The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) – Paul Schrader calls this a key example of the “transcendental style in film,” from his book by that…
Blackmail (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1929) – How can there be so much time for watching and so little for writing? Answer: there’s time for neither, but somehow watching squeezes its…
Further proof that Chaplin had a gift that has evaded most of modern cinema. How can a film 50 minutes long be so, simply, “good.” This is “good” in the…
Had the opportunity to take in a piece of “ethnographic” history today: Robert Gardner’s Deep Hearts. The film is well-known not for being a particularly early documentary (made in ’79)…
My first foray into German Expressionist cinema was, fittingly, F.W. Murnau’s infamous Gothic work Nosferatu. The mother of all horror films (chronologically speaking), Nosferatu marvelously executed some great intercutting, showing…
The General has to be one of the funniest movies ever made. It’s rather embarrassing to have just seen my first Buster Keaton film, but some things are worth being…
Watching Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou is truly like watching one’s subconscious; it’s more than a dream but less than a nightmare, the sort of disturbing thing that causes you…
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was an exercise in geometric film-making laden with special effects with a political/economic admonition. At the risk of bringing up W. Anderson again, the symmetry alone makes…
So it’s totally backwards to watch Charlie Chaplin after you’ve seen the hundreds of stars who emulate his every move. Thankfully, I remember as a kid watching The Gold Rush…
Have begun reading Sergei Eistenstein’s famous Film Form, and watching Potemkin was like watching theory put into practice in a way rarely done. There are theorists (or philosophers) and then…
