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[…]
Category: Historical & Epic
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
Auteurs in the Arena: Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire
It’s thumb’s up and thumb’s down for Mann’s sprawling, fascinating, multi-auteur epic that inspired “bone-headed” imitations from Ridley Scott (Gladiator) and Mel Gibson (Braveheart)
Crime · Essays · Historical & Epic
A Propaganda Opportunity Shot Down: The Changing Image of the FBI Agent in G-Men (1935) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951)
“Putting aside whatever doubts the FBI had about its image in these films, the two films represent one of the many fascinating permutations of the gangster film in the studio era, with the heroic FBI agent acting in a manner befitting an upstanding American, yet able to shift gears and punch out a gangster.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · War
Tarantino’s Transformations: Inglourious Basterds’ Dizzying Array of Sources
In which Tarantino reshapes Shakespeare, World War II movies, Leni Riefenstahl, Spaghetti Westerns, and more, under the deft guidance of that Italian master Ovid
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Chasing Windmills: Talking with Juan Luis Bunuel about Welles and Don Quixote
“I’d love to be Orson’s assistant again.”
The Energy of an Era: Revisiting Ken Russell’s The Devils
“How else is one to approach a historical episode involving humpbacked, sexually frustrated nuns; crippled autocrats; hammer-wielding exorcists; doctors armed with holy water enemas?”
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Paging Groucho! Notes on Morrie Ryskind and HUAC
“Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
Boris Godunov in America: Notes on a Meyerhold Production Resurrected*
“My God! — cried out a querulous voice within me — is it possible that we, artists of the stage, are doomed by the materiality of our bodies to eternal servitude and the representation of crude reality?” — Stanislavsky, questioning his Realistic method after a failed 1904 production of symbolist one-act plays by Maeterlink2 “The stage is art . . . There’s a genre painting by Kramskoy in which the faces are portrayed superbly. What would happen if you cut the nose out of one of the paintings and substituted a real one? The nose would be “realistic” but the picture would be ruined.” — Chekhov, explaining to an actor why offstage sounds of croaking frogs and buzzing dragonflies would not render a 1898 production of The Seagull more “realistic”3
Crime · Historical & Epic · Reviews
The Scent of a Woman: Perfect Misogyny in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
“The Grenouille of the film experiences an emotional epiphany that does not bring him humanity, but at least makes him yearn for its possibilities.”
Activist & Political · Crime · Historical & Epic · Reviews
The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
How a movie exposé of “abuse of power” defends those in power and their institutions
Playing It Safe with John Dillinger: Michael Mann’s Public Enemies
“Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
On the Incomprehensibility of Timely Films Past Their Time: Or, A Signing Fool Watches The Singing Fool
“Not frustration of a desire of the subject, but frustration by an object in which his desire is alienated and which the more it is elaborated, the more profound the alienation from his jouissance becomes for the subject.”
The Human Monster: On Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood
“There are no good and bad men; there are only damaged men … “
Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Bowling for America: Robert Warshow, There Will Be Blood, and the Topography of Desire
“The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist. But the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.”
Serpentine Evil and the Garden of Eden: On DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949)
Samson, meet Adam; Delilah, meet Eve
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