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, […]
Les Enfants terribles: An Interview with Françoise Marie
By Tim Palmer and Liza Palmer. The recent work of Françoise Marie explores a child-centered view of the world. Setting up a series of improvised games, then filming the results with little or no intervention, her films show young children re-enacting, from their perspective, the actions of adults in their […]
La Vie en Richmond | VCU French Film Festival, 28–30 March 2008
By Liza Palmer and Tim Palmer. Travelling through the Carytown area of Richmond, Virginia, the weekend of 28–30 March 2008, one would not suspect that recent relations between the United States and France had been anything but rosy. Lampposts were festooned with French flags. Local bistros and bakeries promised delectable […]
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 […]
Isolationism in Dead Man Walking
By Dustin Griffin, Honorable Mention in the 2006 Frank Capra Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Criticism. Dead Man Walking (1995) is about religious faith and the societal issues surrounding the death penalty; the film deconstructs the issue of forgiveness as it is taught in the Old Testament, with its […]
The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century, Scott Simmon, 2003
Book Review by Daniel Herbert. Within a discussion of Frederick Jackson Turner’s ideas about the frontier and their bearing upon the Western film genre, Scott Simmon notes that by 1890 the American West was essentially “closed” (page 156). Although it is true that the expanse of the United States had […]