While running the risk of turning this group blog into an All-Polanski-All-The-Time love fest, I thought it worth while to point out my favorite part of the petition currently circulating the mess halls of Sunset Boulevard. (I mean beside the fact that Woody Allen signed it (which is a cheap shot, I know, but much like my teenage years, I’ll take what I can get)).

Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.

In other words, “How dare they disturb the sanctity of a film festival!”

There is a special sort of comedy associated with this idea that only those who have run a film through the festival circuit can appreciate. (more…)

During the 1963 Moscow International Film Festival, few doubted Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” was a masterpiece. The film was not merely contending for the Grand Prize; it was clear that no conventional prize could put a tag on the sheer artistic genius and refreshing power of the movie. Threatened by Fellini’s highly formalistic language, the Communist Party’s movie department (who were making decisions behind the scenes), as usual, suspected something potentially harmful for the cause of the international proletariat. They put pressure on the head of the jury, a Soviet filmmaker Grigori Chukhrai, not to award the Grand Prize to “8 ½.”

Chukhrai was in a tight spot. He had his share of problems with the system with his 1959 war movie “The Ballad of a Soldier,” when he did not depict Nazis as stupid animals but rather as a highly organized and evil intelligence. Because of that, some in the government tried to ban Chukhrai and label him a Nazi sympathizer. They failed. First, Chukhrai’s movies about the war were Soviet classics and second, Chukrai himself was a war hero who fought through almost every battle of the war all the way to Berlin. (more…)