The main character in Le petit Soldat is tortured. At one point, in voice-over, he calls torture "sad" and "boring" and it is a small wonder that Godard is able to convey an experience of it that is more sad than thrilling, more banal than pregnant with significance. Read more
One way that fuzziness is manifested is in the way that anarchy gets conflated with revolutionary violence in our popular media. Read more
What is your favorite Stephen Frears film? And why do you think he doesn't get the love and acclaim of some of his contemporaries? Read more
Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold's series of essays that were later collected together as a book, is the title. No matter how many times I tell students--and I do--"Thus will be on the test," the title makes them think that "culture" is the opposite of "anarchy." Read more
John Donne once wrote, "I am a little world made cunningly," suggesting that the complexity of the world is contained in microcosm in the human spirit. There is a depth and complexity to Joan that is evoked through her words and transcends the wit or cleverness that might be conveyed were the film to try to show it directly rather than by implication. Read more
In Notes on the Cinematographer, Bresson appears particularly anxious to remind himself (and us) that film is its own media and does not have as its purpose the reproduction of a theatrical experience or technique: "The truth of cinematography cannot be the truth of theatre, nor the truth of the novel, nor the truth of painting. (What the cinematographer captures with his or her own resources cannot be what the theatre, the novel, the painting capture with theirs)" (20). Read more
The nature of a celebrity interview is that it can be hit or miss. Surely it is interesting to hear Chaplin opine in 1957 that this new kid, Marlon Brando, has "something." But that doesn't relate much to the film. Read more
A lot of films can break your heart--a precious few can enlarge and renovate it. Read more
Struggle he unquestionably did. He reports both in the audio commentary and in his 1956 interview with Cahiers du Cinema (reprinted in the Andrew Sarris edited anthology Interviews with Film Directors) that he and friend William Faulkner struggled with the story because they had no idea how a pharaoh talked or acted. Read more
Peter Brook has forgotten more about Shakespeare than I'll ever know, and Adrian Lester is an underrated and underappreciated actor. Read more
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