Along tracks in a train car factory in Halle, East Germany, Rita Seidel collapses; youth hasn’t protected her from nervous exhaustion. The image of her in a hospital bed launches flashbacks; are they hers, or do they appear without her intervention or participation, as though she is divided from her own experience? (Discontinuous, the voiceover […]
Monthly Archives: December 2011
Somewhere along the yellow-brick blog I noted that Marlene Dietrich, one of my favorite actresses, was never at her most convincing playing a virgin, but now I must eat those words, having just seen for the first time her performance as Lily Czepanek, a country girl who, upon being orphaned by the death of her […]
Another Year is one of writer-director Mike Leigh’s fullest, richest, most beautiful works. A finely etched tangle of family- and extended family-relations, it is also overflowing with life even as it leans in on death, the omnipresent sterility toward which life heads. Here is a film without creatures of any kind other than human beings. […]
Well, belatedly I’ve seen it: the first Hollywood film to address openly and directly McCarthyism and the postwar reactionary atmosphere engendering hysteria and fear in the U.S.; (as far as I know) the first Hollywood film to use the term “civil liberties”; the first Hollywood film to ask the pertinent question, “What would Thomas Jefferson […]
The Tillman Story, which won the documentary prize of the San Francisco critics, is another sharp, powerful work by U.S. documentarian Amir Bar-Lev. While it refers specifically to official lies regarding the death of a soldier, a high-profile celebrity, in Afghanistan, and the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Administration’s and the U.S. military’s subsequent exploitation of his memory to […]
Dennis Grunes 