Penang (Malaysia) 1997

PENANG'S 1st EAST ASIA FILM AND TELEVISION FESTIVAL LIKE the Hong Kong film industry, Iran has already had fifty years of filmmaking, amounting to the production of 1,200 films in that time. Few national cinemas have had to go through the changes and pressures that Iranian filmmaking has been subjected to from the Shah era of the 1970s to the tumultuous revolutionary days of the Ayatollah Khomeini to the recent creative years. In fact as early as 1989, the Hong Kong International Film Festival was showing Iranian features like Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The Peddlar and Dariush Farhang's The Spell. Despite their difficulties, Iranian filmmakers have tenaciously held on to their art. This year, with much persistence, they have shown to the world that their cinema is more than children's films or propaganda. Even before Abbas Kiarostami's The Taste of Cherry (Ta'm-e Gilass) shared this May's Cannes Palme d'Or with The..

Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon in Colour

GEORGES MÉLIÈS: A TRIP TO THE MOON IN COLOURWithout doubt, the DVD medium can now be considered as a kind of video establishment. Even the more recent Blu-ray disc (BD) is becoming a familiar sight in home theatres. Thousands of new movie titles, many in parallel editions are flooding the video stores, while the prices are sinking, pushed down by generous sales. Moreover, the restoration of old films, shattering cultural, geographical and temporal boundaries are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated, taking advantage of advanced restoration technologies...

Pierre Étaix 5-DVD SET

PIERRE ÉTAIX 5-DVD SET The heyday of the slapstick is long past but this comedy form, perhaps the most filmic of all motion picture genres has not really disappeared. Some of its finest post-WWII accomplishments exist in the work of two famous French film comedians: Jacques Tati (1907-82), the creator of the unforgettable Monsieur Hulot and a generation younger, Pierre Étaix (b. 1928) - the master of subtle visual humour recalling Buster Keaton and Max Linder, the French genius of pre-WWI slapstick, and an inspiration of Chaplin. Étaix was undeniably influenced by Tati whom he met in 1954 and worked with for several years; he was assistant-director in Tati's MyUncle where he also played a minor role...

Film's Illusions

FILM'S ILLUSIONS: KULESHOV REVISITED FOR a century, moving images have been captivating millions around the world. Yet many of the attractions which bring people into cinema theatres and, more recently, which fix their eyes to television screens for hours on end, are only illusions. We say "movies" but no movement exists in film -- it is produced in the spectator's mind. The mechanics of this illusion is explained today with reference to two optical phenomena: The persistence of vision, described theoretically by Peter Mark Roget in 1824, and the so-called phi-phenomenon, also known as "stroboscopic effect," discovered by the gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer.(1) These two effects permit the human brain to perceive a series of related static images (more precisely, motion phases) as a continuous motion. It is this illusion that permits the existence of moving pictures and, more recently, television. Unlike the motion pictures, which need only..

Ekofilm 97

IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE that the fairy-tale Southern Bohemian town of Český Krumlov became the site of the 23rd Festival of Film and Video programmes on Environment (EKOFILM 97). Cesky Krumlov, which is on the UNESCO's world cultural and natural heritage list, taking over the EKOFILM from the North Moravian Ostrava which hosted the festival since its inception during the communist rule in the mid-1970s. In those difficult days this festival was, as its present director Dr. Bedřich Moldán says, one of the "rare islands of renewed and fresh normality within an abnormal world." Some people see a deeper symbolism behind EKOFILM's new home: the steel-city Ostrava (a kind of Czech Detroit), was an example of environmental devastation while Český Krumlov, a few years ago still a neglected, dilapidating town, has been undergoing a careful restoration, revealing the Sleeping-Beauty charms of its medieval architecture...

A History of Narrative Film

A CURSORY EXAMINATION of the Third edition of David Cook's film history already reveals an impressive publication. The more then a thousand pages of dense text include 1,500 colour and monochrome illustrations, a glossary with 250 terms, a bibliography of over 2,000 titles on the history and theory of cinema, and an extensive index. This new edition does not fundamentally change Cook's approach used in the earlier editions (1981 and 1990) -- it simply makes the good even better. Examining narrative film medium's history from its inception up to the mid 1990s, Cook has thoroughly updated the entire text, including the bibliography; he has also added several new sections, such as those on ethnic cinema, Scandinavian and New Spanish cinema. Particularly commendable is the inclusion of many inadequately explored or neglected spots on the world film map: Baltic (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia); Transcaucasian (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan); Central Asian (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,..

The Film Studies Dictionary

SEMANTIC VAGUENESS has been a typical feature of cinema's professional terminology and taxonomy, a problem which exists both in the academic circles of film studies and among film-makers themselves. Moreover, it is amplified by fashionable but meaningless jargon of some film reviewers and commercial newspeak, the intention of which is often disinformation in the first place. Over the past decades, a few attempts have been made to improve this situation through the publication of film term glossaries and dictionaries, including Geduld-Gottesman's An Illustrated Glossary of Film Terms (1973), S. E. Browne's Film-Video Terms and Concepts (1992) and F. Beaver's Dictionary of Film Terms (1994). A major difficulty facing film dictionary writers has been whether to aim at the practical filmmaker or academic theorist; uniting these two user groups has not always been successful. Another problem plaguing some of these reference publications has been that the entries did not go beyond..

100 Years of Cinema

100 YEARS OF CINEMA: REMEMBERING BOLESLAW MATUSZEWSKI In 1995, the eyes of the film world seem to look back upon that celebrated December day a century ago, when the first moving images of Louis and Auguste Lumière flickered on the screen in the Indian Salon inside the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. But there was another man who lived in that same time and place, a long-forgotten visionary without whom we might have very little to celebrate today: Boleslaw Matuszewski. Already in 1898, Matuszewski publicly voiced the idea that films embody values transcending their primary purpose and that the life of a film should not end with its last theatrical presentation. This Polish cameraman, a Lumière employee, proposed that a Motion Pictures Historical Depository (Dépôt de cinématographie historique) be created, thus acknowledging the significance of preservation of filmed material for posterity. At that time, moving..

Jan Švankmajer

JAN ŠVANKMAJER: THE PRODIGIOUS ANIMATOR FROM PRAGUE The Czech animated-film director, visual artist, and surrealist Jan Švankmajer is one of the most remarkable filmmakers of the last three decades. The influential French film journal Positif considers him, together with the famous Russian animator Yuri Norstein (Tale of Tales), "a giant of contemporary film."(1) The British film critic Julian Petley calls him, along with the Polish directors Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, "...one of the key animators to have emerged in Eastern Europe since the war."(2) Born in 1934, the sixty-years-old director embarked on his filmmaking career in 1964; since then, he has made more than twenty films, mostly shorts.(3) His works are regularly featured at major international competitions, including Annecy, Berlin, Cannes, Mannheim, Toronto, and Oberhausen.(4) For his films, Švankmajer has received over thirty festival prizes and honours. Unfortunately, Švankmajer's philosophically profound, visually rich and..