The Exquisite Ecstasy and Agony of Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure
“Tactile wooden spoons, pot lids, rolling pins and boards are alchemistic tools and our bodies are the crucible for the Magnum Opus of tactilism.” - Jan Švankmajer (1) Jan Švankmajer’s third feature...
View ArticlePhilosophies of Non-sense: Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky
[E]verything begins with a horrible combat. It’s the combat of depths: things explode or make us explode, boxes are too small for their contents… monsters grab at us…. Bodies intermingle with one...
View ArticleFaust
Show me what mysteries the universe doth hold, Even to the vaulted heavens; Show me all the suns, Shimmering like snowy flakes; All the secrets that comprise creation In infinite space and time. (1)...
View ArticleThe Whole Family Works: Nagisa Oshima’s Boy
For his 14th feature (in only a decade), leading Japanese New Wave luminary Nagisa Oshima made a fascinating film that has come to be regarded as one of his most acclaimed and interesting works: Shonen...
View ArticleThree Resurrected Drunkards
What better way to disguise one’s anger with the current political situation than through what looks like a quirky, yet poignant comedy? Yet, what starts off as a weird but funny film about three...
View ArticleBlack Panthers
In 1968, Agnès Varda was living in Los Angeles with her husband, director Jacques Demy, who was there to begin filming his first Hollywood film, Model Shop (1969). Although initially hesitant about...
View ArticleElsa la rose
In 1965, Agnès Varda made a short, intense documentary on the then almost 40-year relationship between the French writers Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Her film predominantly and characteristically...
View ArticleL’Opéra-Mouffe
How does one avoid sounding sexist when discussing a great female artist like Agnès Varda and her work against the swirlingly relativistic backdrop of current gender theory? It seems moronic to ignore...
View ArticleDu côté de la côte
Du côté de la côte (1958) is easily dismissed as a frothy travelogue; Agnès Varda herself refers to its “touristy” images (1). Like her previous short, Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux (1958), it was commissioned...
View ArticleLes Plages d’Agnès
There is a difference between biography and autobiography. The first explores the events of a life, while attempting a true and representative narrative. The second is a construction, a series of...
View ArticleBuena Vista Social Club
Among European filmmakers of the highest order, only Federico Fellini has had an identification with travel and the road as metaphors for life remotely as strong as Wim Wenders. The road movie is, of...
View ArticleThe End is a Transition: Wim Wenders’ Alice in den Städten
“I had a funny dream: I turned on the TV set, and sat down in a chair. I tied myself to it. Then, suddenly, a scary movie came on. I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t turn off the TV. I couldn’t close my...
View ArticlePina
Like his compatriot and contemporary Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders has alternated fiction with documentary filmmaking across his long career. Besides the hugely popular Buena Vista Social Club (1999),...
View ArticleParis, Texas
Paris, Texas (1984) is a story about the prodigal son and his uneasy homecoming. It is also, among other things, a road movie, a modern Western, a near textbook perfect example of what an “art film”...
View ArticleAprès mai
A teenager sits in class, barely listening to a lecture on classic French literature. The student begins the film actively political, taking part in demonstrations against an oppressive social order,...
View ArticleL’Heure d’été
“I don’t know whether Summer Hours is a summing up of everything that preceded it, but it does recapitulate a lot of things at a moment when I felt the need to do so. Likewise Disorder, my first film,...
View ArticleThe Ballad of Cable Hogue
Sam Peckinpah has a popular reputation as a macho movie director obsessed with portraying graphic scenes of violence and pursuing a relentlessly misogynistic outlook, particularly in the films he made...
View ArticleMajor Dundee
Famously, and infamously, the majority of the films of Sam Peckinpah were made – and unmade – in the editing room. For instance, as two UK film scholars, John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, demonstrate in a...
View ArticleRide the High Country: The Once and Future Sam
Popularly viewed as Peckinpah’s first accomplished film following the compromised The Deadly Companions (1961), Ride the High Country (1962) has been mostly seen as the director’s farewell to the...
View ArticleBring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
“For me, Hollywood no longer exists. It’s past history. I’ve decided to stay in Mexico because I believe I can make my pictures with greater freedom from here.” – Sam Peckinpah (1) Bring Me the Head of...
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