Parallax View

The Certified Copy (Criterion) of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami’s first European production refers to artworks – Why do we value a reproduction less than an original and what does authenticity even mean? – but resonates just as effectively with the art of filmmaking and its relationship to reproduction and recreation. “It’s our perception that gives it [...]

While The Dictator and Battleship compete for multiplex audiences, the usually robust Seattle film scene has otherwise given a wide berth to the annual event that devours all. Yes, SIFF 2012 has begun. Opening night celebrates local filmmaker Lynn Shelton’s latest, My Sister’s Sister, and by extension an impressive line-up of Washington State-born films. From [...]

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, which runs from Sunday, May 13 through Friday, May 18, 2012, is dedicated to helping the National Film Preservation Foundation raise money to score and stream the recently unearthed reels of The White Shadow, a silent film from director Graham Cutts that young Alfred Hitchcock worked [...]

Cecil B. DeMille’s The Buccaneer is a pirate movie by way of a grand historical adventure a la DeMille. Based loosely on the true story of the French-born “privateer” Jean Lafitte (he preferred the term to pirate), who fought side-by-side with General Andrew Jackson against the British in the War of 1812, it stars Fredric March as [...]

Mario Monicelli, one of the most prolific and popular directors of post-war Italian cinema, never earned a reputation in the U.S. like his compadre, Federico Fellini, despite the international success of numerous films, from Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) to A Very Petit Bourgeois (1977). Perhaps it’s because his preferred genre was comedy, notably the commedia all’italiana, a mix [...]

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, which runs from Sunday, May 13 through Friday, May 18, 2012, is dedicated to helping the National Film Preservation Foundation raise money to score and stream the recently unearthed reels of The White Shadow, a silent film from director Graham Cutts that young Alfred Hitchcock worked [...]

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, which runs from Sunday, May 13 through Friday, May 18, 2012, is dedicated to helping the National Film Preservation Foundation raise money to score and stream the recently unearthed reels of The White Shadow, a silent film from director Graham Cutts that young Alfred Hitchcock worked [...]

There was a vogue for South Seas exotica in the late silent and early sound era, films made up of varying degrees of ethnographic revelation, social commentary, and erotic spectacle. Moana (1926), Robert Flaherty’s documentary portrait of life in Samoa, is the first expression of this idealized screen fantasy (every scene was carefully staged for his cameras), [...]

Tim Burton will try to cast his Dark Shadows across the worldwide domination of The Avengers this weekend, but while these splashy, fantastical Hollywood heavyweights battle it out for box supremacy (and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel reaches out the older demographic), there are plenty of alternatives for discerning filmgoers. The UCLA Festival of Preservation [...]

The Avengers Assemble! But while the superhero supermovie takes over thousands of screens across the country (where the instant audience favorite will surely play to packed houses), Seattle audiences have plenty of alternatives: festivals of films new and old, including the 7th Annual SIFF alternative STIFF and the UCLA Festival of Preservation. Read on for [...]

[originally published in the program for the Grand Illusion Sam Fuller series in 1999] Samuel Fuller straddled two generations: he was the last of that breed of old Hollywood tough guy directors and, along with Orson Welles, one of the first independent mavericks Like Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh and William Wellman he came from [...]

[Originally published in The Seattle Weekly, 1998] You leave behind a lot of the world outside when you step into a Robert Bresson film. One of the most ascetic, uncompromising filmmakers of any age, Bresson strips his films bare. Fastidiously faithful to detail, he shuts out all distractions (and that includes what we might consider [...]

Northwest Film Forum is screening six Robert Bresson films, Tuesdays through Thursdays over the next two weeks (May 1-May 10), so we’re reprinting this essay written for the 1999 Bresson retrospective. [Originally published in slightly different form in The Seattle Weekly, March 24, 1999] It’s a cliché, but it bears repeating: Robert Bresson is an [...]

For first time in its 38 year history, the Seattle International Film Festival—the longest (at 25 days) and best attended film festival in the United States—opens and closes on honest-to-god Seattle films. SIFF 2012 opens on Thursday, May 17 with the local premiere of Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton’s fourth feature Your Sister’s Sister, shot (like [...]

Northwest Film Forum presents Notes on the Cinematographer: The Films of Robert Bresson, a series of six Bresson films (four of them never on DVD in the U.S.) screening on 35mm over the next two weeks. It’s a revisit, in a way, of a similar 1998 touring series organized (as was this one) by James [...]