Category Archive for: ‘Issue 13 – Auteurism 2001’

Uploaded 1 March 2001 I am speaking of the auteur in a strict sense of the term: the auteur of literary or artistic works. Not the auteur of a crime, nor a theorem, nor even the Universe. – Marc Le Bot [1] E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (US 2000) stages an elaborate conceit from an imaginary or speculative history of …

Uploaded 1 December 2001 Chantal Akerman’s most recent film, La captive (France/Belgium 2000), has been described as the latest contribution to a small cluster of works within her oeuvre that could be loosely categorised as “stories of lovers in the city” [1] . La captive thus completes a trilogy inaugurated with Nuit et jour (France/Belgium/Switzerland 1991) and developed in A Couch in New York/Un divan à New …

Uploaded 1 December 2001 | Modified Friday, 11 January 2002 D-Day, 6 June 1944. John Ford was there. Twenty years later, he said it was the most vivid experience of his life: Not that I or any other man who was there can give a panoramic wide-angle view of the first wave of Americans who hit the beach that morning. …

Uploaded 1 December 2001 How inadequate I feel, watching Kenji Mizoguchi’s movies! I want to feel closer to his people, the way I feel close to John Ford’s cowboys, Jean Renoir’s cancan dancers, Carl Dreyer’s bigots, F.W. Murnau’s Polynesians, King Vidor’s blacks, Roberto Rossellini’s partisans – any of whom feel no less “alien” to me than Mizoguchi’s Japanese, medieval or …

[1] Uploaded 1 December 2001 A male director’s relationship with his actress is almost always imbued with myth. Kenji Mizoguchi’s (1898-1956) collaboration with Kinuyo Tanaka (1909-1977) is no exception. Stories revolving around the private life of their romantic relationship tend to fall into cliché, crediting Mizoguchi with Tanaka’s “rebirth” as a great actress with The Life of Oharu(Saikaku ichidai onna, Japan …

Uploaded 1 December 2001 [T]heatre for Cassavetes restores that vital link between the spoken word, the script and physical actions that are forever rearranged in a surprising way, ready to come apart at any moment . . . In short, a script is necessary but not sacrosanct, since it is always being rewritten by life itself. Thierry Jousse [1] The idea …

Uploaded 1 December 2001 Violence, action, psychotic characters, the darker side of sexuality, confused realities and unstable, disturbing social spaces: this is the world of Paul Verhoeven’s films. A mathematics and physics doctoral student turned filmmaker, Verhoeven has had his share of controversy. Hailing from Holland, his Dutch films included Wat zien ik? (Netherlands 1971), Turks fruit (Netherlands 1973), Keetje tippel(Netherlands 1975), Spetters (Netherlands 1980), Soldaat van oranje(Netherlands …

Uploaded 1 December 2001 Whilst studying poetry at Columbia University in the early to mid 1970s, Jim Jarmusch took a sojourn to Paris where he discovered world art cinema at the Cinémathèque Française – Shohei Imamura, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Samuel Fuller, Jacques Rivette and so on. In the various interviews with Jarmusch – at present …

Uploaded 1 December 2001 ‘Marvelous,’ Erik exclaimed. ‘Just what we want – we should congratulate ourselves.’ Hundreds of Bruce Hardings’ photographs chronicling the Flaherty Seminar were splayed across my rustic wood dining room table in my home in the woods in upstate New York. We had finally selected the 75 that would be published. Ruth Bradley, the editor of the …

Uploaded 1 December 2001 In the jargon of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, Joe Dante is a low-norm satirist. (High-norm satire, of which Horace would be a good example, is not practiced today.) This can be puzzling for critics who analyse films for political messages, because the low-norm satirist, without necessarily being a conservative in his politics, tends to appeal …