In Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity, author Philip Mosley makes a salient and illuminating re-evaluation of a bifurcated Belgian cinema, not only through the reality of a federal state characterized by a decentralized government and regional autonomy, but also irreparably marked by occupation and war, and divided by a cultural heterogeneity that has […]
I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure. Shohei Imamura is a compilation of reflexive, analytical, and appreciative essays on Imamura’s idiosyncratic and critical, yet compassionate films that examine the dichotomy of human behavior in the structured, conformist, and highly ordered […]
Published as an updated version of the compilation Cinema and I – a repository of essays, ancillary working notes, talking scripts, and interviews by Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak – Rows and Rows of Fences – Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema is an inspired, thoughtful, fascinating, articulate, and insightful collection of articles that at once, serve as […]
After recently seeing Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman Who… for a second time, I still found that all the words I could muster for this dense, overlapping, fractured, and impenetrable, but somehow idiosyncratically transfixing film was something of a stream of consciousness outline, jotting down passing observations with the idea that, by encapsulating them […]
In the book Patterns of Time: Mizoguchi and the 1930s, Donald Kirihara recounts a legendary episode at the Venice Film Festival that sets the tone for Kenji Mizoguchi’s unique and unforgettable films: When in Venice in 1963 for the festival screening of Ugetsu, he spoke of the film as a representative of Japan’s aesthetic tradition. […]
“I always tell people that I don’t make anything besides tofu and that is because I am strictly a tofu-dealer.” – Yasujiro Ozu In the book Ozu, Donald Richie examines Yasujiro Ozu’s films by following the common steps for constructing a film: the script, shooting, and editing. Of the three elements, Ozu places primary importance […]