For Nicholas Ray love (or ‘love’) is corrosive. It is unstable and moves with the waves and currents of societal corruption and sickness. Born to Be Bad, despite what Dave Kehr persuasively argued, is not a major work, not a masterpiece and not a particularly important signal in Ray’s career. It sits comfortably somewhere in … Continue reading Born To Be Bad (1950, Nicholas Ray)
Is this the most underrated of Howard Hawks’ films? It is, without a doubt, a masterpiece although it is a film rarely accorded with that distinction (except by the critics, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, who are less fazed by the monolithic canon-complacency of industry-derived or AFI-approved film criticism) and it continues (as far as I’m … Continue reading The Big Sky (1952, Howard Hawks)
Is the battle for the recognition of the pre-Grindhouse “quota quickies” and B-cinema over? One would think so considering the posthumous (and richly deserved) attention paid by critics, film-makers and archivists to the works of directors such as Joseph H Lewis, Edgar G Ulmer, Jacques Tourneur, Samuel Fuller and the subsequent efforts from the Corman … Continue reading The Phantom Light (1935, Michael Powell)
Twenty-eight minutes in length, Flunky, Work Hard is the earliest surviving work by Japanese master Mikio Naruse, made just one year after his debut. If Passing Fancy by Ozu belongs to the proletarian-focused cinema on the 1930’s, then Flunky, Work Hard belongs to that tradition too while also straddling a more experimental vein in the … Continue reading Flunky, Work Hard (1931, Mikio Naruse)
It may rarely get credited as such, but Bringing Up Baby is one of the most beautiful films in the American cinema, as well as one of its most definitive. In very few other places would the American dream of independence be so thoroughly explored and so thoroughly exalted, even with the knowledge that it … Continue reading Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks)
Le Train En Marche, made in 1971 by Chris Marker and his SLON group, is the precursor in many ways to a more well-known Marker film; the 1992 feature The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d'Alexandre). The latter film is a more complete reckoning with the life and work of Soviet film-maker Alexander Medvedkin, but … Continue reading Le Train En Marche (Chris Marker, 1971)
In writing about a film like Lang’s one must succumb, for better or worse, to a cliché that has been in existence since shortly after F.W. Murnau released Sunrise, and it became clear that in those celluloid strips containing the look on Janet Gaynor’s face and the way the camera followed her down the frantic … Continue reading Destiny (Der Mude Tod), Fritz Lang, 1921
In 1945 Samuel Fuller was in Czechoslovakia, serving with the US Army as the war ended and the Denazification process beckoned. It was there he shot what was, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, his first ever film footage; this footage was of the liberation of Falkenau, a sub-site of the Flossenburg concentration camp, the infantrymen showing … Continue reading Verboten! (1959, Samuel Fuller)
Bosphore (1964) Byzance (1964) La Corne d'Or (1964) Istanbul (1964) Maitre Galip (1964) Pehlivan (1964) On assignment Maurice Pialat and cameraman/cinematographer Willy Kurant go to Turkey, in disguise as the Lumiere brothers (less than a decade after Louis died), and send back a series of actualities, six in total. The opening trio work more in … Continue reading Pialat in Turkey
Perhaps with the HD camera and digital projection, as we see it used now, and with the widespread use of digital 'correction' of the image, cinema finally joins the tyranny of 'perfection', the realm already inhabited by the television talk show, the prestige novel, the fashion magazine, the bourgeois pop song. A perfect, terrifying, nauseating … Continue reading CHAT SHOW CINEMA
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