In the book Chasing the Truth: The Films of Mrinal Sen, author John W. Hood provides an insightful examination of the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that have shaped filmmaker Mrinal Sen’s personal and creative ideology. Born into a middle-class Bengali family in Faridpur in 1923, Hood provides a contextual frame of reference to the independence […]
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 […]
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 […]
A young man stranded in a Mexican border town recounts the vivid and tragic story of his older brother who crossed the border with a group of illegal immigrants into the U.S. only to wander for days in the disorienting wilderness – each night piling together for warmth and protection, and each morning, fewer and […]