Sight & Sound. July 07.

Tuesday will be Ken Russell's 80th birthday. Linda Ruth Williams talks with him about his life-long passion for photography, his recent foray into online distribution and, of course, his films: "[L]ong after his audiences have forgotten the baroque twists of his picaresque tales, it is individual images that linger in the memory: Oliver Reed trailing through the blue-frozen hell of the Alps in Women in Love; Glenda Jackson tossing her head back against a sunburst in the same film; Jackson (again) in a frustrated sexual frenzy on the train in The Music Lovers; abstract Busby Berkeley-esque body patterns whirling through The Boy Friend; Leslie Caron's cloak swept across the corpse in Valentino; Roger Daltrey's glam-angelic spaceship in Lisztomania; Gabriel Byrne decorated with leeches in 1986's Gothic, the story of the night Mary Shelley gave birth to Frankenstein; the widow walking from Loudon as The Devils' end credits roll."

Also in the July issue Sight & Sound, Mark Cousins tells the story behind the batch of films that have been featured in festival lineups for over a year now, the New Crowned Hope works, and notes along the way:

France, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany have put all money into the co-production pot, but the US seems not to have contributed a cent - not even to Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon, which celebrates the fall of Saddam. Given the billions of dollars ploughed into the war in Iraq, the American championing of the Kurds and the winning optimism of parts of Ghobadi's beautiful film, it seems absurd that the US couldn't see fit to back such a cultural initiative. The fact that Europe is less isolationist and still racked by post-colonial guilt probably explains the continent's funding for films by Ghobadi, Tsai Ming-Liang (Taiwan-Malaysia), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Paz Encina (Paraguay), Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Chad), Garin Nugroho (Indonesia) and Teboho Mahlatsi (South Africa).

Britain's Simon Field (formerly both a director of the Rotterdam Film Festival and director of cinema at the ICA) and Keith Griffiths (a director and producer for Chris Petit, the Quay brothers and Jan Svankmajer) provide curatorial star-power, but it seems that national institutions such as the UK Film Council, Channel 4 and the BBC also kept their wallets shut. Which would not matter so much if it weren't that the New Crowned Hope movies represent one of the most exciting commissioned cinema projects of our times.

Reviews:

• Tim Lucas on the relatively new release of Don't Look Back: "DA Pennebaker's impressionistic black-and-white documentary of Bob Dylan's 1965 British tour, his farewell to purely acoustic performances, somehow retains a sense of immediacy in its fifth decade while other music films of its time have succumbed to nostalgia or irrelevance." Also: "For a film composed of 'things that didn't seem important at the time but now, looking back, do,' [Bob Dylan 65 Revisited] has surprising structural integrity of its own."

• "Lunacy's raw material comes from Poe, one of Svankmajer's long-term influences," writes Michael Brooke. "But de Sade's influence is most keenly felt at a more fundamental level."

• Hannah McGill on Flanders: "While the film's humourlessness is a bar to emotional engagement, there's focus and intelligence here, conspicuously lacking in [Bruno] Dumont's 2003 misfire Twentynine Palms. Sparsely and elegantly shot, with punishing battle scenes, Flanders engages pertinently with the emotional dynamics of war and the concept of sacrifice."

• Sam Wigley on Wild Tigers I Have Known: "Cam Archer's stunning debut film pulses with the libidinous fever of adolescence.... It would be easy to damn Wild Tigers as an uncomfortable alliance of avant-garde tropes and advertising chic if its insistent gorgeousness were all one remembered later, but there is more here..."

Posted by dwhudson at June 29, 2007 7:51 AM