Movies: Daniel Kremer

Worlds collide in this unconventional essay film, when filmmaker, film historian, and archivist Daniel Kremer seamlessly edits Michelangelo Antonioni's legendary but controversial counterculture art film Zabriskie Point (1970) into the same narrative...

Perhaps at first glance, the filmography of Silvio Narizzano appears unremarkable. Thanks to his sleeper hit Georgy Girl (1966), he's known largely as a "one-hit wonder" director. Upon closer inspection, however, likely no other filmmaker used cinema...

What do the movies First Blood and Weekend at Bernie's have in common? One man with a clear and curious thematic focus, that's what. Ted Kotcheff is an auteur filmmaker. He is a director with a unifying style, a clear thematic concern, and a coherent...

Between One Eyed Jacks (1961) and The Godfather (1972), Marlon Brando appeared in twelve feature films. The actor called this period his "F*** You Years" and it was during this time that his on-set behavior hit erratic and unpredictable new heights. ...

Clara grew up in the Belize jungles but was sent to live in San Francisco after a childhood trauma. Her older boyfriend, Gabriel encourages a trip back to her jungle home. Once arriving, the familiar faces and tropic environment fills Clara with hope...

A video essay about fifties and early sixties social and sexual mores, in life and in cinema, and how these "codes" (in partnership with a production Code, capital C, which was almost antediluvian in terms of sexual politics) molded and then trapped ...

A ten-year drought brings local ranches to the brink of disaster. The search for Bert Neville takes its toll on Rail and Mitra. They break up and Rail continues on alone. Travis, Ziggy and Karin hitchhike in high country and get lost in a burnt out f...

"What do you do when the spark touches down-brief and hot?" So begins award-winning director Rob Nilsson's (Permission to Touch, MVFF 2015; A Bridge to a Border, MVFF 2014) provocative meditation on the Möbius relationship of fiction to reality, and ...

Max Plugin is a jaded but flamboyant relic of the 1960s. In his teens, Max ran away to California, where he met Teschlock, a charismatic ascetic and guru renowned among a small group of young followers. At that time, when Teschlock asked Max to join ...

In 1968, filmmaker Jules Dassin collaborated with Ruby Dee and civil rights activist Julian Mayfield on Uptight, a "politically radical" film noir about Black revolution, framed against the April 4 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Directo...

Otto Preminger wasn't only one of the most famous directors of classic Hollywood. He was a presence, a brand, and the only one who rivaled Hitchcock as the greatest showman and self-promoter of his generation. But toward the end of his career, his at...

Lenny Bruce's depiction on film did not start or end with Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974). Through these other often offbeat cinematic incarnations, this essay piece considers how Lenny Bruce was the perfect Bob Fosse subject, and how Fosse's focus on the l...

Shot on black-and-white super-16mm, A Trip to Swadades tells the story of a 74-year-old ex-professor named Schweitzer Haas who, after many years of living away from Philadelphia, the city where he came of age, returns to visit his hermit brother Ezra...

We all know Jack Nicholson the actor. But few know the history of Jack Nicholson the screenwriter, and especially Jack Nicholson the director. Nicholson's lifelong friend, filmmaker Henry Jaglom, reflects on the icon's behind-the-camera career, while...

Carla Durkow is a filmmaker from Istanbul who screens her latest work, entitled Farewell Mighty Spirit, at a Philadelphia art gallery. Her film-within-a-film details the aftermath of the death of the Grand Poet of Santa Maria, and the reading of his ...

Frictions develop when Yisroel "Izzy" Jonigkeyt, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, travels to San Francisco to visit Polish-born Catholic friend Marek Wisniewski with the intent of discovering why a Bay Area art-world iconoclast named Harry Kierk s...

Eddie Huntly, an east coast radio personality, moves to San Francisco to marry Thea, the sister of his best friend Neil, a successful entrepreneur. Shortly before Eddie's arrival, Neil is found murdered in what the police surmise was a simple mugging...

The most that mainstream culture knows of the Talmud is from the finale scene of Schindler's List, when Yitzchok Stern hands Oskar Schinder an engraved gold ring that reads, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." But how can Talmudic wisdom...

A husband-and-wife pair of retired cult deprogrammers experience marital strife when their past catches up with them....

Canadian-born filmmaker Sidney J. Furie made his name with British hits like The Young Ones (1961), The Leather Boys (1964), and The Ipcress File (1965). When he arrived in Hollywood, Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra wreaked havoc on his first major s...