At the beginning of The Velvet Underground, the first documentary film by Todd Haynes, a title card appears: “A documentary film by Todd Haynes.” I laughed out loud when I saw it, though not out of derision. I had been waiting for Todd Haynes to make a documentary for a while.
“Parasite” disrupts as many expectations as possible under limited spatial and temporal conditions, but does it have anything original to say about class?...
Without a service like Karagarga movie-lovers are in thrall to the whims of an implacable market — one whose recent and unerring shift to digital streaming has…
“I am in this earthly world, where to do harm / Is often laudable, to do good / Sometime accounted dangerous folly.” So says Lady Macduff in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Moments later, she and her entire family—innocents all—are slaughtered. The triumph of Joel Coen’s film adaptation is that it
Ben Barenholtz kept Eraserhead playing in theaters at midnight for week after week and month after month before the film finally found its audience, thereby launching the career of David Lynch. There were only twenty-five people in the theater on opening night in New York’s Cinema Village in 1977, twenty-four the second night, but Barenholtz persisted and kept the film running for almost a year. A year later, Barenholtz opened it again in New York at the Waverly, where it more than doubled its first run — playing ninety-nine weekends through mid-September 1981, a run that ended only when the theater closed to build a second screen. According to Lynch himself, there was never a single point when the film simply “took off”: “It was a very gradual incline.” But it proved that persistence of this kind — which is possible only in independent theaters, at least according to the way most chains are run — can eventually reap spectacular dividends, especially when it comes to creating and developing new markets.
Chris Marker kept returning, across the vast body of films, writings, photographs, and multimedia projects he produced between the 1940s and his death in 2012, to the matter of what it meant to live a happy life. In an early essay about the novelist and playwright Jean Giraudoux, he quoted Sartre’s insistence that at certain moments the streets of Paris turn “fixed and clear” and offer up “an instant of happiness, an eternity of happiness.” The challenge, Marker thought, was to put such instants in a pattern, “to make the feeling of those privileged moments into a permanent conviction.” San...
They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? is dedicated to the art of motion picture film-making and most specifically to that one particular individual calling the shots from behind the camera - the film director.
They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? is dedicated to the art of motion picture film-making and most specifically to that one particular individual calling the shots from behind the camera - the film director.
James Benning’s 13 Lakes, Landscapes, and a brief note on Mt.Mayon
(1) Slovenian critic Nil Baskar begins his introductory essay on the films of James Benning for the catalog of the Ljubljana International Film Festival: Fernand Léger, a versatile avant-gardist, o…
1963 and all that: Raymond Durgnat and the birth of the Great British Phantasmagoria | Sight & Sound
No war broke out, nor was there an economic crash or general election, but 1963 has long been regarded as a watershed in modern British history. Above all it was the year of the Profumo scandal, which, as Richard Davenport-Hines argues in An English Affair, “sounded a death-knell to the confidence of traditional hierarchical authority”. Echoing this theme, it was a year that began with de Gaulle’s rejection of Britain’s application to join the Common Market and ended with the granting of independence to Kenya, one of the last major acts of decolonisation. It was also the year Beatlemania arr...