Of edges and instants, light and shadow, love and work, gesture and speech, silence and dialogue, tension and fear, agitation and pressure: forces of coupling.
“In the film I made about the Straubs you can see there’s really an acute tension in the editing room between Danièle and Jean-Marie, and there’s definitely a bit of fear. [...]
“My head’s spinning. I’m aching all over. I can’t open it.”
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Often in Farber’s paintings, the work takes material form as a workspace not quite sorted out.
Various angles, perspectives entwine and compete within the distribution of objects, figures, instruments, unruly but patterned, too composed to be haphazard.
The late paintings increasingly feature a dense invasion of vines and flowers and other plant life, which overtake and lyricize [...]
A “communication of lights” in the border town of Nabua, a place marked by ancient legend and modern atrocity.
Static and dynamic, natural and artificial:
A fluorescent street lamp / lightning flashes against rising smoke / a soccer ball in flames: kicked back and forth by shadowy figures, it leaves short-lived streaks of fire across the stitched [...]
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“By Time I mean organic time, such as it exists in the ordering of all the alternating and fundamental functions of life. Each of these is affected by a series of muscular acts which reproduces itself, as if the end or fulfillment of each series brought [...]
Mann’s style is, once again, anxiously precise, but the volatility this time is amplified.
Cutting that accelerates, like a quickening pulse, around and through pivotal moments.
Not to be confused with the choppy disorientation that Bordwell keeps complaining about.
An onslaught of angles, an intense collage of surfaces and textures,
and graphic collisions in constant, irresolvable tension with a [...]
If a flood came and we didn’t have a camera with us, I said to the geologist, wouldn’t that be a missed opportunity? A flood can’t come about just because of rain, Le Pichon answered. The amount of water has to be greater than that which can rain down from the clouds. And, what’s more, [...]
Plenty of familiar territory here:
As the film says – “The past happened. But it’s over now, isn’t it?” “Not for us.” – and shows – (Renoir’s color, Ray’s music, Anderson’s dioramic, wide-angle frontalities) – the marks of the past are inescapable.
Which makes it possible to overlook quiet, tentative gestures of discovery. Here in the [...]
How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we [...]
When I think about something, I’m really thinking of something else.
You can only think about something if you think of something else.
For instance, you see a landscape that’s new to you. But it’s new to you because you mentally compare it to another landscape, one which you know.
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As so often in a Dardennes Brothers film, the handheld camera hovers, anxiously, in a medium to medium-close shot range: we sense an interval between the camera and the performers that expands, contracts, varies in angle but almost never releases into something like an “analytic” breakdown of the surroundings.
The frame enables a game of hide [...]
. . . the surest way to lose something . . .
“The cinema is above all plastic: it represents in various ways an architecture in movement that must be in constant accord and dynamic equilibrium with the [...]
Interrupting these two moments are several minutes of interactions among yet-unbound characters and spaces;
according to her shirts and the part in her hair, at least a day’s worth of unseen activity. These two brutal vertical stripes slice
the already disrupted horizontal. The planes only [...]
Mozart piano concerto no. 23 in A, K 488, adagio
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“That fort is not the world.
The river leads back there. It leads onward, too.
Deeper. Into the wild. Start over. Exchange this false light for a true one.
Give up the name of Smith.”
Some ninety minutes in, John Rolfe (Christian Bale) suddenly appears, without much of an introduction.
When did he arrive? No shot of him landing on the shore, no dialogue telling us he’s a tobacco farmer who’s lost his wife and daughter.
In a tight medium close-up, his elbow on the ledge of a window, the backs of [...]
. . . mobility and immobility; instantaneity (of the appearance of the image) and accumulation (of the images in the viewer’s consciousness); singularity (of one frame) and overlapping (of all the objective images with all the psychic images, the cinema being a floating synthesis of the two). By means of its re-shooting process and its [...]
Just as Zodiac really starts filling up, Dermot Mulroney introduces himself by stepping into a close-up, a movement repeated some time later when he tells Anthony Edwards and Mark Ruffalo that, finally, they’re wrong about their only real suspect. Here, in the bustling police station that’s 12 hours later than the preceding shot, he engages Ruffalo [...]