Current Features
The Devil’s Trap »
Ďáblova past. Czechoslovakia, 1961, black and white, 87 minsFrantišek Vláčil's second feature was the first of a [...]
News
Kinoteka 2010 highlights »
London's 8th Kinoteka Polish Film Festiwal (sic), organised by the Polish Cultural Institute, has just [...]
Pawel Łoziński DVD »
The latest entry in NInA (formerly PWA)'s superlative Polish School of the Documentary (Polska Szkoła [...]
Daniel Szczechura DVD »
After releasing four superbly-presented general overviews of Polish animation (Anthology of Polish [...]
DVD Surveys
Wojciech J. Has on DVD »
As the Barbican Centre in London gears up for a long overdue part retrospective of the career of the man I recently described in Sight & Sound as [Read More]
Animation
The Banner of Youth »
Sztandar Młodych. Poland, 1957, tinted monochrome, 3 mins. A three-minute [...]
Daniel Szczechura »
After releasing four superbly-presented general overviews of Polish animation (Anthology [...]
Documentary
Pawel Łoziński DVD »
The latest entry in NInA (formerly PWA)'s superlative Polish School of the Documentary (Polska Szkoła Dokumentu) has just been announced, and it's a survey of films by Pawel Łoziński, son of Marcel.The press release is currently in Polish only, but Culture.pl has an [Read More]
More Documentary Headlines
Reviews
The Devil’s Trap
Ďáblova past. Czechoslovakia, 1961, black and white, 87 minsFrantišek Vláčil's second feature was the first of a loose trilogy set in the distant past. All three films (the others being Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees/Údolí včel, both 1967) take place at a time of fundamental ideological conflict and upheaval - in the case [...]
The Banner of Youth
Sztandar Młodych. Poland, 1957, tinted monochrome, 3 mins. A three-minute advertisement for the Polish Communist daily youth newspaper Sztandar Młodych ('Banner of Youth'), this is a more or less exact equivalent of the films that Len Lye made for the GPO Film Unit in Britain twenty years earlier. Lye's A Colour Box (1935) was an [...]
In the Time of King Krakus
Za króla Krakusa. Poland, 1947, black and white, 14 mins. One of the peculiarities of Polish film hisory is the almost perfect separation between the pre-1939 and post-1945 eras, for reasons that the dates themselves spell out all too clearly. Many Polish filmmakers didn't survive World War II, while others chose not to [...]
Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe
Édes Emma, drága Böbe Hungary, 1992, colour, 81 mins. István Szabó’s return to his native Hungary after over a decade of international acclaim produced a film that’s a stark contrast not only to the glossy, star-studded production values of Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985), Hanussen (1988) and Meeting Venus (1991), but [...]
Punitive Expedition
Büntetőexpedició Hungary, 1970, black and white, 34 mins. Is there another national film culture that has devoted so much screen time to the study of horses? Not merely in the sense of lots of them on screen at any one time (there are plenty of American-made Westerns that offer much in that department), but in the way that many [...]