There Will Be Blood John Fidler February 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Men die violently in There Will Be Blood (2007), Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature film. They are impaled by the tools of the oil trade in late 19th and early 20thcentury America. And they are murdered. When...
Casque d’or John Fidler November 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film Midway through Jacques Becker’s sparkling, multi-faceted Casque d’or (1952), a wise old woman watches lovers Marie (Simone Signoret) and Manda (Serge Reggiani) enjoy what they don’t know are their last blissful...
Irma Vep John Fidler July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier Originally published in Senses of Cinema Issue 56, August 2010 With its rapid cuts, roaming camera, passel of characters (some of them so pitiful they seem always in need of a hug or maybe a swat on the behi...
Anatomy of a Murder John Fidler March 2013 CTEQ Annotations on Film In an interview with his fellow filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, Otto Preminger speaks of the influence of the law on his life and work. Preminger’s father was a District Attorney and Attorney General for the Austr...
Time Regained John Fidler August 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was – only is.” - William Faulkner, interview in The Paris Review, Spring 1956 T...
Green Fish John Fidler June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Lee Chang-dong’s wrenching, tonally nuanced first film, Chorok mulkogi (Green Fish, 1997), packs a quiet wallop. By turns emotionally coercive, visually subtle, and as ruthless as the ritual pummeling its main ...
The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 by Pamela Robertson Wojcik John Fidler June 2011 Book Reviews In Billy Wilder’s hilariously acid The Fortune Cookie (1966), sports cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) gets clobbered by football star Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson (Ron Rich) when Jackson is tackled along the ...
The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience by Jennifer M. Barker Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience by Carl Plantinga John Fidler December 2010 Book Reviews Towards the end of Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos, 2009) – his sad, playful, colour-saturated tribute to his own and so many others’ films – Harry Caine/Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) caresses...
Irma Vep John Fidler October 2010 CTEQ Annotations on Film With its rapid cuts, roaming camera, passel of characters (some of them so pitiful they seem always in need of a hug or maybe a swat on the behind), sense that chaos is only a phone call or knock of the door aw...
How to watch a movie: The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory by Murray Pomerance John Fidler April 2010 Book Reviews WALDO PEPPER : Do you like movies? MARY BETH : Mmm-hmmm. – The Great Waldo Pepper (George Roy Hill, 1975) … perhaps one must become the films one loves. – Murray Pomerance (1) A moment in Psycho (1960), Al...
La ronde John Fidler April 2010 CTEQ Annotations on Film 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 t...
Commissar John Fidler December 2009 CTEQ Annotations on Film The only male soldier in Aleksandr Askoldov’s Commissar who shows up ready for a fight as the Russian Civil War lurches on is a child. The opening scenes of this monumental film are chock-a-block with bedraggle...