News

Guest reviewer Matt Rovner delves into the cultural riches of ethnic films specially made for speakers of the Yiddish language. Some were filmed in Poland and others in New Jersey (according to Edgar Ulmer!)… and if they seem obscure they’re nevertheless culturally significant as a record of a language that’s fast disappearing. Among the gems is a significant folk-horror tale and an original non-musical drama about Tevye the Milkman’s problems with his daughter and the oppressive laws of the Czar.

The Jewish Soul: Classics of Yiddish Cinema

Blu-ray

Kino Lorber Repertory

The Dybbuk, American Matchmaker, Her Second Mother, Mir Kumen On, Tevya, Overture to Glory, Eli Eli, Jewish King Lear, Motel the Operator, Three Daughters

1935-1940 / all B&w / 1:37 Academy

750 min. / Street Date November 24, 2020

available through Kino Lorber

Starring: Avrom Morewski, Leo Fuchs, Moishe Oysher, Maurice Schwartz, Maurice Krohner, Chaim Tauber, Max Badin, Charlotte Goldstein,...

Olaf Möller in front of Katharine Hepburn posters for Christopher Strong and Spitfire: "Das Spukschloss im Spessart [The Haunted Castle]! Which is fantastic. Great musical! It's a horror musical." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

On the opening night of The Lost Years of German Cinema: 1949–1963 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, film historian Olaf Möller, following his introduction of Gottfried Kolditz's White Blood (Weißes Blut), joined me for a conversation on the program he curated that includes sensational work of filmmakers Helmut Käutner, Hans Heinz König, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, Kurt Hoffmann, Harald Braun, Wolfgang Staudte, Aleksander Ford, Konrad Petzold, and Robert Siodmak.

Earlier in the day at the Walter Reade Theater I watched Robert Siodmak's The Devil Strikes At Night (Nachts, Wenn Der Teufel Kam) and Hans Heinz König's Roses Bloom In The Moorland (Rosen Blühen Auf Dem Heidegrab). I started out with a couple of childhood television memories.

Fritz Lang's The Tiger Of Eschnapur...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Hard to Be a God is playing on Mubi in the Us through January 2.Hard to Be a GodRussian director Aleksei German spent the final 15 years of his life working on Hard To Be A God (2013), a brutal medieval epic adapted from a 1964 novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strutgatsky, dying just before he could complete the job in February 2013. Happily, his son and widow were able to oversee the final sound mix. The result is one of the most immersive and harrowing cinematic experiences going, three hours of being put to the sword and mired in the mud, blood and viscera of a nightmare alternate reality.Although German's characters are dressed in the clanking armour, chainmail and robes of the European Middle Ages, Hard To Be A God is in fact set on a distant planet,...

★★★★☆ "Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever," quoth the Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. The turning wheel of time on which the master orator predicated this assertion is one that is palpably intertwined with the viewing experience of Aleksander Ford's bombastic Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960), Poland's first blockbusting epic which still remains the most viewed film in the country's history. Based on Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel of the same name it is medieval pomp in glorious Eastmancolor, set against the backdrop of Poland and Lithuania's decisive conflict with the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410.

A retrospective of work by the Polish cinematographer, who worked with Polanski and Haneke, to screen at the festival.

Camerimage, the cinematography festival held in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, is to pay tribute to the late Jerzy Lipman with a retrospective of his work.

Films shot by the Polish cinematographer will be screened as part of Camerimage’s Remembering the Masters series throughout the 22nd edition of the festival (Nov 15-22).

Included in the series will be Kanal (1957), Knife in the Water (1962), A Generation (1955), The Ashes (1965) and Colonel Wolodyjowski (1969).

Lipman, who died in 1983, is considered one of the most eminent cinematographers in Polish cinema history and is a co-originator of the Polish Film School movement.

Lipman endured occupation and imprisonment during the Second World War before he became a celebrated filmmaker. After his release in 1948, he joined the Cinematography Department of the National Film School in Łódź and graduated in 1952.

As a student, he was the...

What is the most significant and watched footage of actual/unstaged events ever recorded? Among the obvious candidates: Abraham Zapruder’s film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 23, 1963; Nasa’s footage of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon on July 21, 1969; and the live TV news footage of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Long before those events took place, though, another one of at least as much historical importance as any of them — and, in my humble opinion, of even greater importance — was also visually recorded, seen by the vast majority of Americans alive at the time, and, yes, questioned by conspiracy theorists: the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. The biggest difference between this footage and the rest? The story behind it has been largely forgotten. I think it’s worth retelling.

The extent to which Allied leaders were aware...

Polish film was an early frontrunner, before occupation forced wave after wave of talent abroad. Its fortitude is embodied by Andrzej Wajda – still going strong 50 years after his first feature

There aren't many traces on the internet of the early Polish pioneers: people such as Kazimierz Prószyński and Bolesław Matuszewski who were operating at the turn of the century, turning out silent short docos called things like Ślizgawka w Łazienkach (Skating-rink in the Royal Baths). (Prószyński was also a pioneering camera inventor, developing a model called a pleograph in 1894, and a handheld effort called an aeroscope in 1909.) Nor is there any link for Anton in Warsaw for the First Time, Poland's legendary first feature film, directed by and starring Antoni Fertner in 1908.

Fertner, though, went on to a respectable career as an actor in the interwar period – you can see him as an old man in Książątko (1937, above) and Gehenna...

With 2010 only a week over, it already feels like best-of and top-ten lists have been pouring in for months, and we’re already tired of them: the ranking, the exclusions (and inclusions), the rules and the qualifiers. Some people got to see films at festivals, others only catch movies on video; and the ability for us, or any publication, to come up with a system to fairly determine who saw what when and what they thought was the best seems an impossible feat. That doesn’t stop most people from doing it, but we liked the fantasy double features we did last year and for our 3rd Writers Poll we thought we'd do it again.

I asked our contributors to pick a single new film they saw in 2010—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they saw in 2010 to create a unique double feature.

As a devout member of the Communist Party (or as Roman Polanski refers to him: “an orthodox Stalinist”), Polish director Aleksander Ford created The Youth of Chopin as a "socialist-realist" film. Ford made certain to include all the Communist party prescriptions from the congress in Wisla; therefore Ford’s “biography” of Chopin -- the famous Polish piano composer -- is reduced to a mere propaganda piece, with the sole purpose of portraying Chopin in the image of the "friend of working classes." (During the Filmmakers' Meeting in March 1952, Communist Party officials maintained that The Youth of Chopin was a model film.)...