‘Countries’ Archives
The Eye and the Ear
UK, 1945, black and white, 11 mins. Of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson's three surviving films, The Eye and the Ear is much the most successful, and one can only regret that their extensive interests in other fields precluded them making any more in a similar vein. As the title implies, and the explanatory intertitles explain in [...]
Calling Mr Smith
UK, 1944, black and white, 8 minsThe first of two films made by the husband-and-wife team of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson in Britain towards the end of World War II, Calling Mr Smith is a visually virtuosic, despairingly bleak piece of anti-Nazi propaganda that tries to open British audiences' eyes not merely to the physical destruction of [...]
The Adventure of a Good Citizen
Przygoda człowieka poczciwego Poland, 1937, black and white, 10 minsThe last of five films made by the husband-and-wife team of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson in their native Poland, The Adventure of a Good Citizen is the only one to have survived World War II - indeed, it's one of the few remaining examples of what by all accounts was a [...]
Agnieszka Holland DVD Box
I meant to review the four titles in Telewizja Kinopolska's DVD box set of Agnieszka Holland's first four films (one's a collaborative exercise) in more detail, but it's so long since I watched them that I'm in danger of forgetting salient bits. So here's a quick précis: Screen Tests (Zdjęcia próbne, 1977): a three-part portmanteau film [...]
Kinoteka 2009
The Kinoteka Film Festiwal (or, more prosaically, London's seventh annual Polish film festival) has just announced its full programme - and very impressive it is too, offering a mixture of recent Polish films and important retrospectives, including the extraordinary Polish New Wave season at Tate Modern. I say "extraordinary" partly because it's [...]
What You Got?
23 January sees the launch of the Barbican's What You Got? season, a triple tribute to rebel icons James Dean, Gérard Philipe and Zbigniew Cybulski. As far as Cybulski is concerned, Andrzej Wajda's seminal Ashes and Diamonds (Popioł i diament, 1958) unsurprisingly gets the most prominent slot, being the opening gala on 23rd January at 19:30, [...]
40th Hungarian Film Week
The 40th Hungarian Film Week is running from 27 January to 3 February 2009, and Magyar Filmunió have just announced the final line-up. In total, 101 recent Hungarian productions are screening across five categories (feature, short, documentary, scientific, television), including 26 new feature films. Seven of the competition entries are by [...]
Polish Traces
If all goes according to plan, by the time this post appears I'll have just landed in Warsaw, where I'm spending what promises to be four fascinating days as a guest of the Filmoteka Narodowa, the main Polish film archive. To mark this year's centenary of Polish cinema, they wrote to their counterparts abroad to ask if they had any pre-1945 [...]
The Investigator
A nyomozó Hungary, 2008, colour, 110 minsBy some distance the most enjoyable new Hungarian film I've seen this year, Attila Gigor's feature debut owes a huge amount to traditional noir-styled murder mysteries, but gives all the familiar ingredients a genuinely original spin - while injecting plenty of deliciously dry black comedy into the [...]
Remnants of the Black Wave
Via Popkitchen, a brief introduction to Yugoslav cinema's 1960s 'black wave'.