With a retrospectively simple story, Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour complexly integrates documentary and documentary-like footage with more standard narrative-fiction chunks. Helpd a great deal by themes of Freudian repression,…
No doubt knowing Persepolis first as a graphic novel would help to guide one’s reading of the film. But since comics and films are different enough media to warrant independent…
Jean-Luc Godard created Bande à part in the middle of his most well-documented period of filmmaking, which is the period when he was most self-conscious about filmmaking in his films.…
The most brutal, epic, and fair documentary-style film most will ever see, the (remarkably!) French-made The Battle of Algiers creates a sense of sympathy in the viewer for colonized people…
How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman humorously and ironically tells a tale of true cultural submersion and does so without pretense, living up to its title and opening promise: that…
Caché, attempting to be many things at once, succeeds in some of them, being above all else an excellent example of postmodern uncertainty paired with postcolonial criticism and reversing the…
Screening Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts in a class focusing on Marxist theory somewhat demands a Marxist reading of the film. But fairness will be attempted. Blood of the…
Cinéma vérité is one of those topics of film studies that doesn’t exactly have a definition, on account of the many different manifestations of it. However, as the term implies,…
Amazingly, I have something in common with the great Jean Renoir. In high school, I helped author and direct a one-act play that has some remarkable similarities with The Rules…
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen was a highly stylized, post-apocalyptic, retro-surrealist film that presages Jeunet’s later, more famous, Amelie. The film used a variety of dark colors (especially reds), and materials were…
Having only seen Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou so far, Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary was a departure. The film is somewhat infamous for its sacreligious content, re-depicting the pre-Nativity story…
Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket is Dostoevsky meets The Bicycle Thief. Vittorio de Sica’s film focuses on the man rather than on the whodunit?, and in the same way, Bresson’s film centers…
