By Deirdre Devers. ‘You are despicable little liars’, spits Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward) to a room full of schoolgirls during the first act of Robin Hardy’s cult classic, The Wicker Man. Sgt. Howie wields the full authority of his policeman’s uniform when he arrives on the idyllic and remote island […]
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamini si 2 Zile, 2007)
By Steven Yates. One of the most surprising successes of 2007 was Cristian Mingiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamini si 2 Zile). A film set in the Ceausescu period and detailing the events prior to an illegal abortion in a hotel may not have […]
The French Old Wave: Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques
January 1, 2009
By Tim Palmer. Commemorated widely, the French New Wave is basking in the afterglow of its fiftieth anniversary. Few today dispute the resonance of this movement—its guerilla modes of production, its intellectual auteurs, its playfully non-traditional aesthetics, its joyous cinephilia. But despite all the nostalgia, it is worth remembering that […]
Tarkovsky, Nathan Dunne, ed., (2008)
A book review by Tim Palmer. Black Dog’s new compendium of essays on the great Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, belongs in a fairly recent category of film studies titles, intellectual coffee-table books or prestige books, which offer themselves as comprehensive, even definitive works. These are literally and figuratively weighty tomes, […]
Judex (1963) & Nuits rouges (1974)
By Anton Bitel. At first glance Judex (1963) and Nuits rouges (1974)might seem like chalk and cheese. One is in black and white with a marked interest in orthochromatic effects, the other is in vivid seventies colour. One is a period film whose use of intertitles and irising mimics the […]
Inland Empire (2006)
By Bryan Nixon. David Lynch’s latest dream-like film Inland Empire (2006), a three-hour experimental epic that resembles a house of mirrors, is certainly his most ambitious and abstract. The director of daring masterworks such as Blue Velvet (1986) has pieced together yet another film that cannot be analyzed in terms […]
Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film, Yana Hashamova, (2007)
Book review by Daria Kabanova. Yana Hashamova’s short, but engaging volume brings together psychoanalysis, cultural studies and film to examine the challenges to the post-Soviet Russian national identity that the fall of the Soviet Union brought about. Hashamova constructs a very elegant methodological framework for approaching the issue at stake, […]
Silence (Chinmoku, 1971)
By Anton Bitel. In Japan, Christianity is a minority religion of only marginal significance to the nation’s culture, and accordingly Japanese films that focus on Christianity tend to do so as a means to an end. While Norifumi Suzuki’s nunsploitation shocker School of the Holy Beast (Seiju gakuen, 1974), for […]
Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion: Beast Stable (Joshuu sasori: Kemono-beya, 1973)
By Anton Bitel. If ever proof were needed that genre is what you make of it, then one only need look to Japan’s ‘pink’ cinema of the 1970s, where the lowest of exploitation subgenres was being approached with the highest of artistic sensibilities, disinterring unexpectedly exquisite treasures from the trash. […]
Army of Shadows (1969)
By Tim Palmer. Few directors have enjoyed a contemporary renaissance like Jean-Pierre Melville. Over the last five years his career has been newly appraised and celebrated ― especially in the English language ― while many of his films have received meticulous restorations, and at last been re-released. Today, Melville’s reputation […]