By Deborah Allison. Back in 1928, Herbert C. McKay wrote a filmmaking manual which offered the following advice: ‘The main title group with the first title may be made as elaborate as one desires as few spectators stop to read them anyway aside from the simple title of the film’ […]
The Strange Career of Tamango: From Prosper Mérimée’s 1829 Novella to its 1958 Film Adaptation
January 29, 2011
By Raphaël Lambert. Prosper Mérimée’s 1829 novella Tamango is a simple case of a biter being bit: Tamango, an African slave dealer, is captured along with the people he has just sold to a French captain. Once in the hold of the slave ship with his former victims and now […]
In Memoriam: Robin Wood
By Michael Tapper. When thinking about Robin Wood, his book Personal Viewsalways comes to mind. He published it in 1976 – a transitional period between what he called his life as ‘an ideal bourgeois man’ and his coming out as a gay, feminist and socialist in his manifesto ‘Responsibilities of […]
Exodus collides with the Kedma
By Robin Wood. This article discusses (ultimately!) two films about the founding of modern Israel: Otto Preminger’s Exodus(Hollywood, 1960), and Gitai’s Kedma(2002). Both titles are also the names of the ships from which the Israelis land in Palestine – legally, in Exodus, illegally (by just four days!) in Kedma. It […]
Revenge is Sweet: The Bitterness of Audition
By Robin Wood. Auditionstands apart from the rest of Miike Takashi’s other films to date: this seems to be the general consensus, and it is confirmed by the three other films by him I have seen. It is the only one of the four that interests – more than interests, […]
Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’
By Robin Wood. Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 2 (Read Part 1 here.) What it isn’t I have before me two statements about I Can’t Sleep(J’ai pas sommeil, 1994) by reputable and intelligent critics: 1. On the cover of the video, Georgia Brown (who used to write for The […]
Running Track: 50 Scores from World Cinema
By John Caps. Some seasons ago, Lincoln Center’s Film Comment magazine published an annotated survey of the history of Hollywood film music, “Soundtracks 101.” There I took readers from the beginning of descriptive/narrative soundtrack scoring in 1933’s King Kong through latter day experiments in sight/sound correlation like Waking Life where […]
From Short Story to Film to Autobiography: Bergman’s Intermedial Variations
By Maaret Koskinen. (These are excerpts from In the Beginning Was the Word: Ingmar Bergman and His Early Writings [Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2002], originally published in Film International 1, vol. 1. no. 1, 2003.) One autumn a few years ago the author of this article was in the process […]
Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman’s ‘The Silence’ vs. Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger’
By John Orr. The Silence(Tystnaden) (1962) and The Passenger(1974) are two of the great modernist films of their period, and two of the most enduring. From the standpoint of a new century neither is dated and both are richly rewarded by DVD rewatching. Yet their genesis lies in a previous […]
You Don’t Know What Love Is
By Daniel Garrett. The book Annie Proulx’s short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is amazing: detailed, observant, naturalistic and smart, it is a story about men and land and love and society – in Wyoming, a state of mountains and valleys, greenlands and deserts. Annie Proulx’s language is mostly spare, though a […]