Weary Shadow: Considering The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970)
What’s in the bag is Marcello Clerici, and the bag, not surprisingly, is empty. * * * Upon its release in 1970, how many of us were prepared for The[…]
Category: Historical & Epic
Historical & Epic · Producers & Studios · War
“War Brings Out What People Really Are”: Hell’s Angels Reconsidered
Introduction Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes’s 1930 film, was praised for its aerial photography and derided for its story. “War Brings Out What People Really Are” surveys critical films Hollywood produced[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“Hundreds of Thousands of Hours of Moments”: On Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake (2015)
In a recent interview, the English filmmaker Adam Curtis described finding “hidden levels in the BBC archive” where a vast collection of extraneous footage has been accumulating over the last[…]
Directors · Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic · Pre-Code · Religion & Spirituality · Silents
The Wickedest Movie in the World: How Cecil B. DeMille Made The Sign of the Cross
This post was adapted from the new book by Cecilia de Mille Presley and Mark A. Vieira, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic (Running Press, 416pp, December[…]
Animation · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Private Snafu’s Hidden War: Historical Survey and Analytical Perspective
In honor of Memorial Day, we present Christopher Dow’s lively history and critical analysis of World War II’s favorite cartoon fuck-up, Private Snafu, which appeared originally in Bright Lights in[…]
Between Artless Passions and Anal Hells: On the Edinburgh Festival’s Production of Marlowe’s Edward II
“Why should you love him who the world hates so?”
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Histories Private and Public: Talking with Péter Forgács about Letters to Afar
“We wanted to do a writing of history through a sensual observance of the films. By having those details opened up, we show how the daily life was — not by explaining didactically but rather offering this inner representation.”
Historical & Epic · Reviews · Silents
What Becomes a Legend Most: Fritz Lang Adapts the Nibelungenlied
“If head and heart are united, harmony can exist even in the midst of strife. Let them come into opposition, however, and chaos enters from which there is no escape and no conclusion possible except a tragic one.” — Francis G. Gentry. “Triuwe and Vriunt in the Nibelungenlied.” Amsterdam: Rodopi: 1975. p. 45.”Perception is everything. It turns villains into heroes and victims into collaborators.” — Hilary Mantel. “A Change of Climate.” New York: Henry Holt and Company: 1997. p. 317.
Directors · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Tarantino and Spielberg: Two Visions of America
“In Lincoln, the abolition of slavery is the goal of the narrative; the closing scenes are intended to confirm our notion of a historical trajectory that moves from injustice to justice. In Django Unchained, the narrative is simpler, but the notions of justice and history are more complex. The story gives no hint that slavery will ever be abolished. It presents an America that has yet to escape its foundational sin, and may never be able to.”
The Lost Films of the 1840s: The Mississippi River and the Tradition of Proto-Cinema
“The unrolling of the canvas was timed to take around two hours, with the speed of movement simulating the experience of drifting on a steamboat down the river itself. Lit by gaslight, the presentation was accompanied by the delivery of a lecture by a narrator, an episodic commentary that ranged from the didactic to the purely entertaining. The exhibition was often joined by piano accompaniment, the score composed specifically for the painting and even made available for purchase after viewing. In some cases, as the scene moved, stage crews would manipulate lighting to simulate sunrises and sunsets, daylight and darkness.”
Activist & Political · Essays · Historical & Epic
A Journey into Political Consciousness: Africa as “Setting and Backdrop” in Shekhar Kapur’s The Four Feathers (2002)
“In reflecting the postcolonial sensibilities, rather than the imperialist enthusiasms, of the early twenty-first century, the film is very much a creature of its time.”
Father of His Country: On Spielberg’s Lincoln
“Spielberg’s post-millennial Lincoln epitomizes the more experienced politician’s awe for Justice (as distinguished from the malleable Law), which is to be sought by whatever means necessary and inevitably involves sacrifice, perhaps of one’s very soul. There’s more than a touch of Faust in this script.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
The Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films
“While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don’t-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers’ films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what’s not there.”
What’s “Natural” about “Naturalist” Cinema? On Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2012)
“Director Arnold heightens the once-“natural” processes of life events such as birth and death by setting them outside, historically as if for the last time, before Western medicine and Victorian domesticity.”
Father of His Country: Spielberg’s Lincoln
Great drama often depends on the playwright’s ability to select (or invent) a fateful day or two in his hero’s life that symbolically sums him up and enables him to[…]
Uncle Sam’s Love Letter: Samuel Fuller’s Park Row on DVD
“If you can get past all these potentially off-putting deviations, Park Row offers Samuel Fuller at his most free, exuberant, and even experimental. As unfocused as the narrative is, it is essentially a realist fable, or collection of fables, condensing an entire rough-and-tumble era into a coincidence-riddled pill.”
(Re)Staging the Story: The Pre-History of Cinema
“Though most people in earlier times could not even have imagined the present role of science and technology, nor, even more implausibly, the apparently alternate life offered by the cinema and its recent offshoots, the human imagination refused to be tied down.”
Two Cinematic Visions of the Inca Conquest: The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Aguirre: Wrath of God
“Both films suggest Europe has run aground spiritually, as they both depict the Catholic Church and its representatives to be as bloodthirsty as the conquistadors.”
Asian · Historical & Epic · War
History or Humanity? On Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death: A Nietzschean Perspective on Nanjing
“The monumental approach, as one would guess, takes history as something to be inspired by, as a record of human greatness that serves to encourage similar greatness by individuals in future times; in the case of City of Life and Death, it is the various acts of compassion and solidarity that play this role.”
“Nun-Lust, Torture-Porn, Church-Desecration and Bad Taste”: Reconnecting with Ken Russell’s The Devils
“Sex mingles easily with religion, and their blending has one of those slightly repulsive and yet exquisite and poignant flavors, which startle the palate like a revelation — of what? That, precisely, is the question.” – Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun “The Devils is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with open sores, open bonfires, court intrigue, the King shooting Protestants for sport, the callous and ludicrous behaviour of the Inquisition, the two-facedness of the King’s soldiers and sex-deprived nuns. It’s about the corruption of a whole town and the man at the centre who defies it. — Ken Russell, quoted in the London Times, March 13, 2012
