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 »
For 85 years, the cinematic collaborations of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers have been dazzling audiences with their goofy spirit, irresistible romance, and exquisite dancing. Separate, the actors were clever, attractive, and full of good humor. Together, they became magnetic and simply gorgeous to watch. Nothing compares to any one of their dances, whether it’s… Read more »
Robert Bresson is a filmmaker apart. Or, so his friend Jean Cocteau once quipped about him, and this remark has summed up the general critical response to Bresson’s filmography for decades. His work is inscrutable, seemingly without other film referents. And a mythology has built up around him – not completely without merit. However, over… Read more »
“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 »
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 »
Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky-tacky Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes all the same There’s a pink one and a green one And a blue one and a yellow one And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky And they all look just the same … Read more »