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Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German
Virtually unknown in the West, Aleksei German is regarded by Russians as their most radical and original film director. Tony Wood considers his techniques of disorientation, and the craft of induced paranoia in his latest movie about the Doctors’ Plot of 1953—its title taken from Beria’s triumphant shout to his chauffeur.
Dogme 95
“With the release of Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), the work of a group of Danish film makers who work collectively and individually under the ‘documentary’ and verité demands of Dogme 95 has now begun to achieve a measure of critical visibility. In fact, with the release . . .” read more
Play It Again, or, Old-Time Cuban Music on the Screen
“A friend of mine, a Cuban film director, writes to me about visiting the Salzburg Festival. After enjoying operas by Berlioz and Mozart, he says, the big surprise was the Festival’s closing event, a concert by the Cuban old-timers La Vieja Trova Santiaguera, chosen by the Festival’s special . . .” read more
Spielberg’s List
“At the climax of Amistad, Steven Spielberg’s rescue fantasy about the rebellion, recapture, and courtroom liberation of African slaves, the slave leader Cinque (Djimon Hounsou) teaches John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) the value of ancestor worship. He thereby authors the Supreme Court brief that wins back his freedom. . . .” read more
Cinematic Ethnology: Siegfried Kracauer’s 'The White Collar Masses'
“In the Introduction to his last, posthumously published book History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969), Siegfried Kracauer formulates a summa of his intellectual existence. The discovery of the hidden connection between his interest in history and his interest in the photographic media reveals to him the . . .” read more
The Bourgeois Paradigm and Heritage Cinema
“Present disaffection with key institutions of the British state—the monarchy and the Palace of Westminster for instance—has brought about what Tom Nairn described recently as a transitional time, one in which ‘former subjects. . .have unintentionally half-mutated into citizens.’ He added that ‘in a society still unprogrammed for . . .” read more
Nikita Mikhalkov and Burnt by the Sun: A Monarchist Film-Maker Confronts Humane Socialism
“Despite the deep hostility of present-day Russian film-makers to the concept of socialism, a considerable number of films about the Soviet past have been made in Russia during the past decade. For the most part, the directors of these films have sought to outdo one another in depicting . . .” read more
A Note on 'Jumanji'
“Parents have a different experience of cinema going from the childless or ‘child free’: instead of the Art-Deco bar of the local art house, the cavernous spaces of the multiplex and a sense of having been magically transported to the United States as kids in baseball caps and . . .” read more
The Hollywood Left: Aesthetics and Politics
“Two generations after McCarthyism, the Hollywood Left has almost receded from living memory. Its principal figures now show up mainly in the obituary columns of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, their experiences with the blacklist reduced to a sentence or deleted entirely. The most politically . . .” read more
From Courtly Love to 'The Crying Game'
“Why speak about courtly love (amour courtois) today, in the age of permissiveness, when sexual encounter is often nothing more than a ‘quickie’ in some dark corner of an office?The impression that courtly love is something out of date, long superseded by modern manners, is a lure which . . .” read more
The Story of the Lost Reflection
“The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the . . .” read more
On an Aside by Eagleton
“It is always more difficult to criticize a publishing journal than a book or article; even so, Terry Eagleton’s remarks on Screen (nlr 107) are not adequate to the rigour and seriousness of that journal’s project. Essentially, Eagleton reproaches Screen with formalism. More than merely the willingness . . .” read more
Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
“The existential value of the work of art, as a declaration about being, cannot be extracted from the adherent signals alone (its symbolism), nor from the self-signals alone (the medium). The self-signals taken alone prove only existence; adherent signals taken in isolation prove only the presence of meaning . . .” read more
Comment on Rohdie’s 'Signs and Meaning in the Cinema'
“Sam Rohdie’s review of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema makes a number of telling and important criticisms, but I should like to append this comment since it seems to me that on one simple point he has missed the author’s intention, and, more seriously, in certain respects . . .” read more
Cinema--Code and Image
“In recent years a considerable degree of interest has developed in the semiology of the cinema, in the question whether it is possible to dissolve cinema criticism and cinema aesthetics into a special province of the general science of signs. It has become increasingly clear that traditional theories . . .” read more
Roberto Rossellini
“Rossellini’s reputation has ebbed and flowed more perhaps than that of any other leading director. In part this has been because of the nexus between politics and film criticism in Italy, in part because of changes in fashion and taste, in part because of the personal scandals which . . .” read more
Jean-Luc Godard
“During the English lessons in Bande `Part the teacher asks Odile to quote what T. S. Eliot says about tradition: ‘Everything that is really new is by that fact automatically traditional’. Godard’s films may strike one at first as a bewildering complex of inter-related themes: all the central . . .” read more
Joseph von Sternberg
“Josef Von Sternberg remains best known as the director of a sequence of films with Marlene Dietrich in the thirties, starting with The Blue Angel in Germany and then continuing in Hollywood. Usually these are thought of as ‘glamour’ films, successful because they took people’s minds off the . . .” read more
Alfred Hitchcock
“Hitchcock, of course, is a household name. His first film was made in 1921, his first sound film (Blackmail) in 1929, his first American film (Rebecca) in 1940. He has come to dominate completely the suspense thriller genre; his silhouette on publicity posters is enough to chill spines . . .” read more
Budd Boetticher
“Budd Boetticher is not a well-known director; indeed, even such a knowledgeable critic as Andrew Sarris ranks him among ‘esoterica’. Most critics would be inclined to dismiss him as responsible for no more than a few run-of-the-mill westerns, hardly distinguishable from his equally anonymous fellows—a typical Hollywood technician, . . .” read more
John Ford
“The cinema of John Ford is rooted in history. He has steeped himself in those crucial periods of American history which have determined popular American consciousness: the colonization of the west, the waves of immigrants, the three great wars, the depression. Today America has emerged as the most . . .” read more
Censorship
“Samuel Fuller’s film Shock Corridor—described by Lee Russell in an article on Fuller in New Left Review 23—is not to be shown in England, apparently because it has been refused a certificate by the censor. Decisions like this pass alsolutely unnoticed as a rule—certainly there has been no . . .” read more
Introduction to 'Motifs'
“Throughout the world, art and art criticism are perplexingly fluid. It is at this moment that socialist artists and art critics can intervene decisively, staking out the arena for debate, indicating and achieving the next steps forward. In this section of New Left Review we shall publish a . . .” read more
L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad
“Ideally, criticism of L’Année Dernière à Marienbad should be totally superfluous. One would say: ‘A lot of money has been spent, a troupe of actors and technicians has been engaged, and three châteaux invaded to serve as decor, for an entertainment devised by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and presented in . . .” read more
Come Back Africa
“the second most impressive thing about Come Back Africa is that it was made at all. Lionel Rogosin, its creator, spent a year in South Africa simply getting to know the Africans, and after months of wrangling with suspicious white authorities, got permission to shoot a film, . . .” read more