Kamera.

"The two soundtracks that had the most influence on me date back to the late 1970s, and they stand the test of time... The first was Apocalypse Now, where Walter Murch revolutionized the way sound was used in films, and the second was Days of Heaven... I don't think [they] have been excelled, in either their subtlety or indeed their bombast, by the advances that have been made in technology in the intervening years." Phillip Noyce tells Peter Cowie why "sound is 60 percent of the experience, not 50 percent!"

Kamera can bump along for weeks without causing much of a stir, but occasionally, there's an issue like this one. Christopher Sandford, author of McQueen: The Biography, takes measure of the immediate and lasting impact of James Dean: "Warner Brothers came knocking with East of Eden, the start of one of the most spectacularly brief screen careers of all time. McQueen took longer to find his feet, shamelessly filching Dean's angst-ridden act in The Blob (1958) before becoming a sort of male equivalent of the Statue of Liberty.... Personally, I always think it striking that Dean died in the same year as rock and roll was born."

Marcelle Perks wraps her report from July's Fantasia Festival in Montreal and Catherine Richards Golini looks back on the Locarno International Film Festival.

Antonio Pasolini reports on Hurluberlu Films, sort of an international version of Atom Films, founded in the UK earlier this year, and Tim Smedley reviews Paul Morrissey's Flesh: "For [Joe] Dallesandro it meant instant cult and mainstream fame, depending on which country's perspective you look from. Nineteen when Flesh was filmed, he seemed to embody many of the intangible ideas of the late sixties – a new sex, a masculine androgyny, a drugged-up Renaissance figure."

Posted by dwhudson at August 31, 2005 5:35 AM