Search Results for: "Orson Welles"

Late in one of the greatest filmic encounters with what scholars have started to conceptualise as the “long 1968,” we listen to a voiceover (VO) calmly narrating the gradual disappearance of one of the film’s p...

This will not be a typical festival review, in that it will not offer in-depth commentary – or even a “best of” roundup – on a sizable selection of what was programmed over Labor Day weekend in the mining town-...

In Two Cheers for Hollywood, film historian and critic Joseph McBride is on a mission: to recover the marginalised or unsung reputations of screenwriters, directors, producers and craftspeople of some of our fa...

I fully admit to having trouble with nostalgia – in life, but especially on film. So searing is the “real” version, I find, it has to be at least partially repressed. Nostalgia’s screen portrayal, meanwhile, ne...

Of all of the inanimate paraphernalia in my life, the thing that I treasure more than any other is effectively weightless. It is, in one sense, a geometric construction, composed solely of criss-crossing horizo...

Of all the films to have faced censorship battles in the English-speaking world, there are few as apparently innocuous as Alice au Pays des Merveilles (Alice in Wonderland, Lou Bunin, Dallas Bower and Marc Maur...

From Failed Propaganda to Timeless Masterpiece: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) In 1927 while Soviet cinema was celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, one of its most ferve...

This article offers an overview of the highly mediatized nature of the current phase of the Mexican narco wars, highlighting the existence of explicit videos released online by the cartels, which show execution...

In the early 1930s Jean-Paul Sartre exclaimed that philosophy would get nowhere until it stopped treating images as isolated postcards stored away somewhere inside the brain and occasionally brought out for vie...

In the last fifteen years, no less than three biographies have been dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard. Of the three, Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard from 2008 is indisputabl...

Oscar “Budd” Boetticher was truly one of a kind, as both a film director and a man. He was a boxer and a bullfighter (becoming only the third white matador in history) before embarking upon a prosperous Hollywo...

The Good Lord really made this place for movies. There’s everything there. There’s sand, there’s rivers, it’s made for motion pictures. What I would do that other directors did not do, I knew every inch of Lon...

Budd Boetticher (pronounced “bettiker”) was primarily known for his work as a director in the Western genre, but I didn’t want to tell him that. Boetticher refused to be pinned down with any labels, and describ...

“Cinema must set fire to life.” – Jean-Marie Straub This text was transcribed and translated from Claude-Jean Philippe's interview with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet entitled, “Le cinéma n’existe pas e...

Barton Fink (1991), the Coen brothers’ fourth feature, represents a departure from their earlier excavations of classical American genre cinema, Blood Simple. (1984) and Miller’s Crossing (1990), as well as the...

That Candy Box of Vulgarity: Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967) Upon the fifty-year anniversary of the release of Jacqueline Susann’s bestselling novel Valley of the Dolls in February 2016, many noted how...

8 October 1896, Lille 29 October 1967, Paris “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier at the entrance” (Jean Renoir, 1967) Julien Duvivie...

What would cinematic thought be like refracted through the master filmmakers of Asia? In her book The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani, Laleen Jayamanne responds to this question by formulating a unique theory of t...

Edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice comprises a series of reflections by an impressive selection of established and emerging film and media scholars o...

Big Deal on Madonna Street is such a great, catchy, and memorable title that you would hate to lose it. It was the third (at least) tried out by the film’s English-language distributors after Persons Unknown an...

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...

For 30 years, Bologna has been the home of Retrieved Cinema – Il Cinema Ritrovato. That idea of “retrieving” cinema is what makes this annual gathering of critics, archivists, restorers and ordinary film lovers...

“You know the money shots in porn films? Well, this was just a different substance: it was red” – Director Roberta Findlay on the relationship between pornography and horror “Roberta is a pioneer, a ground-br...

 When Jesús “Jess” Franco won a prestigious Spanish Goya Award in 2009, it represented a victory from below, a truly grassroots push from fan communities. Never a major box-office presence with his microbudgete...

It is often said that a film set is like a military campaign. Another analogy would be that of a professional kitchen (itself based on the military model), which after the eminent French chef Auguste Escoffier,...

It’s one of the great gags in film theory. Writing in 1969, Cahiers du cinéma editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni devise a seven-part critical typology of the cinema, based on the political or ideologic...

Each of Walerian Borowczyk's fourteen features has one thing in common. There's no toplessness in Blanche (1972) so it can't be that. The answer must be that they're all consistently nice to look at. Amongst th...

What I don’t like is the persistent denial by blubbering sentimentalists of man’s basic nature. Away with those who would sterilize life, or, as they call it, ‘spiritualize’ life. - Erich von Stroheim In Gree...

This is an appropriate question, as last fall the 34 year-old Canadian festival unfolded its second year with its new administrative team (Jacqueline Dupuis taking over the functions of Executive Director in 20...

Entries in part 5: Fidel Jesús Quirós Bérénice Reynaud Stuart Richards Jeremy Rigsby Peter Rist Eloise Ross Julian Ross André Roy Dan Sallitt Maria San Filippo Yianna Sarri Christine Sathiah ...

In September 1973, 26-year-old Steven Spielberg attended a press conference in Rome to promote his made-for-TV chase thriller, Duel (1971), which had been released theatrically in Europe with around fifteen min...

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...

Three recent additions to Caboose’s Kino-Agora series are dedicated to fundamental terms in the history of film theory and criticism: Frank Kessler writes on mise en scène, Jacques Aumont on montage, and ...

Raphaël Bassan has worked as a freelance critic for many journals and magazines in France including Écran, Cinéma différent, La Revue du cinéma, and for the fine arts magazines Canal, L'art vivant and the Frenc...

A long, long time ago English film magazines arrived in Melbourne after a journey by boat that often took several months. They could arrive in a rush, several issues at a time. The place where they were sold wa...

Special Dossier edited by Bruce Bennett, Leon Gurevitch and Bruce Isaacs Michael Bay occupies a curious place in contemporary culture. The films he has directed, including the Transformers franchise (2007-2014...