Kinoeye. 4.5.

Somehow, immediately after contributing three primers to GreenCine - on Polish, Czech and early Russian cinema - as well as eight dispatches from Thessaloniki, Andrew James Horton has found time to complete work on a new issue of the excellent journal he edits, Kinoeye.

It'll be a double issue, "Polish cinema: Old masters," with Part I offering views on the work of four "'classic' directors who established their reputations before the symbolic year of 1989" and one highly influential writer.

"Much has been written about Polanski's work dealing with victimization, uncannily articulating the victim's view of things, as well as showing the precarious dynamics of victims turning into perpetrators, but the important thing missing in this discussion is Polanski's films' treatment of the specific 'double vision' available to victims and mostly inaccessible to the society around them and often even to the people closest to them," writes Gordana P Crnkovic. "This double vision involves victims' knowing - or rather seeing - that people who look fully normal to others have the potential to be monsters capable of the worst atrocities."

Crnkovic has another piece as well, and an important one, too, in the light of the ongoing discussion of border-crossing filmmakers: "[Agnieszka] Holland's model of global and cosmopolitan cinema escapes the trap of 'global' being a synonym for the execution of pre-given American mass culture models in local terms, avoids the homogenizing push of Hollywood and is instead based on active interaction with existent local and national cinema cultures and filmmakers."

Elzbieta Ostrowska, recently noted here as one of the co-editors of The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance, considers Wajda's use of landscape to establish a sense of Polish national identity.

In an extract from his book, The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance, Marek Haltof examines the filmmaker's early documentaries.

James Fiumara traces the influence of Bruno Schulz on the work of the Brothers Quay.

Posted by dwhudson at December 1, 2004 5:15 AM