A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. Some criticisms noted, John Billheimer’s book is still very helpful for teaching history of regulation/censorship and their effects on authorship….” Hitchcock continues to compete with Welles as the “Shakespeare” of film studies in the sense that he’s the most analyzed in the medium, […]
An Honest Window: An Interview with Haifaa Al-Mansour
By Ali Moosavi. Attitudes do not change easily, so part of the goal of my film is to start a dialog about the core values that are at the heart of these issues.” Haifaa Al-Mansour, the award winning director and the first Saudi female filmmaker, has a new film, The […]
Post-War Malaise in the Rural US: Spring Night, Summer Night (1967)
By Tony Williams. I can’t help but reflect that noir and neorealism, contemporary film movements, may exactly be opposite sides of the same coin. (Isn’t Open City a noir, and The Sound of Fury an alternate version of The Bicycle Thief?) The key traits that they have in common are […]
Fiction Telling Early Hollywood About Itself: from The Last Word
By Justin Gautreau. Well aware of film’s representational constraints, technologically and politically, these writers told a different story than the one early Hollywood could tell about itself.” From its earliest days in Southern California, the film industry inspired a body of fiction that helped shape Hollywood as a place of romance […]
Shadows: Bela Lugosi on the Hungarian Silent Screen
Lugosi and Ila Lóth in a Hungarian silent film, possibly Leoni Leo (Leo Leoni, 1917)
The Courier, or the Ongoing Uses of the Cold War
By Christopher Sharrett. The Courier has some touching moments…. but we should keep in mind that there is much more to this story.” As the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 1980s, some U.S. politicians talked about a “peace dividend,” that is, the possibility that money, for years thrown at […]
The Play’s the Thing: Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating
By Jeremy Carr. Make-believe and storytelling are not only central to the shared and exclusive lives of the film’s fanciful female leads, but are devices ratified and dissected at every turn of the movie’s wonderfully screwy scenario.” There is a repeated refrain heard throughout Adrian Martin’s predictably perceptive commentary on […]
An Unsung “Free Cinema”: Celebrating Lindsay Anderson
Anderson directing This Sporting Life (1963) with Richard Harris
Eros Deformed: Problems in The Fox (1967) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
Marlon Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye
Mystical Recognition in the Czechoslovak New Wave
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, 1970 By Levan Tskhovrebadze. Most of the features of the period are meticulous representations of social wonders and miracles.” In 1964, Czech critic Antonín J. Liehm described Czechoslovak New Wave as a “film miracle.”[i] Later, producer Carlo Ponti successfully introduced to western society cinema […]