‘Countries’ Archives
The Musicians
Muzykanci Poland, 1960, black and white, 9 minsWhen Sight & Sound magazine ran the fifth of its decennial critics' Top Ten polls of what was alleged to be the best films ever made, they extended the invitation to filmmakers for the first time. As one of the leading arthouse cinema lights at the time (1992) Krzystof Kieślowski's list came [...]
Day In Day Out
Jak co dzień... Poland, 1955, black and white, 12 minsMade as a Łódź Film School project, Day In Day Out, Kazimierz Karabasz' lyrical portrait of the daily morning journey of Warsaw's suburban commuters, has hardly dated at all: my fellow Londoners will find themselves nodding in recognition on numerous occasions, even if hanging onto the [...]
Symmetrical Corpses
I've just watched two Polish films from 2003 back to back. The first, The Body (Ciało), was the first film by the directing duo of Tomasz Konecki and Andrzej Saramonowicz, whose follow-up Testosterone (Testosteron, 2007) I watched last week. In general, the earlier film is superior: much tighter at 94 minutes, funnier and better structured, [...]
Polish précis
A huge workload means I can't do much more than brief jottings on a handful of Polish films that I've seen recently, but here goes: War of the Worlds: Next Century (Wojna światów - następne stulecie, d. Piotr Szulkin, 1981) The sly opening dedication to H.G.Wells and Orson Welles works on at least two levels: as an acknowledgement of the [...]
Jiří Menzel on DVD
Going from private e-mail, last week's Kieślowski DVD survey seemed to have gone down pretty well - so here's a similar overview of Jiří Menzel's output. Unlike the situation with Kieślowski, if you aren't familiar with the Czech DVD market you could be forgiven for thinking that there's next to nothing available besides the inevitable [...]
Krzysztof Kieślowski on DVD
The very welcome arrival of PWA's DVD survey of Krzysztof Kieślowski documentaries earlier today made me realise that of all Polish filmmakers, his output is probably the best represented on English-friendly DVD. So here's a survey of what's available with English subtitles, based on the filmography appended to Culture.pl's admirably thorough [...]
Wajda’s War Trilogy on Film4 this week
I've just discovered that Andrzej Wajda's great war trilogy - A Generation (Pokolenie, 1955), Kanal (Kanał, 1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958) - is being shown on Film4 in the small hours of the next few days (there are two complete screenings scheduled on consecutive nights, starting on the mornings of Tuesday 24th and [...]
Update
Apologies for the lack of updates - things have been insanely busy over the past fortnight, what with the Ken Russell retrospective at BFI Southbank (for which I contributed a 75-minute illustrated talk and met the man himself a few days later) and various other work-related things - including an interview about Jan Švankmajer for MovieMail's [...]
Sight & Sound on Lunacy
OK, I promise the next few posts will be about someone other than Jan Švankmajer, but the BFI has just uploaded a selection from the current Sight & Sound onto its website, including my extended review of Lunacy. (And I should also link to, and enthusiastically recommend, Kinoblog commenter David Sorfa's far more exhaustive analysis on the [...]
BFI Švankmajer DVD in Czech media
I'm taking it on trust that this interview with me in Czech daily paper Hospodářské noviny does a reasonable job of conveying what I originally said in English... Closer to home, more rave reviews of the Švankmajer DVD box have appeared in The Scotsman and Teletext, as well as today's Metro (page 30) - though not, for some reason, the online [...]