Kinoblog

Sight & Sound’s special issue, ‘Cinema of the New Europe’, was published this week. The coverdate is June 08, though the Andrzej Klimowski-designed cover makes it instantly recognisable from a fair distance.

As the title implies, it’s an Eastern European special edition, including the following articles:

• ‘Out of the Past’ by Shane Danielsen - how filmmakers in the region have flourished by adapting to changing political and economic realities;
• ‘Danube Blues’ by Demetrios Mathieu - recent developments in Hungarian cinema;
• An interview with Jiří Menzel by Sheila Johnston;
• An interview with Andrzej Wajda by yours truly and Kamila Kuc;
• ‘On the Road Again’ by Adina Bradeanu - how documentary makers are engaging with their countries’ communist pasts;
• ‘Eastern Promise’ by Nick Roddick - how the Romanian film industry is following up its sudden critical acclaim;
• ‘Home and Away’ by Richard Combs - a celebration of the work of Jerzy Skolimowski, focusing particularly on recent films;
• ‘The Outsider’ by me - a beginner’s guide to Skolimowski, biased towards his pre-1980s career

…plus the usual raft of news, features and reviews, including my take on Sergei Bodrov’s hugely entertaining surprise Oscar nominee Mongol.

Going by precedent, one or two of these pieces will probably appear on the magazine’s website in due course.

I’ve just had to disable my kinoblog@mac.com address, as it’s been hijacked by spammers and I’ve been getting a flood of (entirely justifiable) rejections from the hapless individuals they’ve been trying to spam.

I’ll try switching it on again in a few days - but in the meantime, my previous Filmjournal address, closelydotwatcheddotdvds@macdotcom, is still working - or at least it will once you’ve edited that address a bit.

I’ve just ported over the rest of the full-length reviews from my old blog - see below for individual posts.

The comments have also been transferred, which explains why the dates of many of them seem to predate this blog’s official existence.

I’ve just got back from a 48-hour wedding anniversary trip to Budapest with an armful of Hungarian DVDs - and since I discovered that I already had two of them (one disc in the Hungarian Film Classics series looks very much like another if you haven’t actually watched the films yet), it’s finally spurred me into trying to do a complete catalogue of all the Central/Eastern European DVDs in my collection.

Since these now run well into triple figures (and that’s before covering the Russian/Soviet titles, which should add at least another hundred), it’s as much for my own information-cum-sanity as anything else - but I’ll very happily consider review requests (e-mail), or provide pointers as to where to get hold of individual discs.

The first draft has been uploaded here.

I’m spending the next few days at the Matita Film Festival in Guardiagrele, Italy, introducing a retrospective of Quay Brothers films - so there probably won’t be any new posts until Sunday. Apologies to those checking the Katyń links for new additions: I’ll update them as soon as I can.

In an attempt to make this blog rather less obscure and hermetic than it’s been thus far, I’m starting a new series that aims to give a general overview of the history of Russian and Eastern European cinema from the perspective of a hundred of its most distinguished titles.

The full shortlist is here - and was assembled according to these principles:

1. The film must be available (or imminent) on an English-friendly DVD;
2. The film must be notable in some way (artistically or commercially; big domestic hits are certainly valid);
3. The film must reflect the native culture in some way (so no Repulsions or Mephistos);
4. No more than two titles per director (to prevent the likes of Eisenstein, Tarkovsky and Kieślowski squeezing out others);
5. The list as a whole should reflect a reasonable geographical and temporal spread, while accepting that certain decades (notably the 1960s) were vastly more fruitful than others.

Obviously, this means that loads of equally valid titles are going to fall by the wayside, and there’s every possibility that when I get to the end of writing up every entry, there’ll be several dozen additional releases that could easily be added - so this list shouldn’t be taken as being remotely definitive (even assuming such an exercise was possible or desirable in the first place).

But I can safely say for now that every single one of these titles is worth seeing - and if you want to know where to get hold of the DVD(s) before I get round to supplying full details, just e-mail me, and I’ll be happy to help. Virtually everything is available now, and the handful of titles that aren’t just yet (i.e. Markéta Lazarová, The Round-Up) are imminent.

Welcome to Kinoblog, intended as a repository for things that I dig up in my ongoing research into central and eastern European cinema that I haven’t managed to turn into professional commissions. In fact, they’ll often be by-products of background research for interviews and overviews where I have to gloss over individual titles in a few dozen words (if that).

It’s built on foundations laid by two earlier, somewhat over-specialised blogs - FilmJournal’s Closely Watched DVDs and an unpublished earlier effort from 2004 (also called Kinoblog), and I’ll be porting all the pieces I wrote for them over here in due course. The problem I had with them was that their focus (on Czech and Soviet cinema, respectively) was too narrow, and I was watching loads of great films, especially from Hungary, Poland and the former Yugoslavia, that didn’t fit the template. Also, I was insanely over-zealous when it came to things like credits and links, meaning that near-complete pieces would be bogged down in fact-checking and formatting hell when there was no particularly good reason not to publish them.

So hopefully it’s third time lucky - and this time, I’ll be mixing more formal reviews with instant snapshots of whatever I happen to be watching, so updates should be a lot more frequent than they’ve been in the past. As you’ll see from the list of pieces I’ve written for Sight & Sound magazine over the past five years, my current viewing is overwhelmingly biased towards Central and Eastern European cinema - and although this is doubtless partly self-fulfilling (since I’ve written the majority of pieces about the region’s cinema in the last few years, I tend to get first refusal on future commissions), there’s little doubt that a large and increasing part of my regular film diet is from that part of the world, helped enormously by the surprisingly large number of DVD releases with English subtitles.

So why ‘Kinoblog’? Well, ‘Kino’ means ‘cinema’ in most of the region’s languages, including Czech, Polish, Russian and the various languages of the former Yugoslavia (Hungarian is the major exception, but that’s always been a law unto itself), so it seemed appropriate.