A work of great stylistic flexibility, The Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria) is one of Federico Fellini’s finest achievements. Fellini first introduced its protagonist, a Roman prostitute, in his glorious comedy The White Sheik (1952), whose screen story Michelangelo Antonioni wrote—Fellini and Antonioni’s one collaboration. There, Cabiria is worldly-wise, her professional experience the […]
Daily Archives: January 31, 2007
One of the most brilliant pieces of short fiction in the English language, albeit in an unsmooth version of the language, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was first published in 1902, sixteen years after the Ukrainian-born author, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, became a British subject. A mariner, Conrad often wrote about the sea, his […]
From France, the beguiling, haunting Olivier, Olivier is Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s companion-piece to her Europa Europa from the year before. Both, fact-based, center on an adolescent boy whose life is unimaginably rough—in Salomon’s case, in Europa Europa, because he is a German Jew impersonating a Nazi to elude imprisonment and death; in Olivier’s case, […]
The quality of Bernardo Bertolucci’s work is all over the map, but it is universally agreed that, from Moravia, the moody, spiderlike The Conformist (Il conformista, 1970), about Fascism’s ghosts, is one of the most beautiful films ever made. I also hold in esteem Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione, 1964), Tragedy of a Ridiculous […]
Paced to a crawl in order to intensify the effect of punctuations of violence, and decked out in tricks of editing to manufacture the same result, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later . . ., strenuously written by Alex Garland, is pitched between two genres: horror and science fiction. In this regard it doesn’t compare with […]
Dennis Grunes 