Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is one of those richly polyvalent works that, like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), deploys a central conceptual image variable enough to acquire a startling metaphorical complexity. The dual and divisible image of human nature at the heart of Stevenson’s work… Read more »
Entries by Jack Miller
Varda’s The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993)
In most discernible ways, the respective bodies of work of the long-married French Left Bank filmmakers Agnès Varda (1928-2019) and Jacques Demy (1931-1990) have remained quite distinct from one another. Unlike some other notable filmmaking couples (like Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, for instance), Varda and Demy rarely worked on each other’s films in any… Read more »
Adventures in Cinema: Stromboli (1950)
“This film, of astonishing beauty, is a film about the cosmos… STROMBOLI is the poem of creation.” – João Bénard da Costa When the film historian Tag Gallagher finally completed his long-in-the-making biography, the first to be published in any language, on the great Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini in 1998, he had the good sense… Read more »
Cinema and Childhood
“It’s one thing to learn to watch movies ‘professionally,’ but it is another to live with those movies that watched us grow up and saw us — prematurely hostage to our coming biographies — already entangled in the snare of our history.” — Serge Daney (1992) Literary depictions of the experience of childhood tend to… Read more »
Fassbinder Melodrama
Much has been made of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s relationship with the great Hollywood auteur Douglas Sirk, and of Fassbinder’s predilection toward working within a mode of overwrought melodrama – the kind of “weepies,” largely intended for female audiences, that Sirk was most comfortable working with in the ‘50s. Those who study Fassbinder have even come… Read more »
Alternative Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to the “Spiritual Avant-Garde”
Though certain filmmakers have been making films for personal reasons, rather than institutional or financial ones, since the days of silent cinema, this tendency toward authorial independence only began to coalesce into a bonafide artistic movement in the United States during the 1940s – the decade in which American filmmakers like Maya Deren and Kenneth… Read more »