By Wheeler Winston Dixon. It’s a commonplace thing to discuss the individual vision of filmmakers, on both a national and international level, and the names of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, John Frankenheimer, Fritz Lang, Dorothy Arzner, Agnes Varda and numerous other cinematic […]
The Trouble With Hitchcock
June 7, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Mark Rutland: “What do you believe in?” Marnie Edgar: “Nothing.” (From Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie) Alfred Hitchcock is routinely regarded as one of the most profound and technically adept directors in the history of cinema, but I would argue that only the latter half of that statement […]
Female Sexual Pleasure Unpunished in Bright Days Ahead
May 14, 2014
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Finally, a film about an older woman who has an affair, and doesn’t get punished by the narrative. How delightful! How unusual! It isn’t as if Bright Days Ahead (Les Beaux jours) is a masterpiece, but it does get a few things right and it is […]
Out of the Furnace: The Question of Adversarial Cinema
April 8, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. I did not see Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace during its initial run some months ago, in part because I thought little of Cooper’s Crazy Heart (2009), and anticipated, incorrectly, that the film would adapt Thomas Bell’s important (although not very distinctive) novel Out of This […]
Bruno Dumont and the Revival of the Human, Part 3
March 22, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. To Part 2. Hadewijch Hadewijch is the first of two films (the second is Hors Satan) directly focused on the pursuit of the spiritual. I should say first that the two films present a problem, since the search is embodied in Hadewijch in a hysterical young woman […]
Bruno Dumont and the Revival of the Human, Part 2
March 21, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. To Part 1. L’Humanité Bruno Dumont’s second film has been termed by certain commentators a “remake” of La Vie de Jésus. The notion is bewildering. Yes, both films are shot in Bailleul, both films deal with often everyday, banal actions of characters, but to fail to note […]
Bruno Dumont and the Revival of the Human, Part 1
March 21, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. Bruno Dumont is among our most important filmmakers, a fact that has gone mostly unnoticed outside Europe. His particular significance seems unrecognized in the US. There are very few critical essays about him of any depth and intelligence, except for a couple of notable contributions in Senses […]
Surviving the Monster Mom: Child’s Pose
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “I hope it’s like a mirror.” (Călin Peter Netzer on Child’s Pose) “They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do.” (Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse” [1971]) If a toxic abusive mother raised you, be forewarned. Child’s […]
The Narcissistic Sociopathology of Gender: Craig’s Wife and The Hitch-Hiker, Part 2
March 9, 2014
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. To Part 1. While Dorothy Arzner’s Craig’s Wife (1936) revolves around a pathological female who is undone by her desperate attempts to conform to the norms of patriarchy during the depression era, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) presents us with a male serial killer, another malignant […]
Hollywood Nomad: Andrew Dominik’s Aussiewood
March 8, 2014
By Stephen Gaunson. “I live here now and I don’t like going home.” (Andrew Dominik qtd. in Sperling 2012) “I wouldn’t mind shooting again in Australia but I have no particular Australian story I want to tell right now. America is home at the moment.” (Andrew Dominik qtd. in Gray […]