‘Countries’ Archives
Miklós Jancsó on DVD
To mark the release next Monday of Second Run's long-awaited DVD of Miklós Jancsó's The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, 1965), here's an overview of the surprisingly impressive number of Jancsó DVDs currently in circulation - provided you don't mind shopping around Britain, the US, France, Italy and Hungary. I'll be looking at many of these in [...]
Censorship as a Creative Force
In late April, the Barbican Arts Centre in London is hosting a week-long season, Censorship as a Creative Force, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute, the Czech Centre and the Hungarian Cultural Centre.I've already booked tickets for the two highlights - a panel discussion on April 25 with the extraordinarily impressive line-up of [...]
Six capsules
Here's a quick round-up of films seen recently that were either reviewed in more depth elsewhere, or which I'm unlikely to get round to writing up in full. Katyń (d. Andrzej Wajda, 2007, Poland) A good film from a director who's made several great ones. The reason for my slight disappointment is twofold. Firstly, no mere film could possibly [...]
Katyń DVD: good news and bad news
I'm delighted to confirm that the ITI Home Video release of Wajda's Katyń has English subtitles - or at least the single-disc edition does; I didn't bother with the double-disc one as there's every likelihood that the extras aren't English-friendly. The bad news, though, is that the image has been cropped to 16:9 from the theatrical 2.35:1 - [...]
Polish poll
Despite being considered a hot favourite in some circles, Andrzej Wajda's Katyń failed to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar, being beaten at the final hurdle by the German film The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher). However, Polish Radio's English-language news service puts on a positive spin by pointing out that the largely Polish-made stop-motion [...]
Miklós Jancsó – UK tour details
March 17 sees Second Run's long-awaited DVD release of Miklós Jancsó's masterpiece The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, 1965), and to mark the occasion, the 86-year-old Hungarian master is coming to London, Cambridge and Edinburgh to give a series of interviews and presentations.The schedule is as follows:Friday 14th March – 6.30pm Curzon [...]
Man on the Tracks
Człowiek na torze Poland, 1956, black and white, 80 minsNotwithstanding the fact that The Stars Must Burn (Gwiazdy muszą płonąć, 1954) and Men of the Blue Cross (Błękitny krzyż, 1955) were arguably closer to drama than documentary, Man on the Tracks is generally recognised as Andrzej Munk's first fiction feature. And in many ways this is [...]
Derek Malcolm’s Century of Cinema
While researching something else (as is always the way), I stumbled upon former Guardian critic Derek Malcolm's A Century of Films - a survey of his personal Top 100, with a robust defence of each film's inclusion. And on glancing down the list again for the first time since 2001, I notice that nine of his choices came from central and eastern [...]
Katyń in Berlin
Andrzej Wajda's Katyń has just had its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, with Leslie Felperin's Variety review broadly in line with what seems to be the critical consensus: The 1940 massacre by the Soviets of some 15,000 Polish Army officers at Katyn, Russia, reps the hub from which spokes of drama emanate in the WWII epic [...]
A Walk in the Old Town of Warsaw
Spacerek staromiejski Poland, 1958, colour, 18 minsBy 1958, Andrzej Munk had already begun his second career as a maker of fiction features, and although A Walk in the Old Town of Warsaw was classified as a documentary short (and even won first prize in that category at the Venice International Documentary Festival), it works just as well as a [...]