Author Archive for: ‘Sam Rohdie’

1. Les Glaneurs est la glaneuse (1999) Agnès Varda has been linked to the work and the ideas of the French Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol) having to do with four aspects of her films: the bringing together of fictional and documentary elements (all her fictions have a documentary presence and in her documentaries, either fictions and stories emerge …

Every piece of film that you put in a picture should have a purpose. You cannot put it together indiscriminately. It’s like notes of music. They must make their point. I put first and foremost cinematic style before content…I don’t care what a film is about…Content is quite secondary to me. (Alfred Hitchcock) Introduction In Hitchcock’s films the clothing of …

I teach classes in criticism and history in an essentially film production department. These writings were prepared for students in a film history class. The classes met once a week for three hours only. A feature film was screened each week in class leaving only one hour for tuition. I thought the hour was best spent in dialogue with the …

Part I: Dreams I had a lot of dreams about the cinema…I always wanted to make films.  I wrote film scripts and some were shot, but in the end it didn’t work out. [1] –  Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre was nineteen when he entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris  He was a student at the École Normale from 1924 to1929. [2] …

In a dream I had last night, I was about to address a seminar on the cinema. The members of the seminar were professors, some distinguished, some I knew. It was a small group. I had nothing prepared in detail, a few notes only. Nor can I remember whether in the dream there was a topic or theme to the …

In 1986, Michelangelo Antonioni exhibited a series of still images in Rome called Le montagne incantate, Magic Mountains. He painted watercolours of shapes resembling mountains. Some of the images were constructed collages of painted paper. The shape of mountains suggested by the watercolours and collages were only that, suggestions, a possible, but not a certain figuration. At another glance, in another moment, …

1. Jean Painlevé Jean Painlevé was born in 1902. He died in 1989. He made his first film in 1927 and his last in 1982, in all more than 200 films, many now lost. With few exceptions the films were documentary shorts of marine fauna, small animals, predominantly crustaceans whose homes were at the floor of the sea, in caves, …

Mulberry Omelette Once upon a time there was a king who could call all the power and treasures of the earth his own, but who for all that was not happy and who became more and more despondent from one year to the next. One day he summoned his personal cook and said to him, “You have served me faithfully …

Il gatto selvatico (1) Bernardo Bertolucci’s La via del petrolio (The Oil Road) is a film made for RAI television in 1965. The film was commissioned by the Italian oil company Eni [Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi] in 1964. The film is in three parts: Le origini (Origins), Il viaggio (The Voyage), Attraverso l’Europa (Across Europe). The first part of the film …

Introduction The actors in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury [1970]) are English and Italian. The film has an English and an Italian version, both dubbed. The speech of the characters in the two versions is ‘popular’, the speech of ordinary people. Almost certainly Chaucer’s poem in Middle English went through a series of transformations for …

Bresson again Mouchette and Le journal d’un curé de campagne are returns to an ancient story, the Passion of Christ. In that story, as in Bresson’s two films, there are similar elements: chance (a series of encounters none of which are particularly connected, but all of which lead to a predestined end); predestination (though the path to a final end are matters of chance and coincidence, the …