For the daytime crowd…
Nighttime drop: 2600 words on King Vidor's The Big Parade, Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, and what Andrew Sarris got wrong (and right) about them. fcardamenis.substack.com/p/the-big-pa...
Bam Adebayo scoring 83 is like if the next James Mangold film were the best film of the 21st century.
Beat you by a minute! Good work though.
If you sign up for the newsletter you get extras each week. That’s where they keep the really hard stuff.
@ryangodfrey.com I was not fast but
Okay Leon Moussinac is crazy for this one.
Jean Epstein on Abel Gance.
I need to watch Oyster Princess (it’s been on my list alongside a few other Lubitsch silents).
Have you seen J’Accuse?
Just published: some thoughts on Philip Cavendish's book on 1920s Soviet cinema and a little-known film that he discusses in passing. fcardamenis.substack.com/p/two-days-g...
Cavendish contends that the directors were a bit insecure and didn't credit their DPs enough, although this is more a criticism of Eisenstein than the others. But I'd be interested to hear your thoughts after you read it!
Cavendish concedes that censorship makes the sound-era films by these directors worse; his claim is that the DPs are still the primary authors of the silent era stuff. I think that's an overstatement, but these were some of the best DPs of the silent era all the same.
Just published: some thoughts on Philip Cavendish's book on 1920s Soviet cinema and a little-known film that he discusses in passing. fcardamenis.substack.com/p/two-days-g...
The Big Parade is so good.
First time I played, but I had no errors and solved in “less than 10 minutes” (I don’t see an exact time). Fun game!
Have watched both the Brownlow/BFI disc of Napoleon and the new restoration this week and the info out there on the differences is terrible. On KG and Reddit both you have people saying 5.5 vs. 7 hours is almost entirely attributable to the change from 20fps to 18. There’s a math problem there!
For what it’s worth, I also hate what he did with Seven and I consider every film he made from Zodiac on to be better than all the movies before it (Mank is fake; do not ask me about Mank), and I really dig The Killer. But I still hate the after-the-fact fuckery!
I'll have a longer report on the festival as a whole in Documentary Magazine soon, but here's a brief recap of my impressions of the expanded cinema I watched in Rotterdam. fcardamenis.substack.com/p/what-i-wat...
I'll have a longer report on the festival as a whole in Documentary Magazine soon, but here's a brief recap of my impressions of the expanded cinema I watched in Rotterdam. fcardamenis.substack.com/p/what-i-wat...
Beau Travail.
Top 2 for me.
This is probably a “me” problem but as I watch all these silent films my esteem for every single director has gone up, with the sole exception of…Murnau. I’m not really buying what this guy is selling! I’m sorry if this offends!
“You know what these tight ends are so relaxed about? Prostate cancer screenings.”
Honeygiver Among the Dogs
My festival pals and I discussed most of these works (and a couple more) on the Moiree podcast here: moiree.transistor.fm/episodes/iff...
The Tiger winner, Variations on a Theme, was my final screening. It’s okay. Special Jury Award winner La Belle Année is also fine.
Back home after a week at IFFR. The film of the festival is Chronovisor, but I had a good time with the Tetsuya Maruyama retrospective, the experimental shorts programs, James N. Kienitz Wilkins The Misconceived, Xacio Baño’s After the Cities, and Roy Cohen’s Far From Maine.
It was constant rotation when I was a kid (we all like Bruce so the CD was in the car) but I’ve probably not listened all the way through in 15-20 years.
