Three features, a documentary, and a rare short showcase the peculiar pleasures of the late Russian director “Surrealism,” “incitement to suicide,” and my favorite, “traffic in art objects leading to[…]
Directors · Horror · Interviews
Wit and wisdom from the man who created one of cinema’s most enduring genres JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Your background in academics was quite different from that of your partner David Friedman.[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Free-associating with a master of free cinema “Free cinema” has the dull ring of an oxymoron. The extreme level of control required and the mass of pressures that collide in[…]
Asian · Directors · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Resurrection and renewal in postwar Japanese cinema, as seen through Tomu’s 1955 masterpiece Following Japan’s surrender in World War II, the colonial tables were turned. The Chinese took control of[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Abigail Child’s compulsive visual collages are visual and aural legerdemain Since the 1970s, experimental filmmaker and poet Abigail Child has been engaged in a kind of cultural archaeology. Unearthing found[…]
Asian · Directors · Interviews
This article appeared originally in the all-Hong Kong issue of Bright Lights #13 (1994). * * * Hong Kong’s master of balletic blood ‘n bulletplay speaks John Woo, one of[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
The arthouse staple gets a gorgeous makeover in this DVD set brimming with extras Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) has been called the most versatile artist of the twentieth century, and in[…]
Tubercular yakuza, scandalous artists, and postwar paranoids duke it out with the world For a variety of reasons, Western audiences have enshrined Kurosawa as the preferred director of Japan’s golden[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Jordan’s collage films are “moving” in two senses “Animation” connotes many things to us jaded moderns – Bugs Bunny and variants, the dreaded Disney and its hellspawn, Spike and Mike[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
The work of an avant-garde master restored I had the privilege of sitting with Warren Sonbert (1947-1995) at some of San Francisco’s press screenings in the several years that preceded[…]
A bar in a provincial town. A strange dance is underway, with three drunken patrons enacting an eclipse, sun, moon, and earth circling and interposing. The dance is choreographed by[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
SuperRuss speaks! I interviewed Russ Meyer in 1974 at his office in Los Angeles. He answered the door himself, dressed in red jockey shorts with a strip of film dangling over his[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Western Civ gets a brutal debunking courtesy of this South African expat auteur The titles of Ian Kerkhof’s films are both seduction and warning about what to expect from the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
New York’s pioneering campmeister’s flame still sears Not long ago, Fran Lebowitz invoked the sad-comic image of a sailor disembarking in New York, heading to Times Square, and experiencing total[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
The master of Super-8 radical cinema takes us into the cave of the unknown, with extraordinary results The Super-8 camera and projector were once the beloved means by which postwar[…]
The later masterworks of one of cinema’s titans in fine VHS transfers Film has always been considered something of a mongrel art form, inherently populist and therefore of dubious aesthetic[…]
Hitch’s – and by now the whole damn culture’s – seminal Oedipal nightmare revisited Read the companion photo essay “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone”[…]
Making art in the most unlikely circumstances Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) was one of many beneficiaries of the wave of auteurism that galvanized critics in France in the 1950s and[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Plan 9 from Outer Space; Glen or Glenda; Jail Bait; Bride of the Monster One of my fondest memories of a communal movie experience is seeing my first Ed Wood[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
Fun in the New World Corman founded New World in 1970; it was his second attempt to control production and distribution (after the ill-fated Film Group, which lasted a couple[…]
