Federico Fellini is famous for inventing the “self-portrait” genre of filmmaking. His 1961 masterpiece 8 ½, which is about a director modeled on Fellini himself, led other filmmakers to make films about themselves. Examples include but are not limited to Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), and Pedro Almodóvar’s… Read more »
During an episode of the Pure Cinema Podcast from April, recorded remotely with guest Edgar Wright, the 1963 Italian film The Leopard came up in conversation. Co-host Elric Kane joked that this 3-hour-plus epic would be a great film to watch early in the morning. Since the coronavirus pandemic has made my schedule very flexible,… Read more »
“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 »
