“I like the silence in a silent movie. . . . You must respect the silence.” The source of these two comments is René Vidal, whose career as a filmmaker has deteriorated—a reflection of a national phenomenon following May 1968: the disillusionment of France’s political Left. In truth, French cinema has always had its diversions […]
Monthly Archives: June 2008
ONE HUNDRED GREATEST FILMS LIST. 9/09 Below is a list of what, on a given day, I consider to be the 100 greatest films of all time through the year 2008. Each film is given an entry of about 300 words. The first twenty-five films are given in rough order of preference. The remaining titles […]
1953 (cont’d) 51. VOYAGE IN ITALY (Roberto Rossellini, Italy). Ingrid Bergman gave her most probing, penetrating performance in husband Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia. The film surveys a faltering marriage. Rossellini described its subject matter as “a couple’s relationship under the influence of a third person: the exterior world.” Alex and Katherine Joyce, a British […]
Based in part on the career of model Jinx Falkenberg (who makes a cameo appearance), Cover Girl stars Rita Hayworth, in one of her most accomplished and incandescent star turns, as Rusty Parker, a Brooklyn chorine who becomes Vanity magazine’s Golden Wedding Girl. This is the film that introduced the lovely, immemorial tune “Long Ago […]
Last Chants for a Slow Dance, Jon Jost’s “Gary Gilmore film” (metaphorically, not literally), proceeds by set-pieces, switching between color and black and white, sound and silence, static and moving camera, realism and moody dreaminess, script (by Jost and Peter Trias) and improvisation. A haunting evocation of some interior male American landscape, the film follows […]
Dennis Grunes 