The encounter of unspoilt Nature and industrial technology: this is the theme of Louisiana Story, the final work by Robert J. Flaherty, the brilliant American director of Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926), Industrial Britain (1931), Man of Aran (1934) and The Land (1942). In this extraordinary film, underwritten by Standard Oil, the “father […]
Daily Archives: March 11, 2007
Eric Rohmer ventured outside France but for a single film: the West German The Marquise of O . . ., from Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 novella. It is a civilized, exquisitely ironical comedy about a woman’s rape, a meditation on the limits society imposes on a woman’s right to self-determination. During the Franco-Prussian War, Julietta, […]
Factoring in inflation, Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic, from Tolstoi, today would cost over a billion dollars. To say the least, Voyna i mir is grand in scope; it encompasses balls and battles, romance, old age and youth, philosophy, spirituality, and all things Russian. It was an official production into which the Soviet Union poured its resources […]
The first postwar Hungarian film, Somewhere in Europe . . . (Valahol Európában . . .), set in the mid-1940s, is about children who, orphaned or otherwise dispossessed or discarded by the war, band together and hunt for food in order to survive. This requires vandalizing and theft. A remote ruined castle, the adopted domain […]
The grown narrator is Sanja. Pavel Chukhraj’s Vor (The Thief) opens with a pan of frozen terrain. Down a lonely road walks Katja, a suitcase in one hand, a satchel in the other. A sudden closeup shows the girl’s face contorted in pain; it could be a shot from a war film, where the character […]
Dennis Grunes 