The American studio films of the 1940s represent a great period for truly evocative and audacious uses of color: the lost art of three-strip Technicolor (which can’t be recreated today in exactly the same way — it’s now gone with the original film stock) tinted the world in bold and vivid hues. And yet, even… Read more »
Entries by Jack Miller
The Phantoms of Permanence: Mrs. Muir and the Ghost Romance
There’s always been something about cinephilia, particularly that classic form of cinephilia (well known to many us) which fetishizes old Hollywood films, that strikes me as a little bit morbid. Films capture a series of moves and gestures that remain permanent — the movies always stay the same, though our reactions change almost invariably with… Read more »
Festival Recap: Il Cinema Ritrovato
For the last 35 years, a wonderful event has happened in Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato, meaning “the cinema rediscovered,” a unique film festival that does not showcase new films competing for prizes or distribution, but rather one that’s dedicated to preserving and sharing the classic and lost treasures of film history. Film culture remains alive… Read more »
In Dreams: Sternberg / Dietrich
Between 1930 and 1935, Josef von Sternberg directed seven movies starring the German actress Marlene Dietrich. This extended collaboration represents one of the most fruitful and dazzling creative partnerships in film history, a director-actor pairing that rivals Yasujirō Ozu & Setsuko Hara or John Ford & John Wayne. The films they made together (one in… Read more »
The Mysteries of Combat: Two by King Hu
Writing in the Chicago Reader about Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915-16), Jonathan Rosenbaum enticingly called that ten-part silent serial “one of the supreme delights of film.” This assertation basically gets at how I feel about the extraordinary wuxia films that the Chinese director King Hu made in the 1960s and ‘70s and, more specifically, about… Read more »
A Portrait of the Artist at Work: Unknown Chaplin
Though it’s perhaps difficult for us to fully conceive today, Charles Chaplin (1889-1977) likely remains the most widely recognized great artist in the history of movies. Chaplin’s startling degree of success in his own time, combined with the important fact that he worked in the “universal” language of silent cinema, made him a truly international… Read more »