Search Results for: "visconti"

"The risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism." Thomas Piketty (1) "So what do you think, now that the whole world wants to sleep with you?" Hunger Games: Catching Fire...

Translator’s Preface Federico Fellini Federico Fellini’s Fare un film (1980) is the most comprehensive collection of the idiosyncratic Italian director’s writings available in any language. The contents we...

Looking over the Frontier It’s a pity that, at Sundance, we are so busy trying to discover the next hot feature that the wonderful offerings of the New Frontier section are not at the top of our priorities. A ...

How did Italian cinema manage to become so big when from Rossellini to Visconti and from Antonioni to Fellini, no one recorded sound with images? A simple answer: the language of Ovid and Virgil, Dante and Le...

Postwar neorealism is often and rightfully framed as the cinematic phenomenon that shaped the course of Italian film for the rest of the 20th century; it is not a coincidence that some of the major academic stu...

“I love life so fiercely, so desperately, that nothing good can come of it.” - Pier Paolo Pasolini (1960) (1) “Pasolini (in his death) has successfully evaded the mortal synthesis, and reproposes around his c...

The King Vidor/Bette Davis melodrama Beyond the Forest (1949) is mostly remembered today for a single line of dialogue. Davis – miscast as a frustrated housewife in Smalltown USA – surveys her drab but actually...

Between 1961 and 1968, Elio Petri established himself as one of the most distinctive voices of Italian post-neo-realist cinema. His 1961 feature debut L’Assassino is an often-overlooked example of the filmic gi...

In the early to mid 1960s, the Italian cinema was going through a sort of renaissance, as it not only produced important films by such renowned cineastes as Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luchino Viscon...

In the midst of one of his conversations with fellow director Giuseppe Tornatore, Francesco Rosi interrupts his own argument and says: ‘You should have called this book A life, because it is a life I am narrati...

Geoff Gardner Antony I. Ginnane Chiranjit Goswami Jaime Grijalba Lee Hill Alexander Horwath Florent Houde Peter Hourigan Cerise Howard Christoph Huber Dominik Kamalzadeh Daniel Kasman Christop...

Martin Scorsese concludes his A Personal Journey… Through American Movies (co-directed and co-written by Michael Henry Wilson, 1995) with a brief passage from Elia Kazan’s America America (1963). This epic, phy...

Michelangelo Antonioni’s name seems to have fallen somewhat into disrepute in US film culture over the last several decades, his main concerns – alienation and the collapse of communication – the subject of a c...

I imagine editing a book series is somewhat akin to curating an art show or even a film retrospective: in all three cases the curators/editors need to present works tied together with a thematic thread. For the...

The trailer for Salvatore Giuliano (1962) begins with a town crier walking down a Sicilian street, banging a drum. This is followed by a group of men distributed across the town square, one playing a Jew’s harp...

Recine, the International Festival of Archival Cinema, is the stuff a cinephile’s dreams are made of. Its slate bulges with beloved classics, premiering restorations, and a host of new films competing for p...

Fred Schepisi has been writing, directing and producing films in Australia, America and Britain since the 1970s. Along with Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, and Bruce Beresford, Schepisi was a key figure in the r...

Released in 1954, Senso was Visconti’s fourth feature and is recognised as a milestone in the director’s career. Not only did it mark a decisive move away from the neo-realism of Ossessione (1942) and La terra ...

The fabulous and fascinatingly contested thing that is film noir is not only alive and kicking, it appears to be undergoing something of a re-evaluation in critical thought. Gone is the stubborn insistence that...

From the silent era and onwards to fimmakers such as Luchino Visconti, Hans- Jürgen Syberberg and Christian Rischert, King Ludwig II has long been an enigmatic figure of fascination for the cinema.

b. 18 August 1906, Paris, France d. 31 October 1996, Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, France Cinema is the art of forming a team. –Jean Cocteau Carné’s films now impinge upon our consciousness above all as memori...

Numerous contributors from across the globe offer their selections and thoughts on their movie-going experiences in 2010. Readers should find it a fascinating overview of cinema from a multitude of countries and cultures.

Perhaps the most outrageously beautiful man ever to step in front of a camera, the 1920s and ’30s star Ramon Novarro is remembered today for the ghastly manner of his death – and the rumours (more ghastly still...

Once, and appropriately, Melbourne based filmmaker Leo Berkeley went under the moniker of “last of the independents”. Having shaped a decades-long body of work on the fringes of the industry, he talks at length about the filmmaking principles that inform his work.

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 co...

“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 serio...

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 ...

Pioneer Room Rhapsody A slightly cagey throng of greying cinemagoers mill nervously in the lower foyer of Sydney’s State Theatre. Red liveried ushers assure us the theatre will be opened soon. A quick trip t...

“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 a...

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 o...

Odd Man Out With the plurality of choices it offers, a film festival constitutes a meta-text – and what you write about, ultimately, is your own journey within the grid of the published schedule, like a Baud...

André Bazin and Vittorio Storaro may make for strange bedfellows, but by bringing the fabled theorist and the equally fabled cinematographer into ‘dialogue’ with one another, Angela Dalle Vacche helps clarify their respective philosophies regarding the ontology of the image.

What is a fit subject for laughter? Reimer looks at one of the most contentious of all subjects and discovers a surprisingly long history of films that have addressed it through the comedic mode.

Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City/Open City (1945 Italy 103 mins) Prod Co: Excelsa Film Dir: Roberto Rossellini Scr: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini Phot: Ubaldo Arata Ed: Erlado Da R...

  5-15 February 2009 As if out of spite, just as banks fail and states teeter towards insolvency, German cinema could not be better. In a year of crisis, the Berlin International Film Festival booked...

If Pauline Kael is often pugnacious, Jonathan Rosenbaum belligerent, Anthony Lane frivolous, then what word should we bestow upon David Thomson? Perhaps impertinence fits best, as Thomson so often takes a small...