In an early sequence in Alberto Lattuada’s The Overcoat, the mayor (Giulio Stival) relishes the idea of history having to be rewritten as a result of an archaeologist’s discovery of ancient artifacts that had been unearthed during the groundbreaking of his commissioned, large-scale urbanization project. Designed to transform the landscape of the town’s main square […]
In Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon’s Remembrance of Things to Come, a thoughtful and illuminating survey of Denis Bellon’s photo-reportage between the two world wars, the filmmakers provide a framework for the interpretation of Bellon’s artistically rendered, zeitgeist images as prescient, historical documents that, in hindsight, provide an insightful glimpse of the looming, profoundly transformative […]
Sunrise weaves fluidly through the canvas of human emotion with the poetic grace of a silent, visual masterpiece. Directed by German expressionist icon, F.W. Murnau, the film is an ageless tale of dichotomy: betrayal and redemption, duty and hedonism, innocence and guilt, tradition and modernization. The Man, a young husband (George O’Brien), seduced by an […]
A droll and acerbic fictional corollary to Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution, Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue, like Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an odyssey through the crumbling institutions and broken social systems of a country […]
At dusk, the impressive sight of a steam engine passenger train bisects the horizon, traversing an empty stretch of track under construction near a rural train station. The train engineer Zapora (Zygmunt Listkiewicz) and his junior assistant Nowak (Roman Klosowski) perform a station check of the semaphores and, upon seeing only one light on, proceeds […]
Prefaced as a heroic symphony in two parts, Eroica is a darkly comic, intelligent, and unorthodox chronicle of the Polish resistance against the Germans in World War II, a movement commonly referred to as the Warsaw Uprising. The first movement, Scherzo alla polacca, opens to a shot of an apprehensive and reluctant militia soldier named […]