Ed. note: The movies of Rustam Khamdamov are impossible to find in the West, and for the most part in his native Russia as well. Read this article (to our knowledge the most extensive retrospective of Khamdamov to be found on the Internet in English) to discover how this legendary, and very weird, director has [...]
Guest review by Kevin Pyrtle of WTF-Film
Here in Minneapolis there’s a strange little show [you'll have to forgive me for not remembering the name of it] that plays the public access stations every week or so. It features a host of young talent who frolic in front of a blue screen in various stages [...]
Maya Deren’s At Land (1944) opens with a scene of fearsome waves crashing against a desolate shore. It could almost be described as Debussian, save for the unsettling dead, total silence which continues, unabated, throughout the film.
The exotic Deren appears, emerging from a sleep, like a mermaid spit ashore from the crashing waves (symbolic of her adopted name).
Deren begins slowly [...]
In 1987, producer Don Boyd brought his labor of love, Aria, to the screen. The concept was to have ten directors, each with a distinguished style, visually interpret ten arias. Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell were among the directors. Predictably, many less than erudite American critics put their working class hero noses [...]
Daniel Barenboim and Harry Kupfer followed their acclaimed “Ring” cycle (discussed in last week’s column) with Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, which, if anything, was even more successful. Alas, the film of this version has been long unavailable.
Scene from Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982)
Comparing their geometric, sparse Parsifal to that of Neues Kino director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s controversial 1982 multi-layered [...]
In 1976, at Pierre Boulez’s suggestion, Wolfgang Wagner brought in the 31 year old progressive French stage and film director Patrice Chereau to produce a new “Der Ring Des Nibelungen” cycle for the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival, and aptly teamed him with Boulez as conductor. The result scandalized and shook the entire opera world. [...]
