cameras, and a large number of technicians and film craftsmen, including some of the most established industry names of the time. For six months, three cameramen—Claude Renoir, Armand Thirard and Andréas Winding—shot seemingly endless studio tests and,...
- 9/28/2018
- MUBI
Review by Roger Carpenter
After several critical and financial successes, Henri-Georges Clouzot was at the top of his game as a filmmaker. Widely considered one of the greatest French filmmakers and continental Europe’s answer to Hitchcock, Clouzot had directed such genuine classics as Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfevres, The Wages of Fear, and Diabolique. By this time he was being courted by many large film companies, but it was Columbia who won out, giving him complete creative control and an unlimited budget to create what was to be his masterpiece: L’enfer (Inferno in English).
Clouzot, rightly recognizing this exceptional opportunity, set to work creating a unique slice of cinema. L’enfer was to tell the story of a newlywed couple, he a middle-aged man and she a twenty-something debutante. But soon after the nuptials, the new husband, Marcel, spirals into jealousy and paranoia, convinced his wife, Odette, is sleeping with others.
After several critical and financial successes, Henri-Georges Clouzot was at the top of his game as a filmmaker. Widely considered one of the greatest French filmmakers and continental Europe’s answer to Hitchcock, Clouzot had directed such genuine classics as Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfevres, The Wages of Fear, and Diabolique. By this time he was being courted by many large film companies, but it was Columbia who won out, giving him complete creative control and an unlimited budget to create what was to be his masterpiece: L’enfer (Inferno in English).
Clouzot, rightly recognizing this exceptional opportunity, set to work creating a unique slice of cinema. L’enfer was to tell the story of a newlywed couple, he a middle-aged man and she a twenty-something debutante. But soon after the nuptials, the new husband, Marcel, spirals into jealousy and paranoia, convinced his wife, Odette, is sleeping with others.
- 4/2/2018
- by Movie Geeks
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
A Trip to the Moon
Blu ray
Flicker Alley
1902 / 1:33 / 15 Min. / Street Date March 20, 2018
Starring Georges Méliès
Cinematography by Théophile Michault, Lucien Tainguy
Written by Georges Méliès
Edited by Georges Méliès
Produced and directed by Georges Méliès
In the fall of 1886 the magician Georges Méliès was filming near the Place de l’Opera when his camera jammed for a few fateful moments. Those missing frames resulted in an unexpected optical illusion that for Méliès was a new kind of a magic trick; “I suddenly saw a Madeleine-Bastille omnibus change into a hearse and men into women.”
Embracing that happy accident, Méliès established himself as the foremost fantasy filmmaker of his generation – it could be said that he was responsible for the multitude of special effect extravaganzas occupying multiplexes to this day. But let’s not judge him too harshly.
Méliès first made his mark as an illusionist and for 16 years...
Blu ray
Flicker Alley
1902 / 1:33 / 15 Min. / Street Date March 20, 2018
Starring Georges Méliès
Cinematography by Théophile Michault, Lucien Tainguy
Written by Georges Méliès
Edited by Georges Méliès
Produced and directed by Georges Méliès
In the fall of 1886 the magician Georges Méliès was filming near the Place de l’Opera when his camera jammed for a few fateful moments. Those missing frames resulted in an unexpected optical illusion that for Méliès was a new kind of a magic trick; “I suddenly saw a Madeleine-Bastille omnibus change into a hearse and men into women.”
Embracing that happy accident, Méliès established himself as the foremost fantasy filmmaker of his generation – it could be said that he was responsible for the multitude of special effect extravaganzas occupying multiplexes to this day. But let’s not judge him too harshly.
Méliès first made his mark as an illusionist and for 16 years...
- 3/24/2018
- by Charlie Largent
- Trailers from Hell
A cinematic puzzle and a filmic detective piece, Serge Bromberg’s examination of a world-class filmmaker’s catastrophic, never-finished production fascinates and dazzles. If the particulars of H.G. Clouzot’s experimental epic of internal torment remain clouded, the astonishing visuals he created are a total knockout. Working with hours of uncut dailies and precise collaborator memories, Bromberg gives us the most interesting filmic autopsy on record. Incredible stuff!
Inferno
(L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot)
Blu-ray
Arrow Academy
2009 / Color & B&W / 1:78 widescreen / 100 min. / L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot / Street Date February 6, 2018 / Available from Arrow Video 34.95
Starring: Romy Schneider, Serge Reggiani, Bérénice Bejo, Jacques Gamblin, Dany Carrel, Jean-Claude Bercq, Mario David, Catherine Allégret, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Gilbert Amy, Jacques Douy, Jean-Louis Ducarme, Costa-Gavras, William Lubtchansky, Thi Lan Nguyen, Joël Stein, Bernard Stora, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Bernard Blier, Inès Clouzot, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Lino Ventura, Burt Lancaster.
Cinematography: Jérôme Krumenacker, Irina Lubtchansky...
Inferno
(L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot)
Blu-ray
Arrow Academy
2009 / Color & B&W / 1:78 widescreen / 100 min. / L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot / Street Date February 6, 2018 / Available from Arrow Video 34.95
Starring: Romy Schneider, Serge Reggiani, Bérénice Bejo, Jacques Gamblin, Dany Carrel, Jean-Claude Bercq, Mario David, Catherine Allégret, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Gilbert Amy, Jacques Douy, Jean-Louis Ducarme, Costa-Gavras, William Lubtchansky, Thi Lan Nguyen, Joël Stein, Bernard Stora, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Bernard Blier, Inès Clouzot, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Lino Ventura, Burt Lancaster.
Cinematography: Jérôme Krumenacker, Irina Lubtchansky...
- 2/20/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (2009) is showing from February 2 - March 4, 2018 in many countries around the world.“Memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened.”—Marguerite Duras With Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea both reconstruct and describe the production of the titular unfinished 1964 film, presenting their film as at once an op-art experiment and a traditional documentary of a failed production. At its center, however, is a preoccupation with the notion of the historical fragment and the viewer’s attribution of meaning and value to the fragment. This attribution is largely the result of a lack, as Lacan put it, experienced by both the fragment and viewer that can never be satisfied. The fragment signifies its own symbolic desire to be a part of a whole and the viewer’s symbolic desire for that whole.
- 2/19/2018
- MUBI
In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot, the acclaimed director of thriller masterpieces Les Diaboliques and Wages of Fear, began work on his most ambitious film yet.
Set in a beautiful lake side resort in the Auvergne region of France, L’Enfer (Inferno) was to be a sun scorched elucidation on the dark depths of jealousy starring Romy Schneider as the harassed wife of a controlling hotel manager (Serge Reggiani). However, despite huge expectations, major studio backing and an unlimited budget, after three weeks the production collapsed under the weight of arguments, technical complications and illness.
In this compelling, award-winning documentary Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea present Inferno’s incredible expressionistic original rushes, screen tests, and on-location footage, whilst also reconstructing Clouzot’s original vision, and shedding light on the ill-fated endeavor through interviews, dramatizations of unfilmed scenes, and Clouzot’s own notes.
Special Edition Contents
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation Original 5.1 DTS-hd Master...
Set in a beautiful lake side resort in the Auvergne region of France, L’Enfer (Inferno) was to be a sun scorched elucidation on the dark depths of jealousy starring Romy Schneider as the harassed wife of a controlling hotel manager (Serge Reggiani). However, despite huge expectations, major studio backing and an unlimited budget, after three weeks the production collapsed under the weight of arguments, technical complications and illness.
In this compelling, award-winning documentary Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea present Inferno’s incredible expressionistic original rushes, screen tests, and on-location footage, whilst also reconstructing Clouzot’s original vision, and shedding light on the ill-fated endeavor through interviews, dramatizations of unfilmed scenes, and Clouzot’s own notes.
Special Edition Contents
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation Original 5.1 DTS-hd Master...
- 1/24/2018
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
*Sigh* — Not a day goes by that I don’t miss my escaped brontosaurus. This wonder movie of the silent era, which pits five intrepid explorers against Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fantastic South American plateau where marvelous animals from the dawn of time still live. Blackhawk Films and Lobster’s latest digital restoration includes footage never before seen, in original tints; it’s dedicated to film restorer David Shepard.
The Lost World
Deluxe Blu-ray Edition
Flicker Alley
1925 / Color / 1:37 Silent Ap / 110 min. / Street Date September 19, 2017 / 39.95
Starring: Wallace Beery, Lloyd Hughes, Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Alma Bennett, Arthur Hoyt, Margaret McWade, Bull Montana, Frank Finch Smiles, Jules Cowles, George Bunny, Leo White.
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Writing credits: Marion Fairfax from the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
New Music Score: Robert Israel
Technical Director: Willis O’Brien, assistants & effects men Marcel Delgado, Ralph Hammeras, Fred Jackman, Devereaux Jennings, Hans Koenekamp,...
The Lost World
Deluxe Blu-ray Edition
Flicker Alley
1925 / Color / 1:37 Silent Ap / 110 min. / Street Date September 19, 2017 / 39.95
Starring: Wallace Beery, Lloyd Hughes, Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Alma Bennett, Arthur Hoyt, Margaret McWade, Bull Montana, Frank Finch Smiles, Jules Cowles, George Bunny, Leo White.
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Writing credits: Marion Fairfax from the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
New Music Score: Robert Israel
Technical Director: Willis O’Brien, assistants & effects men Marcel Delgado, Ralph Hammeras, Fred Jackman, Devereaux Jennings, Hans Koenekamp,...
- 9/4/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Do rediscovered ‘lost’ movies always disappoint? This Depression-era pre-Code science fiction disaster thriller was unique in its day, and its outrageously ambitious special effects –New York City is tossed into a blender — were considered the state of the art. Sidney Blackmer and a fetching Peggy Shannon fight off rapacious gangs in what may be the first post-apocalyptic survival thriller.
Deluge
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1933 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 67 min. / Street Date February 21, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring Peggy Shannon, Lois Wilson, Sidney Blackmer, Lane Chandler, Samuel S. Hinds, Fred Kohler, Matt Moore, Edward Van Sloan .
Cinematography: Norbert Brodine
Film Editor: Martin G. Cohn, Rose Loewinger
Special Effects: Ned Mann, Williams Wiliams, Russell Lawson, Ernie Crockett, Victor Scheurich, Carl Wester
Original Music: Val Burton
Written by Warren Duff, John F. Goodrich from the novel by Sydney Fowler Wright
Produced by Samuel Bischoff, Burt Kelly, William Saal
Directed by Felix E. Feist...
Deluge
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1933 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 67 min. / Street Date February 21, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring Peggy Shannon, Lois Wilson, Sidney Blackmer, Lane Chandler, Samuel S. Hinds, Fred Kohler, Matt Moore, Edward Van Sloan .
Cinematography: Norbert Brodine
Film Editor: Martin G. Cohn, Rose Loewinger
Special Effects: Ned Mann, Williams Wiliams, Russell Lawson, Ernie Crockett, Victor Scheurich, Carl Wester
Original Music: Val Burton
Written by Warren Duff, John F. Goodrich from the novel by Sydney Fowler Wright
Produced by Samuel Bischoff, Burt Kelly, William Saal
Directed by Felix E. Feist...
- 2/21/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Maybe it’s that face, but it seems like Buster Keaton has been the subject of more great posters over the past century than almost any other actor. I’ve featured a number of them over the years (like this and this and this) and one of these days I’ll try to collect them all together, but for now we have these marvelous new posters for Kino Lorber’s release of four Keaton restorations. Created by Dylan Haley, a Californian artist and designer now based in New Zealand, these whimsical mixtures of black and white stills, multi-colored hand-lettering (a Haley specialty) and simple hand-drawn backgrounds are intended to bring Keaton a younger, hipper audience than might normally be attracted to silent movies (though Buster, as we all know, is the hippest cat of all).The films have been restored in France by Serge Bromberg and Lobster Films and Kino Lorber...
- 2/3/2017
- MUBI
All hail Buster Keaton! The Great Stone Face's pre-feature output is a comedic treasure trove that allows us to watch a performing genius perfect his filmic persona. Lobster's all-new restorations debut some alternate scenes and fix a number of broken jump cuts. It's the whole shebang -- the earlier Fatty Arbuckle shorts and Buster's later solo efforts. Buster Keaton The Shorts Collection 1917-1923 Blu-ray Kino Classics 1917-1923 / B&W / 1:37 flat Silent Ap / 738 min. / Street Date May 24, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 59.95 Starring Buster Keaton, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. . Original Music Robert Israel, Donald Sosin, Stephen Horne, Timothy Brock, Neil Brand, The Mont Alto Orchestra, Sandra Wong, Günther Buchwald, Dennis Scott Directed by Roscoe Arbuckle & Buster Keaton
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
What's this, a full compilation of Buster Keaton Shorts? Kino has released sets of these before, including a 3-disc Blu-ray package from back in the summer of 2011 and overseen by Kino's Bret Wood.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
What's this, a full compilation of Buster Keaton Shorts? Kino has released sets of these before, including a 3-disc Blu-ray package from back in the summer of 2011 and overseen by Kino's Bret Wood.
- 5/21/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
I live in Los Angeles, and my residency here means that a lot of great film programming-- revival screenings, advance looks at upcoming releases and vital, fascinating glimpses at unheralded, unexpected cinema from around the world—is available to me on a week-by-week basis. But I’ve never been to Cannes. Toronto, Tribeca, New York, Venice, Berlin, Sundance, SXSW, these festivals are all events that I have yet to be lucky enough to attend, and I can reasonably expect that it’s probably going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. I never attended a film festival of any kind until I made my way to the outskirts of the Mojave Desert for the Lone Pine Film Festival in 2006, which was its own kind of grand adventure, even if it wasn’t exactly one for bumping shoulders with critics, stars and fanatics on the French Riviera.
But since 2010 there...
But since 2010 there...
- 4/24/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
Other winners include Venice title Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me and documentary Rabin In His Own Words.
Elad Keidan’s debut feature Afterthought (Hayored Lemaala) was crowned Best Israeli Film at this year’s Haifa Film Festival (Sept 26-Oct 5).
London-based Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf presided over the jury that included Karlovy Vary artistic director Karel Och, MoMA’s former cinema curator Laurence Kardish, Israeli cinematographer-director-actress Yvonne Miklosh and director Julie Schlez.
Screened earlier this year in Cannes’ Special Screenings section, the film is a metaphor of Israel today, focusing on two characters, one going up and the other down the staircases crisscrossing Haifa’s Mount Carmel and was entirely shot on location in the city.
Back from Venice’s Horizons section, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me (Lama Azavtani), a gloomy portrait of a city slum and of a teenager living on the fringes of society who desperately tries to find his own identity, gained director...
Elad Keidan’s debut feature Afterthought (Hayored Lemaala) was crowned Best Israeli Film at this year’s Haifa Film Festival (Sept 26-Oct 5).
London-based Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf presided over the jury that included Karlovy Vary artistic director Karel Och, MoMA’s former cinema curator Laurence Kardish, Israeli cinematographer-director-actress Yvonne Miklosh and director Julie Schlez.
Screened earlier this year in Cannes’ Special Screenings section, the film is a metaphor of Israel today, focusing on two characters, one going up and the other down the staircases crisscrossing Haifa’s Mount Carmel and was entirely shot on location in the city.
Back from Venice’s Horizons section, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me (Lama Azavtani), a gloomy portrait of a city slum and of a teenager living on the fringes of society who desperately tries to find his own identity, gained director...
- 10/5/2015
- by dfainaru@netvision.net.il (Edna Fainaru)
- ScreenDaily
The Telluride Film Festival is actually many festivals rolled into one. You can pursue world cinema and see the work of up-and-coming filmmakers, concentrate on documentaries, focus on revivals (including silent films with live musical accompaniment), or get the jump on the hottest films of the fall season. Making choices over the jam-packed Labor Day weekend event is always a challenge and this year was no exception. Although I did see some high-profile films and got to interview director Danny Boyle onstage before a screening of his dazzling Steve Jobs, the two programs that meant the most to me were Kent Jones’ documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut and Serge Bromberg’s presentation of restored...
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[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]...
- 9/9/2015
- by Leonard Maltin
- Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy
Top brass at the 42nd edition of the Colorado event have announced the roster of 27 films, with surprises to come over the September 4-7 run date.
The line-up is as follows:
Carol (Us), Todd Haynes
Amazing Grace (Us, 1972/2015), Sydney Pollack
Anomalisa (Us), Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
Beast Of No Nation (Us), Cary Fukunaga
He Named Me Malala (Us), Davis Guggenheim
Steve Jobs (Us), Danny Boyle
Ixcanul (Guatemala), Jayro Bustamante
Bitter Lake (Us), Adam Curtis
Room (UK), Lenny Abrahamson
Black Mass (Us), Scott Cooper
Suffragette (UK), Sarah Gavron
Spotlight (Us), Tom McCarthy
Rams (Iceland), Grímur Hákonarson
Mom And Me (Ireland), Ken Wardrop
Viva (Ireland), Paddy Breathnach
Taj Majal (France-India), Nicolas Saada
Siti (Indonesia), Eddie Cahyono
Heart Of The Dog (Us), Laurie Anderson
45 Years (UK), Andrew Haigh
Son Of Saul (Hungary), Lázló Nemes,
Only The Dead See The End Of The War (Us-Australia), Michael Ware, Bill Guttentag
Taxi (Iran), Jafar Panahi
Hitchcock/Truffaut (Us), Kent Jones
Time To Choose...
The line-up is as follows:
Carol (Us), Todd Haynes
Amazing Grace (Us, 1972/2015), Sydney Pollack
Anomalisa (Us), Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
Beast Of No Nation (Us), Cary Fukunaga
He Named Me Malala (Us), Davis Guggenheim
Steve Jobs (Us), Danny Boyle
Ixcanul (Guatemala), Jayro Bustamante
Bitter Lake (Us), Adam Curtis
Room (UK), Lenny Abrahamson
Black Mass (Us), Scott Cooper
Suffragette (UK), Sarah Gavron
Spotlight (Us), Tom McCarthy
Rams (Iceland), Grímur Hákonarson
Mom And Me (Ireland), Ken Wardrop
Viva (Ireland), Paddy Breathnach
Taj Majal (France-India), Nicolas Saada
Siti (Indonesia), Eddie Cahyono
Heart Of The Dog (Us), Laurie Anderson
45 Years (UK), Andrew Haigh
Son Of Saul (Hungary), Lázló Nemes,
Only The Dead See The End Of The War (Us-Australia), Michael Ware, Bill Guttentag
Taxi (Iran), Jafar Panahi
Hitchcock/Truffaut (Us), Kent Jones
Time To Choose...
- 9/3/2015
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
Top brass at the 42nd edition of the Colorado event have announced the roster of 27 films, with surprises to come over the September 4-7 run date.
The line-up is as follows:
Carol (Us), Todd Haynes
Amazing Grace (Us, 1972/2015), Sydney Pollack
Anomalisa (Us), Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
Beast Of No Nation (Us), Cary Fukunaga
He Named Me Malala (Us), Davis Guggenheim
Steve Jobs (Us), Danny Boyle
Ixcanul (Guatemala), Jayro Bustamante
Bitter Lake (Us), Adam Curtis
Room (England, pictured), Lenny Abrahamson
Black Mass (Us), Scott Cooper
Suffragette (UK), Sarah Gavron
Spotlight (Us), Tom McCarthy
Rams (Iceland), Grímur Hákonarson
Mom And Me (Ireland), Ken Wardrop
Viva (Ireland), Paddy Breathnach
Taj Majal (France-India), Nicolas Saada
Siti (Indonesia), Eddie Cahyono
Heart Of The Dog (Us), Laurie Anderson
45 Years (England), Andrew Haigh
Son Of Saul (Hungary), Lázló Nemes,
Only The Dead See The End Of The War (Us-Australia), Michael Ware, Bill Guttentag
Taxi (Iran), Jafar Panahi
Hitchcock/Truffaut (Us), Kent Jones
Time To...
The line-up is as follows:
Carol (Us), Todd Haynes
Amazing Grace (Us, 1972/2015), Sydney Pollack
Anomalisa (Us), Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
Beast Of No Nation (Us), Cary Fukunaga
He Named Me Malala (Us), Davis Guggenheim
Steve Jobs (Us), Danny Boyle
Ixcanul (Guatemala), Jayro Bustamante
Bitter Lake (Us), Adam Curtis
Room (England, pictured), Lenny Abrahamson
Black Mass (Us), Scott Cooper
Suffragette (UK), Sarah Gavron
Spotlight (Us), Tom McCarthy
Rams (Iceland), Grímur Hákonarson
Mom And Me (Ireland), Ken Wardrop
Viva (Ireland), Paddy Breathnach
Taj Majal (France-India), Nicolas Saada
Siti (Indonesia), Eddie Cahyono
Heart Of The Dog (Us), Laurie Anderson
45 Years (England), Andrew Haigh
Son Of Saul (Hungary), Lázló Nemes,
Only The Dead See The End Of The War (Us-Australia), Michael Ware, Bill Guttentag
Taxi (Iran), Jafar Panahi
Hitchcock/Truffaut (Us), Kent Jones
Time To...
- 9/3/2015
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
"Over the span of two decades, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (Sfsff) has transformed itself from a one-day, three-film event into the second most prestigious silent movie showcase in the world," writes Michael Hawley at the top of his extensive overview. Featured in the 20th edition opening today are "Pauline Kael's all-time favorite film (the 1926 French short Ménilmontant), Harold Lloyd's last silent picture (Speedy) and Frank Capra's first sound film (The Donovan Affair, whose lost soundtrack will be recreated by live actors). The roster of high-profile guests includes Kevin Brownlow, Serge Bromberg and Leonard Maltin." We're gathering previews of highlights including Andre Antoine’s The Swallow and the Titmouse, Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes and more. » - David Hudson...
- 5/28/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
"Over the span of two decades, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (Sfsff) has transformed itself from a one-day, three-film event into the second most prestigious silent movie showcase in the world," writes Michael Hawley at the top of his extensive overview. Featured in the 20th edition opening today are "Pauline Kael's all-time favorite film (the 1926 French short Ménilmontant), Harold Lloyd's last silent picture (Speedy) and Frank Capra's first sound film (The Donovan Affair, whose lost soundtrack will be recreated by live actors). The roster of high-profile guests includes Kevin Brownlow, Serge Bromberg and Leonard Maltin." We're gathering previews of highlights including Andre Antoine’s The Swallow and the Titmouse, Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes and more. » - David Hudson...
- 5/28/2015
- Keyframe
First in New York and then in Los Angeles, Serge Bromberg will be presenting new restorations of films made by Charles Chaplin between 1915 and 1917. More goings on in the next few days: Darren Aronofsky and Patti Smith in New York, Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner in Los Angeles, James Benning and Richard Linklater in San Francisco, Orson Welles and Lav Diaz in Seattle, the Austin Asian American Film Festival, plus Gregory J. Markopoulos in Vienna and Alexandra Navratil in Zurich. » - David Hudson...
- 11/13/2014
- Keyframe
First in New York and then in Los Angeles, Serge Bromberg will be presenting new restorations of films made by Charles Chaplin between 1915 and 1917. More goings on in the next few days: Darren Aronofsky and Patti Smith in New York, Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner in Los Angeles, James Benning and Richard Linklater in San Francisco, Orson Welles and Lav Diaz in Seattle, the Austin Asian American Film Festival, plus Gregory J. Markopoulos in Vienna and Alexandra Navratil in Zurich. » - David Hudson...
- 11/13/2014
- Fandor: Keyframe
A 20th anniversary screening of “The Shawshank Redemption”; restorations of Mary Pickford’s “Little Annie Rooney” and Charlie Chaplin’s “The Bank”; a screening series and panel discussion complementing the landmark Hollywood Costume exhibition; and six diverse films from director Edgar G. Ulmer are all part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ November programs. Ticket holders for Hollywood Costume will receive free same-day admission to Hollywood Costume-related public programs.
“The Shawshank Redemption”
With special guests Frank Darabont, Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins
The Academy will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1994 Best Picture nominee “The Shawshank Redemption” onNovember 18 at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater. The evening will feature an onstage discussion with writer-director Frank Darabont, who received an Oscar nomination for his adapted screenplay, Best Actor nominee Morgan Freeman, and star Tim Robbins.
Click here for more information
Defining Character: The Art...
“The Shawshank Redemption”
With special guests Frank Darabont, Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins
The Academy will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1994 Best Picture nominee “The Shawshank Redemption” onNovember 18 at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater. The evening will feature an onstage discussion with writer-director Frank Darabont, who received an Oscar nomination for his adapted screenplay, Best Actor nominee Morgan Freeman, and star Tim Robbins.
Click here for more information
Defining Character: The Art...
- 10/21/2014
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Bollywood stars including Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan turned out for the opening of the Mumbai Film Festival (October 14-21), which is celebrating its 16th edition despite almost being shut down a few months ago due to lack of funding.
Saved through donations from filmmakers, stars, industrialists and audience members, the festival put on a glittering opening night ceremony at the historical Chandan Cinema in Mumbai’s Juhu district.
Almost losing the festival appears to have convinced the Bollywood fraternity to show unprecedented levels of support. Sponsors and partners including HBO, Rentrak, Pinkerton, Bajaj Group and Mahindra Rise have also recently come on board the event.
Kalki Koechlin played compere for the evening, while Rai Bachchan inaugurated the festival and Kumar presented a lifetime achievement to veteran Bollywood diva Helen. Rai Bachchan and industrialist Niraj Bajaj also presented Catherine Deneuve with a lifetime achievement award.
Also present in the audience were stars such as Ranbir Kapoor, [link...
Saved through donations from filmmakers, stars, industrialists and audience members, the festival put on a glittering opening night ceremony at the historical Chandan Cinema in Mumbai’s Juhu district.
Almost losing the festival appears to have convinced the Bollywood fraternity to show unprecedented levels of support. Sponsors and partners including HBO, Rentrak, Pinkerton, Bajaj Group and Mahindra Rise have also recently come on board the event.
Kalki Koechlin played compere for the evening, while Rai Bachchan inaugurated the festival and Kumar presented a lifetime achievement to veteran Bollywood diva Helen. Rai Bachchan and industrialist Niraj Bajaj also presented Catherine Deneuve with a lifetime achievement award.
Also present in the audience were stars such as Ranbir Kapoor, [link...
- 10/15/2014
- by lizshackleton@gmail.com (Liz Shackleton)
- ScreenDaily
The 16th edition of the Mumbai Film Festival announced the Jury for International competition, India Gold and Dimensions Mumbai sections.
British filmmaker Peter Webber (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Hannibal Rising) will head the International Jury which comprises Indian filmmaker Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox), Chad-born and Paris-based filmmaker Mahamat Saleh Haroun (A Screaming Man, Grigis) and Canadian documentary filmmaker Ron Mann (Imagine the Sound, Comic Book Confidential).
India Gold Jury will be headed by Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic (Midwinter Night’s Dream, How Harry Became a Tree) and will comprise Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage (With You Without You), Chinese actress Bai Ling (Red Corner, Southland Tales) and French producer Serge Bromberg (Inferno, The Extraordinary Voyage).
Dimensions Mumbai section will be judged by actor Huma Qureshi, film critic Rajeev Masand, actor-director Satish Kaushik, and directors Gauri Shinde and Homi Adajania.
The 16th Mumbai Film Festival will be held from 14th...
British filmmaker Peter Webber (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Hannibal Rising) will head the International Jury which comprises Indian filmmaker Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox), Chad-born and Paris-based filmmaker Mahamat Saleh Haroun (A Screaming Man, Grigis) and Canadian documentary filmmaker Ron Mann (Imagine the Sound, Comic Book Confidential).
India Gold Jury will be headed by Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic (Midwinter Night’s Dream, How Harry Became a Tree) and will comprise Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage (With You Without You), Chinese actress Bai Ling (Red Corner, Southland Tales) and French producer Serge Bromberg (Inferno, The Extraordinary Voyage).
Dimensions Mumbai section will be judged by actor Huma Qureshi, film critic Rajeev Masand, actor-director Satish Kaushik, and directors Gauri Shinde and Homi Adajania.
The 16th Mumbai Film Festival will be held from 14th...
- 10/6/2014
- by NewsDesk
- DearCinema.com
Sometimes life doesn’t play out like in the movies, or rather, sometimes the movies don’t play out like in real life. Actor-director Brady Corbet can fondly look back at Olivier Assayas’ Sils Maria as proof (he plays an author courting the A-lister) that Juliette Binoche was his first choice, but due to scheduling conflicts, a Cosmopolis-like reunion between the actress and Robert Pattinson will have no longer be the case. Variety reports that the matriarch role now goes to Berenice Bejo, the Oscar nominated actress who saw her last film (by hubby Michel Hazanavicius) get panned in Cannes, will next be featured alongside Melanie Laurent and Audrey Tautou in Tran Anh Hung’s Eternity. The Childhood of the Leader is now set for a November shoot in Budapest.
Gist: Co-written by Mona Fastvold (The Sleepwalker) and Corbet, this is a chilling fable about the rise of fascism...
Gist: Co-written by Mona Fastvold (The Sleepwalker) and Corbet, this is a chilling fable about the rise of fascism...
- 8/21/2014
- by Eric Lavallee
- IONCINEMA.com
This is a reprint of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education , L’affaire Natan, about a little known story given new life, the Dreyfus affair of French cinema. “Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect. Entitled Nazis, French Port and Film Studies: Bernard Natan’s Strange Saga, by Thomas Doherty, chair of the American-studies program at Brandeis University whose most recent book is Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013).
Nazis, French Porn, and Film Studies: Bernard Natan's Strange Saga
By Thomas Doherty
Mention Bernard Natan to even the most obsessive connoisseur of French cinema and you’re liable to get a blank stare. If recognized at all, the name might call up a vague association with sleaze and scandal. "Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect.
Natan, né Natan Tannenzapf, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth. Following a sensational trial laced with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was sentenced to four years in the Prison de la Santé, in Paris, which is where the Nazis found him. Shipped to Auschwitz, Natan perished in 1943 and promptly vanished—or was he erased?—from historical memory.
Natan seeks to undo the second injustice. At a brisk 66 minutes, it unspools like a much shorter, cinema-centric version of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the searing j’accuse that vaporized the glorious myth of consensual French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Francophilic cinephiles are sometimes afflicted with a similar case of selective amnesia, hailing the subversive frisson of Marcel Carné’sChildren of Paradise (1945) while forgetting the collaborationist filmmakers who adapted to the new regime without missing a beat. A different kind of film noir, Natan unravels the knots in three interlacing threads: the nature of history (whom do we remember and whom do we choose to forget?), the tenacity of French anti-Semitism (where the indigenous variant proves a congenial blend with the imported vintage from Germany), and (here’s where things get strange) the archival shadows of pornography flickering in film studies.
The outlines of Natan’s biography read like a Gallic version of an American rags-to-riches story featuring a colorful hustler who might have fit in well with the moguls who built an empire of their own in Hollywood. A self-made Frenchman, perhaps in nothing so much as his passion for the emerging art of the century, Natan arrived in Paris when the city was still reeling from the actualités of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the prestidigitation of Georges Méliès. Hitting the ground floor running, Natan took any gig available: lab worker and projectionist, tripod carrier and camera-cranker, and, in 1910, an outré credit—probably on a nudie film—that earned him a hefty fine and jail time for trafficking in obscene material. Still, he assimilated with a vengeance, marrying a French Catholic and enlisting in the French army during the Great War. His heroic service at the front was his passport to French citizenship; it also got the prewar bust for obscenity expunged from his record.
Mustered out, Natan assumed a prominent role in rebuilding an industry left prostrate by the Great War and plowed under by Hollywood imports. He acquired exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, built high-quality processing plants for developing and duping prints, and moved into the production of top-line features, most notably the patriotic blockbuster The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne. Both a detail-oriented manager and a big-picture man, Natan kept a hand in all ends of the business, from the chemicals used in the labs to the interior design of the theaters.
Even before the onset of sound, in 1927, Charles Pathé had lamented that there was no more money to be made from motion pictures. Natan knew better. In 1929 he bought out Pathé—whose "crowing rooster" logo was as much an emblem of ur-Frenchness as the Eiffel Tower—and, under the name Pathé-Natan, set about consolidating his various holdings into a vertically integrated business, a streamlined system of production, distribution, and exhibition, just like the major Hollywood studios. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded—creating big-budget, must-see feature films, building a fleet of ornate theaters, and bringing technical innovations like sound and Technicolor to the French screen. Among the 70 or so feature attractions produced under his shingle are two enduring classics by the director Raymond Bernard: Wooden Crosses (1932), a grim, trench-level slog through the Great War, and Les Misérables (1934), a prestige literary adaptation that, as the documentarians Duane and Cairns cannily note, probably had a personal reverberation for Natan, with its theme of a powerful man haunted by a petty crime from his past.
So far, so business-as-usual, not unlike a TCM documentary on Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. But then the story detours into a distinctly French quarter. In December 1938, at the height of his power, Natan was hobbled by two indictments, that he was a swindler and a Jew. He could mount a defense against only one. More-scandalous allegations were whispered—actually, in the right-wing press, shouted: that Natan’s long-ago brush with the law was no youthful indiscretion but part of a pattern of perversity. Despite his high profile and respected position, the coverage suggested, the slick foreigner was still peddling pornographic films to an underground market of like-minded lechers. The charges were straight from the playbook of the Nazi propagandists, echoing the double-barreled libels of Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, where the Jew was depicted as an invasive virus sucking the life out of the body politic while defiling the purity of the native bloodline.
Unfolding from January to June 1939, trumpeted in lurid press headlines, the criminal case against Natan involved cooked books, stock manipulation, and dummy holding companies. In brief, he was accused of robbing his own company blind and cheating the stockholders. He confessed to manipulating funds—but only, he insisted, to keep his company afloat, not to bilk the stockholders. Unmoved, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. In 1940, under the Third Republic and still before the Nazi invasion, the sentence was extended to five years. The next year, a Vichy court deprived him of the French citizenship he had won during the Great War. When the Nazis requested custody of Natan (according to the French Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, Natan was one of only two French Jews targeted by name, the other being Léon Blum, the former prime minister), the Vichy authorities readily complied. As the French film historian Georges Sadoul remarked, Natan’s prison cell served as the "antechamber to the oven of the crematorium."
The obvious French back story to l’affaire Natan is the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whom the French military railroaded into Devil’s Island on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1895. "You might call this the Dreyfus affair of cinema," says the director and actor Frédéric Tachou. But the criminal charges against Natan are a bit harder to disentangle. In 1940, the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which had no dog in the fight, reviewed what it called "the largest scandal ever recorded in the French cinema world" and came down hard on the man in the cross hairs of the French justice system: Natan "built up a monster organization without sound financial foundation and it collapsed of its own dead weight, although it required more than 10 years to bring him to justice."
Nonetheless, a cadre of French film historians has been adamant that Natan was set up; that, despite his confession, he was no less a victim of anti-Semitic hysteria than Dreyfus. André Rossel-Kirschen, Natan’s nephew and the author of Pathé-Natan: the True History, published in France in 2004, attacked the legend of the "swindler Natan" as a smear by greedy business interests seeking to gain control of a company that was not a hollowed-out shell but a solid moneymaker—that, in fact, was always in the black. The French historian Gilles Willems, another diligent researcher in the archives of Pathé, also scorns "the tenacious legend" regarding "the Jewish swindler of Romanian descent, Bernard Natan, who acquired the great Pathé firm the better to pillage it."
For film scholars lacking a Cpa license, the labyrinthine bookkeeping trail is difficult to follow—a confirmation of the cynical Hollywood adage that the most creative people in the motion-picture business work in the studios' accounting departments. In a blog post on the making of the documentary, the filmmaker Cairns offers what seems a measured appraisal: that Natan "did more good than harm" in the annals of French cinema, and that whatever the nature of his financial malfeasance, he "was scapegoated and punished with a grotesque severity."
Ironically, after getting little more than a footnote in most chronicles of the French cinema, Franco or Anglophone, it would be the more scandalous charge that rescued Natan from his cruel fade to black. In 1993, Joseph W. Slade, a professor of media and culture at Ohio University, published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with the come-hither title "Bernard Natan: France’s Legendary Pornographer." The piece was both salacious and, as it turned out, propitious. Slade was a pioneer in what has since morphed into a full-blown subfield of cinema studies—porn studies. Jump-started by the University of California at Berkeley film professor Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ published in 1989, and lent momentum by her edited collection, Porn Studies, in 2004, the close textual examination of pornography has turned from what was, not so long ago, an indictable offense into an au courant career path in the academy. Feminist critics especially have cultivated a nonprurient interest in porn, seeing in the raw footage an unfiltered lens into the male—and female—psyche, not to say physique.
Despite smirking from the mainstream press, few media scholars today would argue that a multibillion-dollar industry that has thrived since the dawn of cinema is not worthy of serious scrutiny and archival excavation. That consensus is confirmed by the steady inroads of a series of exceptionally well-attended panels at annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and, this spring, the debut of Porn Studies, an academic journal devoted to all things triple-x. If anything, the mainstreaming of porn in media studies has lagged behind its mainstreaming on the motion-picture screen, cable, and the web.
Slade’s article certainly resurrected Natan—not as a forgotten giant of the French film industry, but rather as a priapic smut merchant. Slade charged that even as Natan was consolidating his aboveboard cinematic empire, he "unquestionably turned out some of the most historically significant hard-core footage made during the silent era." More than that, Slade contended that Natan was a featured player in many of the films, exuberantly joining in with the sadomasochism, sodomy, and bestiality. "Natan’s dapper, slightly vulpine figure, capable of stalking or mincing as the role demanded, suited the storylines," he asserted. No prude himself, Slade frankly admired the sheer épater le bourgeois of Natan’s risky moonlighting, pointing out that "as a pornographer," Natan "parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema."
The French, who love a good trans-Atlantic donnybrook over cinema more than a Gitane after dinner, took to the conference-journal-and-cyberspace barricades to defend Natan’s honor. None have been more tenacious than the archivist Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, who on the website Les indépendants du premier siècle, blasted Slade’s "poor knowledge of both the man Bernard Natan and the French cinema in general" and accused him of "slander," "fantasies," and (the mildest cut) "a rich imagination." (Unfortunately, Berg played no role in Natan, because of creative/scholarly/economic differences with the filmmakers.)
Natan resolves the fracas with a montage worth a thousand monographs: the first extended unreeling of Natan’s alleged on-screen acrobatics. Inarguably, the glimpses of proto-porno from the prewar, silent era possess redeeming archival value, from the posed nudes in nickelodeon-era stag films (pretty much the kind of mild erotica you might see on a visit to the Louvre) to the hard-core coupling, and tripling, of the 1920s and 1930s. The most shocking snippet (I have never seen anything like it and, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it) features a randy swain engaging in sexual congress with a mallard. (The French title—Le Canard—sounds far more genteel than the rhyming imperative that is its English billing.) "The ugliest film I have ever seen in my life," says the archivist Serge Bromberg. "We didn’t want to restore it."
But, of course, the best argument for restoration is that without being able to eyeball the primary source, the canard against Natan would persist. Freeze-framing and telescoping in on close-ups of the actor, the filmmakers compare the visage of the energetic star in the French porn with contemporaneous pictures of Natan, plainly showing that the men are not one and the same. The accusation always sounded unlikely—sort of as if David O. Selznick used his off time during Gone With the Wind (1939) to cavort in blue movies shot in 16mm down in the Valley. On camera, Slade now concedes that there may be reasonable doubt as to the identity of the performer and to Natan’s filmography in pornography. "I do not now believe that Natan performed in the films," he wrote me in an email, "but I do think it is likely that he was involved in their making." Although he finds Natan "somewhat maudlin," he is "delighted that Natan is at last getting the attention he deserves, attention long denied him because of the anti-Semitism that has for so long erased him from French film history."
It is odd, though, that a story that hits so many of the buttons of film scholarship—and that is this juicy—has been for so long so forgotten. "I don’t think he has been airbrushed out" of history, says the writer Bart Bull in Natan. "I think he has been deliberately destroyed." Yet it’s hard to gauge how much of the history in any field just slips down the rabbit hole of memory—like say, the story of the unheralded pioneers of American film, Harry and Roy Aitken, who produced The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and how much results from willful acts of historical erasure. However, one can see why historians of French cinema would rather remember the glory that was the cinéma français than they would the political, cultural, and business sadism, the bigotry and hypocrisy, not to mention the seediness intertwined with the triumphs in the story of Bernard Natan.
Appropriately, the most inspired sequence in Natan is also a work of restoration, though not of a pornographic film, at least not as usually defined. A newsreel clip shows Natan in the dock in 1941, at the trial that stripped him of his citizenship, a sequence that Ophuls also unspooled inThe Sorrow and the Pity. "This is not a comedy," sputters Natan, trying to hide from the cameras. "This is a tragedy." Produced by none other than Pathé Cinema, by then a tool of the Nazi occupation, the newsreel dubs in a panicky high-pitched voice for Natan, to make the outcast Jew sound like a squealing rat. Duane and Cairns correct the distortion, rewinding the clip with Natan’s real voice on the soundtrack. "You can hear his real voice in another clip used in the film where he’s telling architects what he wants in his cinemas," Duane told me in an email. "We pitch-shifted the sped-up voice in the trial newsreel until it was closer to the way he really sounded."
The gesture neatly demonstrates that if film can distort and delete history, it can also restore and repair it. "The man is dead," says the narrator at the beginning of Natan. "Even his memory has been destroyed."
No more.
Nazis, French Porn, and Film Studies: Bernard Natan's Strange Saga
By Thomas Doherty
Mention Bernard Natan to even the most obsessive connoisseur of French cinema and you’re liable to get a blank stare. If recognized at all, the name might call up a vague association with sleaze and scandal. "Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect.
Natan, né Natan Tannenzapf, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth. Following a sensational trial laced with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was sentenced to four years in the Prison de la Santé, in Paris, which is where the Nazis found him. Shipped to Auschwitz, Natan perished in 1943 and promptly vanished—or was he erased?—from historical memory.
Natan seeks to undo the second injustice. At a brisk 66 minutes, it unspools like a much shorter, cinema-centric version of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the searing j’accuse that vaporized the glorious myth of consensual French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Francophilic cinephiles are sometimes afflicted with a similar case of selective amnesia, hailing the subversive frisson of Marcel Carné’sChildren of Paradise (1945) while forgetting the collaborationist filmmakers who adapted to the new regime without missing a beat. A different kind of film noir, Natan unravels the knots in three interlacing threads: the nature of history (whom do we remember and whom do we choose to forget?), the tenacity of French anti-Semitism (where the indigenous variant proves a congenial blend with the imported vintage from Germany), and (here’s where things get strange) the archival shadows of pornography flickering in film studies.
The outlines of Natan’s biography read like a Gallic version of an American rags-to-riches story featuring a colorful hustler who might have fit in well with the moguls who built an empire of their own in Hollywood. A self-made Frenchman, perhaps in nothing so much as his passion for the emerging art of the century, Natan arrived in Paris when the city was still reeling from the actualités of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the prestidigitation of Georges Méliès. Hitting the ground floor running, Natan took any gig available: lab worker and projectionist, tripod carrier and camera-cranker, and, in 1910, an outré credit—probably on a nudie film—that earned him a hefty fine and jail time for trafficking in obscene material. Still, he assimilated with a vengeance, marrying a French Catholic and enlisting in the French army during the Great War. His heroic service at the front was his passport to French citizenship; it also got the prewar bust for obscenity expunged from his record.
Mustered out, Natan assumed a prominent role in rebuilding an industry left prostrate by the Great War and plowed under by Hollywood imports. He acquired exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, built high-quality processing plants for developing and duping prints, and moved into the production of top-line features, most notably the patriotic blockbuster The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne. Both a detail-oriented manager and a big-picture man, Natan kept a hand in all ends of the business, from the chemicals used in the labs to the interior design of the theaters.
Even before the onset of sound, in 1927, Charles Pathé had lamented that there was no more money to be made from motion pictures. Natan knew better. In 1929 he bought out Pathé—whose "crowing rooster" logo was as much an emblem of ur-Frenchness as the Eiffel Tower—and, under the name Pathé-Natan, set about consolidating his various holdings into a vertically integrated business, a streamlined system of production, distribution, and exhibition, just like the major Hollywood studios. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded—creating big-budget, must-see feature films, building a fleet of ornate theaters, and bringing technical innovations like sound and Technicolor to the French screen. Among the 70 or so feature attractions produced under his shingle are two enduring classics by the director Raymond Bernard: Wooden Crosses (1932), a grim, trench-level slog through the Great War, and Les Misérables (1934), a prestige literary adaptation that, as the documentarians Duane and Cairns cannily note, probably had a personal reverberation for Natan, with its theme of a powerful man haunted by a petty crime from his past.
So far, so business-as-usual, not unlike a TCM documentary on Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. But then the story detours into a distinctly French quarter. In December 1938, at the height of his power, Natan was hobbled by two indictments, that he was a swindler and a Jew. He could mount a defense against only one. More-scandalous allegations were whispered—actually, in the right-wing press, shouted: that Natan’s long-ago brush with the law was no youthful indiscretion but part of a pattern of perversity. Despite his high profile and respected position, the coverage suggested, the slick foreigner was still peddling pornographic films to an underground market of like-minded lechers. The charges were straight from the playbook of the Nazi propagandists, echoing the double-barreled libels of Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, where the Jew was depicted as an invasive virus sucking the life out of the body politic while defiling the purity of the native bloodline.
Unfolding from January to June 1939, trumpeted in lurid press headlines, the criminal case against Natan involved cooked books, stock manipulation, and dummy holding companies. In brief, he was accused of robbing his own company blind and cheating the stockholders. He confessed to manipulating funds—but only, he insisted, to keep his company afloat, not to bilk the stockholders. Unmoved, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. In 1940, under the Third Republic and still before the Nazi invasion, the sentence was extended to five years. The next year, a Vichy court deprived him of the French citizenship he had won during the Great War. When the Nazis requested custody of Natan (according to the French Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, Natan was one of only two French Jews targeted by name, the other being Léon Blum, the former prime minister), the Vichy authorities readily complied. As the French film historian Georges Sadoul remarked, Natan’s prison cell served as the "antechamber to the oven of the crematorium."
The obvious French back story to l’affaire Natan is the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whom the French military railroaded into Devil’s Island on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1895. "You might call this the Dreyfus affair of cinema," says the director and actor Frédéric Tachou. But the criminal charges against Natan are a bit harder to disentangle. In 1940, the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which had no dog in the fight, reviewed what it called "the largest scandal ever recorded in the French cinema world" and came down hard on the man in the cross hairs of the French justice system: Natan "built up a monster organization without sound financial foundation and it collapsed of its own dead weight, although it required more than 10 years to bring him to justice."
Nonetheless, a cadre of French film historians has been adamant that Natan was set up; that, despite his confession, he was no less a victim of anti-Semitic hysteria than Dreyfus. André Rossel-Kirschen, Natan’s nephew and the author of Pathé-Natan: the True History, published in France in 2004, attacked the legend of the "swindler Natan" as a smear by greedy business interests seeking to gain control of a company that was not a hollowed-out shell but a solid moneymaker—that, in fact, was always in the black. The French historian Gilles Willems, another diligent researcher in the archives of Pathé, also scorns "the tenacious legend" regarding "the Jewish swindler of Romanian descent, Bernard Natan, who acquired the great Pathé firm the better to pillage it."
For film scholars lacking a Cpa license, the labyrinthine bookkeeping trail is difficult to follow—a confirmation of the cynical Hollywood adage that the most creative people in the motion-picture business work in the studios' accounting departments. In a blog post on the making of the documentary, the filmmaker Cairns offers what seems a measured appraisal: that Natan "did more good than harm" in the annals of French cinema, and that whatever the nature of his financial malfeasance, he "was scapegoated and punished with a grotesque severity."
Ironically, after getting little more than a footnote in most chronicles of the French cinema, Franco or Anglophone, it would be the more scandalous charge that rescued Natan from his cruel fade to black. In 1993, Joseph W. Slade, a professor of media and culture at Ohio University, published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with the come-hither title "Bernard Natan: France’s Legendary Pornographer." The piece was both salacious and, as it turned out, propitious. Slade was a pioneer in what has since morphed into a full-blown subfield of cinema studies—porn studies. Jump-started by the University of California at Berkeley film professor Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ published in 1989, and lent momentum by her edited collection, Porn Studies, in 2004, the close textual examination of pornography has turned from what was, not so long ago, an indictable offense into an au courant career path in the academy. Feminist critics especially have cultivated a nonprurient interest in porn, seeing in the raw footage an unfiltered lens into the male—and female—psyche, not to say physique.
Despite smirking from the mainstream press, few media scholars today would argue that a multibillion-dollar industry that has thrived since the dawn of cinema is not worthy of serious scrutiny and archival excavation. That consensus is confirmed by the steady inroads of a series of exceptionally well-attended panels at annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and, this spring, the debut of Porn Studies, an academic journal devoted to all things triple-x. If anything, the mainstreaming of porn in media studies has lagged behind its mainstreaming on the motion-picture screen, cable, and the web.
Slade’s article certainly resurrected Natan—not as a forgotten giant of the French film industry, but rather as a priapic smut merchant. Slade charged that even as Natan was consolidating his aboveboard cinematic empire, he "unquestionably turned out some of the most historically significant hard-core footage made during the silent era." More than that, Slade contended that Natan was a featured player in many of the films, exuberantly joining in with the sadomasochism, sodomy, and bestiality. "Natan’s dapper, slightly vulpine figure, capable of stalking or mincing as the role demanded, suited the storylines," he asserted. No prude himself, Slade frankly admired the sheer épater le bourgeois of Natan’s risky moonlighting, pointing out that "as a pornographer," Natan "parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema."
The French, who love a good trans-Atlantic donnybrook over cinema more than a Gitane after dinner, took to the conference-journal-and-cyberspace barricades to defend Natan’s honor. None have been more tenacious than the archivist Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, who on the website Les indépendants du premier siècle, blasted Slade’s "poor knowledge of both the man Bernard Natan and the French cinema in general" and accused him of "slander," "fantasies," and (the mildest cut) "a rich imagination." (Unfortunately, Berg played no role in Natan, because of creative/scholarly/economic differences with the filmmakers.)
Natan resolves the fracas with a montage worth a thousand monographs: the first extended unreeling of Natan’s alleged on-screen acrobatics. Inarguably, the glimpses of proto-porno from the prewar, silent era possess redeeming archival value, from the posed nudes in nickelodeon-era stag films (pretty much the kind of mild erotica you might see on a visit to the Louvre) to the hard-core coupling, and tripling, of the 1920s and 1930s. The most shocking snippet (I have never seen anything like it and, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it) features a randy swain engaging in sexual congress with a mallard. (The French title—Le Canard—sounds far more genteel than the rhyming imperative that is its English billing.) "The ugliest film I have ever seen in my life," says the archivist Serge Bromberg. "We didn’t want to restore it."
But, of course, the best argument for restoration is that without being able to eyeball the primary source, the canard against Natan would persist. Freeze-framing and telescoping in on close-ups of the actor, the filmmakers compare the visage of the energetic star in the French porn with contemporaneous pictures of Natan, plainly showing that the men are not one and the same. The accusation always sounded unlikely—sort of as if David O. Selznick used his off time during Gone With the Wind (1939) to cavort in blue movies shot in 16mm down in the Valley. On camera, Slade now concedes that there may be reasonable doubt as to the identity of the performer and to Natan’s filmography in pornography. "I do not now believe that Natan performed in the films," he wrote me in an email, "but I do think it is likely that he was involved in their making." Although he finds Natan "somewhat maudlin," he is "delighted that Natan is at last getting the attention he deserves, attention long denied him because of the anti-Semitism that has for so long erased him from French film history."
It is odd, though, that a story that hits so many of the buttons of film scholarship—and that is this juicy—has been for so long so forgotten. "I don’t think he has been airbrushed out" of history, says the writer Bart Bull in Natan. "I think he has been deliberately destroyed." Yet it’s hard to gauge how much of the history in any field just slips down the rabbit hole of memory—like say, the story of the unheralded pioneers of American film, Harry and Roy Aitken, who produced The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and how much results from willful acts of historical erasure. However, one can see why historians of French cinema would rather remember the glory that was the cinéma français than they would the political, cultural, and business sadism, the bigotry and hypocrisy, not to mention the seediness intertwined with the triumphs in the story of Bernard Natan.
Appropriately, the most inspired sequence in Natan is also a work of restoration, though not of a pornographic film, at least not as usually defined. A newsreel clip shows Natan in the dock in 1941, at the trial that stripped him of his citizenship, a sequence that Ophuls also unspooled inThe Sorrow and the Pity. "This is not a comedy," sputters Natan, trying to hide from the cameras. "This is a tragedy." Produced by none other than Pathé Cinema, by then a tool of the Nazi occupation, the newsreel dubs in a panicky high-pitched voice for Natan, to make the outcast Jew sound like a squealing rat. Duane and Cairns correct the distortion, rewinding the clip with Natan’s real voice on the soundtrack. "You can hear his real voice in another clip used in the film where he’s telling architects what he wants in his cinemas," Duane told me in an email. "We pitch-shifted the sped-up voice in the trial newsreel until it was closer to the way he really sounded."
The gesture neatly demonstrates that if film can distort and delete history, it can also restore and repair it. "The man is dead," says the narrator at the beginning of Natan. "Even his memory has been destroyed."
No more.
- 6/12/2014
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Silent films shouldn’t be seen alone. Watching movies from the silent era is a participatory experience, a fact driven home this past weekend at the 19th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Unspooling in the seductive environment of the historic Castro Theatre, the three-day event presented a wide variety of films from many countries, including a handful of exciting restorations and discoveries. It was Argentinian film collector Fernando Peña who discovered that an alternate version of Buster Keaton’s 1921 short subject The Blacksmith existed in home-movie form—with four minutes of hilarious, never-before-seen footage—and French archivist Serge Bromberg who unearthed the...
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- 6/4/2014
- by Leonard Maltin
- Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy
Every Labor Day weekend, cinephiles journey out to a small town nestled in a remote corner of southwest Colorado’s San Juan mountain range for the Telluride Film Festival. Production staff are hard at work building state-of-the-art theaters for more than a month before the event and readying for a sudden influx of dedicated filmgoers. Veteran pass holders, staff, and volunteers make the trip largely out of faith in the festival’s superb programming that’s famously kept completely secret up until the day before it begins. The shroud of mystery, the breathtaking scenery of a box canyon and the fact that there are no press lines, competitions, or paparazzi lend a sanctified awe to this complete cinematic immersion. Venturing deep into uncharted storytelling territory with old or new friends make the cost of getting out here and the intensive labor involved with putting it all together worth it each and every time.
- 8/25/2013
- by Lane Scarberry
- SoundOnSight
Reality check on my last full day in Telluride: you can’t see everything. If I go to see Geoff Dyer’s last pick as Guest Director, “Unrelated,” a debut film from director Joanna Hogg from 2007, which was not only the sole film of the six he chose that I hadn’t seen before, but hadn’t even heard of before, I’ll miss seeing Madds Mikkelsen in person with Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Hunt,” a repeat of the Telluride Silver Medallion Tribute from last night – which I missed because I went to the unique performance of Serge Bromberg’s program of early film rarities, “Retour du Flamme.” I figure I can see “The Hunt,” which I also managed to miss in Karlovy Vary, at 6 p.m., when it’s playing without the clip show and interview that is part of the tribute. Dyer chose an eclectic array of fairly contemporary films – i.
- 9/6/2012
- by Meredith Brody
- Thompson on Hollywood
Walt Disney Animation Studios (Wdas) debuted a newly restored digital print of the once-thought-lost 1928 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit animated short .Hungry Hobos. at the Telluride Film Festival on September 2, according to Dave Bossert, producer/creative director and head of special projects for Wdas. The film, which was found in a private film vault in England in 2011, was acquired by Disney that same year and has undergone extensive digital restoration. .Hungry Hobos. will debut in Telluride, Colorado as part of a special animation shorts program presented by leading film historian and restoration expert Serge Bromberg. Also on the program (.Serge Bromberg.s Retour De Flamme.) was a sneak peek at Disney.s newest animated short .Paperman,. which premiered at this year.s Annecy International Animated Film Festival, generating excitement in the industry for its innovative hybrid use of computer animation and hand-drawn techniques.
.Hungry Hobos. was overseen by Walt Disney in...
.Hungry Hobos. was overseen by Walt Disney in...
- 9/5/2012
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Above: Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Love.
The lineup for the 39th Telluride Film Festival has been announced, with the guest programming slot this year being given to Geoff Dyer. His program, along with the Pordenone, Medallion, and Spotlight sections, contain one of the best aspects of the Telluride festival: side-by-side programming of new films with old. Tucked away at the bottom is the program we're most excited about: short films by neglected Hollywood director Jean Negulesco.
Show
The Act Of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark)
Amour (Michael Haneke, Austria)
At Any Price (Ramin Bahrani, Us)
The Attack (Ziad Doueiri, Lebanon/France)
Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany)
The Central Park Five (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon, Us)
Everyday (Michael Winterbottom, UK)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, Us)
The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh, Israel)
Ginger And Rosa (Sally Potter, UK)
The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark)
Hyde Park On Hudson (Roger Michell, Us)
The Iceman (Ariel Vromen,...
The lineup for the 39th Telluride Film Festival has been announced, with the guest programming slot this year being given to Geoff Dyer. His program, along with the Pordenone, Medallion, and Spotlight sections, contain one of the best aspects of the Telluride festival: side-by-side programming of new films with old. Tucked away at the bottom is the program we're most excited about: short films by neglected Hollywood director Jean Negulesco.
Show
The Act Of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark)
Amour (Michael Haneke, Austria)
At Any Price (Ramin Bahrani, Us)
The Attack (Ziad Doueiri, Lebanon/France)
Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany)
The Central Park Five (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon, Us)
Everyday (Michael Winterbottom, UK)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, Us)
The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh, Israel)
Ginger And Rosa (Sally Potter, UK)
The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark)
Hyde Park On Hudson (Roger Michell, Us)
The Iceman (Ariel Vromen,...
- 8/30/2012
- MUBI
The most secretive of the fall festivals has now been unveiled. Kicking off Friday, Telluride 2012 has revealed their line-up, with highlights including Michael Haneke‘s Amour, Ramin Bahrani‘s At Any Price, Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Hunt, Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson, Jacques Audiard‘s Rust & Bone, Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha and Sarah Polley‘s Stories We Tell.
Unfortunately absent are a few major titles, including Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond the Pines, Terrence Malick‘s To the Wonder, Olivier Assayas‘ Something in the Air, but rumors point to Ben Affleck‘s Argo secretly getting a bow there, as they will announce a few more as the festival progresses this weekend. Check out the line-up and press release below, which includes more programs, such as showings of Stalker and Baraka.
The Act Of Killing (d. Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark, 2012)
Amour (d.
Unfortunately absent are a few major titles, including Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond the Pines, Terrence Malick‘s To the Wonder, Olivier Assayas‘ Something in the Air, but rumors point to Ben Affleck‘s Argo secretly getting a bow there, as they will announce a few more as the festival progresses this weekend. Check out the line-up and press release below, which includes more programs, such as showings of Stalker and Baraka.
The Act Of Killing (d. Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark, 2012)
Amour (d.
- 8/30/2012
- by jpraup@gmail.com (thefilmstage.com)
- The Film Stage
First-time director John Kahrs showcases a minimalist black-and-white style with .Paperman,. an innovative animated short about a lonely young man in mid-century New York City who relies on his heart, imagination, a stack of papers.and a little luck.to change his destiny and win the girl of his dreams. In collaboration with producer Kristina Reed, the short makes its theatrical debut in front of .Wreck-It Ralph. on Nov. 2, 2012.
Introducing a groundbreaking technique that seamlessly merges computer-generated and hand-drawn animation techniques, first-time director John Kahrs takes the art of animation in a bold new direction with .Paperman.. Using a minimalist black-and-white style, the short follows the story of a lonely young man in mid-century New York City, whose destiny takes an unexpected turn after a chance meeting with a beautiful woman on his morning commute. Convinced the girl of his dreams is gone forever, he gets a second chance when...
Introducing a groundbreaking technique that seamlessly merges computer-generated and hand-drawn animation techniques, first-time director John Kahrs takes the art of animation in a bold new direction with .Paperman.. Using a minimalist black-and-white style, the short follows the story of a lonely young man in mid-century New York City, whose destiny takes an unexpected turn after a chance meeting with a beautiful woman on his morning commute. Convinced the girl of his dreams is gone forever, he gets a second chance when...
- 6/30/2012
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
With three selected films in the Main Comp (Yousry Nasrallah’s After the Battle, Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love, Walter Salles’ On the Road) and one in the Un Certain Regard section (Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways) you could say that French sales/production/distribution company MK2 are spoiled this year. Where buyers might want to focus their attention is the film that wasn’t yet ready and is posed for a Venice showing in Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air (see pic above).
After The Battle by Yousry Nasrallah
Like Someone In Love by Abbas Kiarostami
On The Road by Walter Salles
A Monkey On My Shoulder by Marion Laine
Fire By Louboutin (Feu By Louboutin) by Bruno Hullin
Kinshasa Kids (Le Diable N’Existe Pas) by Marc Henri Wajnberg
Laurence Anyways by Xavier Dolan
Leadersheep (Tous Au Larzac!) by Christian Rouaud
Nuts (Ouf) by Yann Coridian...
After The Battle by Yousry Nasrallah
Like Someone In Love by Abbas Kiarostami
On The Road by Walter Salles
A Monkey On My Shoulder by Marion Laine
Fire By Louboutin (Feu By Louboutin) by Bruno Hullin
Kinshasa Kids (Le Diable N’Existe Pas) by Marc Henri Wajnberg
Laurence Anyways by Xavier Dolan
Leadersheep (Tous Au Larzac!) by Christian Rouaud
Nuts (Ouf) by Yann Coridian...
- 5/17/2012
- by Eric Lavallee
- IONCINEMA.com
Before attending the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival, the question in the back of my mind was, "With all the classic repertory theaters in Los Angeles, and all the chances to see classic films in 35mm or even 70mm on the big screen, what can TCM offer that the other screening series can't?"
The answer, I soon discovered, is that TCM offers a real festival experience. Attending only two sessions, I spent over 12 hours going from screening to screening, watching movies, studying the schedule closely and making hard decisions about what to see, all without a single break. And though I never found time to eat, at the day's end I emerged with the pleasant, gorged feeling experienced after any satisfying film festival.
The most incredible event was the program titled "A Trip to the Moon and Other Trips through Time, Color and Space." I was attracted to the screening by...
The answer, I soon discovered, is that TCM offers a real festival experience. Attending only two sessions, I spent over 12 hours going from screening to screening, watching movies, studying the schedule closely and making hard decisions about what to see, all without a single break. And though I never found time to eat, at the day's end I emerged with the pleasant, gorged feeling experienced after any satisfying film festival.
The most incredible event was the program titled "A Trip to the Moon and Other Trips through Time, Color and Space." I was attracted to the screening by...
- 4/23/2012
- by Jonathan Weichsel
- Planet Fury
Omar Sy, François Cluzet, The Intouchables Among the three dozen or so films screening at the City of Lights / City of Angels (Colcoa) French film festival currently being held in Los Angeles, you'll find a couple of restored classics, several César nominees, and one of the biggest box-office hits in French history. Georges Méliès' 1902 short Le voyage dans la lune / A Trip to the Moon, inspired by Jules Verne's novel, is one of the restored classics to be screened at Colcoa. Méliès' short will be accompanied by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange's Le Voyage extraordinaire / The Extraordinary Voyage, about the making and the restoration of A Trip to the Moon. The festival's other classic presentation is Marcel Carné's 1938 drama Hôtel du Nord, with Arletty, Louis Jouvet, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Tyrone Power's future wife Annabella, the recently deceased Paulette Dubost, and Bernard Blier. Those ignorant about the...
- 4/17/2012
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
The 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival has unveiled another spectacular lineup of special guests and events for this year’s four-day gathering in Hollywood. Among the newly announced participants for this year’s festival are five-time Emmy® winner Dick Van Dyke, Oscar® winner Shirley Jones, two-time Golden Globe® winner Angie Dickinson, six-time Golden Globe nominee Robert Wagner, seven-time Oscar nominee Norman Jewison, longtime producer A.C. Lyles and three-time Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker. In addition, the festival will feature a special three-film tribute to director/choreographer Stanley Donen, who will be on-hand for the celebration.
As part of its overall Style and the Movies theme, the festival has added several films featuring the work of pioneering costume designer Travis Banton. Oscar-nominated costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis will introduce the six-movie slate, with actress and former Essentials co-host Rose McGowan joining her for one of the screenings.
Other festival additions include a screening...
As part of its overall Style and the Movies theme, the festival has added several films featuring the work of pioneering costume designer Travis Banton. Oscar-nominated costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis will introduce the six-movie slate, with actress and former Essentials co-host Rose McGowan joining her for one of the screenings.
Other festival additions include a screening...
- 3/9/2012
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
The 41st edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam was a programme full of audience-friendly features, significant guest-directors, new festival locations, unexpected discoveries and even experimental productions, giving insight on what happens globally on the film market.
In such a formidable maze of screenings and events, first thing for every attendant would be to restrain the options and so I did: getting “specialized” for a few days in French, Canadian, Indian, Romanian, Hungarian and Portuguese productions, adding to it, just a few of those highlighted events that make any festival a festive occasion and some features of the Tiger Competition. So at the end of my stay I could sum up 26 movies, a few meetings and an interview with the most influential guest of the 41st Iffr, Takashi Miike.
I was glad to see that the public is taken seriously in Rotterdam offering them intriguing and valuable movies to watch. I...
In such a formidable maze of screenings and events, first thing for every attendant would be to restrain the options and so I did: getting “specialized” for a few days in French, Canadian, Indian, Romanian, Hungarian and Portuguese productions, adding to it, just a few of those highlighted events that make any festival a festive occasion and some features of the Tiger Competition. So at the end of my stay I could sum up 26 movies, a few meetings and an interview with the most influential guest of the 41st Iffr, Takashi Miike.
I was glad to see that the public is taken seriously in Rotterdam offering them intriguing and valuable movies to watch. I...
- 2/14/2012
- by Boglarka Nagy
- DearCinema.com
The Extraordinary Voyage (Le voyage extraordinaire)/A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune)
Directed by: Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange/Georges Mélies
Cast: Georges Mélies, Michel Gondry
Running Time: 60 min/14 min
Rating: Not Rated
Showtimes at Piff: Friday 2/10 8:45Pm at World Trade Center Theater and Sunday 2/12 at 3:00Pm at Whitsell Auditorium Complete Piff Schedule
Plot: The Extraordinary Voyage tells the story of Georges Mélies and his creation of A Trip to the Moon. It also tells the story of the discovery of a colorized version and its restoration over almost a decade. Followed by a screening is the remastered version of the short film.
Who’S It For? Filmgoers who saw Hugo and want to know more about the film that inspired it.
Overall
Every few years, someone makes an homage to Georges Mélies and his most famous film, A Trip to the Moon. Smashing...
Directed by: Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange/Georges Mélies
Cast: Georges Mélies, Michel Gondry
Running Time: 60 min/14 min
Rating: Not Rated
Showtimes at Piff: Friday 2/10 8:45Pm at World Trade Center Theater and Sunday 2/12 at 3:00Pm at Whitsell Auditorium Complete Piff Schedule
Plot: The Extraordinary Voyage tells the story of Georges Mélies and his creation of A Trip to the Moon. It also tells the story of the discovery of a colorized version and its restoration over almost a decade. Followed by a screening is the remastered version of the short film.
Who’S It For? Filmgoers who saw Hugo and want to know more about the film that inspired it.
Overall
Every few years, someone makes an homage to Georges Mélies and his most famous film, A Trip to the Moon. Smashing...
- 2/10/2012
- by Megan Lehar
- The Scorecard Review
The International Film Festival Rotterdam has announced the lineup for Regained, a "renewed" section of the Signals program devoted to what it calls "the memory of film." This year's edition promises a broader ranges of genres and "will consist not only of film projections, but also exhibitions, presentations and events."
To mark the 150th anniversary of Georges Méliès's birth, Regained will present Martin Scorsese's Hugo, the newly restored Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) and Serge Bromberg's documentary on the restoration, Le Voyage extraordinaire. "In addition, under the title Retour de Flamme, Bromberg will be opening up his box of tricks for us with a live presentation of a series of unique cartoons illustrating how the 3D-effect has been stimulating animators’ imaginations for decades."
The world premiere of Martina Kudlácek's Fragments of Kubelka will be accompanied by screenings of seven of Peter Kubelka's shorts made between 1955 and 2003.
Richard Goldgewicht's Pablo,...
To mark the 150th anniversary of Georges Méliès's birth, Regained will present Martin Scorsese's Hugo, the newly restored Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) and Serge Bromberg's documentary on the restoration, Le Voyage extraordinaire. "In addition, under the title Retour de Flamme, Bromberg will be opening up his box of tricks for us with a live presentation of a series of unique cartoons illustrating how the 3D-effect has been stimulating animators’ imaginations for decades."
The world premiere of Martina Kudlácek's Fragments of Kubelka will be accompanied by screenings of seven of Peter Kubelka's shorts made between 1955 and 2003.
Richard Goldgewicht's Pablo,...
- 1/9/2012
- MUBI
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has unveiled additional programming and events for the 2012 edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival, including a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Paramount Pictures. Robert Evans, longtime producer and former head of production for Paramount, is set to take part in the tribute, which will focus on the studio’s 1970s renaissance. In addition, the TCM Classic Film Festival is slated to include a look at The Noir Style, a tribute to legendary costume designer Travis Banton, a look at art deco in the movies, a collection of early cinematic rarities and much more.
TCM.s own Robert Osborne will once again serve as official host for the four-day, star-studded event, which will take pace Thursday, April 12 . Sunday, April 15, 2012, in Hollywood. Passes are on sale now through the official festival website: http://www.tcm.com/festival.
The Paramount Renaissance
The TCM Classic Film Festival will...
TCM.s own Robert Osborne will once again serve as official host for the four-day, star-studded event, which will take pace Thursday, April 12 . Sunday, April 15, 2012, in Hollywood. Passes are on sale now through the official festival website: http://www.tcm.com/festival.
The Paramount Renaissance
The TCM Classic Film Festival will...
- 12/19/2011
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Clouzot and Romy Schneider on the set of L'Enfer
"Watching a film by the French master Henri-Georges Clouzot, you often feel as if the walls were closing in on you — even when there are no walls," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "The Wages of Fear (1953), the movie that opens the Museum of Modern Art's Clouzot retrospective [today], takes place almost entirely out of doors, yet it's as claustrophobic as a stretch in solitary confinement…. It is perhaps fortunate, for the sanity of his viewers, that he managed to complete only 11 features between 1942, when his deceptively light-hearted L'Assassin Habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at No. 21) was released, and 1968, when his last movie, La Prisonnière, came out.... All 11 will be screened before the series ends on Dec 24, along with odds and ends like a couple of early-40s pictures for which he supplied screenplays and a 2010 documentary, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno,...
"Watching a film by the French master Henri-Georges Clouzot, you often feel as if the walls were closing in on you — even when there are no walls," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "The Wages of Fear (1953), the movie that opens the Museum of Modern Art's Clouzot retrospective [today], takes place almost entirely out of doors, yet it's as claustrophobic as a stretch in solitary confinement…. It is perhaps fortunate, for the sanity of his viewers, that he managed to complete only 11 features between 1942, when his deceptively light-hearted L'Assassin Habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at No. 21) was released, and 1968, when his last movie, La Prisonnière, came out.... All 11 will be screened before the series ends on Dec 24, along with odds and ends like a couple of early-40s pictures for which he supplied screenplays and a 2010 documentary, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno,...
- 12/10/2011
- MUBI
Of all the fall movies, the one that hit me in the solar plexus, made me laugh and cry, and struck me as a likely Oscar contender in multiple categories, was heartfelt low-budget comedy The Descendants (November 18), Alexander Payne’s return to the screen, after winning best original screenplay (with Jim Taylor) for 2004’s Sideways. “Alexander should make more movies,” George Clooney told me at Telluride. Of course he should, but this is the one Payne was able to get made. And it was worth the wait. (Here's my Telluride review.) In Telluride, I interviewed the laconic writer-director as we walked from one theater to another. He'd rather watch movies than talk about them, and convinced me to check out Serge Bromberg's night of rare ...
- 10/18/2011
- Thompson on Hollywood
Northern California Premiere of Restoration
Palo Alto, CA - The Palo Alto International Film Festival (Paiff 9/29-10/02 ) is thrilled to announce that it will present the northern California premiere of Georges Méliès’ masterpiece, .A Trip to the Moon. (1902), in its original color version on Saturday, October 1, for two special screenings at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. The restoration was carried out by Lobster Films, Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage and Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema. Prior to each screening, Tom Burton (Technicolor), who supervised the restoration, will speak about the process of restoring 13,324 severely damaged color frames.
The color version of .A Trip to the Moon. premiered at the Cannes Film Festival during the Opening evening, on May 11, 2011, 109 years after its first release a fully restored color version is once again visible on screen, after being considered lost.
The digital restoration of Méliès’ masterpiece took place at Technicolor Creative Services in Los Angeles,...
Palo Alto, CA - The Palo Alto International Film Festival (Paiff 9/29-10/02 ) is thrilled to announce that it will present the northern California premiere of Georges Méliès’ masterpiece, .A Trip to the Moon. (1902), in its original color version on Saturday, October 1, for two special screenings at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. The restoration was carried out by Lobster Films, Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage and Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema. Prior to each screening, Tom Burton (Technicolor), who supervised the restoration, will speak about the process of restoring 13,324 severely damaged color frames.
The color version of .A Trip to the Moon. premiered at the Cannes Film Festival during the Opening evening, on May 11, 2011, 109 years after its first release a fully restored color version is once again visible on screen, after being considered lost.
The digital restoration of Méliès’ masterpiece took place at Technicolor Creative Services in Los Angeles,...
- 9/19/2011
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Telluride 2011, Day 4: ‘Shame’, ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’, Tilda, and the future of film history
Telluride 2011, Day 4
Tilda Swinton is the ideal Telluride guest. She’s just famous enough to provide the fest with a bit of an exclusive sheen, but she has more than enough credibility as an artist to suit the fest’s reputation of catering to people who are serious about film. At the public tribute and Q&A that accompanied the screening of We Need to Talk About Kevin, another good reason for her selection emerged: the line of questioning trended towards both the film festivals she has been organizing back in Scotland, and her sense of family. The Telluride fest crew often give the impression of being one hyper-extended global family connected by their love of film and their belief in it as a sacred place to gather in and around – and of the town of Telluride itself as an ideal vessel for that love.
That feeling was only reinforced...
Tilda Swinton is the ideal Telluride guest. She’s just famous enough to provide the fest with a bit of an exclusive sheen, but she has more than enough credibility as an artist to suit the fest’s reputation of catering to people who are serious about film. At the public tribute and Q&A that accompanied the screening of We Need to Talk About Kevin, another good reason for her selection emerged: the line of questioning trended towards both the film festivals she has been organizing back in Scotland, and her sense of family. The Telluride fest crew often give the impression of being one hyper-extended global family connected by their love of film and their belief in it as a sacred place to gather in and around – and of the town of Telluride itself as an ideal vessel for that love.
That feeling was only reinforced...
- 9/7/2011
- by Simon Howell
- SoundOnSight
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