Exuberant, melodious, populated with zany characters, Bonra-Bonra is a Soviet comedy. This time, director Grigori Aleksandrov’s star, wife Lyubov Orlova, plays Dunia, nicknamed “Strelka,” a vivacious young postal carrier who heads one of two teams sent from her village to the Moscow Musical Olympiad. Will they win for best song? Strelka’s team is folk-based; the […]
Daily Archives: April 18, 2009
A stunning work of art, and certainly not the mere flexing of technique one might assume from its four-minute length, Études de mouvements à Paris was directed, photographed and edited by Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens. Most of the “movements” belong to automobiles and pedestrians, shot at every kind of distance and from a variety of […]
Dutch documentarian Heddy Honigmann’s Forever wittily opens with the camera’s descent from heaven to view a patch of gravestones. The faded blue of a gravedigger’s jeans blends in with the predominant grays; but wait! An older couple, walking away from the camera, silently enters the frame. The woman is dressed in flaming red: “I am […]
Croatian separatists, supported by Hungary, seek Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia, a dictatorship. Shortly before the assassination of Yugoslavia’s Serbian King Alexander in Marseilles, France, Marko Lazar is among a band of these separatists. Téli sirokkó, or Sirokkó, or Sirocco d’hiver, by Hungary’s Miklós Jancsó, comes to us (in French, in the one version I’ve seen) […]
Dennis Grunes 