[Archives from 10/97-3/11]
“I always tell people that I don’t make anything besides tofu and that is because I am strictly a tofu-dealer.” – Yasujiro Ozu In the book Ozu, Donald Richie examines Yasujiro Ozu’s films by following the common steps for constructing a film: the script, shooting, and editing. Of the three elements, Ozu places primary importance… read more »
Our Films, Their Films is a collection of perceptive, contemplative, and illuminating critical essays and personal memoirs by seminal filmmaker, composer, artist, author, intellectual, and cinephile, Satyajit Ray. Arranged into the two titular sections, Ray’s terse, candid, and often thematically overlapping expositions on Indian and international cinema reveal, not only profound engagement with, and sensitivity… read more »
In Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, Ivone Margulies provides a comprehensive examination of the minimalist visual imagery, deliberate pacing, and recurrent themes of disconnection, wanderlust, isolation, and longing that define Akerman’s intensely personal cinema. Citing Akerman’s penchant for filming the rhythm of everyday life, and her de-emphasis of unique and significant events, Margulies proposes… read more »
In Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano presents an insightful, multi-faceted analysis of Japan’s interwar cinema within the context of Tokyo’s rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (even as the process of industrialization had already been underway), in particular, the output of Shochiku Kamata… read more »
With Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s body of work deeply rooted in an aesthetic as well as political and social consciousness, it is not surprising that Darlene J. Sadlier analyzes the trajectory of dos Santos’s cinema through a similar paradigmatic approach of integrating film form with historical context. Brought up in a middle-class, cinephile household in… read more »
My Years With Apu, A Memoir reflects the lucidity, compassion, and humility of the versatile and immensely talented humanist filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. The book is prefaced by his wife, Bijoya Ray, who describes her attempts to faithfully recapture Ray’s memoir from his first draft, after his final draft was stolen at a hospital shortly before… read more »
The title of the book, My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer refers to a quote from a 1950 Dreyer interview: On October 23, 1950, Carl Dreyer was interviewed for the radio program New Perspectives on the Arts and the Sciences. He discussed Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath… read more »
In Manoel de Oliveira, Randal Johnson’s comprehensive and informative critical evaluation of the Portuguese filmmaker’s body of work for the Contemporary Film Directors series, Johnson insightfully points out that the first 43 years of Oliveira’s film career coincides with the repressive, right wing regime of António de Oliveira Salazar and Estado Novo, an era of… read more »
Consisting of a series of critical essays and Andrew Horton’s interview on the distinctive imagery, cultural influences, and the filmmaker’s own personal, spiritual, and intellectual preoccupations, The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos presents a diverse, insightful, and comprehensive examination into the dynamic framework that innately characterizes and forms the indefinable substance of Theo… read more »
In Marguerite Duras, author Renate Günther examines Marguerite Duras’s films from the perspective of interweaving politics and memory that runs through her body of work. Born in Gia-Dinh in French Indochina (now Vietnam), the only daughter of emigrant teachers Emile and Marie Donnadieu who moved to the colonies in search of a better life, Duras’s… read more »