“My basic concern in making them was to dramatize the all-importance of communication, of the capacity for feeling. They are not concerned—as many critics have theorized—with God or His absence, but with the saving force of love. Most of the people in these three films are dead, completely dead. They don’t know how to… Read more »
“Underseen” is a new, ongoing series where I highlight exceptional titles that have gone unfairly overlooked or underseen. “He set out on a journey boring, wrapped tightly in a cloak he wore. The coach’s bell, its voice imploring, rang, rang, and then was heard no more.” — Mikhail Lermontov In 1975, Soviet filmmaker and actor Sergei… Read more »
“Underseen” is a new, ongoing series where I highlight exceptional titles that have gone unfairly overlooked or underseen. Serpent’s Path is one half of a two-part project which followed Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s international sensation, the frightening and strange horror detective story Cure (1997). Having been offered a small budget to make two films, director Kurosawa and… Read more »
In Hal Hartley’s first feature film, The Unbelievable Truth, Adrienne Shelly’s character refers to the 17th century French playwright, actor, and poet Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known by his stage name Molière; she says her favorite play is Molière’s The Misanthrope. This detail is not simply a matter of characterization. Instead, it reveals something of Hartley… Read more »
“I feel my time has run out. […] The movies I want to make are movies the studios don’t want. What they want to make, I don’t.” — Robert Altman, in an interview with The New York Times, 1981 “Norman Levy (president of 20th Century-Fox) and the rest are scum. […] They’re not interested… Read more »
By the time Godard began making La Chinoise in 1967, the radicalism of his previous cinematic experiments, constituting a front-line of the popular thrust of the French New Wave, had begun to lag behind the leftism of the elite French intelligentsia and its growing student army. Godard, fearful of being out of step at the… Read more »