Author David Melville

The war is over and we’ve lost. What matters is to come out alive. – Eleonora Rossi Drago, Violent Summer One of the few violent moments in Estate violenta (Violent Summer, 1959) happens early on, as the cr...

There is gore on everything; opera is synonymous with bloodshed and erotic violence. – Peter Conrad In the beginning was the Word – and the Word was the Director. The cinema of Michael Powell is a world sha...

Oh, the soft sound of rain On the ground, on the town. For the heart in its pain Oh, the sound of the rain! - Paul Verlaine, “ Il pleure dans mon coeur”[1. Paul Verlaine, “Il pleure dans mon coeur,” 1885....

But thou, dear, hide my body with thy veil, And with thy raiment cover foot and head… And now for God’s sake kiss me once and twice And let me go; for the night gathers me, And in the night shall no man gat...

In the age of cinema the Faustian myth became a play of darkness and light, and this play indeed replaced all the words from Marlowe up to Goethe. - Helmut Schanze If we boil the cinema down to its essentia...

“We must try to be more conspicuous!” - Monica Vitti,  Modesty Blaise A typical scene in Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966) takes place in a hip Amsterdam nightspot. A darkly epicene illusionist (Aldo Silvan...

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing. — W. B. Yeats The Slovak director Juraj Jakubisko has been described by some critics as ‘the Fellini of the East.’ The comparison ...

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. – Oscar Wilde The term “sophisticated comedy” has become a lazy critical shorthand for any film in which the characters sip champagne from crystal goblets an...

Dear friend, I congratulate you. Disaster endears beyond Fortune. – Emily Dickinson Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Vittorio De Sica, 1970) is a tranquil film about disaste...

Ever and anon the snow fell, penetrating so profoundly into the depths of her enraptured being that she had no room in her for any other sensation than that of dying of cold, and being buried beneath the adorab...

They flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been ...

“Often,” says Tieck in William Lovell, “the world, its people, and its contingencies flicker before my eyes like flimsy shadows; often I appear to myself to be a shadow playing a part, coming and going and doi...

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. But it will be my decision.” -Robert Stack, Bullfighter and the Lady In the opening five minutes of Bullfighter and Lady (1951), viewers may well start wondering if they ha...

“When you dream about my likeness, you create it. The more ardently you dream, the sooner you will see me. And I will resemble your dream.” - The Beast to Beauty, Panna a netvor (Beauty and the Beast) Of al...

“You feel as if your dreams were alive and you could touch them – and real life just passes you by!” - Marcello Mastroianni to Maria Schell, Le notti bianche (White Nights) Night falls on a provincial Italian...

Roberto Gavaldón 7 June 1909, Chihuahua, Mexico 4 September 1986, Mexico City The so-called Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the 1940s and ’50s remains a mythical terra incognita for most film lovers. We may...

“A life that should have been but never was! A fate that moved on twisting and tortuous paths!” - Dolores del Río, La Otra (The Other One) The ‘twin sisters’ melodrama was one of the more intriguing and idios...

January 15, 1893, Dublin, Ireland. d. July 24, 1950, Los Angeles, USA The world’s greatest director. Erich von Stroheim Rex Ingram may be the best-known enigma in film history. We are aware of him, these d...

She watched him, and was aware that his eyes were on the diamonds and not on her face. She quickly took them off and handed them to him. ‘I am afraid,’ she said, with dry eyes more tragic than if they had been ...

 “I lie... but only once in a while. At times, if I told the truth they wouldn’t believe me. So I tell lies.” - Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Les Quatre cents coups In the first scenes of François Truff...

Adapted from a 1973 novel by the Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm is a tale of disintegration. Of a family, of a culture, of an entire social and psychological way of life. An upper...

Cinema is, above all, the art of the real. A series of images that show what actually was. When cinema overpowers reality and becomes a hallucination, that’s something very rare. A privileged moment to be prese...

The King Vidor/Bette Davis melodrama Beyond the Forest (1949) is mostly remembered today for a single line of dialogue. Davis – miscast as a frustrated housewife in Smalltown USA – surveys her drab but actually...

Once upon a time – this is a true story – there was a poor old woman who loved opera to death, and who probably was not rich enough to afford herself the luxury of a whole production. Consequently, throughout h...

“It was then that the revelation took place: the vision of the fiery beauty of the world suddenly appeared, the secret message of good tidings, the special announcement of the limitless possibilities of being.”...

“The world changes all the time. We can no longer win by force alone.” - Akira Kobayashi in The Flowers and the Angry Waves In his 1973 essay, Le Plaisir du texte, Roland Barthes hails the 19th century noveli...

Is there one person in our family who has died sane? - (Tía Lala) María Vaner, The Headless Woman As a “poster girl” for what is wishfully called the New Argentine Cinema, Lucrecia Martel has built a career b...

“In my day, there were too many symbols.” - Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) in Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) Madrid in 1951 was a drab place. The capital of Europe’s last surviving fascist ...

Perhaps the most outrageously beautiful man ever to step in front of a camera, the 1920s and ’30s star Ramon Novarro is remembered today for the ghastly manner of his death – and the rumours (more ghastly still...

Pick up the two books and hold one in each hand. Just looking, you can learn a lot. Latin American Melodrama is a slender, grey volume, barely thicker than a child’s school notebook. All About Almodóvar is a he...

“You have to change your own desires, not the order of the world.” - Maurice Ronet to Alain Delon, La piscine There are the reasons why we love movies – and then there are the ones that we admit to. Few serio...

“There are few films I have so longed to make”, said Jacques Demy of Une chambre en ville. “Few I have dreamed of as much as this.” (1) So it seems oddly fitting that this film – which is rapturously romantic a...

India Song (1975 France 120 mins) Prod Co: Sunchild/Les Films Armorial (France) Prod: Stéphane Tchalgadjieff Dir, Scr: Marguerite Duras Phot: Bruno Nuytten Ed: Solange Leprince Mus: Carlos D’Alessio, Lud...

Pistol Opera (2001 Japan 112 mins) Prod Co: Victor Company of Japan/Shochiku/Eiseri Gekijo/Television Tokyo Channel 12/Dentsu/Ogura Jimusho Prod: Satoru Ogura, Ikki Katashima Dir: Seijun Suzuki Scr: Kazu...

If…. (1968 UK 107 mins) Prod Co: Memorial Enterprises Prod: Michael Medwin, Lindsay Anderson Dir: Lindsay Anderson Scr: David Sherwin Phot: Miroslav Ondriček Prod Des: Jocelyn Herbert, Brian Eatwell Ed: ...