It’s something of a paradox that one of the greatest and most central works of film noir, a genre marked by its dark and often cynical worldview, becomes a kind of ecstatic parable about spiritual epiphany and moral regeneration in the hands of Nicholas Ray. On Dangerous Ground (1951), Ray’s eighth feature, is usually overshadowed… Read more »
A friend of mine once summarized the conceptual continuity of Yasujirō Ozu’s cinema by saying to me that one could, quite reasonably, “put all of his films together” so that his body of work played out as one, very long movie, and that it would all “make sense, synthesized together in this way.” His reasoning… Read more »
“Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” – William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell” c. 1793 Many critics and commentators of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, an artfully grim, post-classical “acid western” from 1995, have casually noted its relationship with the work of William Blake (1757-1827), both because the film’s main character,… Read more »
This fall, the IU Cinema programmed a series entitled “The Rashōmon Effect” which, in the spirit of the 1950 Akira Kurosawa classic, brought together a number of titles from disparate countries and decades which all employ a narrative device that deals with contradictory interpretations of the same events by various witnesses. Upon reviewing their selections,… Read more »
The cinema of Vincente Minnelli (1903-1986) can be divided into three categories in terms of genre: he made musicals, melodramas, and marriage comedies. Though the pictures in each of these camps differ from one another in tone and technique, it’s always been particularly easy for those of us who love Minnelli to unite them without… Read more »
Who exactly was Anthony Asquith? A British cinema pioneer, a reluctant aristocrat, a Hitchcock imitator, a repressed homosexual – Asquith has been subjected to all of these nondescript labels and more by various commentators, and yet today he remains a shadowy figure within the annals of film history. Despite his prolific output, which spans from… Read more »