The first establishing shot in the film follows a subjective shot, consistent with Bergman form that emphasizes subjective experience even while thematically concerned with big ideas like God. Persons, characters,…
Have been reading through Mark Betz’s Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema, which includes a chapter entitled, “Wandering Women: Decolonization, Modernity, Recolonization.” Although the chapter only mentions Antonioni’s Red Desert,…
This one is textbook, one that teaches itself. We get the opening image of an extreme-closeup of an eye, a nod to Vertov, then followed up very shortly by a…
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…
Le Jour se lève (dir. Marcel Carné, 1939) – A nice little essay by Maureen Turim grounds aspects of the film in a theoretical and critical framework, although she doesn’t…
The Rules of the Game (dir. Jean Renoir, 1939) – It was time to revisit the great work. Christopher Faulkner makes a great analysis of the film through an ethnographic mode.…
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…
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…
It’s quite enigmatic, quite the quintessential art film, and yet once a window–or better yet, a lens–clarifies what it’s doing, it becomes more-or-less accessible. Also, a second viewing doesn’t hurt.…
Breathless (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) – Other than obligatory and ubiquitous clips, have probably only sat through Breathless twice. What can you say about it that hasn’t already been said ad…
Precious Bodily Fluids 