This November, Kino Film Collection is celebrating its one-year anniversary! To honor this momentous milestone, we’re turning it over to our staff, who know and love the Kino Film Collection library better than anyone. In this series, you’ll discover standout titles with their (very passionate) personal recommendations… and what better way to kick things off than with Richard Lorber himself? Get to know Kino Lorber’s chairman and CEO in his own words and learn about his favorite titles — it was no easy task for him to narrow them down to five!
How and when did your love of film begin?
“Before getting into the film business I was an academic, an assistant professor at NYU teaching art history and miscellaneous other courses. I was an art critic for Artforum and other publications and I thought I would live happily ever after on the academic path towards a tenure sunset. But I decided I didn’t want to go down with the sun in that world, so I made a change and wound up in the film world after having written a fair amount about film while also writing about the visual arts.
In the late ‘60s and ‘70s, when I was in graduate school, I would make regular pilgrimages to arthouse theaters like the Thalia and the New Yorker – it was a very exciting time in the history of cinema. The nouvelle vague was in full force and thriving. Everybody was eagerly awaiting the new film from Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, or Antonioni. There was a real sense of destination with those theaters. I started college when I was 16, so I was very impressionable and the films imprinted deeply on me when I was at that tender age. It opened up the world in ways I never would have imagined.
One of the first films I fell in love with was Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. That led to an ongoing love affair with cinema from the ‘60s and ‘70s and that helped me catapult into [the film business].
And here I am. I’ve got a great organization, a great team, and I'm very happy about this library that we've built. We’ve been carefully selecting films from our library of over 4000 titles to add to Kino Film Collection, and we have almost 500 of our favorite films that are early arrivals on the site. It was a challenge for me to come back with five staff picks. I could probably come back to you with another five, and another five, and another five, but I’ll start with the ones I have on the tip of my tongue and the top of my mind.”
Richard’s Top 5 Picks (in no particular order)
Dawson City: Frozen Time by Bill Morrison (2016)
“One of the most fascinating films that I’ve come across is Bill Morrison’s documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time. This is a really amazing work of cinematic archeology. It follows the discovery of hundreds of canisters of films that were discarded in Canada, in the Yukon, at the end of the distribution line, when prints were bicycled from theater to theater. The film presents these treasures of lost cinema from the early part of the century, along with the narrative of how they were lost and rediscovered. It’s an analysis of the whole apparatus of film distribution. So it's both metacinema and an inquiry into the economy of film exhibition. It’s a film of discoveries – personal discoveries that you see looking at the films and discovery of the ideas that led to what is now contemporary film distribution in the most analog sense, from the past to what is now digitally new. So it's something that I would consider a key primer for anyone inquiring about the history of film.”
The Forbidden Room by Guy Maddin (2015)
“I will veer from that into something that's also true metacinema, but in the most playful, surrealistic form that I can imagine. This is the work of the great auteur Guy Maddin. Guy's Forbidden Room from 2015 is inexplicable. It's a surrealistic fantasy for which he recruited various talents like Charlotte Rampling and Udo Kier and a whole bunch of other celebrities to participate in his fever dream of cinema. It looks very distorted and rugged and crude, and I can't even begin to describe the narrative, but it's something that is just totally eye-filling and wondrous, and you just have to let your mind roam freely over his images and not try to make any sense out of it. But it all seems to amount to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. I can't say much more about it except that it was a total delight to discover, and it's the kind of film that you can watch again and again and see new things and get new ideas and come up with new interpretations. It's a film made of many films and many ideas, and I recommend it strongly.”
Diamantino by Daniel Schmidt and Gabriel Abrantes (2018)
“I'm always looking for films that are pushing the envelope, taking the concept of entertainment into dangerous zones of experimentation and extravagance and using the medium in new ways to uncover new ideas. With more of a narrative tilt than either of the other two, the film Diamantino by Abrantes and Schmidt is an interesting film that won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 2018, but more significantly it won the Palm Dog, the award for the best dog in a film at the Cannes Film Festival. [Laughs.] It’s about a pea-brained soccer star, who is having an identity crisis and is being manipulated by his menacing, demonic sisters, who are trying to control his fate and his fortune. It's a film that keeps tripping over its own premise and it's hysterically funny, visually original, and a delight for the eyes and for the mind. It takes the popular concept of soccer and turns it into kind of a surrealistic carnival of ideas and characters.”
The Trouble With You by Pierre Salvadori (2018)
“Another film that is narratively convoluted, but exploratory, is a wonderful French film called The Trouble With You. This is a film by Pierre Salvadori, a French filmmaker who was very acclaimed for a film he did in 1995 called Les Apprentis. The Trouble With You has the most ridiculously complex storyline with characters who interact with each other and change identities. It uses the cinematic skills that he has as a filmmaker to invert all the usual tropes of the French genre of the policier, the traditional crime thriller that the French are really brilliant at and know so well. It stars Adèle Haenel. It was produced by David Thion, who was nominated for an Academy Award® last year as the producer of Anatomy of a Fall. The Trouble With You was a film that for a variety of reasons was kind of forgotten about and unsung, but it remains one of my most delightful experiences. It is just uproariously funny. It's poignant. It's a love story. It's a crime thriller. It's really a cinematic delight.”
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Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell by Phạm Thiên Ân (2023)
“So going from the ridiculous to the sublime, here is my final pick, which is one of my all-time favorites: Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes last year. It’s a film by Phạm Thiên Ân and it is a story of psychological immersion. It's a tale of search. It's a spiritual journey. It's a three-hour film that is riveting and visually mesmerizing and brings you into another lane, another level of consciousness in my own experience. It starts with a motorcycle accident where a man's sister is killed and her young child survives and the protagonist of the film takes it upon himself to raise the child. This leads them to travel through the countryside in Vietnam in search for the man’s missing brother. But more importantly, it's a spiritual search for his own sense of self and identity. The colors, the shots, there are shots that are continuous shots that go on for 20 minutes. As you give yourself to the cinematic spectacle of the film, the visual splendor of it, you kind of just lose all sense of time and you begin to reflect on your own sense of self and where you are in the greatest scheme of the widening universe. It's a film that has found a high level of praise both from critics and audiences, and is right now one of the nominees for the Gotham Award for Best International Feature. So when you have three hours to spare, try it out. The time will fly.”