Christian-Jacque’s The Charterhouse of Parma (La chartreuse de Parme), from Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), is the sort of film I should intensely dislike. Narrative by virtue of the novel on which it is based, it proceeds by scenes rather than by shots. It is long because it needs to tell its story; its nearly three-hour length […]
Daily Archives: March 5, 2007
We change in many ways over time, and sometimes a film with which we are familiar strikes us very differently than it once did. I recall a time when I didn’t much like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s celebrated thriller Les diaboliques (Diabolique, in the U.S.; more accurately, Fiends in Great Britain). Eventually, I gave it a grudging […]
“[Pascal] was a very boring man, who never made love in his life.” — Roberto Rossellini One of the most beautiful of Roberto Rossellini’s unsentimental, highly analytic, deeply moving present-tense histories, Blaise Pascal examines seventeenth-century Europe from the perspective of a scientist, philosopher and mathematician who helped change the world by advancing the cause of […]
I am underwhelmed by György Pálfi’s Hungarian 2002 Hukkle. The experimental nature of some of the film’s elements does not redeem the whole. I love a good bucolic. (If Albee in Virginia Woolf? can use the word bucolic as a noun, so can I.) And I’m fascinated by films composed of instances of people and […]
Dušan Makavejev had already made one of the most brilliant political films of the 1960s and a particular favorite of mine, Man Is Not a Bird (Covek nije tica, 1965), when he created perhaps his strangest film, Innocence Unprotected (Nevinost bez zaštite, 1968), a collage of various materials, most of them either contemporary or hailing […]
Dennis Grunes 