“He fears the ‘Party of God’ because he reads their ‘cultural elite’ and ‘family values’ rhetoric as ‘code for [attacking] the media, the Jews, the homosexuals, the adulterers, people who do not believe in God, people who are better looking than you are — put it all together, you have a poisoned chalice.'”
Category: Artists
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Essays
Love of Sophia: Lost in Translation, Transcendence, Transfiguration
“Translation is at best an echo.” – George Borrow
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Nothin’ but Legs! Fred and Cyd Go out Kicking in Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Funny Face! Audrey Hepburn’s Fabulous Fifties Fashion Frolic! Also Starring Fred Astaire
Paris! Gershwin! Been there! Heard that!
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Noir
Life of Human Loss: Hugo Haas’s Strange Fascination
“Through his ability to improvise his own scenarios and engage others in their perambulations, Haas successfully negotiates the threat of circumstance that ensnared Pavel and, most always, wills out.”
Actors & Personalities · Uncategorized
Tragic Cinema: The Death of Subjectivities in JCVD
“Once we are shown that JCVD is, in fact, innocent, we are likely to forget 1) that moments earlier we were calling for his blood and 2) the particular events and sequence of events, or types of evidence shown, that had us jumping the gun in the first place. What El Mechri is showing us is how painfully contingent our conclusions about the world are on the particular type of passage we are afforded, the particular unfolding we are privy to.”
Mann in the Dark: The Film Noirs of Anthony Mann
“The morally complex interrelationship of hero/villain, which is partially accountable for the remarkable intensity of his films, has at its roots the film noirs of the 1940s. The darker side of human nature, the interiority of these earlier, psychologically troubled characters, is the determining force in Mann’s noirs. We see the director striving for the depth and complexity of characterization he ultimately achieved in the great films of the 1950s.”
Directors · Genres · Noir · Westerns
Going Through the Devil’s Doorway: The Early Westerns of Anthony Mann
“Mann’s 1950 threesome — The Devil’s Doorway, Winchester ’73, The Furies — was the most auspicious quantum jump by an American director since John Ford’s equivalent Americana triumvirate of 1939 (Stage Coach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk) lifted him into the major phase of his career. Yet Mann’s achievements seem destined to remain unappreciated and the director himself obscure.”
Anthony Perkins: Forever Psycho
“Although he at first resisted, Perkins returned to Norman Bates again and again, in one form or other. Norman’s twitchy eccentricity seeped into many of Perkins’ post-Psycho performances that preceded the run of sequels.”
Composers · Essays · Uncategorized
One Resurrected Drunkard: A Dialogue on Tony Palmer’s Testimony
“Palmer’s meticulously composed images hide the fact that this film is, in a sense, underdetermined, open to endless speculation; it is uncontrolled, savage, and thus, indeed, sometimes given to uncensored crudity.”
Composers · Directors · Music & Musicals · Noir
Clashing Harmonics: The Characteristics of Sound in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil
“Welles familiarizes us with the geography of the town largely through source music. Los Robles is presented as a labyrinth, an inter-place where physical and moral borders are erased.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Finger Envy: A Glimpse into the Short Films of VALIE EXPORT
“EXPORT’s antagonistic body undergoes a bloody rebirth, her mutilation inhibiting the screen’s attempt to dominate the body and recentering a commodified humanity whose “eros” struggles to leave its sanguine imprint.”
Actors & Personalities · Essays · War
Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair: Marlene Dietrich’s Star Persona and American Interventionist Strategies in Postwar Berlin
“I read so much about immigrants, how they must adjust to customs and the words of foreign lands. Maybe because I was never treated like an immigrant! Nobody made excuses for me. Not then – not now. Nobody cares about my roots.”1 – Marlene Dietrich, April 15, 1985
Actors & Personalities · Experimental & Underground
Robert Cowan (1930-2011): Unsung Superstar of the Underground
“Bob and the new people he introduced us to were very inspiring because it meant to me, by seeing them, that you can get older and still run around in a world of uncharted horizons.” – George Kuchar
Actors & Personalities · Asian
A Mere Mortal After All: On the Death of Dev Anand
“Endless self-parody is not a ‘new idea’ — and unless conducted with the awareness of the irony inherent in the process, it is a prank a person may play for years before realizing the joke is on him.”
Counterculture · Essays · Writers & Critics
On the Road to the Ninth Circle of Hell: Easy Rider Merges Lanes with Dante’s Inferno and Faust
How Easy Rider laid the groundwork for Wild Hogs
Actors & Personalities · Experimental & Underground
In a Garden of Tin Men: Marion Eaton (1932–2011) Remembered
“Marion’s character in Thundercrack!, the daft and delusional farm widow Gert Hammond, harkened back to a much more handcrafted Tennessee Williamsesque archetype. She infuses Gert with real pathos as well as genuine creepiness in a series of hauntingly photographed monologues that transcend the film’s threadbare conceits.”
The Annihilative Evils of the Polka Tremblante: Fragments on Rhetoric, Naiveté, and Inevitable Helixes
“Leontev’s rhetoric, though overblown, might strike a chord in those who lament the replacement of honest, inspired amateurism with the interchangeable bodies of the trousered professional class. But wait . . . the polka tremblante?”
Bergman’s Women: The Representation of Patriarchy and Class in Persona (1967) and Cries and Whispers (1972)
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”
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