Author Archive for: ‘Murray Pomerance’

Two remarkable moments in Max Ophüls’ Le plaisir (1952), both “La maison Tellier,” second of the film’s three movements. We have already been introduced to the eccentric, charming, late nineteenth-century European world through Ophüls’ and Jacques Natanson’s adaptation of Guy de Maupassant narrated subtly, mellifluously, and cautiously by Jean Servais off-camera and visualized in the gliding imagery of Christian Matras. …

A general understanding of the gesture – its ideal proportion, the conventions and parameters of its normal usage, its relation to or putative origin in expression and feeling – is pointedly reflected in Hamlet’s address to the Players, who are preparing, he fears, to overdo it: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on …

What e’er thou hearest or seest, stand all aloof. Romeo and Juliet v.3 Prelude We have all worried through this labyrinth many times. And virtually every scholar who really cares about Hitchcock has found a vertiginous minotaur. All of this worrying-through has to be taken as part of the record now. I will speak for myself. When in 2002 I …