Still, in volume 4 in particular, documents drawn from the archives often illuminate Tati’s creative process. G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 starts late in the war, when the German soldiers in the trenches have become thoroughly disillusioned and unspeakably weary. A dossier can spark ideas and introduce you to new information; a critical book focuses on a line of inquiry and marshals evidence around that. Again, the plot is mostly linear, though interspersed with summary montages of sports coverage and brief flashbacks to Billy’s own failed ballplaying career. (“I was always very resistant to the notion of biography as it applies to criticism.”) Their encounters engender a degree of novelistic suspense when early on Nolan proposes  a challenge: In words only, over the telephone, explain the concept of left and right. Abbie’s privileged insight is further stressed by the fact that he’s the only character given a narrator role. (Many of Sorkin’s protagonists have Daddy Issues.) Books like Seitz’s and Nayman’s may make old-guard cinephiles rethink what film criticism can be, and they may introduce young people to auteurism itself. Strange Victory is, it seems to me, the essential documentary of our moment. For now, here are my picks. The sense of a running dialogue spills over every page, where the captions continue to make connections and send you flipping to other pages. The one “Fuck you!” becomes a shocking turning point, a test of friendship. Instead, like Molly’s Game, The Social Network starts its plot in the past, skips ahead to the future, and then fills in more of the past. One of the four German soldiers who form the group protagonist falls in love with a French barmaid in a village near the front. Interestingly, it came out the same year as Seitz’s first Wes Anderson book. These books contain valuable primary documents, but a researcher into the subject would still yearn to see all those items that were kept back. “If I give you some real projections, will you promise not to repeat them from the stage?” Shone subscribes to most of the auteur conventions I’ve mentioned, although he’s somewhat more straightforwardly critical of certain films or moments. Partly as a result of this technical advantage, several early 1930s German films became classics, though not all of them are known abroad. Peter Cowie modeled his International Film Guide series on the Seghers format, launching it with his monograph Antonioni–Bergman–Resnais in 1963 and following it up with his book on Welles and Robin Wood’s trailblazing Hitchcock’s Films (both 1965). My final quotation comes from Jean Cayrol’s text for Night and Fog (1955). Well, actually, yeah.... News! Then, as we see a pregnant woman on a bench, we hear a woman’s voice. Sorkin has layered his plot within several time zones: present, immediate past, and distant past, with the earliest one including scenes scrambled out of chronological order. Auteur because it pursues the idea, now commonplace, that the director is the central creative figure in much filmmaking. The flashback modulates to Jessep reading the letter aloud (an audio hook) and considering how to handle the situation. Low on gas, they are inspired to start their own filling station. Eventually the series would run to dozens of titles, along with the indispensable International Film Guide, an annual begun in 1963, and a journal, Focus on Film (1970-1977). UW police spokesman Marc Lovicott says the vandalism was reported at about 7:20 p.m. on Monday and is believed to have occurred some time between 3:30 and 7 p.m. that same day. In a burst of pique, he turns a blog into a page that denounces her and asks readers to rate local women. From the 1970s on, more lavish auteur volumes began to appear. How Motion Pictures Became the Movies : 1908-1920 Thirteen years that changed world cinema by David Bordwell. He’s miffed that Johnson’s AG Ramsey Clark insulted him on the way out of office. [go to Amazon], The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. In the Moneyball flashbacks we see Billy recruited, decide to give up a college career, and then face failure. Then what? The investigation of the death of a young Marine is pursued by a prosecution team running up against the military code and a couple of hard-headed officers. David did his part in promoting Duvivier by contributing a video analysis of his 1941 Hollywood romance Lydia on The Criterion Channel. were packed into huge horizontal-format volumes. Who is on the lookout from this strange tower to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Reproducing the yearbook montage from Rushmore, Seitz supplies “activity cards” drawn from shots from the film. We should expect more Massive Auteur Monographs; the next Wes Anderson one has already been announced. That motif is dramatized when, at first indifferent to five-year-old Lisa, Steve uses her as a demo to show Chrisann what the Mac can do. (The contrast with 1927, for example, is pretty stark.) (A baby version goes for just $1500.). Where do we put Deineka, recently noticed as no mere Socialist Realist hack, or Shostakovich and Sibelius? Since 1979, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and now, Co-Author, Jeff Smith's Film Art has been the best-selling and most widely respected introduction to the analysis of cinema. Instead she finds him on the verge of ruin, since the new department store is located directly across the street. . Under the mysterious imprint “a visual analysis by Halcyon,” Harcourt Brace Jovanovich produced Alexander Walker’s Stanley Kubrick Directs (1971) and John Simon’s Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972) with specific frames enhancing the critics’ interpretations. The opening of the film had shown Paul as a student being told of the glories of war and rushing off to sign up. “Conservative projections.” The 1984 segment uses only one flashback, a visit to garage-hacking days that sets up the dispute about open and close architecture. Volume 1, Tati Shoots, consists of production stills of scenes, each one given a separate page, as if it were a painting. The Insider: David Bordwell Blows the Whistle on Film Studies Lingua Franca vol. 71 pages, 11 × 8.5 inches During World War I, the relatively small number of films about the war naturally supported the combat, demonized the enemy, and in the US, urged people to buy War Bonds. Notes from the Raccoon Lodge, A variation on a sunbeam: Exploring a Griffith Biograph film, Cognitive scientists 1, screenplay gurus 0, PLANET HONG KONG: backstories and sidestories, Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, The Rhapsodes: American film critics of the 1940s, Jan-Christopher Horak's "Archival Spaces" blog, Midnight Eye: The Latest and Best in Japanese Film, Reid Rosefelt on Social Media for Filmmakers, The Golden Rock on Asian movies and popular culture, Timeline: Visual Effects, Computer Graphics, Computer Animation, Virginia Wright Wexman on enjoying film festivals, Repost: Our daily barbarisms: Leo Hurwitz’s STRANGE VICTORY (1948), THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7: Aaron Sorkin samples the menu, recently noticed as no mere Socialist Realist hack, “Masterworks of American Avant-garde Experimental Film 1920-1970.”. There are no sidebars and little effort to identify the physical book as an extension of the films. The concentration on the director’s personality led many skeptics to consider auteur criticism as a throwback to Romantic aesthetics, where the all-powerful poet infuses deep feelings and formative experiences into the art work. It also recalls the puffy plastic chairs that earlier bewilder Hulot by erasing his presence. Instead, we start with the America of today before flashing back to the high price of defeating the Axis. But the others are left dangling, to be revisited, and we are looking forward to that. From the 70s on, art-book publishers saw that there was a new audience among film fans and began to think of offering movie titles. The series is another example of institutional investment in a festival permitting de luxe publishing. Thanks to a hidden camera, that newsstand becomes a sort of gathering spot, a place where people might encounter uncomfortable truths. Eager young peasants were hailed as heroes, and tractors appeared as the means to greatly increase wheat yields–wheat which was often seized and sent to the cities to enable rapid industrialization. Blog; Main Film Art: An Introduction. (Some proof is here.) Despite the scientific-sounding name, Mechanical Principles is an abstract film made by shooting close view of moving gears and other devices for moving parts of machines (above). What about those artists who refine or revise tradition in fresh ways? Posted in Directors: Murnau, Directors: Ozu Yasujiro, Directors: von Sternberg, Experimental film, Film comments, Film technique: Sound, National cinemas: France, National cinemas: Germany, National cinemas: Japan, Silent film |  open printable version The crisis structure in The American President is presented as a race against time to line up support for two White House bills. If progressive politics is branded as childishness, “We’ll lose elections.” Abbie calmly replies that “We’re going to jail for who we are.” The debates are about tactics as well. But his interest rises when Lisa intuitively understands that she can draw with it. Tom and Abbie function as what Kristin calls parallel protagonists. This shows how he could have empathy for the second-tier players who are cast aside–and whom Brand’s moneyball algorithms give a second chance. or, Film Archives and Me: A Semi-Personal History, Shklovsky and His “Monument to a Scientific Error”, Murder Culture: Adventures in 1940s Suspense, The Viewer’s Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film. The film ends with Tom Hayden reading out the names of troops who have died while the trial was dragging on. She has a natural glamor here that will disappear in her roles for von Sternberg in Hollywood. Although after 1937 there are years when Ozu did not make a film, he will likely feature on these lists as long as I continue to post them. Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) introduced a generation to semiology. The print is gorgeously subtle black and white, and the score by the underrated David Diamond is warm in a chamber-music way. Lem wanders in for a meal, having been sent by his tyrannical father to sell the harvest from their wheat farm in Minnesota. Abbie and Jerry came to Chicago knowing that police violence was very likely. Even after the scene of her arrest, the film’s narration wedges in a VHS interview with young Molly in which she’s asked about her goals. Yet Tom has an outlaw side as well. They introduce each chapter with a little background on the major historical and political currents of each period, which really helps to situate the films in their cultural context. Being from a German novel, however, makes this the first significant Hollywood film to treat German soldiers sympathetically and to make them the lead characters. “For a day or two, the plain people owned the world.” But then we’re back to the newsstand and a montage of race-baiters and graffiti scrawlers. Hurwitz is more canny. The courtroom scenes don’t begin until about an hour into the film, and they alternate with strategy sessions among the legal team and the defendants. Again, the purpose is to reveal character motivation. Having already read his book on Hitchcock, I thought, Now we’re getting somewhere. | Comments Off on Repost: Our daily barbarisms: Leo Hurwitz’s STRANGE VICTORY (1948). Later the film’s narration offers less a study in how his mind works than a portrait of how he handles people–his social survival strategies. Sorkin is worth studying, I think, as a very skilled craftsman. Let’s distinguish dossiers from critical appreciations. After a credits-sequence montage, we’re taken to a CIA awards ceremony, at which Charlie Wilson is honored for working strenuously against the USSR for thirteen years. His presence was foreshadowed by swooping aerial shots of the beginning. Schultz questions him: Was he hoping for a confrontation with the police? Our friend and colleague Vance Kepley published an excellent study, In the Service of the State: The Films of Alexander Dovzhenko (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). Once more a theatrical premise has been turned into classically constructed cinema. “’The only thing Apple’s providing now is leadership in colors.’” The French phrase liaison des scènes, “scene linkage,” captures the way that within a single setting characters’ entrances and exits break the act into distinct pieces. Individuals at a Trump rally yelled “Sieg Heil” and “Light the motherfucker on fire” toward a black protester who was being physically removed by security staffers. Tom: Young people will go to Chicago to show our solidarity, to show our disgust, but most importantly– It seems to me that his easily grasped satiric targets (old versus new, country versus city, people trapped in routine, overweening technology) enabled him to make formally and stylistically complex movies. Not that it will ever be one of my favorites. Most recently, Abrams has given us two Massive Auteur Monographs, written by Cinema Scope and Little White Lies critic Adam Nayman. The most stupendous dossier-catalogue I know comes from the Filmoteca Espagnola and bears the curious title, Los proverios chinos de F. W. Murnau. The war against inhumanity is far from over. I originally saw this film at the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique (now the Cinematek). They know nothing of the American brownshirts, but we know that they must learn our world. Seitz’s artwork includes color drawings by Max Dalton that reinterpret the inhabitants of Wesworld as wispy cutouts, arms hanging down, as if in a police lineup or a paper-doll sheet. His arrogance provokes her to break up with him. Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages pdf online, Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies pdf online, Planet Hong Kong, second edition pdf online, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907–1934 pdf online, CinemaScope: The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses, Constructive editing in Pickpocket: A video essay, Lessons with Bazin: Six Paths to a Poetics, A Celestial Cinémathèque? 5.” I haven’t seen all of the Studies, but I assume they all use the same technique, charcoal drawings on paper. Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell No preview available - 2010. By the 2000s, audiences trained in the time-shifting of the 1990s could follow these quick alternations. Eventually, Tom exposes his rationale. (Available on JSTOR.). Directors like Wes Anderson, the Coens, Nolan, and Paul Thomas Anderson are recasting auteur cinema for our time–not least in their willingness to cooperate on Massive Monographs. Come down from the bird’s-eye view, and we’ll see the same fine-grain fluctuations. A video essay on constructive editing, HUGO: Scorsese's birthday present to Georges Méliès, Down in front! Strange Victory (1948) has been less easy to see. (A running gag is a comic motif.) All Quiet on the Western Front has been restored and released on Blu-ray a deluxe edition with DVD and supplements or with the supplements but no DVD. There are no sidebars and little effort to identify the physical book as an extension of the films. Sorkin delivers it consistently. Another motif softens him a bit: his desire to bring computing to kids. It’s here that we get behind-the-scenes images of Tati at work. The cops, having choreographed the street assembly, push them through the tavern window. We soon are introduced to his worried wife, Mayumi, tending the little girl. Frame enlargements from the finished film were difficult to obtain, and their quality was questionable. D. W. Griffith: American Film Master, a catalogue of an influential Museum of Modern Art exhibition of 1940, brought together a critical essay by Iris Barry, an interview with Billy Bitzer, and a filmography with commentary by Eileen Bowser. We can’t recover many of those subterranean currents from the days of Hawks or Mizoguchi, but focusing on living filmmakers gives these monographs an advantage. Nayman, like many ambitious critics, draws on academic ideas pointillistically, subordinating them to the tasks of appreciation. Karl, the most important character of the four main soldiers, returns for the first time in eighteen months only to find his wife in bed with another man. David did his part in promoting Duvivier by contributing a video analysis of his 1941 Hollywood romance Lydia on The Criterion Channel. . It remains one of the last classics of the Soviet Montage movement. Sorkin’s dialogue does all of them at once. I am particularly fond of Study No. The Bridge is a silent film, adapted from the Ambrose Bierce story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Its director, Charles Vidor (né Karoly Vidor in Hungary, no relation to King Vidor), had come to the US in 1924 and worked as a chorus singer. We can’t recover many of those subterranean currents from the days of Hawks or Mizoguchi, but focusing on living filmmakers gives these monographs an advantage. The frames were taken from the Kino on Video two-disc set, which has both the German and truncated American versions, as well as some supplements. The AC gag is more elaborate in the screenplay; a technician fiddles with the controls, making the undulations vary until the adjustment is right. He now understands revolution as spectacle. None of these books boasted big production values. Here Sorkin samples another option in the schema menu. 6, to “Los Verderomes fandango,” by Jacinto Guerrero (below). About David Bordwell from the University of Chicago Press website. He develops these and others in his own interpretive commentary, and like Seitz, he has incorporated frame enlargements into his argument, so his claims gain specificity. On Tati, for examples of in-depth analyses I’d recommend Malcolm Turvey’s monograph  on Tati and comic modernism, or go back to Kristin’s pathbreaking studies of the  1970s and 1980s, reprinted in her Breaking the Glass Armor collection. The wonderful German animator Oskar Fischinger specialized in making abstract animation in time to pieces of music. Thanks to the energy of the Milestone team, led by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, every citizen has a chance, say rather a duty, to see a film whose force is undiminished today. Like The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), on which Hurwitz was cameraman, and the Why We Fight series, Strange Victory is largely a compilation documentary. All three series attracted some of the best critics and researchers. Cowie’s series was pluralistic, focusing not only on directors but on genres and periods. The tractor temporarily halts, but it turns out that the radiator is dry. For Sorkin, even “Fuck you” becomes a motif rather than a space-filler. After his departure, the film was “finished,” including some dialogue scenes that were inserted. Quotations from collaborators round out the volume. If you want to reach a broad audience in today’s American cinema, you need to either make films with large doses of physical action (as crossover indie directors have found) or to find a signature identity that cultivates a following. Sunrise spends half the film presenting the aftermath to the couple’s reconciliation, while City Girl has a grimmer tone, and the happy ending arrives very suddenly and briefly. The result has its own appeal (and Shanghai Express is a good bet for a place on the 1932 list), but it is revealing to see her performing in a way that she only recaptured occasionally, if at all, in her subsequent films. Somewhere among us, there are lucky Kapos, reinstated officers, and unknown informers. (The Big Parade does kill off the hero’s two friends-in-arms.). All this personal material made me think that perhaps  we should go beyond treating Tati as an isolated artist, as if the local or global film industry had no impact on him, or him on it. “What does Bill Gates have against me?” Kant shows up in the fifth paragraph, and soon enough we encounter Helmholtz and Penrose–names you don’t expect to meet in books about the Coens. The head of the family declares that he will kill his animals rather than turn them over, and he tries to attack his horse with an axe. “I was called a nigger and a cunt, and got kicked out,” Nwanguma said after the incident. From the start Abbie insists that the trial isn’t a matter of law but of contingency. These Halcyon books seem to have had little impact on other publishers, but both showed that heavily illustrated in-depth commentary on an auteur’s work was feasible for a book-length study. This is a book Anderson characters would like to own: geek chic. 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