‘Countries’ Archives
František Vláčil: an introduction
The recent retrospectives and DVD boxes of films by the long-neglected Japanese master Mikio Naruse serve to emphasise the wealth of important cinema that still remains to be discovered outside the established canons. František Vláčil (1924-1999) may be Naruse's closest equivalent in Czech cinema, not because their aesthetic and thematic [...]
The Devil’s Trap
Ďáblova past. Czechoslovakia, 1961, black and white, 87 minsFrantišek Vláčil's second feature was the first of a loose trilogy set in the distant past. All three films (the others being Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees/Údolí včel, both 1967) take place at a time of fundamental ideological conflict and upheaval - in the case [...]
The Banner of Youth
Sztandar Młodych. Poland, 1957, tinted monochrome, 3 mins. A three-minute advertisement for the Polish Communist daily youth newspaper Sztandar Młodych ('Banner of Youth'), this is a more or less exact equivalent of the films that Len Lye made for the GPO Film Unit in Britain twenty years earlier. Lye's A Colour Box (1935) was an [...]
In the Time of King Krakus
Za króla Krakusa. Poland, 1947, black and white, 14 mins. One of the peculiarities of Polish film hisory is the almost perfect separation between the pre-1939 and post-1945 eras, for reasons that the dates themselves spell out all too clearly. Many Polish filmmakers didn't survive World War II, while others chose not to [...]
Pawel Łoziński DVD
The latest entry in NInA (formerly PWA)'s superlative Polish School of the Documentary (Polska Szkoła Dokumentu) has just been announced, and it's a survey of films by Pawel Łoziński, son of Marcel.The press release is currently in Polish only, but Culture.pl has an English-language career overview, and the two discs contain the following [...]
Paradjanov Festival 2010
Here's some genuinely thrilling news - March 2010 sees a major multimedia retrospective of the unclassifiable work of the great Armenian-born Soviet-persecuted filmmaker-artist Sergei Paradjanov, to be staged in multiple venues across London and Bristol. The website is already pretty comprehensive, even though it doesn't include full timetables [...]
Polart: new Polish DVDs
Polart Video in the US have announced three new releases, one of which, Andrzej Wajda's Katyń, is widely available elsewhere (it's even out on Blu-ray in Poland), but I think the other two are exclusive to them.Much the most important is Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948), one of the first major films about the Holocaust, [...]
Lost Polish film discovered
A substantial chunk of a long-believed-lost Polish silent film from 1913 about the 1794 uprising against Prussia and Russia (a short-lived victory for the Poles before their country vanished as an independent nation between 1795 and 1918) has turned up in a flat in Kraków. Thenews.pl has the full story - and it looks like being the most [...]
Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe
Édes Emma, drága Böbe Hungary, 1992, colour, 81 mins. István Szabó’s return to his native Hungary after over a decade of international acclaim produced a film that’s a stark contrast not only to the glossy, star-studded production values of Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985), Hanussen (1988) and Meeting Venus (1991), but [...]
Alpine alliances
A three-day co-production market is being staged as a sidebar of the Les Arcs Film Festival in the eponymous French ski resort.Projects being discussed and hopefully packaged include new features from Attila Gigor (whose The Investigator was one of the brightest Hungarian debuts in recent years), his compatriots Bálint Kenyeres, Réka Kincses and [...]