“Huston once described his job to John Milius like this: ‘You will confer with generals, you will dine at the table with kings, and you will sleep with titled women. All of this you will do while being dead broke. That’s what being a director is.’ Should we even feign surprise that when it came time to make The Bible he cast himself as the voice of the Almighty?
Category: Directors
Directors · Experimental & Underground
George Kuchar and the Great Beyond
by Bob Moricz [Editor’s note: This is our second tribute to George Kuchar, who passed away in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 6, 2011, age 69, from prostate cancer. He was[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
George Kuchar: A First-Person Life
[Editor’s note: George Kuchar passed away in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 6, 2011, age 69. The cause was prostate cancer. He was beloved by many, and was certainly a[…]
Forgotten Fathers – Maurice Tourneur, Richard Oswald
The Frenchman, Maurice Tourneur, and the Austrian, Richard Oswald, were major producer/directors during cinema’s Silent Era, but are hardly remembered today. These days, movie lovers are more likely to know the films and[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
A Dream That Was Not All a Dream: The Films of André Delvaux
“For him, film was not only a profession but a mean of investigating cinema as a language, an investigation in which theory and film practice went hand in hand.”
The Envelope of Time: Wrapping Up the Past in Chris Marker, Alexander Sokurov, and José Luis Guerín
“Being beautiful fights trivializing and ironization by the camera; it saves the women from being regarded as cheap or inscrutable. Elegance and glamour paradoxically grant these subjects an inner life.”
Boris Barnet: The Lyric Voice in Soviet Cinema
“If the silent period showed the flashes of brilliance as well as the unevenness of Barnet’s talent, the next few years would see him produce two worldwide masterpieces that place him as a precursor of French Poetic Realism and the work of Jean Renoir, as well as an influence on the French New Wave through the works of Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette.”
Young Ones and Swan Songs: Luis Bunuel in Mexico, Bela Tarr in Edinburgh
“Attempts to create interesting projects of any sort despite our limitations can sometimes touch us more deeply than slick illusions that — literally by design — hide a lot of skill and effort, yet, in so doing, also hide something of the crazy courage it takes just to be human.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica
The Complete Exile: The Films of Carlos Atanes
“These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”
Directors · Festivals & Awards
A Handful of Keepers: The 40th New Directors/New Films Festival
“Kudos to the Vegas for showing not only the grimness of hustling, but also the ordinariness. As Clemente dresses, his middle-aged, matronly partner puts on her reading glasses to count the cash.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors
Norman, Is That You? The Long Wait of Norman Foster
“Sadly, this oversight neglects Foster’s contributions to both film noir and world cinema, and it dismisses a life nearly as fascinating as that of Welles.”
Between Heaven and Hell: The Movies — Martin Scorsese’s Middle Ground
“Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”
Mapping the Mind Between Movies: Intertextuality in the Work of Wong Kar-wai
“Frustrated by their unrequited love, their inability to capture their objet petit a, Wong’s characters search desperately for appropriate supplements onto which they can displace their yearnings and desires.”
Crazy Dreams: The World Of Blake Edwards
“The truth is that humour and terror play an equal part in his vision, which takes shape at the point where the two extremes meet.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
Loving the Bad: An Interview with Frankie Latina and Sasha Grey on Modus Operandi
“Any director who shoots a grindhouse film without exquisite, triumphant, dangerous, and naked women is doing a disservice to the genre and should move into a different field.”
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries
On the Level: The Films of Frederick Wiseman
“The wonderful paradox of the Wiseman film is that what allows the layered complexities to unfold is the leveling of everything we are shown.”
HELLO OUT THERE – The Last Testament of James Whale
Hello Out There (1949), like virtually all of the films James Whale directed after Show Boat, had a troubled production history. It never obtained a commercial release. Yet, unlike any of[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Loving the Bad: An Interview with Frankie Latina and Sasha Grey on Modus Operandi
by Matthew Sorrento If intentional camp is bad, then camp striving to be bad is even worse. So claimed Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” and others[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Looking at Charlie – Monsieur Verdoux: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“What’s all this about good and evil?” With the release of The Great Dictator late in 1940, Charlie Chaplin had done it again. He had made a movie that, with[…]
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