Cineaste. Summer 07.

"Balkan films, once on the periphery of world cinema, have begun to move to center stage," begins the editorial in the summer issue of Cineaste - written evidently before Cristian Mingui's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days won the Palme d'Or, too. "Despite this upsurge in visibility, international audiences usually have limited knowledge of the region's cinematic traditions. This issue of Cineaste addresses that problem with a supplement that places recent Balkan films into a broad cultural and historical context."

That supplement is edited by Dina Iordanova, and it's not online; but you can browse the TOC and decide whether or not to seek out the latest issue in print.

Update: Just up at the site now, too, "Is There a Balkan Cinema?: A Filmmakers' and Critics' Symposium," organized by Andrew James Horton (you may remember him as the editor of Kinoeye who's written our primers on Polish, Czech & Slovak and Early Russian cinema), with Dan Georgakas and Angelike Contis. You'll recognize more than a few names among the respondents, too.

On a related note, in today's New York Times, Alan Riding talks with Corneliu Porumboiu about 12:08 East of Bucharest and comments: "In one sense the country's entry into the European Union this year has made it easier to forget what happened before 1989. Yet if Romanians prefer to look forward, now thinking of themselves first and foremost as Europeans, Mr Porumboiu has at least reminded them that the past is unresolved or rather, as he puts it, it has been turned into fiction."

Back to Cineaste: "[T]here remains a glimmer of hope for those who wish to rekindle the magic of discovering small films on big screens amid likeminded cinephiles," writes Rebecca M Alvin. "Makeshift theaters have spread across a wide range of communities and are taking up residence not only in actual movie theaters, but also in alternative spaces like tractor trailers, cafes and bars, church basements, and even health clubs. They call themselves microcinemas, and they bring with them the promise of a communal cinema experience, showing films with virtually no marketing campaigns, no stars, and no budgets."

Mitchell Miller interviews Avi Mograbi, who "draws freely upon both the American direct-cinema tradition - seeking out preexisting crises to reveal character - and the 'Rouch tradition' of cinéma-vérité - precipitating a crisis in order to test it."

"Even as Zodiac implicitly extols the professionalism of its reporters and cops, and quietly mourns their emotional collapse and internal decay as their professionalism is negated by a seemingly unsolvable case, it contemplates our information age and its unintended consequence of overwhelming the information gatherer," writes Robert Koehler. "To watch Zodiac unfold is to witness a once-cocky and full-of-beans director of stylish and sometimes self-consciously postmodern movies grow up and turn into a fully mature filmmaker."

"The largest film library in the world - which, thanks to mergers and acquisitions, contains not just Warner Bros releases but MGM's pre-1986 titles, RKO and United Artists films, and more - has thrown open its doors, and is in unprecedented circulation." Robert Cashill offers an engaging, leisurely paced summer read as he makes his way through one DVD box set after another.

Michael Sicinski opens his review of F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing by noting that the editors of the collection warn right off the bat "that the reader should watch out for dubious entries... The hall-of-mirrors that is the 'fake documentary' can, it's implied, best be critically explored in an environment of thoroughgoing readerly suspicion. Most of the essays in the collection provide their own, less shell-gamey version of this thesis. That is, the critical power of the fake-doc is its ability to problematize the transparent styles and truth claims of 'normal' documentary, thereby demanding a higher level of hermeneutic engagement on the part of their viewers."

Posted by dwhudson at June 3, 2007 1:59 PM