Olaf Moller
Hard to Be a God (Aleksei German, Russia)
By Olaf Moller | | CS57, Festivals, From Cinema Scope Magazine, Spotlight
By Olaf Möller Now it’s been delivered, the last work of the late Aleksei German. On Wednesday, November 13th, 10:30 a.m., during the Festival internazionale del film di Roma, his 14-years-in-the-making Hard to Be a God (Trudno byt’ bogom)—for some time called History of the Arkanar Massacre (Istorija Arkanarskoj rezni)—got its first public screening. It…
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Web Only | Books Around: Picking Up
By Olaf Moller | | CS46, Web Only
By Olaf Möller Festivals, the bigger ones at least, are among the last bastions of subsidized non-academic film publication. Traditionally, important or marginal retrospectives were accompanied by nice books or at least representative pamphlets authored usually by journalists—folks who knew how to build up an interest for something, keep the masses flowing into the venues…
Read More Columns | Books Around: New Turkish Cinema
By Olaf Moller | | Columns, CS45, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Olaf Möller It was only a matter of time till a bunch of books on Turkish cinema would hit the stores; film-cultural fads work like that. To give things a more positive spin, what’s a passing fancy for many might be a life’s passion for a few who can now, in the tiny window…
Read More Festivals | One Man’s Century: Peter von Bagh’s Sodankylä Forever
By Olaf Moller | | CS44, Festivals, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Olaf Möller The Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä is something of a legend: everybody has heard about it, but who has actually made the trip to Finland’s farthest north? Besides, the stories one hears—the program, the presence of many an old master over the decades, the drinking and general sense of camaraderie, the…
Read More Columns | Deaths of Cinema – But Farewell: Werner Schroeter
By Olaf Moller | | Columns, CS43, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Olaf Möller In the end, Werner Schroeter’s demise on April 12 did in fact come as a surprise. Over the last few years one had seen him so often so close to death only to regenerate (it seemed) splendidly, and one began to believe that somehow things could and would go on like this,…
Read More Books Around: Eastern Ley Lines
By Olaf Moller | | CS41, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Olaf Möller Originally I wanted to pick things up where I left ‘em last time: in Japan, deep inside genre-land, by praising the brilliance and beauty of Jasper Sharp’s hefty tome on Japanese sex cinema, from whence I intended to commence t’wards a similarly calibrated labour of love, Jack Stevenson’s study on erotic cinema…
Read More Web Only | Books Around: Here’s to Friends
By Olaf Moller | | Web Only
By Olaf Möller Just when I’d concluded that having a fat wad of cash on me at festivals to hit the book stores in style was useless, I came to Udine’s Far East Film Festival where I suddenly found myself lacking the money necessary to buy all the interesting-looking works on offer there. Due to…
Read More Web Only | Books Around: Ghosts
By Olaf Moller | | Web Only
By Olaf Möller Thirty, maybe even 40 years ago it was already high time for somebody to publish a tome on Victor Fleming, yet nobody did until Michael Sragow set down to work on Victor Fleming: An American Movie Maker (New York: Pantheon Books). Before that, the only extensive appreciation of Fleming’s oeuvre appeared in…
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