Matisse’s women … were not immediately women; they became women. It is Matisse who taught us to see their contours not in a ‘physical-optical’ way but rather as structural filaments, as the axes of a corporeal system of activity and passivity. Figurative or not, the line is no longer a thing or an imitation of [...]
Painting is a craft. It works up its grandest, largest-scale effects from a set of familiar coloured substances. Usually, looking at the way these substances go to make a world within the rectangle, one is aware of the special motion of a hand putting them on: a hand and a [...]
par exemple
par exemple
pour moi
le grande histoire
c’est l’histoire du cinéma
elle est plus grande
que les autres
parce qu’elle se projette
Episode 4A: La Monnaie de l’absolu
To’s cinematic Hong Kong can be strangely ordered, simplified, reduced,
as though the spaces in which events unfold — especially pivotal events — are untouched by a larger social world beyond the delimited environments of the plot and its participants.
And it’s within these strangely controlled, sealed-off settings that To likes to conduct his research into bodily [...]
Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that there are two basic ways of staging and shooting bodily movement in martial arts cinema,
a “montage” approach and a “mise en scène” approach, one stressing a synthetic impression of the action through rhythmic and often chaotic juxtaposition (think of King Hu’s near-abstractions),
A Touch of Zen [...]
Scalar: a quantity with magnitude, not direction.
Max von Sydow:
You are in a train in Germany. Now the train is sinking. You will drown. On the count of ten, you will be dead.”
Ill-assorted couples, the disappointed, the rebellious, the intense, the shameless, the unfaithful or the deceived (whether in fact or in dreams, in remorse or in terror, in the delight of revolt or the disquiet of temptation) — few men and women will fail to see that they belong to at least one of these categories.”
Denis [...]
An intensive study of “the car scene” in cinema,
the conversation, the “scenery” rushing past a side window or surging out the back one, the tension of motion and stasis, of interior and exterior, of window and mirror and frame . . .
what Durgnat calls a “contra-flowing of in-shot elements.”
Slight disparities, within and between segments, take on [...]
Malick keeps reminding us that the hillside is a pulsing, living force, not some inert setting for action: full of snakes, insects, birds, butterflies.
The windblown grass blades are repeatedly emphasized, as though they’re the tentacles of something sentient, stirring,
and there’s a continuous play of sunlight and shadow between and within shots. The sonic pulse (insects, [...]
And we:
spectators, always
everywhere, looking at all of that
never beyond!
It fills us too full.
We set it right. It disintegrates.
We set it right again
[...]
Carlito’s Way is a work of crevices,
of doors slightly ajar,
of graphic verticals dividing the frame in a manner analogous to the split screen and the split diopter photography for which De Palma is known.
These crevices, these internal divisions or “cuts” in the image where looks are compelled to alight,
they are the “catching points” in a [...]
Here are four extraordinary shots in Sombre from possible thousands.
I selected these consecutive images not because they distill the film’s aesthetic organization — in fact they introduce a rupture, one of several. I chose them because they form a pattern my eyes can keep up with on first viewing. It [...]