Category: 1940s Cinema
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Italian Neorealism: Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
As Peter Bondanella argues in Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, the movement we now call “neorealism” is as bound up in its own history as it is in the history of its criticism. A film like Rome, Open City is emblematic of the movement in some ways, but the movement’s diversity–even at the level of…
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Germany, Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)
The child scrounger is about as “neorealism” as it gets, pointing toward his counterpart in Buñuel’s Los Olvidados from a couple years later. And it’s not neorealism without a heavy dose of melodrama, which corresponds to the presence and centrality of the child, too. Powerful juxtaposing of the nightclub and the selfish sister with the outside…
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French Film: Texts and Contexts – Hayward and Vincendeau, 1990
Michele Lagny, “The feeling gaze: Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938)” – The essay traces some of the context of the film’s release, particularly the way it was somewhat ordained to be a “three-star” film, what with it being an adaptation of a Zola novel, directed by Renoir (hot off of La Grande Illusion), and starring Jean…
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Viewing Log: August 2013, Vol. I
Pépé le Moko (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1937) – A masterpiece of setting and staging. It’s in Algiers, within the Casbah, and it treats its environs and those native to it as simply mise-en-scene, but this is to be expected from 1930s poetic realism. Everything about this is “classic,” exactly what defines the “golden age” of…
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Viewing Log: July 2013
Thérèse Raquin (dir. Marcel Carné, 1953) – A step back from the poetic realism of Carné’s big-budget, big production Children of Paradise and lower-budget Port of Shadows, this is a melodrama that zooms in on French domestic life during the postwar economic boom of the early 50s. Of course, these folks don’t see a lot of money in…
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Les dames du Bois de Boulogne
Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (dir. Robert Bresson, 1945) – So much to say about this, too little space/time. This is early Bresson, his second feature film. In many ways, it resembles the poetic realism of Jean Renoir more than the Bresson we’ve come to know through his mid-career masterpieces. Rather than all those closeups…
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Viewing Log, 12/9/2012 – 12/21/2012
Magic Mike (dir. Steven Soderberg, 2011) – Despite a lot of time trying to find reasons to validate this film from a critical perspective, it seems mainly noteworthy for being a film by a director with art-house street-cred that tries to switch conventional gender roles. From beginning to end, it’s the women who end dates…
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Catch-Up, cont’d: 11/2012-12/2012
Skyfall (dir. Sam Mendes, 2012) – Really want/need to see it again, but here’s the first of the Craig-era Bond films that tries to get away from the Bourne legacy (as it were). Major shift in narrative gears here, with Bond’s role as protector of the maternal figure he had previously been defying. He’s no…
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Catch-Up: 10/2012 – 11/2012
We’ll see how this goes. It’s going to start as a list, with attempts to fill in the space between titles with whatever jumps to memory. All About My Mother (Todo Sobre Mi Madre) (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) – Another one for film & melodrama. Did a scene analysis of the sequence wherein Manuela transitions…
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Viewing Log, Week of 9/16/2012
Black Narcissus (dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947) – Mere days before starting a seminar in film and melodrama, I’ll make the tentative claim that this film constitutes an example of the melodramatic mode. What makes it particularly exemplary is its narrative content as a counterpoint to melodrama. By revolving around nuns working and…
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Viewing Log, Week of 8/12/2012 (Vol. II)
Mouchette (dir. Robert Bresson, 1967) – And that completes half of Bresson’s oeuvre. Still need to see the first two and the last four. Mouchette contains many clear similarities with Au hasard Balthazar, released only a couple years prior. They’re both about cruelty in the world and the resulting tragedy when cruelty singles out and…
Precious Bodily Fluids 