Vertigo is the greatest motion picture of all time. Or so say the results of the latest round of respected film magazine Sight & Sound‘s long-running critics poll, in which Alfred Hitchcock’s James Stewart- and Kim Novak- (and San Francisco-) starring psychological thriller unseated Citizen Kane from the top spot. [vsw id=”StcvV1pZXz4″ source=”youtube” width=”465″ height=”384″ autoplay=”no” For half a […]
In Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the jungle, oppressive and thick, provides the perfect backdrop to the ambitions and lunacy of men. Obsession weighs heavy on Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski), a man consumed with a plan to build an opera house in the heart of the Amazon. In order to fund the project, he intends to make […]
Tragedy for the purposes of this list does not mean films that are very sad. Rather the films selected explore themes associated with Greek and sometime Shakespearian Tragedy. Throughout this list, philosophers and theorists of the tragic have been cited. This use of theory to discern what is properly tragic is controversial. Raymond Williams for […]
I’m beginning to think that the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman gets a bad rap. Mention the idea of watching one of his films and many otherwise reasonable, intelligent people head for the hills. The presumption is that the experience will be slow, laborious, depressing. If there were such a thing as cinematic paint, you’d […]
It is in the interest of any aspiring filmmaker to strive for originality in storytelling, above all else. Cinema is an art form in which no single iteration of a story formula is truly unique. Hence, it is up to the filmmakers to find new and expressive ways to tell stories that are otherwise anything […]
It’s amazing to think of the vast methods one can use to structure a story. Depending on the narrative itself, you could distort the structure any way you deem necessary, considering the structure enhances the story. Whatever structure the writer decides upon, all good stories fundamentally follow the basic three-act structure. From then on there’s […]
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 […]
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 […]