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…
To The Distant Observer: Form and meaning in the Japanese cinema, Noël Burch Burch aims to do something akin to Bordwell/Thompson/Staiger in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, namely, a…
The original Swedish title is The Face, and that’s more fitting. Diegetic conversations are all about faces, particularly the face of the the magician. Faces convey truth and deception, they bear…
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 film achieves something unusual and delightfully nuanced: a kind of secondary identification that subverts the typical male POV by rendering it merely a proxy of women (or in this case,…
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…
Memory – theme song of Perfidia. WKW’s obsession with eating (too much). One night stands – nothing lasts forever. See slow-motion and freeze frames in the restaurant. This is less of…
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…
The opening long, slow zoom onto the exterior of a house, tilted toward an upper floor, tellingly suggests what at least will be the style of the film to come,…
Precious Bodily Fluids 