The Anarchy of the Imagination is a compilation of interviews, essays, and notes by the talented, self-confident, and versatile provocateur filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Driven by an inexhaustible compulsion to entertain as well as provide social criticism, Fassbinder sought to elevate the role of contemporary German cinema. An avid cineaste, he developed his unorthodox approach […]
In Alain Resnais, author Emma Wilson presents an incisive and comprehensive analysis of Resnais’s recurring themes of memory, plasticity, construction, and fragmentation. By placing contemporary history within the broader context of capturing internal states and subjective reality, Wilson proposes a means of reconciling Resnais’s more experimental, overtly political postwar films (through the 1960s) with his […]
In the book Alain Resnais, James Monaco seeks to demystify the prevalent notion of the filmmaker’s body of work as being purely “intellectual”, arguing that the perceived inscrutability of his films stems more as a result of the absence of familiar, accessible emotional “codes” rather than his realization of abstruse intellectualism. To this end, Monaco […]
The unorthodox presentation of individual criticism by two admirers of Kiarostami’s cinema from different continents in the book Contemporary Film Directors: Abbas Kiarostami is a fascinating approach: the first, a more universal, Western ‘outsider’ perspective from the venerable American film critic Rosenbaum, then subsequently, a more culturally rooted, ‘insider’ perspective from contemporary Iranian filmmaker Mehrnaz […]
Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer by Raymond Carney provides an intelligent, thoughtful, and accessible analysis of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s body of work. In order to illustrate the recurring themes and distinctive visual aesthetic that pervade Dreyer’s films, Carney examines The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and […]
Keiko McDonald Professor McDonald cited her favorite Ozu film as Floating Weeds, and examined several stylistic aspects of the film that depicted the filmmaker’s thematic distillation and visual economy, specifically: (1) the pausive function of the isolated, blue lantern shot after Komajuro’s departure (a ‘nothingness’ that signifies a great weight), and (2) the recurring shot […]