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 […]
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, […]
Playboy: Much of the controversy surrounding 2001 deals with the meaning of the metaphysical symbols that abound in the film—the polished black monoliths, the orbital conjunction of Earth, Moon and Sun at each stage of the monoliths’ intervention in human destiny, the stunning final kaleidoscopic maelstrom of time and space that engulfs the surviving astronaut and […]