Now that Michelangelo Antonioni has departed for Paradise, the greatest living filmmaker is dear Jean-Luc, it seems to me. Dear, dear Jean-Luc! Apart from Godard, perhaps these five, in alphabetical order, round out the half-dozen greatest living filmmakers: Chantal Äkerman Hou Hsiao-hsien Kon Ichikawa Abbas Kiarostami Krzysztof Zanussi At least I think all of these […]
Monthly Archives: July 2007
Today is sadder than yesterday. Michelangelo Antonioni has died. With Ozu, Dreyer and Eisenstein, he was one of the four greatest film artists of all time. Antonioni was 94. Just three years ago, he made one of his loveliest works: “Michelangelo’s Gaze.” “L’eclisse,” the single most essential film for understanding the sixties, is among my […]
In Ingmar Bergman’s first outstanding film, Summer Interlude, Marie (Maj-Britt Nilson, superb) is a ballerina who, after the death years ago of her lover, Henrik, withdrew behind a “protective wall” that imprisoned her. The discovery of the boy’s diary returns her to the island where they fell in love one summer and compels her to […]
In the 1950s a handful of films generated interest among Americans in international cinema: Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique (1954), Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and, also by Bergman, The Seventh Seal. These films were largely responsible for creating the “art house crowd” that sought out […]
News has arrived that Ingmar Bergman, “probably the greatest film artist” ever according to Woody Allen, has died at 89. Below is my piece on my favorite Bergman film, The Silence. Ingmar Bergman has made many interesting and intriguing films, but most of us admire them more than we like them. Excepting The Seventh Seal […]
According to the production code governing the content of Hollywood movies in most of the 1930s (and beyond), “Sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden.” Given the way that America (even more so) then viewed it, homosexuality was therefore taboo as either a subject or a theme, much less a visible reality. Directors, […]
Prior to his celebrated Yi yi (2000), Taiwan’s Edward Yang made Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian, which suggests a cross between Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinema and West Side Story. Rival gangs of youth, fighting over turf in the early sixties, represent those who already lived in Taiwan and those who fled there from the mainland […]
