One day in the middle of September 1951, Akira Kurosawa went fishing. He needed to. The film he had just finished, The Idiot had been released by the studio Shôchiku in a savagely cut version (from 265 minutes down to 166) and was far less popular and less critically acclaimed than earlier films such as […]
He’s as famous and accomplished as a man can be. He could just stay home, relax, and count his money. But Paul McCartney is as driven as ever. Which is why he’s still making music and why he has loads of great stories you’ve never heard—about the sex life of the Beatles, how he talked […]
On September 7th, 1968, Led Zeppelin played their first live show ever in, of all places, a converted gym in Gladsaxe, Denmark. They weren’t yet billed under their soon-to-be world-famous name but were instead performing under the guise of the New Yardbirds, a relaunch of the British Invasion blues rockers who’d imploded just months before. The only […]
Last year, fans of modernist Irish literature and impressionist art saw a must-own volume go under the hammer at Bonhams. “In 1935 the French artist, Henri Matisse, was commissioned to illustrate an edition of Ulysses for subscribers to the Limited Edition Club in America,” announced Artlyst. “Each of the 1,000 copies was signed by Matisse and 250 were also […]
The purpose of this essay is to offer a Deleuzian time-image analysis of Tarkovsky’s montage theory of “time-pressure,” foregrounded against the historical backdrop of Eisenstein’s montage of attractions. Several films from Tarkovsky’s later work will be examined for montage elements that support or contravene these theories. The history of the post-Revolution USSR can be broken […]
How the combo of Robert De Niro going comedic and Charles Grodin getting neurotic turned an action-comedy into an endlessly rewatchable classic. “Jack, you’re a grown man. You have control over your own words.” “You’re goddamn right I do. So here come two words for you: shut the fuck up.” Over the course of Midnight Run, […]
Modern architecture is the school of design that prevailed since the turn of the 20th century till World War II. The horrendous war altered the kind of buildings needed in the post-war era. People needed practicality and functionality more than ever to rebuild—from scratch—the entire cities that were demolished at the time. The dominant Beaux-Arts […]
A new book and exhibition, Through a Different Lens, celebrates the legendary filmmaker’s forgotten early beginnings as a photographer, bringing together rarely seen imagery from film sets, boxing rings and the streets of New York. Stanley Kubrick was just 17 years old when he became a staff photographer for Look, one of the biggest large format […]