Although it lacks his later magic realism, Emir Kusturíca’s Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (Sjecas li se, Dolly Bell), in Serbo-Croatian, is a deeply satisfying, heartaching film about a Sarajevo family in the early 1960s, during the time of Marshal Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia. It is especially about sixteen-year-old Dino (Slavko Stimac, sweet, charming, perfect), the […]
Daily Archives: February 3, 2007
In a piece I wrote about Gianni Amelio’s 1998 Così ridevano I noted that Italy makes the world’s best movies about brothers. Perhaps the finest one, and certainly the most famous, is Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), but another of the films I mentioned is the most widely distributed work by Bolognese filmmaker […]
Among my favorite half-dozen or so books of the twentieth century is Christ Stopped at Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, 1945), Carlo Levi’s account of his life in exile in Gagliano, an impoverished southern Italian village in Lucania province, after his arrest for antifascist activities in 1934. Levi wrote his account in the […]
Ingmar Bergman has a reputation for making stubborn and difficult films. However, his Magician (Ansiktet—literally, The Face) is widely regarded as one of his most accessible works. Because it provides an analysis of human fear, possibly Kierkegaardian dread, it draws upon the familiar genre of the horror film that Bergman’s hallucinatory Hour of the Wolf […]
Passages, Jon Jost’s latest work except for Over Here, which Jost shot last autumn in Portland, Oregon, unfolds in a different kind of world, a young child’s world of Nature, visual wonder, and a father’s implicit protection, companionship and love. In a written prologue, Jost explains that much of the film’s digital video material was […]
Dennis Grunes 