The dense and austere film melodramas of Douglas Sirk pose a problem of interpretation to their viewers, a problem which strikes me as being founded on cultural paradox and compounded by misleading appearances. Sirk, who began his artistic career as a leftist playwright in pre-Nazi Germany and who finished his career as a studio filmmaker… Read more »
Charlotte Brontë, in her 1847 Victorian bildungsroman novel Jane Eyre, employs the invented figure of Bertha Mason as a kind of fictional entity, or a haunting spectre of a full-fledged character, in order to imbue the central setting of Thornfield Hall with a potent sense of atmospheric dread which is permeated by a colonial subtext… Read more »
Guest post by Jack Miller. “I have a long-standing pet theory about Hawks’ comedies that I’m starting to question. The theory is that the comedies contain two different kinds of characters, pitched at different levels of abstraction: one more plausible and naturalistic, the other more stylized and exaggerated. And that the films document the perplexity… Read more »
Guest post by Jack Miller. “I wanted to make a personal picture, but not a personal picture like an indie prod. I wanted to hide it, like the old filmmakers in the studio system did. Hide it behind a genre. The genre was private detectives.” — Bogdanovich “It gives me an ocean of mixed-up emotion —… Read more »