“The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.” — Federico Fellini Scholars and film fans tend to divide the career of Federico Fellini, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year, into two periods. The first half is more influenced by the Italian neorealist movement that his mentor… Read more »
Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage are well known but often oversimplified. In this video, I offer my interpretation of Eisenstein’s film theory, drawing from his 1928 film October: Ten Days that Shook the World to illustrate his ideas about montage. Within Eisenstein’s writings, he repeatedly returns to the importance of conflicting lines of form and movement… Read more »
Due to the intensity of its anguished and baroque surfaces, its radical reconstruction of spatial dimensions, and its cartoonish, sometimes grotesque approach to performance and film dramaturgy, Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished trilogy Ivan the Terrible (1944-46) – the Soviet master’s final work, one of the prime glories of the cinema – may be plausibly considered one… Read more »
There have been many film genres that the United States of America has either made famous or perfected. One of these genres is the crime film. From The Public Enemy (1931) to The Godfather (1972) and GoodFellas (1990), some of the most popular and memorable American movies have been about criminals. These films are classics,… Read more »
Welcome to Score Keeping, a feature where I dive into overlooked and highly praised songs, scores and soundtracks that accompany great films.
As rhythmic meditations on urban spaces that shied away from character and narrative, city films of the 1920s and 1930s blended modernism, documentary, everyday life, and abstraction. The filmmakers took their cameras into the streets, capturing architecture, people, and industrial tempos, and then they pieced together their footage using graphic and thematic modes of organization.
