Le Train En Marche (Chris Marker, 1971)

  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 …

500 (or so) words on the World according to Fassbinder: Lola (1981, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

Lola is Fassbinder in overdrive (“in the red” as star Armin Mueller-Stahl put it, although he seems to have forgotten about the blue his character is always clad in and which sums up the duality and the wildness of this film too). This film is not the fabled critic’s cliché of an “explosion of colour”, …

La Rupture (1970, Claude Chabrol)

Every so often a film just blindsides you. I have been a fan of Claude Chabrol almost as long as I’ve been a cinephile, my admiration stemming from early, formative viewings of Le Boucher and La Ceremonie, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Chabrol work quite like this one and was not expecting …

Trafic (Jacques Tati, 1971)

For all the acclaim he has received, both popular and critical, how can it be that Jacques Tati still features so rarely on lists of, say, the ten greatest film directors? Is the reason as simple as the comedian’s curse, that condition that means that, no matter the greatness of the work itself, it will …