Movies: Daniel Kremer

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

Peter Medak's films toy with notions of cosplay, masquerade, gamesmanship, and how power and permission structures figure into these human diversions. His filmography includes The Ruling Class (1972), The Changeling (1980), A Day in the Death of Joe ...

For over forty years, both from an international platform as well as from his local pulpit in The Bronx, Rabbi Avi Weiss has been an important voice speaking up against injustice for both Jews and non-Jews. In the documentary, filmmaker Phil Schneide...

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...

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...

Eddie Huntly, an east coast radio personality, moves to San Francisco to marry Thea, the sister of his best friend Neil, a successful entrepreneur. Shortly before Eddie's arrival, Neil is found murdered in what the police surmise was a simple mugging...

Next Week in Bologna is a tongue-in-cheek nod to Italian Neo-Realism, shot in Rob Nilsson's Direct Action style. A pickpocket cinema projectionist in Bologna, Italy, narrates three intertwining stories of tourists who visit his city one summer. A tim...

"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 ...

In 1968, filmmaker Jules Dassin collaborated with Ruby Dee and civil rights activist Julian Mayfield on Uptight, a "politically radical" film noir about Black revolution, framed against the April 4 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Directo...

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...

We all know Jack Nicholson the actor. But few know the history of Jack Nicholson the screenwriter, and especially Jack Nicholson the director. Nicholson's lifelong friend, filmmaker Henry Jaglom, reflects on the icon's behind-the-camera career, while...

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...

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...

Traumatized by his recent divorce, lovelorn Stanley takes off cross country to San Francisco, landing at his enterprising sister Nancy's doorstep. Nancy, who makes counterculture cinema-themed t-shirts, lives in "Camille's Castle," a frozen-in-time l...