European Cinema

A page to talk about the marvels of the European Cinema scene, new and old!

Also chiming in to say that for Wiki expansion project, I'm doing a page challenge where every week by Monday (PT) I will make a new work page on a European cinema film. Or significantly improve one, or make additional related pages. So any help will be appreciated!

I can heartily recommend Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, which just got a Shout-Out on the season premiere of The Americans.

I just read the page, it sounds interesting. And pretty wild but potential to be serious and hilarious if done well. Good reviews?

If you're taking requests, I'll naturally be interested in seeing more Lupin films, like the one from 2004.

It won the Oscar for best foreign language film of 1980, beating out Louis Malle film The Last Metro and Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

Periodically I've been working on filling out that page, Academy Award For Best Foreign Language Film. We have pages for most of the winners now, but there are still a few gaps. Besides winners, I've been looking for Russian and Japanese films on the list.

I'll be watching it at some point, then! Are you having trouble finding the foreign films, then?

Okay, so next week I'll probably make Varda's Vagabond, and the week after Lupin, unless I get the motivation to do two :) I'm not where I'll be able to find it.

On some occasions I have just looked around to see if I could find films online. I've found a few on Amazon Prime. Every so often Turner Classic Movies will run one. Just a couple of weeks ago I went looking for DVDs...you can get some real bargains from used copies found in libraries and whatnot. That's how I was able to make pages for 1990s Russian film Prisoner of the Mountains and an old Polish film called Man of Iron. Soon I'm gonna break down and subscribe to Filmstruck.

There's a troper named Breakermorant who has been doing the Lord's work lately in making work pages for European cinema. They created a Useful Notes page for Palme d'Or, which I've added a couple of links to.

Personally I've been looking for movies that are on one or more of our indexes—the Roger Ebert Great Movies List, 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die, the Empire 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time List, the Oscar list as noted, the Palme d'Or as noted. And any Russian or Japanese films I can find I usually end up making a work page for.

edited 2nd Apr '18 1:34:26 PM by jamespolk

The problem I see is that there is a difference between a local classic and what the world at large would consider great cinema. Certain movies just don't translate particularly well.

that's one of the reasons why I've been trying to draft a European Cinema index in TLP — there are so many great films that have stylistic similarities that people really need to be introduced to.

Breakermorrant is doing amazing, like a film page factory, even if his English isn't all that good. I think he's been getting help with it after I advised him to, or at least maybe using a dictionary to help himself, though, because it's been improving. While I've been thinking of doing a Wiki Expansion for a while, his efforts were a good inspiration kick.

Do we need a European Cinema index? We have either Film indexes or Media indexes for just about every nation in Europe except for maybe Liechtenstein.

It's more a draft about the style of European Cinema with hopefully a few examples, so less of an index but with that function. It's not really taking off, though, but it's not that important.

So a Useful Notes page, really. I'd support that.

So is The Gleaners and I uploaded yet?

It is

Did some CrossWicking for you.

I knew I forgot something! I thought maybe I hadn't indexed it but no, it was the crosswicks.

Watched a pretty fascinating Anthology Film from France in 1968 called Spirits of the Dead. Three adaptations of three Edgar Allan Poe short stories. Murderer's row of talent that included Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, and Terence Stamp. And the three segments were directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. The Fellini segment was the best, full of the bizarre surrealism of his later career.

That sounds good, which Poe stories were they?

Three I'd never heard of: "Metzengerstein", "William Wilson", and "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", although apparently that last one, the Fellini story, changed everything except the ending.

I... have not heard of those either. Sounds like the Fellini section is great, though, so I'll at least watch that sometime.

Apropos of nothing, I'd like to point out a French movie called Betty Blue, which was nominated for an Oscar for Foreign Language Film, which appears on the Empire 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time List, and which also appears on the Roger Ebert Most Hated Films List. I think I have to agree with Ebert—it's mostly an excuse for Beatrice Dalle to get naked a lot.

Does have anything but a naked Betty?

Also, Vagabond (1985) is up, but I'll probably do some more work on it.

Solaris is going to run on Turner Classic Movies on April 15.

How do we feel about all The Adventures of Antoine Doinel films being on one page? I have a DVD for Stolen Kisses sitting in my kitchen and I'm thinking about making a separate work page for it.

edited 10th Apr '18 12:36:15 PM by jamespolk

I feel like they were all put together in the first place because whomever made it knew more about 400 Blows than the others, which is understandable completely, but separating them and then maybe having the Antoine Doinel page to stay as the film series page would probably be beneficial if we could make it work. I'd definitely be up for helping out with that, too.