Mediterranee (1963, Jean-Daniel Pollet) If the endless circuit of repetitive simulations and duplications continues then we should at least attempt to find some ecstasy, some liberty and some echoes of what we have lost within it. Jean-Daniel Pollet’s essay film is an edifice (strong yet weak, monumental but crumbling, still just together but ready to … Continue reading Round-Up: Pollet, Guitry, Robson/Lewton, Mizoguchi
Two more silent Mikio Naruse films, both from 1933. Every-Night Dreams is currently the more acclaimed of this pair, perhaps because it’s story and feel is closer to some of the social realist Hollywood films or melodramas of roughly the same period (albeit while remaining distinctly Japanese). It is a film which attempts to present … Continue reading Apart from You (1933, Mikio Naruse) /Every-Night Dreams (1933, Mikio Naruse)
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)
Directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer, written by Curt Siodmak and Billy (or Billie) Wilder, shot by Edgar Schufftan and Fred Zinnemann, all while they were still young Berliners. People on Sunday is an act of democracy from a country about to plunge into the depths of something much darker. It is a … Continue reading People On Sunday (Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer, 1930)
The opening of Number 17, the last film Hitchcock made for the Associated British Picture Corporation, features “a delirium of continuity” (to quote Jonathan Rosenbaum) and a montage of chilled imagery, fluid camera movement and unsettling effects that recalls comparable sequences in the films of Murnau. In these minutes we feel not so far from … Continue reading Number 17 (Alfred Hitchcock, 1932)
