Press Play

This is a web site built around original video essays and critical, personal writing about movies, TV, music, comics and whatever else interests its contributors. It is published by Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic for New York Magazine and overseen by editor-in-chief Kevin B. Lee.

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DVD REVIEW: JEAN-PIERRE GORIN: a new DVD box set spotlights the director's best documentaries

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At first glance, the title of "Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin" looks like a joke. If Jean-Pierre Gorin, a Frenchman who moved to San Diego to teach at UCSD in the ‘70s, is known in the U.S. at all, it’s because he collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard as a member of the Dziga Vertov Group. However, except for Tout Va Bien and Letter to Jane, most of the Dziga Vertov Group’s work is now difficult to see. Eclipse’s 3-DVD set of Gorin’s California-made documentaries, completed between 1980 and 1992, rescues them from oblivion. They’ve rarely been screened theatrically in the U.S. in the twenty years since the most recent one, "My Crasy Life," was made, apart from a 2010 retrospective at New York’s Migrating Forms festival.

By Steven Erickson
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January 16, 2012 12:06 PM
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Disney Magic Transforms Taxi Driver

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