When the Lumière brothers started showing their short films in restaurants, George Méliès was in the audience, taking notes. Unable to buy a camera from the secretive brothers, he built his own, then
DEATH CANNOT STOP TRUE LOVE. ALL IT CAN DO IS DELAY IT FOR A WHILE. Capitaine Fracasse, based on a novel by Theophile Gautier. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. In France. In 1929. It's important to
While Nicholas Ray was directing the bloated and misbegotten epic 55 Days at Peking, he had a dream that if he made the film, he would never complete another feature. The dream turned out to be true
Bertrand Blier, avuncular iconoclast of the French cinema, has said that his mission is fundamentally Godardian: to expose the mechanisms of cinema, while preserving the emotion of cinema. He's also
Segundo de Chomón (1871-1929) appears in film history, at first glance, as a George Méliès clone. A rather good one, admittedly—his shameless rip-off of A Trip to the Moon has more solid, three-dimensional
THE SPY WITH MY FACE "He had the good fortune to be a bad author with an imagination reveling in gross sensation and sex - a natural ally for the Nazis, for whom he was to write, in 1933, the official
STEP OUTSIDE "A man comes in through the door, you got nothing. He comes in through the window, you got a situation." So spoke Billy Wilder, a man who knew a few things about dramatic construction
THE MAGIC LANTERN The sun vanishing behind the moon forms the opening image of Bill Douglas's final film, Comrades, subtitled A Lanternist's Account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and What Became of Them
Joe Dante has earned the right to be called a survivor, with a substantial career in which he has ping-ponged from big-budget sci-fi spectaculars (with attendant studio interference) to TV and low-budget
Above: Dante's The Howling (1981). Joe Dante was kind enough to grant interview time during his visit to the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In a public event, he spoke of his early days cutting
Paper Soldier, dealing as it does with the early days of the Soviet space program (post-Sputnik, pre-manned flight) stands as a sort of interesting companion film to Philip Kaufman's The Right
It feels weird to plead on behalf of William Wyler, who is certainly celebrated and respected and even known by a few people outside hardcore cinephilia. But his most famed works, like The Best Years