Utne Reader Film Reviews: January-February 2009

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

To watch trailers from these films, click here.

Surfing to Europe
Europa Film Treasures
www.europafilmtreasures.eu  

The laptop screen still can’t compete with the silver screen for cinematic grandeur, but what the computer lacks in scale, it compensates for in breadth and immediacy. Visitors to the Europa Film Treasures website will find themselves just a few mouse clicks away from a 1919 Hungarian Revolution parable from the director of Casablanca, a 1928 Russian mini-epic of animated marionettes, and an elegantly astute 1955 Macedonian documentary on a fraternal order of dervishes observing Ramadan.

This welcome trove of the motion picture medium’s formative juvenilia aggregates dozens (so far) of short-form relics—many with new original scores, most in pristine restorations, and all searchable by title, date, nationality, genre, director, cast, and more. Each is appended with a concise scholarly history, synopsis, and production specs; subtitles, where necessary, come in your choice of five languages. It’s the brainchild of compulsive film archivist and restorer Serge Bromberg, whose company Lobster Films houses more than 100,000 reels in its labyrinthine Paris offices and is one of the 28 European film archives from which Europa Film Treasures gathers its remarkable content.

The site isn’t all serious and scholarly. There are also pure entertainments—and impure ones—running a gamut from the 1917 John Ford western Bucking Broadway, in which a cowboy loses himself in New York City, to the understandably popular 1948 erotic short aptly known as The Apple-Knockers and the Coke. Best, and most web-appropriate, is that it’s a work in progress, adding content and interactive features regularly. —Jonathan Kiefer

Kinshasa Cool
On The Rumba River
(First Run Features; on DVD)

On the Rumba River is a music-rich, dramatized documentary built around a simple story line: An aging musician gets his old band back together. Luckily, the musician is not Don Henley but Antoine Kolosoy, a.k.a. Papa Wendo, a former star of Congolese rumba music. Once the kings of the downtown Kinshasa scene, Wendo’s old bandmates fire up the guitars, horns, and thumb pianos and play their cosmopolitan, jazz-inflected music with all the passion they can muster, which is considerable. Wendo emerges as a tyrannical and evangelical figure who inspires great devotion; the Congo emerges as a battered but proud version of its former self after decades of civil war. —Keith Goetzman

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print