Category Archive for: ‘Issue 21 – First Release’

In his Notes sur le cinématographe (1975), Robert Bresson refers to ‘la terrible habitude du théâtre’. This note is not an absolute renunciation of relations between cinema and theatre. At this moment, Bresson is reminding himself of how cinema is always betrayed whenever the filmmaker succumbs to reproducing theatre on screen, a spectacle that in being neither one thing nor the other amounts …

I had a departure. A sudden sense of time being up. And I departed. Sarah, in draft of screenplay for Love Streams [1] This is a sweet film. If I die, this is a sweet last film. John Cassavetes, watching the dailies for Love Streams [2] At the end of John Cassavetes’s A Child Is Waiting (1963), set in a school for mentally challenged children, the …

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 …

Someone said that in this day and age, people won’t accept a play unless it is very realistic and logically convincing, so there are many things in the old stories that people will not stand for now … They will not accept the sort of childish antics of the past. Chikamatsu answered: “That argument seems quite reasonable, but it fails …

In her book on the reception history of Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood films, Barbara Klinger explores the disjunction between the way Sirk’s films were derided by critics upon their first release, only subsequently to be rescued by academic-orientated film scholars during the late 1960s and beyond. The split between the two positions is clear: contemporary critics found the films soppy and …

Sean Redmond and Matt Wagner Am I as much – Am I as much as…being seen? Samuel Beckett, Play (1963, p. 157) [1] In this article, we take up M’s closing question from Play, arguing that it is the central phenomenological conundrum in much of Beckett’s stage and screen work. The question we bring to Beckett’s oeuvre is: what is the relationship between perception and presence, …

Donna Peberdy Tongue-tied – 1. Having the frænum of the tongue too short, so that its movement is impeded or confined; incapable of distinct utterance from this cause; also, unable to speak, dumb. 2. Restrained or debarred from speaking or free expression from any cause; speechless, mute, dumb, silent; also reticent, reserved. Oxford English Dictionary If beauty is in the eye of …