The golden hour in filmmaking is a brief and fleeting time of day directly before sunrise and after sunset when the sky is painted in lush yellows and warm reds. It evokes an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, loss and melancholy – a reason it has become the ideal time for filmmakers and photographers to shoot. […]
Author Archives: Ian Colvin
Out of Focus: Egyptian Theatre to showcase Buñuel’s best films
From the smoke-filled cafes of 1920s Paris, where his landmark film “Un Chien Andalou” was concocted with Salvador Dalí, to the poverty-stricken slums of 1950s Mexico, Luis Buñuel crafted a variety of masterpieces that would cement his status as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers. Blending surrealism with elements of naturalism, and dealing in a […]
Out of Focus: ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’ an exceptional take on Dracula story
A fog-enshrouded Transylvania. A castle raised high in the sky in all of its menace and grandeur. A pale and ghastly vampire looming in the shadows. We’ve seen these images before. We know what we’re going to see and what’s going to happen. German auteur Werner Herzog crafts an excellent variation on the Dracula story […]
Out of Focus: New series calls attention to work by Polish filmmakers
France, Italy, Germany – these are the countries most represented in lists of European cinema’s most beloved films. There are exceptions, yes – you have your Ingmar Bergman movies and your Andrei Tarkovsky pictures, but the trend is unmistakable. A new series that recently debuted in Los Angeles, however, threatens to destroy the notion of […]
Out of Focus: Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’ a beautiful take on ‘King Lear’
Blood stains the rolling hills of the Japanese countryside. Arrows fly through the air as warriors in phalanx formations march across the plains. In Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran,” these images are beautified – we see poetry in the bloodshed, poetry in war. The film will be screening Sunday at The Cinefamily on Fairfax Avenue with lead […]
Out of Focus: Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ pushes past boundaries of comedy genre
The pulsating sounds of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” sound out over the New York City skyline. In a flurry of images, we see the iconography traditionally associated with the city – its brimstone buildings, its towering skyscrapers, its citizens marching on through the bustling, damp and snow-covered streets – as a neurotic, disembodied voice […]
Out of Focus: ‘Touch of Evil’ to return to site of famed opening sequence
Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” opens with an explosion of sight and sound: the loud jazz of jukeboxes, honking cars and near the scene’s conclusion, a literal explosion – a car goes up in flames after a bomb detonates. Welles sets the location in a long three-minute tracking shot that has since become legendary. We, […]