Julien Duvivier: Love Unto Death
Introduction: Apart from his final, posthumously published book Film Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2015), this essay would appear to be one of the last pieces written by Sam Rohdie, and…
The French Cinema Book
Michael Temple and Michael Witt (eds), The French Cinema Book. London: BFI Publishing, 2004. 300pp ISBN: 1 84457 012 6 (pb) £16.99 ISBN: 1 84457 011 8 (hb) £48.00 (Review…
Three Essays
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…
Hitchcock Fabrics
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.…
Studies
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…
House of Bamboo: Cinematic Thoughts (1969)
Introduction: This is among Sam Rohdie’s earliest published writings on film. It appeared in the 1969 book Samuel Fuller edited by David Will and Peter Wollen for the Edinburgh Film…
Ribbons of Time
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon is punctuated by dates crossed out in red on the calendar that mark the time left before the retirement of Captain Nathan Brittles (John Wayne) from…
Jean-Paul Sartre, Hollywood, Citizen Kane and the Nouvelle Vague
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…
A Note on F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Cooking
[1] This essay was originally published in Art & Text no. 7, Spring 1982, and is reprinted here with the author’s permission. In 1932, more than 20 years after the first futurist…
Citations
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…
Film and Landscape
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…
Four Essays: Painlevé; Jennings; Vigo; Ford.
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…
Geography, photography, the cinema
Les Archives de la Planète [1] I want to thank you for inviting me here. I am very pleased to be able to speak at the Royal Geographical Society so crucial…
The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday
John Roberts, The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday. Manchester and New York , Manchester University Press, 1998. ISBN 0 719035600 (hb) ISBN 0 7190 35619 (pb) 241pp…
lIntersections
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…
Profils Paysans
Profils Paysans (Farmer Profiles) is a film divided into three chapters made by Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret centred on the lives of small farmers in the Cévennes region in…
Il gatto selvatico
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…
I racconti di Canterbury (Pier Paolo Pasolini)/The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
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.…
Jacques Rivette: Va Savoir
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…