Month: January, 2009
Sun 25 Jan 2009
Ballad of a Soldier
Category: Janus Challenge
4 Comments
Director: Grigori Chukhrai
Country: Soviet Union
Year: 1959
BACKGROUND
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I can hear you complaining. “Another war film? Another RUSSIAN war film?” It may surprise or even distress you to know that I can hear your thoughts, but make no mistake: I CAN. But here’s the thing, naysayers and jackanapes: While sharing a general theme, country [...]
Sun 18 Jan 2009
L’Avventura
Category: Janus Challenge
4 Comments
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Country: Italy
Year: 1960
“I need to follow my characters beyond the moments conventionally considered important, to show them even when everything appears to have been said.”Michelangelo Antonioni
“In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places of our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and [...]
Sun 11 Jan 2009
Ashes and Diamonds
Category: Janus Challenge
3 Comments
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Country: Poland
Year: 1958
BACKGROUND
The world was introduced to director Wajda via his1950’s “war trilogy” depicting events in Poland during and immediately after WWII. The first part of the trilogy, A Generation (1954), follows the members of an anti-Nazi underground group in Warsaw, and is deeply informed by Wajda’s own disillusionment with political jingoism. The [...]
Sun 4 Jan 2009
Alexander Nevsky
Category: Janus Challenge
5 Comments
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Country: Soviet Union
Year: 1938
BACKGROUND
By the late 1920’s, Sergei Eisenstein had directed three acclaimed films: Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October. In 1929, however, he found himself on Stalin’s shit list when censors rejected his agrarian reform film, The General Line. Besides his crazy agrarian reform ideas, the state-run film industry also objected to Eisenstein’s [...]
