Even from his first feature film La Vie des morts, Arnaud Desplechin was already establishing a quintessentially dynamic framework for his recurring themes on surrogacy, human idiosyncrasies, and the ephemeral nature of desire. In an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma writer Jean Douchet, Desplechin illustrates this envisioned (un)structure of relational roundelays in the composition of […]
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis opens with a series of striking images of nature: colorful leaves, towering trees, sunshine peering through the foliage. But these are the most unnatural of times. A momentary preface reveals the looming tragedy of this picturesque Italian village: the implementation of Mussollini’s racial laws between 1938 and 1943. Beyond the […]
Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti) is a proud, retired civil servant struggling to eke out a meager existence on his government pension. The film opens one morning to a group of pensioners, including the frail Umberto, taking their case for equitable compensation to the streets of Rome, only for their demonstration to be quashed by […]
A crowd forms in front of a government employment agency, as it does every day, waiting – often in vain – for job announcements. Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani), one of the unemployed laborers who participates in this daily ritual, is selected to hang posters in the city, a job requiring a bicycle, which he has […]
In an early episode in Shoeshine, two boyhood friends, Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi), bargain with an opportunistic fortune teller named Anselmi (Maria Campi) over the sale of used American-made blankets before convincing the shrewd woman to give them a reading of their future. As the boys huddle curiously over a deck of […]
A silent, textural, and hypnotic composition in movement and expression, the opening sequence of Ritual in Transfigured Time posits the innate duality of human nature as an animated, approachable female figure (Maya Deren) alternately framed in high contrast against a pair of interchangeable doorways, beckons a seemingly naïve young dancer (Rita Christiani) into a large […]