In 1958 the world was changing rapidly. The post war economic boom had produced new industries and lots of new jobs. Consumer confidence was high and many families were finally able to afford their own home and purchase a car. In the art and design world modernism was transforming household objects into works of art. Furniture, electronics and home appliances began to reflect a new found prosperity that promised optimum function, affordability and were pleasing to the eye. Brazil gave birth to Bossa Nova and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) was established in the United States. Terms like “pop art” and “Aerospace” entered our lexicon and Belgium played host to Expo 58.

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The New York Asian Film Festival (June 25th – July 8th) is more essential than ever. With distribution companies shutting their doors to Asian cinemas of all types,  there are very few outlets to watch the continent’s resourceful, often brilliant genre cinema on the big screen. For nine years programmer Grady Hendrix and his crew have been filling the void, and for the past few has joined forces with the Japan Cuts Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema (July 1 – 16th)  to provide the most eclectic and revelatory overview of Asian film in the U.S. It’s a heady mix of spectacle, grotesquerie, slapstick and resolute artistry. Every year you’ll see something you’d never seen the likes of before.

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After recently reading and writing about Peter H. Brothers’ book Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda, I was motivated to watch one of Honda’s lesser-known films that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see yet, Dogora (1964). I’m not sure how I managed to overlook this little gem involving a giant jellyfish from space with an appetite for diamonds but I’m glad that I finally caught up with it on DVD. It’s undoubtedly one of the oddest monster movies produced by Toho Studios in the ’60s and it has quickly become one of my favorite Ishiro Honda films.

Dogora or Dagora, the Space Monster stars the Japanese actor Yosuke Natsuki (Yojimbo; 1961, Chushingura: 47 Samurai; 1962, Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster; 1964, etc.) as a detective named Komai who is investigating a rash of strange diamond thefts plaguing Tokyo. He enlists the help of an aging scientist (Nobuo Nakamura), his female assistant (Yoko Fujiyama) and an American G-Man named Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham) but things take a strange turn when it’s discovered that creatures from outer space are responsible for many of the thefts. The monsters apparently feed on carbon-based matter and they soon begin to inhale Tokyo’s coal supply while causing massive destruction throughout the city. Naturally the military fights back but these bizarre events don’t slow down a group of jewel thieves who are desperate to get their hands on some diamonds. Detective Komai is forced to do battle with organized criminals as well as space monsters in this entertaining and unusual movie.

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Repertory film is a hard sell on campus, but last night I watched an advance screener for a multi-layered, black-and-white, French-Italian co-production that’s being re-released by Oscilloscope Pictures next month – one that  reminded me (in part) of my college days, and hopefully it will still connect with both students and general audiences today. The Law (La Loi, 1959), was directed by Jules Dassin just a few years after his celebrated Rififi, and stars Gina Lollobrigida and Marcello Mastroianni. Although the people involved are all adults, the story still pivots around something very common on any campus: lots of lusty emotions, drama, and booze. But it also goes further. READ MORE

A groggy John Huston welcomes you to today’s equally confused post. He’s an interview subject in Peter Lennon’s Rocky Road to Dublin (1967), an acidic documentary portrait of 1960s Ireland. Lennon wrote a series of articles for The Guardian about how the Catholic Church and their Republican government cronies were choking off the cultural life of his country, and he adapted his polemics to the screen with the help of regular Godard cinematographer Raoul Coutard. Intimate and barbed, Coutard’s handheld camera nudges its way into bustling pubs, sparsely attended hurling matches (soccer was banned as a “foreign sport”), and the backyards of splenetic Irish authors.  Recently released on DVD by Icarus Films, it’s a unique inverse of the silent “city symphonies” made famous by Walter Ruttmann. Maybe call it a city (and country) evisceration.

So why trot out Huston now? Lennon’s film was the last one screened at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival before Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut shut it down to support the general strike which was occurring outside its doors. There’s a short “Making of Rocky Road to Dublin” included on the disc, and there is footage of a Peter Lennon arguing with Godard and Truffaut at the screening to allow the doomed discussion of his film to continue. All of which is a rather long-winded preamble to talk about this year’s Cannes Festival. Of all of the coverage I’ve been reading, by far the most entertaining has been that surrounding Godard’s latest provocation, his new feature FILM SOCIALISME.

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For the past week the Bay Area has played host to a Godzillathon taking place at Viz Cinema in San Francisco’s Japan Town. This Godzilla film festival started on May 5th and ends tonight on May 13th with a showing of Yoshimitsu Banno’s film Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971). The Godzillathon coincided with what would have been film director and writer Ishiro Honda’s 99th birthday on May 7th. Ishiro Honda directed the original Godzilla film but he was also responsible for many other popular science fiction and fantasy films produced in Japan.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the spectacular Godzillathon event so I consoled myself by spending my time reading Peter H. Brothers’ recent book, Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda. This 282 page book chronicles the life and films of one of Japan’s most beloved and prolific filmmakers. Although Honda’s name is legendary in Japan, the director is still relatively unknown in the US. One reason for this is the lack of information that has been readily available about Ishiro Honda in English. Peter H. Brothers has set out to change that with Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda, which happens to be the first English language book about this important Japanese director.

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Today, I did something rare; I met a deadline. Okay, technically, it was a day late – but I was still the first, of six, to submit my nominations for titles that I’d like to see included in an upcoming collection of short films from the last Sundance Film Festival. These films will then be assembled into a package that will go on a tour through participating theaters nation-wide. Kudos to Lisa Ogdie and Todd Luoto (both from Sundance) for culling through over a hundred shorts to bring the number down to 32 – these then being spread over four DVD’s. From these 32 titles, I picked seven films whose total running time would account for a comfortable 95-minute program.  READ MORE

A heady piece of sci-fi from German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the long-forgotten World On A Wire (1973) resurfaced at the Museum of Modern Art last week for a short run. Produced for the German national television channel, NDR, it was adapted from the novel SIMULACRON 3, by the American Daniel F. Galouye (which was also the basis for The Thirteenth Floor (1999)). Restored in a shimmering print by The Fassbinder Foundation, it’s a visually kaleidoscopic oddity peppered with the director’s uniquely deadpan sense of humor.

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Yesterday, April 11, was Holocaust Remembrance Day, and one path taken to insure this horrific event will never be forgotten has been the chronicling of the stories, the nightmares, and the history of the Holocaust on film. From the testimonies of actual survivors documented for the Shoah Foundation to the dramatization of life in the concentration camps in fictional movies, the horrors of the Holocaust have been recorded and interpreted via the cinema. Of course, any mention of Holocaust dramas brings to mind Steven Spielberg’s highly regarded Schindler’s List, which continues to be the barometer for measuring the artistic value of other films with Holocaust subject matter.

Yet, through my job as a researcher and writer for the Facets DVD label, I have discovered a number of films about the Holocaust that I personally find more interesting and compelling. I am fascinated by some of these films because they were made just a few years after World War II and so convey a sense of immediacy in lieu of the retrospection inherent in contemporary Holocaust dramas. Also, these films were made by Eastern European filmmakers, some of whom had personal experiences in which they or family members were interred in concentration camps, giving the storylines a tragic authenticity. Unfortunately, few of these films are known to movie lovers or even mentioned in film histories, largely because they were produced by communist countries that were satellites of the old Soviet Union. Much of the culture of countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary was hidden behind the Iron Curtain and victim to the whims of the communist-dominated bureaucracies that controlled the arts. Even scholars who may have heard of these titles had little opportunity to see them because there was little organized distribution of such movies to the West.  Since the dismantling of the Soviet Union and its satellites, some of these films have been rediscovered and brought to light by companies such as Facets and Polart Video.

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