Jack Smith Flaming Creatures / 1963 / The screening I saw was presented with a talk by J. Hoberman at The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatrer (Redcat) at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 9, 2009. For years I'd been hearing about the sensational film Flaming Creatures which seemingly influenced filmmakers and dramatists from Andy Warhol, John Waters, and Federico Fellini to Cindy Sherman and...
She was some kind of a woman. Josef von Sternberg may have crafted his own goddess in the form of leggy, sunken-cheek-boned and languid Marlene Dietrich, but Marlene took his tutelage and made herself...Marlene. With classic, otherworldly, baroque beauty (blonde beauty -- which work almost as its own cinematic genre for me) the Sternberg Dietrich duo created their iconic masterstrokes The Blue Angel,...
NYFF – At 25, Filipino director Raya Martin is already prolific, having made about a half dozen shorts and features, his most recent a product of his residency with Cinéfondacion at Cannes. The second in a planned trilogy on imperialism in the Philippines, Independencia concerns the country’s occupation by the United States at the turn of the 20th century, more or less immediately...
With just over 300 titles now included in the Warner Archive Collection, Warner has certainly kept its promise from earlier this year to keep bulking up their selection and, shockingly, have actually been listening to their customers by offering bundle packs and discounts on the DVD-R releases (I remember someone joking in regard to Little Darlings that $20 was pretty steep for a film starring Kristy...
* Notes * The final performance of Parsifal at this year's Bayreuther Festspiele was last night. The orchestra sounded fine under Daniele Gatti, and the chorus was absolutely lovely. The singing was good all around, everyone could be heard, even...
by Ryland Walker Knight The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [Powell & Pressburger, 1943] # Despite the propaganda, there is a critical eye towards tradition. Love the conceit about Kerr playing three ladies, and Wolbrook's tenderness is perfect; Livesey's got stuffy down pat to the point where I don't know how much he's acting. The Flight of the Red Balloon [Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007] # A year later,...
Not many thirtysomething Spanish actresses have been the subject of major retrospectives at London's National Film Theatre. It is a measure of the esteem in which Penelope Cruz is held – and perhaps a testament to her glamour too – that her career is being celebrated in a month long BFI season. The season – for which The Independent is a media partner – launches this weekend...
(Cert 18) What do you do if you're a young film director seeking worldwide recognition, but live in a small country with a language spoken nowhere else? Well, you could emigrate to America as several Scandinavian directors have done. But Lars von Trier, at 53 the oldest enfant terrible in the business, has a phobia about travelling. So after he decided to stay put in Denmark, his basic strategy was...
I first caught Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927) at the Pacific Film Archive von Sternberg retrospective earlier this year accompanied by Judith Rosenberg on piano. I welcomed the opportunity to watch the film again projected on the Castro's giant screen with live piano accompaniment by the indefatigable Stephen Horne for the specific intent of savoring the scene where "Feathers" McCoy...
Caught a terrific silent at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. It was the idea of a collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and one of the all-time great screenwriters, Ben Hecht (who would win an Oscar a few years...
With the virtuosic score, intellectual scintillation, metatheatricality, dramatic boldness and flourishing colour we have come to expect from Rufus Wainwright , his first opera, Prima Donna , premiered last night at the Palace Theatre as part of the Manchester International Festival . Being Rufus, it was also flawed – but grand, magnificent, and always human. The scene is a Paris atelier in 1970,...
[Our thanks to Michael Hawley for this write-up.] July is here—which means it’s time to jump aboard the time machine and set the dial for 1920s San Francisco. The SF Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) returns for its 14th glorious edition this weekend, and lucky Bay Area filmgoers (and scores of devoted out-of-towners) will get to relive the magnificent era of silent movies once more. SFSFF is...
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