Bergman, Skolimowski and European Modernism: Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence: Pictures in the Typewriter, Writers on the Screen by Maaret Koskinen Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist by Ewa Mazierska John Orr October 2010 Book Reviews The cinematic legacy of European modernism is both fascinating and elusive. Not least because the term modernism itself means so many things to so many people: David Bordwell’s surrogate “art-cinema narration” ...
The Moment of Mythodrama: the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival John Orr October 2010 Festival Reports This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival had its best opening night in years. Not in a regular cinema but in the city’s historic Festival Theatre with a 3,000 plus audience where Sylvain Chomet’s remar...
Moonlighting John Orr July 2009 CTEQ Annotations on Film Moonlighting (1982 Britain 97 mins) Prod Co: Channel Four Films/Southern Television/ZDF Prod: Jerzy Skolimowski, Mark Shivas, Michael White Dir, Scr: Jerzy Skolimowski Phot: Tony Pierce-Roberts Ed: Barri...
The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960 John Orr July 2009 Feature Articles Trauma has long played a key role in cinema. John Orr argues that “What is out there as waking nightmare in a dangerous world is often a mirror of what is hidden in here, in the human heart.” In Orr’s provocative analysis, the spectre of key British filmmaker Michael Powell inevitably emerges.
Forgotten Lean: The Ann Todd Trilogy John Orr May 2008 Feature Articles Though other titles loom larger in perceptions of David Lean’s career, John Orr makes a case for the significance of Lean’s collaboration with Ann Todd in The Passionate Friends, Madeleine and The Sound Barrier.
Hitchcock and Hume Revisited: Fear, Confusion and Stage Fright John Orr May 2007 Alfred Hitchcock Revisited, Special Dossiers “This essay is a return to the scene of the crime.” The author of Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema re-evaluates his low opinion of Stage Fright, and discovers that the affinities between Hitchcock’s cinema and the philosopher David Hume run far deeper than he had first imagined.
New Asian Ventures: The Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival John Orr February 2007 Festival Reports 10–24 November 2006 A year after showing at the Warner Village multiplex in the plush new Xinyi district of East Taipei, the Golden Horse Festival reverted to its niche in bohemian Ximending on the west ...
figures traced in light: On Cinematic Staging and The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies by David Bordwell John Orr February 2007 Book Reviews I come to praise Bordwell, not to bury him. He is the greatest academic film critic writing in the English language and his latest brace of books, companion volumes really, leave us in no doubt of this – if the...
Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema John Orr July 2006 Special Dossiers, Three Auteurs One of Hollywood’s finest exponents of mise en scène, Preminger, it can justly be argued, is instrumental in defining the transition from classical to modernist cinema.
Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet John Orr October 2005 Book Reviews Martine Beugnet's study of Claire Denis is a highlight of the lively Manchester series on French film directors, and well worth an uninterrupted read from cover to cover. Ending with a full critique of Vendredi...
