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MILESTONE FILM & VIDEO TO LAUNCH MILESTONE-ON-DEMAND ON JUNE 7, 2011; FIRST THREE TITLES ARE ANNOUNCED

Posted Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 - Comments Off on MILESTONE FILM & VIDEO TO LAUNCH MILESTONE-ON-DEMAND ON JUNE 7, 2011; FIRST THREE TITLES ARE ANNOUNCED
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For Immediate Release                              May 4, 2011

Milestone is proud to announce the MILESTONE-ON-DEMAND video line. In an effort to create greater access to its extensive Milestone collection, high quality masters and replication will be used in the coming months to release some of our most long-sought-after titles. Silent films, documentaries, foreign films and classic comedy shorts will all be featured in the coming months.

The first three releases scheduled for June 7, 2011 are:

A DAY ON THE GRAND CANAL WITH THE EMPEROR OF CHINA by David Hockney and Philip Haas

DZIGA AND HIS BROTHERS: A FILM FAMILY ON THE CUTTING EDGE by Yevgeni Tsymbal.

AND NOW, MIGUEL by Joseph Krumgold

The three films retail for $29.95 each but are available at 20% off at milestonefilms.com or by calling Milestone directly at (800) 603-1104

A DAY ON THE GRAND CANAL WITH THE EMPEROR OF CHINA or surface is illusion but so is depth
A film by Philip Haas and David Hockney. Music by Marc Wilkinson. Cinematography by Curtiss Clark. 48 minutes. Color. 1988. © Philip Haas

Director Philip Haas (Angels and Insects), and artist David Hockney invite you to join them on a magical journey through China via a marvelous 72-foot long 17th-century Chinese scroll. As Hockney unrolls the beautiful and minutely detailed work of art, he traces the Emperor Kangxi’s grand tour of his southern domains. Hockney’s charming and fascinating narration helps bring the bustling streets and waterfronts of three hundred years ago to life. Comparing this work with a Canaletto painting and a later Chinese scroll, Hockney spins a dazzling discourse on eastern and western perceptive and their relationship to his own artistic vision. His trip through one of China’s most magnificent artworks is a joyous adventure for all!

DZIGA AND HIS BROTHERS: A Film Family on the Cutting Edge
Director: Yevgeni Tsymbal. Russia. 2002. 52 minutes. Color and B&W.

The fascinating and tumultuous lives of Mikhail, Boris and Denis Kaufman (better known as Dziga Vertov) are the focus of this powerful documentary. Using rare archival footage from Russian state film archives and private collections, the brothers’ lives and art are traced from Bialystok to Moscow, Paris, and Hollywood. “David, Moisey, and Boris Kaufman – ‘perhaps the most talented brothers in the history of cinema’ per film historian Yevgeni Tsymbal – were born in Bialystok (the “most Jewish town in Poland”) to a used-book dealer and a rabbi’s daughter. The town suffered a major pogrom during their childhoods, and their parents would eventually perish in the Holocaust, but the Kaufman brothers attended Russian school and reinvented themselves in the crucible of revolution: David most radically as docu-visionary Dziga. Mikhail (né Moisey) worked with his older brother—he is the title character in The Man With a Movie Camera – until they quarreled and he too became a director. Baby Boris went first to France, collaborating with Jean Vigo, and then to America. Dziga was targeted during Stalin’s Cold War anti-cosmopolitan campaign; he suffered a heart attack and died in obscurity months before Boris won an Oscar for shooting On the Waterfront.” — J. Hoberman, Village Voice.

AND NOW, MIGUEL
Directed by Joseph Krumgold. 1953. Cast: The Chavez Family. Cinematography by Kenneth Marthey. Filmed in Las Cordovas, New Mexico. 62 minutes. Music score composed by Louis Appelbaum.

AND NOW, MIGUEL is known today as the beloved novel by Joseph Krumgold that won the Newberry Medal for excellence in American children’s literature in 1954. But few know that the story actually originated as a motion picture for the US Department of State directed by the Academy Award®-winning Krumgold. Magnificently photographed with an emphasis on local customs and practices, this DVD debut mastered from the best 35mm material will be an important addition to Latino film studies.

Miguel Chavez, 12 years-old, has dreamed of visiting the Sangre de Cristo Mountains since he was very little. This summer, he is going to work hard and pray until his father and grandfather realize that he is ready to take the trip with the rest of the older men. His prayers are granted when his older brother is drafted. His father needs an extra body and grudgingly allows Miguel to accompany them.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon