Movies: Daniel Kremer

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. ...

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...

Sky-high housing costs, rents no one can pay, urban development, and street crime make life difficult for RV dwellers in Berkeley, California. City bureaucrats collaborate with real estate agents to gentrify neighborhoods forcing out already marginal...

Franklin J. Schaffner is the man behind a great many iconic American films: Planet of the Apes (1968), Patton (1970), Papillon (1973), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and others. Though he was an often enigmatically quiet but no less confident and decis...

"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 ...

Cowboy, a senior citizen ex-lawyer and gambler, is persuaded by his spunky seventeen year old neighbor, Rachel, to seek retribution for having been cheated in Las Vegas many years ago. So begins a wild adventure that marks a young girl's rite of pass...

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...

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 ...

The story of how two people have chosen to deal with what many consider a disability. One is a young boy from Pittsburgh well on his way to realizing his dream of becoming a film director. The other is an established musician who decided one day that...

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...

David Cronenberg (the well-known Canadian director's American film-student counterpart) is making an ambitious "neorealist video feature" entitled "Wireless Internet", a didactic horror film about a contagious mind virus. The project gradually morphs...

An imagined plague diary...