Published in Sight and Sound, January/February 2019. Alas, this list was put together before I saw A Bread Factory, playing in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center this coming weekend. I’ll be introducing the Saturday screening at 2 pm and interviewing Patrick Wang afterwards. — J.R.
In alphabetical order:
Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski)
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (Travis Wilkerson)
The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles)
Ray Meets Helen (Alan Rudolph)
Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)
If ties are permitted, I would add The Image Book(best experimental film, Jean-Luc Godard) and First Reformed (best love story, Paul Schrader).
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Go here for many more choices. — J.R.
Top Blu-ray Releases of 2018:
1. Daisies (Vera Chytilova, 1966); UK, Second Run
2. The Adventures of Hajji Baba (Don Weis, 1954); Twilight Time
3. The Colour of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1969); UK, Second Sight
4. An Actor’s Revenge (Kon Ichikawa, 1963); Criterion
5. The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923); Kino Lorber
6. Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948); Criterion
7. The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954); UK, Masters of Cinema
8. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995); Criterion
9. This is Cinerama (Merian C. Cooper, Gunther von Fritsch, 1952); Flicker Alley
10. Figures in a Landscape (Joseph Losey, 1970); France, Carlotta Films
Top 5 Box Set Releases of 2018 :
1. Liebelei & Lola Montez (Max Ophuls, 1933 & 1955); Munich Filmmuseum; PAL, Germany
2. Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series (David Lynch, 2017 ); Paramount*
3. Dietrich & von Sternberg in Hollywood; Criterion
4. Clouzot: Early Works; Kino
5. Early Hou-Hsiao-Hsien: THREE FILMS 1980-1983; UK, Masters of Cinema
*As DVD Beaver points out, this actually was released in 2017. I selected it anyway because it was the best bargain of the year.
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This appeared originally in Film Comment, July-August 1978, and was reprinted by Saul Symonds in March 2005, with separate new prefaces by myself (reproduced below) and David Ehrenstein, in the online Light Sleeper (which is no longer up, alas). It’s also reprinted in my recent book Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues (2018). — J.R.
Obscure Objects of Desire: A Jam Session on Non-Narrative
By Raymond Durgnat, David Ehrenstein and Jonathan Rosenbaum
Preface by Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 2005:
When this piece was written, or more precisely assembled, over 30 years ago, Ray Durgnat and I were sharing a house in Del Mar, California with experimental filmmaker Louis Hock. Ray and Louis were teaching film in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, where I had taught the previous year — having been coaxed by Manny Farber into leaving my job as assistant editor of Monthly Film Bulletin and staff writer of Sight and Sound in London, at the British Film Institute, and returning to the U.S. after almost eight years of living in Europe. Ray, already a friend, also came over from London to take my position when I wasn’t rehired, and I was starting to work on a book that eventually became Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980). Read more
