I’ve taken a scholarly interest in the pseudodocumentaries of both the 1940s and 1960s, so I thought I’d take a moment to plug one of the key directors of the genre, Peter Watkins, whose reputation has gone from obscurity and dismissal to renewed interest and overdue DVD release of films that often screen no more […]
Though made in the postwar years, Louisiana Story seems like a capstone of American nonfiction filmmaking of the interwar years. It was as if father of documentary Robert Flaherty decided he could make a film in the mold of Pere Lorenz or the British documentariest - exalting man against Nature, man with Machine - and […]
I’m heading off soon to a conference this weekend, so I thought I’d have Film Friday a day early. Since, my paper addresses Warner Brothers’ 1937 film Life of Emile Zola, I thought I’d show a few scenes.
Zola was yet another entry into a cycle of biopics that Warners specialized in. More than Story of […]
Regular readers of my posts on film will probably notice two polemics I feel strongly about. First, I heartily resist the notion that commercialization in itself means inferior culture, or that Hollywood is aesthetically worthless because it makes crowd-pleasing, escapist or otherwise generic material. If you’ve studied Classical Hollywood (1920-1960), it’s hard not to appreciate […]
It was just after reading Paul Harrill’s thoughts on the differences between high-definition video and film that Hal Hartley’s latest film, Girl From Monday, popped up in my Netflix queue. More than anything I’ve seen so far (admittedly limited in scope), it suggests both the expressive highs and the potential to annoy of small-scale HD […]
One thesis I’ve heard about national cinemas is that they often focus on moments of the nation’s origins - the Civil War for the U.S. (Birth of a Nation), the French Revolution in France (La Marseillaise), the Boer War for the Australians (Breaker Morant). Since Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 film Black Girl (recently in a spiffy […]
Do we have another producer-auteur on our hands? The opening credits to Syriana are minimal, just the title and the producers, so for much of the film I was wondering if Steven Soderbergh was directing, or someone who’d watched a lot of Soderbergh films. Turns out it’s the latter. The same formal tics are there […]
Derek of Third Decade had guardedly positive things to say about Brokeback Mountain. I, however, am not that nice. I hated it. The movie was pretty cheesy, a soft porn/melodrama hybrid that’s sold as a commentary on masculinity, but in fact has little critical distance on the gendered fantasies it draws on.
In fact, it’s striking […]
There’s nothing less interesting than a film nerd raving about film noir, I suppose, but just when my sense of discovery is waning, and when I start to feel that I’ve seen the best and brightest of the noirs from the 40s and 50s, I stumble across one that’s simply terrific film, and proof of […]
Complete Oscar bait. You have measured, langorous cinematography and editing, favoring longish-takes shot in melancholy hues. You have meticulous period piece production values. You have good, if showy, transformative acting. You have social problem angle of anti-death penalty thematics. You have plucky, independent vanity production company using culturally serious narrative about the half-misunderstood Artist as […]
As if to answer my complaints about the utter unavailability of avant-garde films on DVD, Kino has released a gorgeous 2-disc set of experimental films of the 20s and 30s, leaning toward the canonical European avant-garde but including some lesser-known American films as well. And in October, Anthology Film Archives will release a 6-disc set […]
Back in a 1979 essay on film noir, Paul Kerr wrote
[J]ust as the advent of radio in 1924 had provoked a cinematic trend away from realism until it was reversed in 1927 with the coming of sound to the cinema, so while colour originally signified “fantasy” and was first appropriated by “fantastic” genres, it too […]
The 1940s saw a number of popularizations of psychoanlysis in Hollywood. Most famously, there’s Hitchcock’s Spellbound, but Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door mined similar territory within the women’s gothic. Home of the Brave propped up its problem film drama with a psychoanalytic explanation of racism. There was even a psychoanalysis-themed musical, Lady in the Dark, […]
I’ve proposed before a pet thesis that the documentary revival of the last couple of years represents, among other things, the return of totality to documentary filmmaking. By which I mean that documentarist have renewed interest in seeing large-scale political economic relations through the particulars of everyday life. Not every filmmaker is a would-be Joris […]
I’ve written on giallo films before, and have gotten on an Italian horror kick lately. Even (especially) for the skeptical, I’d recommend an open mind and a fair chance. (Read this warning first.) The “masterworks” of the 60s and 70s Italian horror, from Mario Bava or Dario Argento, are undeniably stylistic coups, adopting the language […]