An ancient tale of forefathers journeying to a secluded, sacred ground in the forest in order to perform a solemn ritual of prayer and meditation underscores the film’s sense of disconnection and longing, as each passing generation represents a spiritual, ancestral, and cultural dilution of the observance until the ritual is reduced to words without […]
A large blue, white, and red colored block lettered placard initially defines the referential elle of the film title as the Paris region as an off-screen narrator (Jean-Luc Godard) speaking in whispered, barely audible tone provides a contextual reference of the year 1966 through the annotation of Paul Delouvrier’s appointment as prefect of the newly […]
Jean-Luc Godard, the unabashed enfant terrible of French cinema, creates a lighthearted, bizarre and atmospheric utopia in Alphaville. Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), an Outland agent, checks into an Alphaville hotel as Ivan Johnson, a reporter from Figaro-Pravda (the first of many unusual alliances). The hotel manager assigns him a room, a Seductress and a bottle […]
My Life to Live is a highly stylized and extraordinarily unformulaic adaptation of a simple premise: a young woman, seeking the freedom and excitement of, what Federico Fellini calls La Dolce Vita, leaves her family to pursue an acting career, only to turn to a life of prostitution. From the opening sequence showing a detached, […]
An early episode in Esther reveals the deliberately atemporal tone of the film’s rote depiction of the titular character from the Old Testament as officers dispatched by King Ahasverus (Zare Vartinyan) on a mission to find the fairest maidens in the kingdom (among whom, one will replace the disfavored Queen Vashti) traverse an ancient hillside […]
A frail, elderly villager seeking shelter from the burning sun inside a makeshift hut stares inexpressively into the camera as a trio of faceless, black-cladded apparitions perform a vibrant, ritualistic dance before him, perhaps in anticipation of the old man’s inevitable death. The dreamlike, surreal episode seemingly provides an allegorical – and intrinsically operatic – […]