By Christopher Sharrett. Some months ago I saw The Way, Way Back (2013) and was taken by it enough to buy the DVD. It is a small film, yet ambitious, serious in its insights, and uncommon in its understanding of and sympathy for young people, its gentle portrayal of a […]
Peter Bogdanovich: The Comedy Smuggler
By James Knight. This August will see the US theatrical release of She’s Funny That Way, the latest feature from Peter Bogdanovich. Since his directorial debut in 1968, Bogdanovich has been a man who has lived cinema to its fullest, experiencing everything the medium has to offer. He’s been a […]
Mise-en-scène and the Rebirth of Film
By Tom Silva. Film is a living thing and so it faces an unending series of deaths. Like the mythic hero in Joseph Campbell’s magisterial book The Hero of a Thousand Faces, if film is to experience a long survival, it must be continually reborn. As Campbell wrote, it requires […]
Fair Game: Democratic Principle in Hollywood Romances, from Tracy and Hepburn to the Present
By Robert K. Lightning. Lovers that demonstrate both spiritual affinity and spiritual equality have long been popular in middle-class entertainment. Repartee has often expressed that equality: one thinks of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict, Austen’s Emma and Knightley, Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rochester. Romantic relations defined by repartee are inherently democratic, […]
End of a Saga: Andrzej Wajda’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope
By Geoffrey Fox. The credits roll over a black-and-white newsreel of missiles and men parading before an austere Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow on the 52nd anniversary of the October Revolution. A leap in time and place, and we see as through a car window the sepia and rust-brown hulks and […]
Discovering Mary Pickford
By Tony Williams. The title of this article has a double meaning. It is primarily a reworking of that lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched 1999 publication Mary Pickford Rediscovered written by someone (Kevin Brownlow) who already knew her work and had the privilege of once meeting the 70 plus year-old […]
“Thinking as Negation”: Adorno, Vertigo, and the Paradoxical Promise of Popular Cinema
By Benjamin Bergholtz. “Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them.” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002 [Dialectic of Enlightenment]: 99) Few critics have sought to bring the ideas of Theodor Adorno to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In itself, this is […]
The Agony of Woman in Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
By Christopher Sharrett. Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is a work of such staggering importance that its significance to its own culture (Israel), certainly relevant, is secondary to its challenge to the essentials of patriarchy, and all power systems within it. The most important art […]
The Pictures of a Lady: In Praise of Grace Kelly
May 18, 2015
By Daniel Garrett. Some old films have a special appeal. They might not be excellent or particularly beloved objects, and yet they have something that sustains our attention. When I saw Mogambo (1953), I found the love triangle in it interesting even as I recognized its familiarity: an honest rogue […]
Motherhood and Mourning in Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Unknown Woman
By Francesco Pascuzzi. Already with the film’s title, Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta, 2005) sets out to toy with the audience’s perspective and its perception of the lead character Irena (Ksenia Rappoport). When the protagonist arrives in town[1] and lands herself some menial work in an upscale residential […]