Reviewer: Simon Paul Augustine
Ratings (out of five): Milestones ****
Ice ** 1/2
“I was having this dream, the feeling of a gap between what I believe in, and what my life is like day to day…” – from Milestones
Even in the context of underground cinema of the late 60’s and 70’s, Robert Kramer’s Milestones stands as a dizzying confluence of genres and styles, reality and fiction. Kramer is a prominent figure in the American Diy scene that existed forty years ago – a time when auteurs outside the Hollywood system, in lieu of the unprecedented access to video and computer technology that fuels today’s indies, were heir to a tradition that used real film stock and mother-of-invention ingenuity to plumb the possibilities of how celluloid, including its physical tangibility, could harnessed for expression. Part of a lineage that included predecessors like Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger, Kramer and his contemporaries merged text,...
Ratings (out of five): Milestones ****
Ice ** 1/2
“I was having this dream, the feeling of a gap between what I believe in, and what my life is like day to day…” – from Milestones
Even in the context of underground cinema of the late 60’s and 70’s, Robert Kramer’s Milestones stands as a dizzying confluence of genres and styles, reality and fiction. Kramer is a prominent figure in the American Diy scene that existed forty years ago – a time when auteurs outside the Hollywood system, in lieu of the unprecedented access to video and computer technology that fuels today’s indies, were heir to a tradition that used real film stock and mother-of-invention ingenuity to plumb the possibilities of how celluloid, including its physical tangibility, could harnessed for expression. Part of a lineage that included predecessors like Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger, Kramer and his contemporaries merged text,...
- 2/21/2012
- by weezy
- GreenCine
Punishment Park (Masters of Cinema) is to be released in the UK in a new Dual Format Blu-ray + DVD edition on 23 January 2012. We have three copies of the Blu-ray to give away.
Both controversial and relentless in its depiction of suppression and brutality, Punishment Park was heavily attacked by the mainstream press and permitted only the barest of releases in 1971. However, like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) and Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969), Peter Watkins’ film has established itself as one of the key, yet rarely seen, radical films of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Giving voice to the disaffected youth of America that had lived through the campus riots at Berkeley, the trial of the Chicago Seven and who were witnessing the escalation of the Vietnam War, Punishment Park was named by Rolling Stone as one of their top ten films of 1971 and has earned many admirers in the four decades since its release.
Both controversial and relentless in its depiction of suppression and brutality, Punishment Park was heavily attacked by the mainstream press and permitted only the barest of releases in 1971. However, like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) and Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969), Peter Watkins’ film has established itself as one of the key, yet rarely seen, radical films of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Giving voice to the disaffected youth of America that had lived through the campus riots at Berkeley, the trial of the Chicago Seven and who were witnessing the escalation of the Vietnam War, Punishment Park was named by Rolling Stone as one of their top ten films of 1971 and has earned many admirers in the four decades since its release.
- 12/2/2011
- by Matt Holmes
- Obsessed with Film
"Geoff Dyer's forthcoming book Zona (2012) has a premise that is so simple and brilliant it seems almost a wonder that it hasn't been tried before," blogs Katie Kitamura for frieze. "[A]s the book's subtitle puts it, Zona is 'A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.' In other words, a book about Andrei Tarkovsky's seminal Stalker (1979), itself loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic (1971), by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. 'Loosely' is key here. The skeleton of Zona is something like a glorified transcript of Tarkovsky's film, a factual description of what is seen on the screen…. But Zona hangs a great deal onto the scaffolding of this formal conceit. The book itself is full of digressions, both filmic and personal, as well as footnotes, interpretations, imprecations and asides. There's a definite gulf between the tone of Zona and the tone of Stalker, which is almost...
- 10/28/2011
- MUBI
Us film producer who became an innovative London cinema owner
David Stone, who has died aged 78, played significant roles both in radical Us film-making of the 1960s and in Britain's golden age of arthouse cinemas in the 1970s. In 1974, David and his wife, Barbara, acquired the former Classic cinema, at Notting Hill Gate, west London, which they transformed and renamed the Gate. They opened their own distribution company, Cinegate, whose first acquisition was three films by the young German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971); The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972); and Fear Eats the Soul (1974). The first Fassbinder films to be shown in Britain, these brought the Gate instant critical and box-office success at its opening in September that year.
The Gate often enjoyed success with films others had passed over, including La Cage Aux Folles (1978), and Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan...
David Stone, who has died aged 78, played significant roles both in radical Us film-making of the 1960s and in Britain's golden age of arthouse cinemas in the 1970s. In 1974, David and his wife, Barbara, acquired the former Classic cinema, at Notting Hill Gate, west London, which they transformed and renamed the Gate. They opened their own distribution company, Cinegate, whose first acquisition was three films by the young German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971); The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972); and Fear Eats the Soul (1974). The first Fassbinder films to be shown in Britain, these brought the Gate instant critical and box-office success at its opening in September that year.
The Gate often enjoyed success with films others had passed over, including La Cage Aux Folles (1978), and Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan...
- 5/26/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
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