Oldřich Kaiser plays Seman, a fiftyish solitary soul who generally wears nothing but his underwear, and whose street-level Prague apartment is his window on the world. He is the lonely protagonist of Mária Procházková’s threadbare Czech film Žralok v hlavě that attempts to convey his feelings and schizophrenic focus (or non-focus) through a somewhat artificial […]
Daily Archives: April 3, 2009
Swiss writer-director Alain Tanner’s direction of La salamandre begins with something of a visual cheat. A man is cleaning his 30 years’ companion, his military rifle; suddenly there’s a gunshot and he is writhing in pain on the floor; an ambiguous reaction shot of a much younger woman is inserted. What happened? The man will […]
Lon Chaney, the “man of a thousand faces,” contributed two of these to his legendary, apparently lost silent, London After Midnight (1927), about Scotland Yard’s unraveling of a posh murder. Hypnosis is used to make the suspected criminal re-enact his crime; the victim’s doppelganger is also employed in the plot. The film is based on […]
Dennis Grunes 