The Book, the Film, the Music
Art and Politics Always Mix
Early on for Harry Belafonte,
“acting” came to mean social and political “action,” and singing was
its vehicle. If his enthralling and indispensable memoir, My Song, devoured in either sips or gulps,
catapults us to other times and places with immense urgency and verve, the book also
offers a deep reservoir of reflection more...
The Russian title for “hipsters,” stilyagi, refers to a youth sub-culture beginning as early as the late 1940s after WWII introduced Western clothes, films and popular music to the USSR. Stilyagi were a “stylists” from head to toe and morning ‘til midnight, defying Soviet codes for conformity in appearance and behavior by more...
Aleksei Fedorchenko Hails from Russia A Fairy Tale from the Volga
A bicycle makes its way up-screen, as if upstream on a wet road. On the back wheel two birds are perched in a cage. The camera tracks them as they ride, straight ahead through the woods. But then with a jump-cut, the camera still tracking, we see only the rainy road left behind: the rider and birds are now off-screen more...
The World’s Oldest Profession and One of Its Newest
Isabelle Huppert Lights Up the Screen“Nonsense” Makes Sense in Jeanne
Labrune’s Special Treatment
Sans queue ni tête,
the original title of Special Treatment,
can be translated literally to “senseless or disconnected,” or idiomatically to
something one can make neither “head nor tail” of, and this is precisely the
irony upon which Jeanne Labrune plays so exceedingly well in her ninth feature
film. The “nonsense” has more...
Manoel de Oliveira Hails from Portugal The Photographer and His Muse — The Cinema
Manoel de Oliveira must be keenly conscious of the fact that he is probably the only active filmmaker — and one prodigiously at work — whose career spans the nascence of the “talkies” and the embrace of computer generated images, because he has made it his task to probe the stages of the cinema’s development as more...
Our first encounter with the unending grey high-rises that situate Bombay on the map of the world is a street-level tour through the viewfinder of an video camera. In this opening footage of Dhobi Ghat, shot on a taxi ride through the relentless rain that washes the megalopolis of Mumbai, Yasmin, the novice behind the lens more...
A Swedish Debut
A Transitional Point
of View
The Girl unfolds through the innocent eyes of an always curious and sometimes frightened child, one as sensitive to her world as she is withholding of a reaction, and who can be both coy and mortified at turns. But let’s back up. The film opens with an extreme close-up on fidgeting hands and feet as a girl receives an injection more...
The Colombian Tide
Renewing Cinema as an
Art Form
A curious image lingers in the pre-credit sequence of Crab Trap, a stunning feat of neo-existential, “post-exotic” cinema by Colombian writer-director Oscar Ruiz Navia. In the mucky earth, perhaps along a jungle river or en route to the sea, an out-sized shoeprint draws the camera near. From it, a tiny creature struggles to more...
The Russian Master’s Longest Work of Fiction A Georgian-Born Israeli’s Film in English
What an enthralling experience it is to watch The Duel — not so much the duel itself (which in theory could give one the queasy-guilty-perverse sensation of attending a lynching or a day at the guillotine) — but the sparring as it plays itself out in so many words, settings, ideas. Dueling per se was, after all, long out of date by more...
French Producer Par Excellence A Testament of Humbert Balsan’s Living Presence
If ever there were a worthy reason to uphold international participation in cinema production, Humbert Balsan embodied it. So let me begin by looking back, because that is the least that the stunning new film, The Father of My Children, prompts us to do. Some years ago at a prestigious, well-heeled European film festival, more...
A Cineaste Returns to the Classics An Italian Cooks Up a Storm
Word is out: I Am Love (2009) is a feast for the senses. Yet a big part of what writer-director-producer Luca Guadagnino serves up is food for thought, which makes the devouring all the richer. Lest there be doubt, his first feature lays his turf. In The Protagonists (1999), British film star Tilda Swinton takes a film crew to more...
The Paris Opera Ballet A Direct-Access Documentary
From the grand and stately streets of Paris that deliver us to the front door of the Palais Garnier, we go far below to its dark and seemingly endless catacombs, roaming through them to a room of coiled ropes and pulleys that appear to be part of the stagecraft of the Paris Opera House. Then climbing the stairways of empty halls more...
Between Heaven and Earth Phil Grabsky Captures the Man and His Music
Bigger than Life, Better than Fiction: In Search of Beethoven
Somewhere between heaven and earth, documentary filmmaker Phil Grabsky has managed to locate Ludwig van Beethoven, and to probe him so piercingly that it’s as if the “Lion” himself had sprung from his resting place and said, “Here, take all of me, heart and soul, but don’t miss a note or a beat of it…” more...
Dancing on the Head of a Pin
Keats' Moments of Immortality
“Writ in Water”— Bathed in Light: Campion's Keats in Bright Star
How do we learn about poetry? Through the verses themselves, written and spoken, or possibly through the personal correspondence of the poets or their published discourse on the art? How do we come to understand the wrestling of a poet’s conscience, or to enjoy the beauty of the words? In Bright Star Jane Campion more...
The Real World of the Dardennes The Lyricism of Lorna’s
Silence
“His Name Is Claudy”: The Cinematic Language of Lorna’s Silence
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have made some sixty documentaries in their career, have also consistently disarmed fest-goers, jury members, and filmmakers alike with their five theatrical features made over the last twelve years. For budding independents, these Belgian brothers have become gurus, in a way, modeling more...
Olivier
Assayas Returns to
Property and Place in Summer Hours
Shedding Weight in Summer Hours:
Ceylan Visits the Dark Side
Poetic Cinema in Turkey
Flickering Light:
Last year the 61st Festival de Cannes
named Nuri Bilge Ceylan its Best Director.
Not only had he made five features in eleven years, but he was picking
up his fourth major award at that festival in six years,
not counting the two Best Actor awards bestowed on his cast there for Distant (2002). Regardless
of his laurels, more...
Form and Feeling
Discovering an Austrian Auteur
Re-Match in the Woods:
The Vienna Woods has always cut two ways. It played the muse to Schubert’s Lieder, and to Beethoven’s Pastoral and his “Ode to Joy.” But it also saw the Mayerling deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Maria Vetsera, whose ghosts hover there still. Kafka, of all people, is said to have spent happy days more...
Popular Filmmaking in Iran
Majid Majidi Is Back Again
A Fable for Young and Old in The Song of Sparrows
The head of an ostrich is all
eyes and mouth — two-inch-wide eyes that can see forever and the rest, a
long-jawed beak that honks a low sputtering hiss when the bird is under
duress. Its scanty down “hair” stands on
end hiding ears that can hear one of its own feathers fall. Majid Majidi, one of
