Posts Tagged ‘Retrospectives’
The Surrealist Visions of Wojciech Has
Now this is more like it! From October 1-25, London's Barbican Cinema is mounting an ambitious retrospective of the work of Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925-2000) - or rather a partial retrospective, since it only features five films. But I shouldn't complain, since it's an excellent selection that comprises his feature debut Noose (Pętla, 1958), his [...]
Current
Sodrásban Hungary, 1963, black and white, 90 mins Also known as In the Current, this was the debut feature by the 30-year-old István Gaál, and has subsequently been recognised as one of the earliest films of an authentic Hungarian 'new wave'. Gaál had spent two years (1959-61) studying film at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome, and Current [...]
Hungarian New Wave: Melancholy and Silence
During the dozen or so days I spent at the Era New Horizons festival in Wrocław last month, I divided much of my time between compulsory jury duty (i.e. watching all thirteen films in the New Polish Films competition) and sampling as much as my schedule would allow of their mouthwatering 1960s/70s Hungarian retrospective, 'Melancholy and [...]
Polish Paths to Freedom: Sparks of Hope (screening times)
Further to my post last week about the Imperial War Museum's ambitious, very welcome and entirely free series of screenings of Polish films illuminating the country's post-1970s history, they've now confirmed dates and screening times. You can download a PDF document here, but I'm sure they won't mind me reproducing the details for easier [...]
100 Years of Polish Cinema
My friend Kamila has just told me about this extraordinary site, inspired by the Polish Film Institute's commemoration of Polish cinema's centenary (the first truly Polish film is believed to date from 1908). I've only skimmed it so far, but it looks like a fascinating and valuable resource, consisting as it does of individual pages devoted to [...]
Polish Paths to Freedom: Sparks of Hope
Just over a year ago I posted details about the second instalment of the Imperial War Museum's enterprising Polish Paths to Freedom season - a series of films illustrating aspects of twentieth-century Polish history from various perspectives, fiction and non-fiction, contemporary and historical, you name it.They've just announced the line-up for [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
What’s Art Doc?
18 November to 8 December sees the second What's Art Doc? festival being staged across various London venues. It's a collection of documentaries on the subject of artforms and artists made from all over Europe, and has been backed by the European Commission. Unsurprisingly, central and eastern European cinema is very heavily represented, with [...]