It is 1897—the year of the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Near Werewolfsville in the Carpathians, opera singer Count Teleke, accompanied by his manservant, while out walking comes across the near-dead body of a gamekeeper who visited “Devil’s Castle,” the domain of the mysterious Baron Gorc; but the poor man has forgotten everything that […]
Daily Archives: August 8, 2009
Vaguely reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) and Cries and Whispers (1972) and Theodoris Angelopoulos’s Eternity and a Day (1998), Carlos Sorin’s Argentinean La ventana, filmed in color in Patagonia, has its Bergmanian clock ticking away time, with the tuning of a piano aurally augmenting this sound of mortality. (An old Bergmanian trick: Sorin […]
The contrived story counts for little except to erase the taint of misogynism, which at least figures into the appearance of most film noir. (Actually, The Maltese Falcon, John Huston, 1941, and Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, 1944, ambiguate that impression.) Among the living, three female characters are associated with bedeviled civil engineer Scott Henderson, who, […]
Dennis Grunes 