Film International

By Brandon Konecny.  In his foreword to William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936), John Jeremiah Sullivan points out that “a fundamental law of storytelling is: withhold information.” By this he means that instead of front-loading a story with character information—a charge of which a substantial amount of today’s screenwriters are guilty—a […]

By Cleaver Patterson. Since that historic evening on the 21st December 1937, when the father of the animated feature film Walt Disney unleashed the game changing force that was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs upon an unsuspecting public, the studio which bares his name has more or less dominated […]

By Paul Risker. One of the intriguing occurrences that forms part of the spectatorial experience is the point when you will silently interrogate the source of your enjoyment. Perhaps it is that the characters, the pictures and the music have touched your sensibilities on an emotional level. But sometimes there […]

By Robert Buckeye. She is from Seattle. She is from Dubuque, Dayton, Dover. She is going to San Francisco, Chicago, New York. To Paris. She will be an actress, writer, artist. She will be herself. At one point in Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013, written and directed by Gustav Deutsch), […]

By Christopher Sharrett.  While watching Daniel Peddle’s very interesting Sunset Edge (2015), I couldn’t help but think of F.R. Leavis’s reaction to George Eliot’s final masterpiece Daniel Deronda (1876). He argued (very wrong-headedly) that the two “halves” of the novel didn’t cohere, and that the “Zionist half” should be cut away, leaving […]

By James Knight.  During his legendary conversation with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock remarked on the differences between feature and documentary filmmaking, stating that in documentary, god has already created all the elements for the director, whereas in feature filmmaking the director must essentially become his own god and create his […]