Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet
Martine Beugnet’s study of Claire Denis is a highlight of the lively Manchester series on French film directors, and well worth an uninterrupted read from cover to cover. Ending with a full critique of...
View ArticleOtto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema
One of Hollywood’s finest exponents of mise en scène, Preminger, it can justly be argued, is instrumental in defining the transition from classical to modernist cinema. The post Otto Preminger and the...
View Articlefigures traced in light: On Cinematic Staging and The Way Hollywood Tells It:...
I come to praise Bordwell, not to bury him. He is the greatest academic film critic writing in the English language and his latest brace of books, companion volumes really, leave us in no doubt of this...
View ArticleNew Asian Ventures: The Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival
10–24 November 2006 A year after showing at the Warner Village multiplex in the plush new Xinyi district of East Taipei, the Golden Horse Festival reverted to its niche in bohemian Ximending on the...
View ArticleHitchcock and Hume Revisited: Fear, Confusion and Stage Fright
“This essay is a return to the scene of the crime.” The author of Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema re-evaluates his low opinion of Stage Fright, and discovers that the affinities between Hitchcock’s...
View ArticleForgotten Lean: The Ann Todd Trilogy
Though other titles loom larger in perceptions of David Lean’s career, John Orr makes a case for the significance of Lean’s collaboration with Ann Todd in The Passionate Friends, Madeleine and The...
View ArticleThe Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960
Trauma has long played a key role in cinema. John Orr argues that “What is out there as waking nightmare in a dangerous world is often a mirror of what is hidden in here, in the human heart.” In Orr’s...
View ArticleMoonlighting
Moonlighting (1982 Britain 97 mins) Prod Co: Channel Four Films/Southern Television/ZDF Prod: Jerzy Skolimowski, Mark Shivas, Michael White Dir, Scr: Jerzy Skolimowski Phot: Tony Pierce-Roberts Ed:...
View ArticleThe Moment of Mythodrama: the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival
This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival had its best opening night in years. Not in a regular cinema but in the city’s historic Festival Theatre with a 3,000 plus audience where Sylvain...
View ArticleBergman, Skolimowski and European Modernism: Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence:...
The cinematic legacy of European modernism is both fascinating and elusive. Not least because the term modernism itself means so many things to so many people: David Bordwell’s surrogate “art-cinema...
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