Full transparency: all Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Kino Lorber. The unofficial title of this month’s batch of reviews will be called Oops! All Kino. Yes, February’s titles are all from Kino Lorber, and what a batch it is: a sizzlin’ Eartha Kitt vehicle, a Sammy Davis Jr. double feature, two crime pictures, a foundational… Read more »
Tag: silent film
The Myth of the Lost Cause in Buster Keaton’s The General
By the time Buster Keaton made The General (co-directed by Clyde Bruckman) in 1926, Civil War melodramas were already old-fashioned. In the early silent era, the Civil War and the Antebellum South provided fodder for countless narrative films by U.S. studios, so that by the time Keaton made his film, this was well-worn territory. The… Read more »
Approaching Adaptation: JEKYLL & HYDE on Screen
Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is one of those richly polyvalent works that, like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), deploys a central conceptual image variable enough to acquire a startling metaphorical complexity. The dual and divisible image of human nature at the heart of Stevenson’s work… Read more »
Monthly Movie Round-Up: February
Every month, A Place for Film brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked… Read more »
Sublime Tragicomedy: I Was Born, But… (1932)
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 »
Montage as Conflict: Sergei Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days that Shook the World
Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage are well known but often oversimplified. In this video, I offer my interpretation of Eisenstein’s film theory, drawing from his 1928 film October: Ten Days that Shook the World to illustrate his ideas about montage. Within Eisenstein’s writings, he repeatedly returns to the importance of conflicting lines of form and movement… Read more »