Following the quasi-documentary Konkurs (Audition, 1964), Cerný Petr (Black Peter) marked the feature debut of Milos Forman, the most famous, arguably most important and influential director of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s. It was shot simultaneously with “Kdyby ty muziky nebyly “If There Were No Music”, the second of the two shorts that [...]
Cinémathèque Annotations on Film
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Aleksandr Sokurov’s Dni zatmeniya (Days of the Eclipse) “centres” on Dmitry Malyanov (Alexei Ananishnov), a Russian doctor sent to an isolated village in central Asia. In the sweltering heat, he endures a series of strange incidents that distract him from his work, perhaps estranging him from reality itself. The tenor of the film is that [...]
The creative process is difficult under any circumstances and in any milieu. However, it becomes excruciatingly difficult under the all-seeing, intrusive cloak of a communist dictatorship. Milos Forman’s Horí, má panenko (The Firemen’s Ball) is a product of – actually, a reaction to – the Czechoslovakian communist regime during the months leading up to the [...]
Alonzo de Monçado: “When a powerful agency is thus exercised on us, – when another undertakes to think, feel, and act for us, we are delighted to transfer to him, not only our physical, but our moral responsibility.”
- Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Now known for an American body of work that largely comprises musicals, [...]
Lásky jedné plavovlásky (Loves of a Blonde) is a hybrid film. It brilliantly walks the thin line between bitter and sweet, between understated tragic situations and moments of comic relief. It is a feature film, but one organised like a documentary. Its main concern is not to follow the development of a dramatic plot or [...]
Joseph Losey’s Monsieur Klein (Mr. Klein) is one of the exiled American director’s finest accomplishments. Shot in both Paris and Strasbourg between December 1975 and mid-February 1976, this existential thriller was the first of four films that Losey made in France while striving unsuccessfully to secure funding for Harold Pinter’s screenplay adaptation of Marcel Proust’s [...]
1988 was a high point in the cultural transformations that exploded under perestroika. The films produced under these new conditions bore the malignant fruits of glasnost combined with the promise of fresh possibilities, a new cinematic language, new values and hitherto unseen characters and narratives. These films highlighted the moral collapse and unrepressed sexuality of [...]
Try to imagine an actor other than Jack Nicholson starring in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Gene Hackman? Not randy enough. Paul Newman? Too good-natured. Robert DeNiro? Maybe – if the filmmakers had wanted to portray the wrongly institutionalised R. P. McMurphy as an actual psychopath. Nicholson’s McMurphy is indelible, difficult to separate from [...]
Jean Renoir is arguably the greatest artist that the cinema has ever known, simply because he was able to work effectively in virtually all genres without sacrificing his individuality or bowing to public or commercial conventions. Although he was the son of the famed Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, his visual sensibility was entirely his own, [...]
“You have to change your own desires, not the order of the world.”
- Maurice Ronet to Alain Delon, La piscine
There are the reasons why we love movies – and then there are the ones that we admit to. Few serious “cinephiles”, perhaps, would confess that they love watching impossibly glamorous people commit acts of absurdly [...]
The first of five novels Patricia Highsmith published about her murderous protagonist Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) begins with the eponymous central character fearful of his presumed pursuit by an older man and concludes with his self-assured dismissal of some Cretan policemen and confident conversation in Italian with a native cab driver. That [...]
Directed by the unique figure of Luchino Visconti – heir to one of Milan’s richest families, a communist, and gay – Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers) was one of three huge Italian films released in 1960 along with Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura and Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita. Visconti’s work was always [...]
Visiting foreign observers to the Republic of the United States of America have always been easily taken with its amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesty; its natural wonders, so to speak. Its people and its culture, however, have proven harder to latch onto and describe.
Travelling through the USA at the dawn of the [...]
Tod Browning is simultaneously one of the most compelling and neglected figures of Hollywood’s silent film era. Such a statement may seem paradoxical considering that much has been written on the director known as the “Edgar Allen Poe of the Cinema”. He has been the subject of a careful biography by horror aficionado David J. [...]
WARNING: This article divulges most of the film’s major plot elements.
“Don’t step on it, it might be Lon Chaney.”
- A 1927 quip.
As in any art form, the history of cinema contains many works that are, for whatever reason, overlooked and underrated. Tod Browning’s The Unknown (1927) is definitely one of these [...]
Jean-Pierre Melville’s movies have been called distant or abstract, but that’s not quite right. His decorous criminals and dogged policemen may be predisposed to understatement and carefully considered action, but they are far from unfeeling. In Le Samouraï [...]
The last of what would turn out to be a mere handful of films by this major director, a relatively meagre opus which nevertheless houses some of the most remarkable and lyrical images to have ever been created on film, The Sacrifice (Offret sacrificatio) is undoubtedly Tarkovsky’s cinematic last will and [...]
“Like Samuel Fuller, Scorsese fills his movies with personal talismans; like Werner Herzog, he riddles them with documentary subtexts.” (1)
Martin Scorsese’s first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, is a curious beast. Sometimes dismissed as little more than an extended film school exercise, it is in fact a significant and quite revelatory document that [...]
Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne): “What do you want from me? I’m just a word processor!”
Street Pickup (Robert Plunket): “Why don’t you just go home?”
Paul Hackett: “Pal, I’ve been asking myself that all night.”
Martin Scorsese’s After Hours is eternally underrated. It’s also one of the director’s very best films. It breaks free of convention and critical [...]
“I don’t trust inner feelings. Inner feelings come and go.”
- Leonard Cohen
The above quote, from Cohen’s song “That Don’t Make it Junk”, could well be taken as a mission statement for the emotionally tormented characters that populate the singular cinematic world of Eric Rohmer. The battleground for this director is almost exclusively the arena in [...]
A recent roundup of prostitutes in a small town yielded a collection of mug shots of the women of the night. Looking at these empty, grey faces staring blindly into the same kind of camera that departments of transportation use for drivers licenses, one couldn’t help asking, “Who would spend money – or time – [...]
Figuring Landscapes is a remarkable collection of moving image works that has grown from the background of the political and cultural history that links the UK and Australia. Presented as a series of five screening programmes, the works in Figuring Landscapes address questions of ecological survival, post-industrialism, gender, the touristic gaze, and uniquely in Australia, [...]
The world of Fellini’s Amarcord is one shaped by the director’s own imagination. Often accused of being an apolitical artist who betrayed neo-realism and cared only about his own personal “playground”, in Amarcord Fellini revisits his upbringing in fascist Italy. Fellini’s vision depicts an extravagantly funny, dreamlike evocation of life in a small Italian coastal [...]
Federico Fellini, one of the cinema’s greatest artists, began his career as a cartoonist, and then enrolled in the University of Rome Law School in 1938 in order to avoid being drafted into Mussolini’s fascist army. However, Fellini never actually took any classes, and instead spent his time as a court reporter, where he met [...]
Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) is Federico Fellini’s classic visual study of romantic resilience and faith in human nature. The film is also a lyrical take on themes that embrace a tragic-omic view of human cruelty and envy. The latter is what the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, has called the “mass man [...]
A hot topic in literary circles of late has been whether the memoir has successfully superseded forms of fiction as the pre-eminent formal expression of contemporary life. Certainly the sales and critical approval of such American practitioners of the genre as David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr give credence to this notion. At the [...]
Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 film, Aelita, begins in December of 1921 with the worldwide transmission of a cryptic message. An iris revealing a set of powerlines is followed by a quick cut to an image of an electric current dancing between two wires. The next sequence reveals scientists and military men in different regions of the [...]
If Jacques Demy’s Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) is a film without generic precedent – as an all-sung, jazz opera on film – then his follow-up effort, Les demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort) is a much clearer nod towards the American musical genre. While it may be tempting [...]
“There are few films I have so longed to make”, said Jacques Demy of Une chambre en ville. “Few I have dreamed of as much as this.” (1) So it seems oddly fitting that this film – which is rapturously romantic and darkly tragic at the same time – is one of the screen’s all-time [...]
Roy Armes claimed that Max Ophuls, to whom Lola is dedicated, was a cinematic “test case”:
For those whose concern is purely visual and whose ideal is an abstract symphony of images, Ophüls has the status of one of the very great directors. For spectators and critics who demand in addition to the images the sort [...]
