On the surface, The Entertainer is something of a cross between Charles Chaplin’s late period film, Limelight in its evocation of an aging, down and out vaudevillian performer seeking to recapture the glory days of his professional career by putting on one last career-defining show, and a prefiguration of Xavier Giannoli’s understatedly rendered The Singer […]
Based on playwright John Osborne’s groundbreaking 1956 play that re-energized London theater with its gritty, unsentimental portrait of the working class and ushered a politically charged, socially conscious literary movement that the critics would collectively dub the “Angry Young Men”, Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger bears all the ugliness and unflinching brutality of a […]
Part of the Morality and Society program in the Clandestí: Forbidden Catalan Cinema Under Franco series, Enric Ripoli i Freixes and Josep Maria Ramon’s Happy Parallel emulates the familiar format of official Noticias Documentales newsreels – the only shot footages of “real life” permitted by Franco under a 1942 ban on non state-sponsored documentary filmmaking […]
In a scene that occurs midway through Jacques Rivette’s 36 Views of Saint-Loup Peak, former circus performer turned textile designer, Kate (Jane Birkin) returns to Paris with a batch of fabrics that she has dyed during a visit to her family’s provincial circus and tries to match the color of the swatches to a Pantone […]
Jacques Rivette returns to the rigorous formalism and claustrophobic interiors of La Religeuse to create a refined, bituminous, and cooly smoldering tale of seduction, obsession, and manners in The Duchess of Langeais. Remaining faithful to the spirit of Honoré de Balzac’s nineteenth century novel (the second installment featuring the adventures of a secret organization known […]
Jacques Rivette creates another refined and sublimely enrapturing composition in The Story of Marie and Julien, a film that ostensibly chronicles the relationship between a brooding, reclusive restorer of antique clocks and occasional blackmailer named Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and the elusive object of his affection, a beautiful and enigmatic woman named Marie (Emmanuelle Béart) whom […]