In the opening scene of Yasujiro Ozu’s first silent about the working poor, Dekigokoro, the camera moves backward across rows of people seated on the floor. The pervasive use of hand fans conveys oppressive airlessness and heat, thus fragmenting with shared discomfort a unifying shot. Someone’s wallet, accidentally misplaced, makes its way through the audience, […]
Daily Archives: August 25, 2007
As I explain in my essay “Allegory Versus Allegory in Hawthorne” (American Transcendental Quarterly, fall 1976), Nathaniel Hawthorne employs allegory ironically, as a means of contesting reductive U.S. allegorical thinking, one result of the puritanical/biblical confusion of life and art. Wim Wenders’ Der Scharlachrote Buchstabe takes no such tack, nor any other I can discern; […]
Wobbling, Robert Rossen’s vaguely liberal adaptation of Alec Waugh’s popular novel is a mix of adultery, murder, miscegenation and local politics on a fictitious West Indies island, a former French, now British colony. It gets into all kinds of lives except those of any of the impoverished, teeming black lives of slave descendants. Two light-skinned […]
Yi ge mo sheng nu ren de lai xin transposes Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella from turn-of-the-century Vienna to Beijing in the years of the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the years just after. Xu Jinglei, who took the filmmaking prize at San Sebastián, convincingly weaves in strands of Chinese history. The film ends in […]
