In the final, melancholic passage of Maurice Pialat’s L’amour existe, a narrator contemplates the double entendre image of a victory commemorative sculpture that appears to equally articulate strength and human frailty, noting that “the hand of glory, ordering and directing, can also beg – a simple change in angle is sufficient.” This intrinsic contextual duality […]
A 2002 addition to the National Film Registry and one of Robert Breer’s longest duration, rotoscope animation films, Fuji transforms a seemingly mundane state of transience – a tourist’s eye view from a window seat of a train passing through an area overlooking Mount Fuji – into an imaginative, transfixing, and lyrical free-association of everyday […]
The opening image of Robert Breer’s Form Phases #4 is that of two-strip red and white color panels, a seemingly tongue-in-cheek image that visually presages the film’s fusion of two-dimensional animation and early color-process motion picture, as a sliver of white line breaks the bounds of the color border and continues to transect unimpededly (and […]
Ostensibly an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s baroque fairytale, Bluebeard is also a distilled and densely layered exposition on Catherine Breillat’s recurring preoccupation with socioeconomic and sexual politics. Structured as a tale within a tale, the film alternates between past and present, childhood and adolescence, fiction and reality. On one level is bright, cherubic Catherine (Marilou […]
There is a moment in The Last Mistress when the Comtesse d’Artelles (Yolande Moreau), after having played her part in mitigating the scandal surrounding the dashing, but inscrutable rogue, Ryno de Marigny’s (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) unresolved romantic entanglement with his long term mistress – and, consequently, enabling his marriage to the Marquise’s granddaughter and heir, […]
A young woman steps off a bedroom balcony and falls to her death, her white shawl hovering above, deflected by the breeze. Her pawnbroker husband (Guy Frangin), speaking with methodical detachment, recounts their relationship in a series of flashbacks. But inevitably, the answers remain as elusive as his lost, despondent (and appropriately nameless) wife (Dominique […]