Adjudging it, properly, as belonging to the highest rank of films, Garbicz and Klinowski in Cinema: The Magic Vehicle begin by calling ¡Qué viva México! “[a] masterpiece which does not exist.” Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s never completed Mexican film remains cinema’s most celebrated phantom work. Its history is famous—a true legend, part of which unfolded in […]
Daily Archives: March 16, 2007
In the past I wrote the following about one of my favorite films, Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad), written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais: Not a signatory of the 1959 manifesto, and therefore only an honorary New Waver, Resnais invested [the film] with great visual irony. Fluid, upwardly tilted […]
The 1936 Oscar for best picture went to the nearly three-hour The Great Ziegfeld, a musical biography of sorts about the American impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, most famous for his Broadway series the Ziegfeld Follies which sought “to glorify the American girl.” The film, produced by Hunt Stromberg and directed by Robert Z. Leonard (the team […]
François Truffaut once remarked that he despised what he called “film elitism,” which to my understanding can apply equally to those who make movies and those who criticize and evaluate them. There is no movie on earth that more rankly embodies film elitism than David Lean’s ponderous, self-important Lawrence of Arabia, which at the time […]
Dennis Grunes 