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 […]
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 […]
BFI Film Classics: Belle de Jour, Michael Wood, (2000)
Book Review by Daniel Herbert. Michael Wood begins his book on Belle de Jour by characterizing Luis Buñuel’s style as “a form of impatience” (page 8). One might assume that, at a mere seventy-seven pages, Wood might require a similar impatience to breeze through the intricacies and enigmas that abound […]