Thursday, 28 January 2010
Гендерной Программы
Uzbek photographer Umida Akhmedova was arrested in Tashkent last month, after police claimed that her photographs insulted Uzbekistan. She has directed several controversial documentaries, though the formal charges relate to a book of her photos, titled Гендерной Программы Посольства Швейцарии, published in 2007.
Saturday, 23 January 2010
Only In New York

Some of Kubrick's contact sheets featuring images of the Copacabana nightclub are included, as are several of his portraits of Walter Cartier (the subject of his film Day Of The Fight), Rocky Graziano, Rosemary Williams, and others. Selections of Kubrick's Look photos have previously been published in several books: Ladro Di Sguardi (direct reproductions from published Look layouts), Still Moving Pictures (an exhibition catalogue), and Drama & Shadows.
Friday, 22 January 2010
Cinema 2000-2009
My favourite films of the decade, in chronological order:
- Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
- Tears Of The Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000)
- Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
- Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002)
- City Of God (Fernando Meirelles & Katia Lund, 2002)
- OldBoy (Park Chan-Wook, 2003)
- Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
- Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
- Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)
- Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (Michael Bay, 2009)
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Melanz Ostateczny

(Last year, Ottmar Horl was threatened with prosecution in Germany, when his Nazi gnome was shown in Nuremberg. However, he was not prosecuted, and he subsequently displayed 1,200 Nazi gnomes in Straubing.)
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Orson Welles At Work

There is a detailed Welles bibliography and filmography, and a brief chronology. Jonathan Rosenbaum's Discovering Orson Welles features a comparable filmography; Peter Bogdanovich's This Is Orson Welles has a more detailed chronology (compiled by Rosenbaum), plus appendices on The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch Of Evil. The ...At Work series also includes Bill Krohn's acclaimed Hitchcock At Work, about Alfred Hitchcock.
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Time Out Film Guide 2010

18,500 films are reviewed in total, mostly taken from Time Out magazine's London cinema listings. While two other annual guides (Radio Times Guide To Films and VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever) include more reviews, they are largely restricted to mainstream films, in contrast to Time Out's unique emphasis on arthouse cinema. Time Out is also the only major guide to resist star-ratings. Unfortunately, though, its thematic index has now been discontinued. (As a substitute, VideoHound includes extensive thematic indexes; the excellent Halliwell's Film Guide has apparently ceased publication, after its awful Movies That Matter edition.)
This new edition reviews thirty-six films which were screened at Cannes last year - including Antichrist ("as wildly implausible as it is provocatively gruesome"), Broken Embraces ("self-reflective melodrama"), Inglourious Basterds ("wild and childish revisionist revenge fantasy"), and Enter The Void ("swirling camerawork, hallucinatory sense of real time and narrative maelstrom of sex, drugs and death") - though they are not yet incorporated into the main alphabetical reviews section.
Monday, 4 January 2010
Psycho In The Shower


Skerry tabulates the shower scene into a series of acts and shots, which reads like a maths textbook: "in this shot, and in the next shot, number 13, which is an almost exact duplicate of number 12"... zzzz. The extended interviews with star Janet Leigh, writer Joseph Stefano, and assistant director Hilton Green are much more interesting. Skerry attempts to debunk some of the rumours which have built up around Psycho, though in doing so he politely contradicts the conflicting accounts of his interviewees. He uses film stills to demonstrate that a knife does cut Leigh's skin in a split-second shot, and that her breasts are visible behind the opaque shower curtain.
The book also contains a previously unpublished photograph of a shot which was cut from all known prints of the film: Leigh's body-double, Marli Renfro, slumped naked over the bath. For Psycho fans, this exclusive photo automatically makes the book worth buying. In his valiant search for "the ur-Psycho", Skerry viewed laserdisc, VHS, DVD, and off-air versions of the film for comparison, though he is apparently unaware of the uncensored print which has been repeatedly broadcast on European TV.
Sunday, 3 January 2010
The Moment Of Psycho

I've seen Psycho more times than I can remember; Hitchcock's low-budget shocker, in which Marion Crane steals $40,000 and is murdered in the shower by Norman Bates, is an ideal case study for anyone interested in filmmaking or film analysis. It arguably epitomises the shift from classical to post-classical Hollywood, and indeed David Bordwell divides Hollywood history into pre-1960 (The Classical Hollywood Cinema) and post-1960 (The Way Hollywood Tells It).
Thomson pays particular attention to the first half of Psycho, up to and including the shower scene. He notes the fatalism in Marion's relationship with her lover, and especially savours the parlour conversation between Marion and Norman ("One needs to see this scene several times to catch all the nuances"). However, he's disappointed by the unconvincing plot device (Norman's schizophrenia) in the film's second act, which, he writes, "is as fabricated and spurious as the first hour is solid and resonant".
The Moment Of Psycho, at less than 200 pages, feels like an extended essay with a lot of padding: a production history of The Birds, a mainly expository summary of Psycho's first half, capsule reviews of films influenced by Psycho, and even a chapter on American highways. It would be more satisfying as a single fifty-page chapter, minus the superfluous digressions.
Appropriately enough, Psycho is one of the most analysed films in cinema history. Raymond Durgnat's scene-by-scene analysis (A Long Hard Look At Psycho), Richard J Anobile's visual guide (The Film Classics Library: Psycho), Stephen Rebello's comprehensive production history (Alfred Hitchcock & The Making Of Psycho), and Philip J Skerry's new study of the shower scene (Psycho In The Shower) are also worth reading.
Saturday, 2 January 2010
Bruno

An early scene featuring a pilot for the fake TV show A-List Celebrity Max Out is hilariously obscene and tasteless ("Keep it or abort it?"; "Bruno!"). Unfortunately, the remainder of the film is little more than a remake of the similarly episodic Borat (also directed by Charles), with the main character supposedly abandoned by his sidekick. The sketches become more drawn-out, less funny, and less plausible as the film goes on.