One of the things that the notorious film and theater artist Rainer Werner Fassbinder was famous for was his productivity. He created dozens of feature films, several for television, at least three miniseries, and wrote 24 plays. Fassbinder had the type of career where an 8-hour miniseries such as Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day… Read more »
At twelve noon in Broadway, New York, Harry S. Young, billed the “human fly,” began climbing the side of the Martinique Hotel in 1923. Thousands of people gathered at Greely Square just below the hotel to watch the spectacle, including his wife. After climbing up ten stories Young slipped and fell to his death. The… Read more »
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 »
The first feature-length anime (slang for Japanese animation) that I saw, as opposed to TV shows such as Dragon Ball Z or Cowboy Bebop, was a Hayao Miyazaki film. He has directed some wonderful anime films which have been primarily aimed at children, such as Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and My Neighbor Totoro (1988). I expected… Read more »
In 1957, a Hollywood princess and a legendary director went to Paris and created a Technicolor dream of a musical. In 1963, they revisited Paris to play a thrillingly dangerous game of cat and mouse. Finally, in 1967, they made southern France their backdrop to the bittersweet journey of a crumbling marriage. For three unforgettable… Read more »
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) opens to Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira), a German cleaning woman, timidly entering a bar one night on her way home to get out of the pouring rain. Fassbinder’s frame composes her at a distance; she is isolated and alone and by the looks of it, lonely…. Read more »