Weird American Odysseys: Music, Authenticity, and the Coen Brothers
“When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s going to tell the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” – Bob Dylan (while not wearing a mask), Rolling Thunder[…]
Category: Directors
Cityscapes · Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Sex & Relationships
Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969): The “Baroque Geometry” of Los Angeles in the 1960s
“I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilized major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer. . . .”1 – Adam[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Interviews · LGBT & Queer
“How Stupid the Whole World Is!” An interview with Paul Morrissey
“There was no movement! I was not part of a movement, I. Made. My. Own. Films. They. Were. Not. Part. Of. Any. Movement. You’re incapable of understanding that, aren’t you? I have to be in a category. First I’m in ‘Andy Warhol films,’ then I’m an ‘independent.’ I like good films that are worth watching, OK?”
Directors · Festivals & Awards · Interviews
Women in Film: Interviews with Mati Diop, Marie Kreutzer, Haifaa al-Mansour, and Zoé Wittock at Berlinale, Toronto, and Sundance Film Festivals
Our globe-trotting correspondent Amir Ganjavie spoke with four emerging women directors at the 2019 Berlinale and Toronto International Film Festivals and the 2020 Sundance Festival. Collectively, they represent France (via[…]
Directors · Literature and Film · Production History · Writers & Critics
At Sea, In Port, Up the River: Orson Welles’s Conrad Adaptations
Conrad was more than a mere influence. He was also a direct source of story material. Welles considered himself “made for Conrad” and frequently returned to Conrad’s original stories. Adaptation[…]
The Architecture of Horror: Space, Light, and Atmosphere in Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar
We encounter filmic atmosphere vaguely, imperceptibly, but emotively and reflexively; a movie is a mood. Hereditary and Midsommar creep into our consciousness through subtle shifts in light, sound, and camerawork.[…]
She-Gods, Gangsters, and Gunslingers: The “New Woman” in the Early Films of Roger Corman
As part of their liberation from convention, Corman empowers female characters with choices both real and metaphorical. Even a common love triangle can represent female empowerment, with the choice between[…]
Before Hollywood: Max Ophüls, Curtis Bernhardt, and Robert Siodmak in Exile in Paris
Hollywood was just beyond the horizon for the émigrés. There is no doubt that Curtis Bernhardt, Robert Siodmak, and Max Ophüls thought they would settle down in Paris and become[…]
The Auteurist Stork: Alfonso Cuarón’s Cinema of Deliverance
Roma is the latest edition in what can be considered Cuarón’s prenatal trilogy, preceded by Children of Men (2006) and Gravity. This is a director obsessed with matters of pregnancy,[…]
Modernity, Melancholia, and Cultural Heritage: Johnnie To’s Sparrow
In Sparrow, this sense of melancholia manifests as an abstract nostalgia for the architecture and cultural values of an old Hong Kong that is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by[…]
“Nicholas Who?” An Irreverently Linear Journey Through the Work of the Late Nicolas Roeg, Director of Well Over Four Films
“There’s something that happened, and there’s a kind of ring around that event – or it’s fenced off – and everything else is okay around it, but there’s just something[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Essays
But It Did Happen! Werner Herzog and the Ecstatic Truth
I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. We have to redefine reality.1 – Werner Herzog There are dignified stupidities.[…]
Le Misanthrope: On Lars von Trier
If there’s an authorial hand in Trier’s films, it serves only to pull the wings off the fly. * * * In the thirty-five-odd years he’s been active, Lars von[…]
Andrew and Virginia Stone: Noir to the Bone
Andrew Stone and his fantastically helpful wife-editor have evolved an entirely different ethos of film-making.… If they want to blow up a train, they blow up a real train. If[…]
Comedy · Directors · Women in Film
Drop In and Get Lost: Sex as Funhouse, Freak Show, and Masquerade in Irma la Douce and Kiss Me, Stupid
American Audiences watched Irma la Douce without discomfort, perhaps because French prostitutes and pimps were performing immoral acts and misdeeds. The same subversion of middle-class values that would later inform[…]
Dark Undercurrents: Claude Chabrol’s Second Wave from Les Biches (1968) to Innocents with Dirty Hands (1975)
“There are no waves, there is only the ocean.” – Claude Chabrol * * * From 1968 to 1975 Claude Chabrol directed a dozen films – one of the most[…]
Directors · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Weird and Pissed Off: Field Notes on John Carpenter’s First Fifteen Years
“It’s better to be a human being than an imitation.”- John Carpenter, on The Thing * * * 1. Begin with sound. Begin with Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). A[…]
Directors · Essays · Philosophy
Asking the Wrong Questions: Reiteration and Doubling in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Mullholland Drive, and Inland Empire
“Mystery is good, confusion is bad. And there’s a big difference between the two.” – David Lynch * * * A survey of the critical literature pertaining to David Lynch’s[…]
Biopic · Directors · Drama · Experimental & Underground
James Franco’s The Disaster Artist: Hollywood Caught in the Act of Kissing Its Own Ass
“Hollywood oddballs are like everything else in Hollywood. Don’t look too close.” * * * Greg Sestero’s now reasonably famous book The Disaster Artist, co-written by Tom Bissell, is much[…]
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