Mr. Wenders, you once said that at the beginning of your career you felt like a painter who was searching for a way to express time. Would you still describe your approach to making films that way? I started making movies as an extension of painting. I worked as a painter, I wanted to be […]
Alfred Hitchcock is unquestionably the greatest director of suspense films in cinema history. His best films are marked by sequences of suspense that are memorable, exciting, engaging and cinematically magnificent. Hitchcock described the difference between suspense and surprise by giving the illustration of two men sitting at a table with a time bomb set to […]
There are many excuses to start drinking, most of which are stretched as an attempt to justify the self-imposed intoxication, but some are hard to imagine surviving completely sober. “My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown” is one of these heartbreakers. The versatile Daniel Day-Lewis stars in his breakout performance as the Irish Christy […]
Yesterday we ran a list of 93 films beloved by Stanley Kubrick, which includes two by Andrei Tarkovsky: 1972’s Solaris and 1986’s The Sacrifice. You expect one auteur to appreciate the work of another — “game recognize game,” to use the modern parlance — but the selection of Solaris makes special sense. Just four years before it, Kubrick had, […]
“It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has […]
Analysis of the “Berton’s Report” film sequence from “Solaris” directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) “I want to emphasize yet again that, […], cinema is an art which operates with reality…” (A. Tarkovsky 1989: 177) [1] I. Introduction Andrei Tarkovsky is one of my favorite directors. I admire his films. However, to interpret and analyze the […]
Introduction In her article “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” Kristin Thompson speaks of a dual tendency in film criticism: we could see films as a “struggle of opposing forces,” some of which “strive to unify the work, to hold it together sufficiently that we may perceive and ‘follow’ its structures.” Outside of these structures “lie […]
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset has referred to man as a “conscious cosmic phenomenon”. What he meant by this has everything to do with the fact that there is at least one cosmic entity that is capable of self-awareness in the universe. Ironically though, Ortega recognized that this reality remains the most transparent […]