Actualités

Frank Ocean: musician, visual-album releaser, list-making cinephile. Following on the heels of his latest album finally being made available to the eager public, Ocean has revealed his 100 favorite films. Originally posted on Genius, which has a breakdown of how movies like “The Little Mermaid” and “Eyes Wide Shut” made their way into his lyrics (“I’m feeling like Stanley Kubrick, this is some visionary shit/Been tryna film pleasure with my eyes wide shut but it keeps on moving”), the list contains a mix of familiar favorites (“Annie Hall,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”) and comparatively obscure arthouse fare (“Woyzeck,” “Sonatine”). Avail yourself of all 100 below.

“Atl”

“Un Chien Andalou”

“Blue Velvet”

“Barry Lyndon”

“Battleship Potemkin”

“Eraserhead”

“Chungking Express”

“Raging Bull”

“The Conformist”

“Bicycle Thieves”

“Taxi Driver”

“A Clockwork Orange”

“Mean Streets”

“Gods of the Plague”

“Persona”

“Mulholland Drive”

“Happy Together”

“Fallen Angels”

“Apocalypse Now”

“The Last Laugh”

“Pi”

“Full Metal Jacket...

After a few delays, Frank Ocean‘s Channel Orange follow-up, Blond, has now arrived and, with it, not only an additional visual album, but Boys Don’t Cry, a magazine that only a select few were able to get their hands on. (Although, if you believe the artist’s mom, we can expect a wider release soon.) In between a personal statement about his new work and a Kanye West poem about McDonalds, Ocean also listed his favorite films of all-time and we have the full list today.

Clocking at 207.23 hours, as Ocean notes, his list includes classics from Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Fritz Lang, Werner Herzog, Akira Kurosawa, Ridley Scott, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, Luis Buñuel, and more.

As for some more recent titles, it looks like The Royal Tenenbaums...

This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor conclude their two-part discussion of Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder.

About the films:

From the very beginning of his incandescent career, the New German Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder refused to play by the rules. His politically charged, experimental first films, made at an astonishingly rapid rate between 1969 and 1970, were influenced by the work of the Antiteater, an avant-garde stage troupe that he had helped found in Munich. Collected here are five of those fascinating and confrontational works. Whether a self- conscious meditation on American crime movies, a scathing indictment of xenophobia in contemporary Germany, or an off-the-wall look at the dysfunctional relationships on film sets, each is a startling...

DVD Release Date: Aug. 27, 2013

Price: DVD $69.95

Studio: Criterion

R. W. Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)

From the very beginning of his incandescent career, the New German Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder (World on a Wire) refused to play by the rules. His politically charged, experimental first films, made at an astonishingly rapid rate between 1969 and 1971, were influenced by the work of the antiteater, an avant-garde stage troupe that he had helped found in Munich.

Collected in Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder are five of those fascinating and confrontational works; whether a self-conscious meditation on American crime movies, a scathing indictment of xenophobia in contemporary Germany, or an off-the-wall look at the dysfunctional relationships on film sets, each is a startling glimpse into the mind of a twenty-something man who would become one of the cinema’s most prolific artists.

Love Is Colder Than Death (1969)

For his debut, Fassbinder fashioned an acerbic,...

German actor best known for his roles in the films of Fassbinder

Filmgoers familiar with the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder will certainly know Günther Kaufmann, who has died of a heart attack aged 64. Kaufmann had parts great and small in more than a dozen of the prolific German director's movies. He was what the Germans call a "Besatzungskind", one of the many children born between 1945 and 1949 as a result of relationships between German women and American soldiers. Kaufmann's black GI father, whom he never knew, returned to the Us before he was born in Munich. According to Fassbinder: "Günther thinks Bavarian, feels Bavarian and speaks Bavarian. And that's why he gets a shock every morning when he looks in the mirror." Kaufmann, whom Fassbinder always called "my Bavarian negro", played an important role in his life.

They first met in the autumn of 1969 on the set of Volker Schlöndorff's television film of Baal,...

German actor best known for his roles in the films of Fassbinder

Filmgoers familiar with the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder will certainly know Günther Kaufmann, who has died of a heart attack aged 64. Kaufmann had parts great and small in more than a dozen of the prolific German director's movies. He was what the Germans call a "Besatzungskind", one of the many children born between 1945 and 1949 as a result of relationships between German women and American soldiers. Kaufmann's black GI father, whom he never knew, returned to the Us before he was born in Munich. According to Fassbinder: "Günther thinks Bavarian, feels Bavarian and speaks Bavarian. And that's why he gets a shock every morning when he looks in the mirror." Kaufmann, whom Fassbinder always called "my Bavarian negro", played an important role in his life.

They first met in the autumn of 1969 on the set of Volker Schlöndorff...

Let's join Der Tagesspiegel's Claudia Lenssen in wishing Margarethe von Trotta all the best on her 70th. Lenssen reminds us that when von Trotta hoped to see her first feature, The Second Awakening of Christina Klages (1978), in cinemas, the "fine machos" at the Filmverlag der Autoren in Munich judged it worthy of television, but no more. For the movers and shakers of the New German Cinema, the story of a bank employee and a bank robber who fall for each other was all together too much a woman's picture. Lena (Katharina Thalbach) finds out that the stolen money's supposed to save a kindergarten from being shut down? Not sexy enough.

Lenssen: "Margarethe von Trotta's films are inspired by real events and circumstances. Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981) tells the story of Raf terrorist Gudrun Ensslin and her sister, Christiane, Rosa Luxemburg (1986), the story of the revolutionary who was...