Polish Documentaries

Posted on September 30, 2008 by Michael Brooke

The Polish Documentaries series that I wrote for Kinoblog between August 2007 and April 2008 has just been restarted with a piece on Article Zero (1957), Włodzimierz Borowik’s hard-hitting exposé of prostitution at a time when the Polish legal system refused to acknowledge its existence.

The next few days will see similar entries on all the rest of the titles on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: The Black Series DVD set, namely:

Place of Residence (d. Maksymilian Wrocławski, 1957)
Sopot 1957 (d. Jerzy Hoffman, Edward Skórzewski, 1957)
Jazz Talks (d. Andrzej Brzozowski, 1957)
Break Up the Dance (d. Roman Polański, 1957)
Island of Great Hopes (d. Bohdan Poręba, 1957)
The City on Islands (d. Jerzy Dmowski, Bohdan Kosiński, 1958)
From Powiśle (d. Kazimierz Karabasz, 1958)
STS 58 (d. Agnieszka Osiecka, 1959)
A Day Without the Sun (d. Kazimierz Karabasz, Władysław Ślesicki, 1959)

…followed by a DVD Times review of the complete set. Links will be added to this post when they’re published, though a complete list of all the Polish documentary reviews I’ve written to date can be found here.

Brian De Palma Special

Posted on September 17, 2008 by Michael Brooke

At 1.30 tomorrow morning (I wasn’t expecting a peaktime slot…), Sky Movies Premiere is airing a half-hour look at six Brian De Palma films that they’re showing over the following week, which might feature yours truly as one of the talking heads – assuming I didn’t end up on the cutting room floor.

UPDATE: Apparently I didn’t, but I haven’t seen it myself yet.

The GPO Film Unit Volume 1: Addressing the Nation

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Michael Brooke

This is the feature that I wrote for the MovieMail catalogue extolling the virtues of the BFI’s marvellous double-DVD set The GPO Film Unit Volume 1: Addressing the Nation.

The same catalogue also contains my much shorter piece on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg.

Nicolas Roeg at the Riverside

Posted on September 12, 2008 by Michael Brooke

Tomorrow I’ll be chairing a panel discussion at the Riverside Studios Cinema as part of their ambitious three-day Nicolas Roeg retrospective, jointly organised by the London Film Academy.

As far as I’m aware, the line-up includes Luc Roeg (producer of Two Deaths and co-star of Walkabout), Jeremy Thomas (producer of Bad Timing, Eureka and Insignificance), Tony Lawson (assistant editor of Don’t Look Now and then editor of all Roeg’s films from 1980-1995) and Jason Wood (writer and curator of the Riverside season) – so I suspect I won’t have very much to do except keep all the anecdotes under control.

UPDATE: Sadly, Luc Roeg had to drop out for medical reasons, but everything else went ahead as scheduled, and proved to be just about the most enjoyable event I’ve ever chaired – and Tony Lawson’s mini-masterclass on editing a couple of particularly intricate sequences from Bad Timing was worth the trip on its own.

Screenonline in September

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Michael Brooke

The new Screenonline homepage for September 2008 has just been published, including a look at the GPO Film Unit, the Free Cinema movement and BFI-funded animation.

I wrote most of the last collection, including the introduction and individual entries on Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin’s Round the World in 80 Days, Joan and Peter Foldes’ A Short Vision (1955), Peter King’s Thirteen Cantos of Hell, Mel Calman’s The Arrow (1969), Abu’s No Arks (1969), Antoinette Starkiewicz’s High Fidelity (1976) and Martyn Pick’s Signature (1990) – and the collection also revives older pieces on the Quay Brothers’ Nocturna Artificialia (1979) and Street of Crocodiles (1986).

My other new Screenonline work includes pieces on the recent Timothy Spall vehicle Pierrepoint (2005), James Bond films Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), some turn-of-the-20th-century films from the Warwick Trading Company – Feeding the Tigers, Highland Reel and Metropolitan Fire Brigade Turn-Out (all 1899).