Sirk, Wilder, Kieslowski.

As the American Cinematheque screens its series Douglas Sirk: The Far Side of Paradise through the weekend, Sean Axmaker surveys the oeuvre at the main site: "He turned suburbia into a storybook pretty but socially arid prison of conformity and high living mansions into tarnished nurseries of corrupted values and festering jealousies. Simply reading their plots might cause the uninitiated to regard his canon as some perverse auteurist joke, but under the kitschy trappings and absurd situations is an ironic (back before irony had become the cinematic norm) and at times surreal refraction of the American self-image."

Jeff Duncanson has launched a Billy Wilder Blog-a-Thon at filmscreed, where you'll find fine pix and posters to gaze at. Edward Copeland's been tracking the linkage.

Quiet Bubble is hosting a Krzysztof Kieslowski Blog-a-Thon, scheduled to run through Monday. Jim Emerson's contribution is also an entry in his magnificent Opening Shots Project.

Updated through 3/3.

Update, 3/3: Steven Shapiro: "If Kieslowski retreats from politics in the Decalogue and in his subsequent films, if A Short Film About Killing, made in the waning days of 'actually existing socialism,' says so little about that social system in particular (everything in the film could just as easily happen, much the same way, in an economically depressed capitalist society and state), if Kieslowski seems to reject politics altogether, in order to focus on supposedly more 'universal' concerns (ones which are generally described as moral or ethical, and as spiritual or religious) - then this movement is still founded upon a bleak and critical view of the social, one that is not dissolved away by any sort of move to more 'individual' concerns."

Posted by dwhudson at March 2, 2007 11:15 AM