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,…
Chuu, Sharon et al. “Exploring Art Film Audiences: A Marketing Analysis.” Journal of Promotion Management Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (2009): 212-228. The study reveals no real surprises, mainly demonstrating by quantitative…
From its first shot, here is a film that invites its own phenomenology, another potential description or requirement of the art film. We slowly zoom into a line of men…
An “art film” in the sense that every shot provides a new occasion for experimentation but with a stronger sense of connection between story and plot. Other WKW films, particularly…
It’s worth noting at the outset that, although published in 1980, this is a doctoral dissertation from 1976. As such, it is dated and functions chiefly (at this point) as…
Another work from Borwell within his broader project of doing aesthetic/formal film history that doesn’t discount the industrial or economic aspects but nevertheless insists that aesthetics on its own demands…
For my purposes, I only cursorily read the bulk of this and focused on chapter 30, “Since 1960: the persistence of a mode of film practice.” Bordwell/Thompson/Staiger’s method is scientific…
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,…
The opening credits sequence is all slow-mo, glorying in a static frame long shot of LaMotta warming up in the ring alone, distanced but surrounded by spectators. Occasional flashes…
An aesthetic of stylized trash set in a dystopic, post-apocalyptic France overwhelmed with a warm red-orange-green color scheme. Terry Gilliam meets Time Burton, and then some. It’s a live-action cartoon,…
See previous post on Deleuze and the crystal image as it applies to this film. The ashes in the first shot of the film shifts to sweat via dissolve. The…
Highly intertextual, referencing All About Eve, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Almodóvar’s own work, not to mention the form of the soap opera. Early shot in the kitchen highly reminiscent of Jeanne…