I’ve been pretty silent for a few months about my on-going, still-untitled documentary on Winnipeg movie theatres. The reason for that was a massive case of creative block which had me stumped. Faced with the material (28 interviews of various lengths, a slowly accumulating collection of archival and personal photos, a small amount of video […]
Watching Betrand Tavernier’s sombre, moving Death Watch (1980) recently, I started wondering about mainstream filmmakers who tried their hand just once at science fiction. While Tavernier’s film fits in with the humanistic themes which run through his work, was there a similar thematic consistency in other directors’ forays into the genre? Shot mostly on bleak […]
After decades of neglect (at best) or even active suppression, the release of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) on DVD should be cause for celebration, particularly as it arrives in a 2-disk special edition from the prestigious British Film Institute. But the problems which have plagued the film since even before its release continue to […]
My parents knew Charles Lightoller, 2nd Officer on the Titanic; these photos show my father on a trip to Calais in 1939 with the Commander.
I used to like Mel Gibson, particularly in his early, Australian period. I’m still a big fan of the Mad Max trilogy (1979-85), and although they may not seem quite as impressive now as when they were first released, Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) are both still worth watching. […]
Anthony Burgess wrote his short novel A Clockwork Orange in 1962 as a way of coming to terms with the rape of his first wife. It may seem odd then that the book takes the first person point of view of Alex, a 14-year-old boy, who commits numerous crimes, including rape and murder. In addition, […]
I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in St. John’s, Newfoundland, when I was 13. Like a lot of people back then, I responded to it as an “experience” rather than a narrative. I don’t think I even thought about what it might “mean”, I just got caught up in the imagery, the […]
I had an interesting evening last Friday, thanks to Dave Barber at the Cinematheque. Dave and his co-workers at the WFG brought Craig Baldwin in from San Francisco for a weekend workshop on found-footage filmmaking. I didn’t have time for the workshop itself, but did make it to the Friday night screening of Tribulation 99 […]
By 1964, Stanley Kubrick had been honing his filmmaking skills for more than ten years in a series of increasingly ambitious projects, all of which were somewhat conventional in terms of form and content – film noir, historical epic, war film. Even Lolita, although the subject matter pushed accepted boundaries, is recognizable as melodrama. For […]
After the experience of directing Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick got as far away from Hollywood as he could. He moved to England, where he stayed for the rest of his life and made his eight subsequent features. Interestingly, the first two of those films were both set in the United States, as if despite making the […]