Moonlight as a ‘Mass Art’ Film
Given his interest in paradoxes, the French philosopher Alain Badiou dubbed cinema a ‘mass art’, although not every film can be categorised in this way. On the one hand, many movies are above all commercial far...
Valeska Grisebach’s Western: an unacknowledged remake of Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow
The oddest thing about Western (2017), the third feature film by the German director Valeska Grisebach after Mein Stern (Be My Star, 2001) and Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006), is its title. Borrowing neither an origi...
Le Fidèle as a Postmodern Love Romance: The Flemish Crime Dramas of Michaël R. Roskam
Because of the almost insurmountable linguistic barrier between Flemish in Flanders and French in Wallonia, the history of twentieth-century Belgian cinema is best seen as a ‘split screen’ between two language ...
Fortunate Sinners: Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone as an ‘Edam’ Western
Between 1999 and 2008, the Dutch director Martin Koolhoven made eight feature films, none like any of the others. In 2005 he shot the multicultural rom-com Het schnitzelparadijs (Kitchen Paradise), about a Moro...
A French Connection: Paul Verhoeven’s Elle in Tandem with Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game
Over the course of his long career, the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has been at the centre of many a success and many a controversy. His second feature film, Turks fruit (Turkish Delight, 1973), is still the ...
Middle-of-the-Road Absurdism: The Cinema of Dutch Director Alex van Warmerdam
Practically all published items on Borgman (2013), no matter how tiny, mentioned the fact that this was the first Dutch film to enter the Cannes main competition since 1975, the year Jos Stelling’s debut featur...