Documentarian Kazuo Hara and Miyuki Takeda, his child’s mother, broke up in 1972. Takeda moved from Tokyo to Okinawa, leaving Hara with unresolved feelings that he hoped making a film about her would resolve. With her permission, therefore, he stayed with her and her new lover, Sugako.      Miyuki proves a fascinating subject. A feminist and […]

Romance sentimentale, from France, is one of the most beautifully photographed films ever made—by Eduard Tissé. Essential viewing, it is nonetheless the one Sergei Eisenstein film I find dubious.      Its theme is the relation of mortal awareness to the suspension of this consciousness wrought by art, whose impetus, ironically, can be an overwhelming feeling of […]

Estonian-born Russian emigré Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant, from France, opens explosively. A grinning lunatic hacks to death a man and a woman with an ax, orphaning the couple’s two daughters, whom we watch playing outdoors with a cat, lamenting their loss at their parents’ graves, and walking together from the cemetery down a desolate path lined […]