Author Archives: Jan-Christopher Horak

Archival Spaces 305 Invaders from Mars (1953) restored Uploaded 30 September 2022 At the Cinecon Classic Film Festival in Los Angeles over Labor Day weekend, Scott MacQueen, the former head of film preservation at UCLA Film & Television Archive, presented his restoration of William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (1953). MacQueen had previously introduced theContinue reading “305: Invaders from Mars”

Archival Spaces 304 Donna Rifkind’s The Sun and Her Stars Uploaded 16 September 2022 I first read Salka Viertel’s autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers (1969/2019) in the late 1970s, as I was writing my first piece on German-Jewish refugees in Hollywood, “The Palm Trees Were Gently Swaying. German Refugees from Hitler in Hollywood” (1980). TheContinue reading “304: Salka Viertel Biography”

Archival Spaces 303 Three Minutes. A Lengthening  (2022) Uploaded 2 September 2022 In the Summer of 1990, after the fall of Communism, I visited Poland for the first time, training docents for a United States Information Agency exhibit on American cinema in Katowice. On a free day, I asked my driver to take me toContinue reading “303: Three Minutes. A Lengthening  (2022)“

Archival Spaces 302 Summer of ‘62 Uploaded 19 August 2022 Heinz Erhardt was an extremely popular comedian in 1950s cinema of the German Federal Republic. I have been watching some of his films on YouTube because I’m writing about William Thiele’s penultimate feature film, The Last Pedestrian (1960) for a Thiele book I’m editing withContinue reading “302: Summer of ’62”