Though the singular French filmmaker Robert Bresson was once thought of as a kind of transcendentalist, and was even discussed as such alongside Carl Dreyer and Yasujirō Ozu in Paul Schrader’s famous book Transcendental Style in Film (1972), more recent criticism on Bresson has pushed back against this as the dominant hermeneutic approach. If transcendentalist… Read more »
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) has usually been celebrated for its weirdly oneiric narrative hijinks and its unsettling doublings of character. In 2012, the critic Miriam Bale identified the film as a key entry in a subgenre she coined the “persona swap” film, in which the personalities of two female characters become blended or swapped… Read more »
“It’s true that all the men you knew were dealers / Who said they were through with dealing / Every time you gave them shelter” – Leonard Cohen, “The Stranger Song” Many of the great songwriters like to evoke forms of narrativity within the potent imagery of their lyrics. One immediately thinks of Bob Dylan… Read more »
In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s definitive 2002 text on the Ukrainian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, he persuasively argues that Dovzhenko’s cinema represents a form of “heroic portraiture” more than it does a vehicle for storytelling or narrative expression. Comparing Dovzhenko’s work with a more contemporary film by Jean-Marie Straub, Rosenbaum writes that “[Straub’s film] qualifies as heroic portraiture… Read more »
In the cinema of Leo McCarey, the act of socializing takes on paramount importance. The rhythms of his films, and the way that they make meaning, largely derive from his direction of actors and from the characters’ behavior toward one another within the fiction — the ways that they look at, listen and react to… Read more »
The question of realism in narrative cinema is an interesting and complex one. When a group of Italian filmmakers in the 1940s, led by Roberto Rossellini but also composed of quite different figures such as Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, began to produce works that have come to comprise the Italian Neorealist canon, their… Read more »