André Delvaux often spoken passionately and poignantly of the unique bicultural experience that had infused early Belgian cinema (an industry that also fostered other pioneering bicultural filmmakers such as social realist – and undoubted spiritual ancestor to the cinema of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne – Paul Meyer) that had become increasingly regionalized towards the end […]
The panning shot of an anonymous city street establishes the tensile, yet integral relationship between citizen and environment in Guy Debord’s dense and minimalist essay On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, describing the rows of generic apartment buildings as places of refuge from the constant social immersion […]
Ostensibly an allegorical, cautionary tale on religious fundamentalism, Uttara is also a bracing and incisive examination of the provincialism, anachronism, moral and social quandary, and inherent contradictions that continue to shape contemporary Indian culture. Composed of seemingly unrelated narrative threads – a pair of bored, train crossing signal operators, Nemal (Tapas Pal) and Balaram (Shankar […]
A disoriented, lumbering man named Shibnath (Mithun Chakraborty), recently released after an eleven-year incarceration (which he served, in part, at the prison asylum) for the death of a British officer during the country’s anti-colonialist resistance movement, is escorted on a train ride home by a former comrade – now a successful businessman and aspiring politician […]
There is a palpable spirit of Robert Bresson (most notably Pickpocket and L’Argent) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment at work in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L’Enfant, so it comes as no surprise that during the subsequent Q&A, the brothers remarked that one of the images that they had wanted to capture in the film […]
The film opens with a chaotic scene: Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), dismissed from her station after her employment trial period has elapsed, refuses to leave the factory, and is escorted off the premises by security guards. Shot through a handheld camera, the confusion seems to continue as we follow Rosetta as she crosses a busy intersection, […]