In 1927 Claude Friese-Greene shot some of the first-ever color film footage ever taken around London. He captured everyday life in the city with a technique innovated by his father, called Biocolour. The British Film Institute used computer enhancement to reduce the flickering effect of the original Biocolour and bring us this striking rare film which transports us back through time.

From Urban Peek via Jose Guardia.

Cracked

From Cinephilia and Beyond:

In 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky told Leonid Kozlov about his favorite films. Tom Lasica recently talked with the critic.

I remember that wet, grey day in April 1972 very well. We were sitting by an open window and talking about various things when the conversation turned to Otar Ioseliani’s film Once Upon a Time There Lived a Singing Blackbird. “It’s a good film,” said Tarkovsky and immediately added, drawing out his words, “though it’s, well, a little bit too… too…” He fell silent with the sentence half finished, his eyes screwed up. After a moment of intense reflection, he bit his fingernails and continued decisively, “No! No, it’s a very good film!” It was at this point that I asked Tarkovsky if he would compile a list of his favorite ten or so films. He took my proposition very seriously and for a few minutes sat deep in thought with his head bent over a piece of paper. Then he began to write down a list of directors’ names – Buñuel, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Bresson, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Vigo. One more, Dreyer, followed after a pause. Next he made a list of films and put them carefully in a numbered order. The list, it seemed, was ready, but suddenly and unexpectedly Tarkovsky added another title – City Lights.

This is the final version of the list he made:

Le Journal d’un curé de campagne
Winter Light
Nazarin
Wild Strawberries
City Lights
Ugetsu Monogatari
Seven Samurai
Persona
Mouchette
Woman of the Dunes (Teshigahara)

After the list had been typed and signed “16.4.72 A. Tarkovsky,” we returned to our conversation, during which he quite naturally changed the subject and started with his gentle sense of humor to talk about something of no importance. Looking back at the list today, 20 years on, it strikes me how clearly his choices characterize Tarkovsky the artist. Like the numerous top ten lists submitted by directors to various magazines over the years, Tarkovsky’s list is highly revealing. Its main feature is the severity of its choice – with the exception of City Lights, it does not contain a single silent film or any from the 30s or 40s. The reason for this is simply that Tarkovsky saw the cinema’s first 50 years as a prelude to what he considered to be real film-making. And though he rated highly both Dovzhenko and Barnet, the complete absence of Soviet films from his list is perhaps indicative of the fact that he saw real film-making as something that went on elsewhere. When considering this point, one also needs to bear in mind the polemical attitude that Tarkovsky became imbued with through his experience as a film-maker in the Soviet Union.

For Tarkovsky, the question lay not in how beautiful a film-maker’s art can be, but in the heights that Art can reach. The director of Andrei Rublov strove for the most profound spiritual tension and extreme existential self-exposure in all his work and was ready to reject anything and everything that was incompatible with this end. His list, which includes three films by Bergman, undoubtedly reflects his taste both as a director and as a viewer – but the latter is subordinate to the former. As the way he began to compile his top ten shows, this is not only a list of Tarkovsky’s favorite films, but equally one of his favorite directors.

Not my “Top Ten” list, but certainly not an implausible collection, one particularly indicative of Tarkovsky’s metaphysical obsession. What I found curious was the omission of The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Tarkovsky’s apparent unfamiliarity with the films of Eric Rohmer and Yasujiro Ozu.

The trailer for the Bob Loveless tribute documentary which premiered in Los Angeles on April 26th is now on-line. Presumably the filmmakers will eventually be offering it for sale on DVD.

“Among his peers, Robert ‘Bob’ Loveless achieved the title, ‘living legend.’ He was the superstar of the custom knife world and you would have to reach far and wide to find someone to say differently. He was respected and his knife designs are the most copied around the world. He was a modern times genius. He had the eye and the taste. When you get a Rolex right, a Ferrari right, a Porsche right, you don’t mess with it. Same with a Loveless knife. Bob was fearless, gentle, stubborn, loving, generous, witty and sometimes just outright mean. Bad or good, that was Bob. . . he lived life ‘his way.'”

Yahoo informs us that the arrival of Joss Whedon’s latest cultural contribution is just around the corner.

Anticipation for the film is off the charts, and having Whedon running the show reassures Marvel fanboys that it’s been done right, since he’s been one of them from childhood, and informs general audiences that it’s worth their time, since he has a gift for taking far-out tales into the mainstream.

The film opens in U.S. theaters May 4 and a bit earlier in many overseas territories.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Variety tells us that Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” (2012), scheduled for release next December, is going to have a different look.

Exhibs and press gathered at Caesar’s Palace to see the debut of 10 minutes of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” at 48 frames per second, the format that James Cameron championed at the confab one year ago.

Exhibitors — all of whom would need projection upgrades to show the format — were not all enamored of the 48 frames-per-second look. The “Hobbit” reel looked distinctively sharper and more immediate than everything before it, giving the 3D smoother movement, while losing the cinematic detatchment from the motion blur of the longtime industry-standard 24 fps.

“Some of the closeup shots looked like an old soap opera on TV,” said one exhib, who added that his cinema already has a digital projector to accommodate the change. “But the wide vistas were pretty breathtaking. It will take some getting used to, for sure.”

Robert Loveless, An America Legend Film Poster, top lines read: “A reputation can put a load on your shoulders that some men don’t want to bear.” –Jack London. Below: “A Documentary about the greatest custom knife maker in the World.”

Blade Magazine reports that a new documentary on the great Bob Loveless will premier on April 26th, as part of the Beverly Hill Film Festival, two days prior to the biannual Solvang Custom Knife Show.

Information and publicity are scarce. Hey! it’s twenty-odd days away. But we have that tiny (nearly unreadable) poster image above, and we know that there will be a pre-theater get-together at 4:00 p.m. at Mel’s Diner, 8585 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.

The actual screening will be at the Clarity Theater, 100 North Crescent Drive, Beverly Hills. Red Carpet reception at 5:30 p.m. The film is scheduled to run from 6:00 – 7:20 p.m.

Intended viewers are instructed to RSVP to Producer Ed Wormser at edw11@aol.com. Repeat after me: M.I.C.K.E.Y. M.O.U.S.E.

Still, if I were on the lower left coast, I would definitely want to see it.

After 12 years of silence, Whit Stillman, to young American haute bourgeoisie what Akira Kurosawa was to ronin samurai, has returned to feature film directing. Damsels in Distress, theoretically released in 2011 in order to qualify for various cinema awards is about to start showing in the theaters.

The New York Times‘ description sounds exactly like a Whit Stillman flick.

“Damsels in Distress” follows four college girls, Heather, Lily, Rose and Violet, as they grapple with problems ranging from love troubles to toxic frat-house odors and suicide attempts by education majors who insist on throwing themselves off two-story buildings. (“If they can’t even destroy themselves, how are they going to teach America’s youth?” Rose asks.) The students at Seven Oaks, the fictional college, have a lot in common with the preppies and patricians of “Metropolitan” (1990), “Barcelona” (1994) and “The Last Days of Disco” (1998), the autobiographical trilogy that prompted reviewers to call Stillman “the WASP Woody Allen” and “the Dickens of people with too much inner life.” They grope for direction but are seldom lost for words, and beneath their barmy crotchets and pretentious dissertations there’s heartache and yearning. Stillman is the knight-errant of sneered-at bourgeois values. He extols the overlooked merits of convention and the hidden virtues of the status quo. Inveighing against “cool people” and the social cachet of “uniqueness, eccentricity, independence,” the transfer student Lily asks: “Does the world really want or need more of such traits? Aren’t such people usually terrible pains in the neck? What the world needs to work properly is a large mass of normal people — I’d like to be one those.”

and

A film by Edison’s company. It starts with a 360 degree pan to take in the entire stadium filled with a crowd estimated at 50,000.

The film industry is totally dependent financially on huge draw Superhero action flicks that fill theaters for weeks with popcorn-crunching adolescents. Some industry executives were so desperate that they decided to do a Spiderman re-make opening next summer with a new cast and an “untold story” angle.

Two boys debate attending the American Theater in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in 1938.

Roger Ebert explains why movie theater revenues are in free fall. Only blockbuster movies are currently keeping the whole system afloat.

I guess that’s just how things work.

You have the movie theater business, an industry whose pioneer days were a century ago. That business prospered and bloomed, but for decades now what was once a luxurious escape experience has been subjected to the careful ministrations of bean counters and corporate optimizers who have turned movie theaters, once palaces, into cheap industrial warehouse spaces operated robotically and understaffed with inadequate contingents of the bitter and indifferent working for the minimum wage.

It takes hundreds of millions for special effects, movie star salaries and blowing up all those expensive cars, but at the actual delivery end the industry has whittled every possible penny out of quality of service.

Their problems are compounded by the aging US population. Even hard-core cineastes like myself (I ran a film society at Yale) today feel out-of-place in today’s theaters. Adults buy videos or watch films on cable or the Internet these days. Teenagers go to movie theaters for the same reasons teenagers always went to movie theaters.

The film industry is being confronted by the same kinds of changes in technology and the arrival of handier and more competitive methods of product delivery that confronted the music industry, and it seems that these dinosaurs are no more able than the other dinosaurs to cope positively with new challenges and opportunities.

Old industries wind up being run by rentiers, but dramatic innovation requires visionaries and risk-takers. The motion picture industry today is run by corporations, what changing times need are the equivalent of the aggressive businessmen, recently off the boat from Poland and Lithuania, the Warners, the Zukors, the Goldwyns, and the Mayers, who created the studios and the industry in the first place. But that kind of leadership is not going to come from inside today’s industry establishment.

To be released December 14, 2012.