Privilege

Jul 12, 2011 — Heeeere’s Johnny, the desperate, destructive prophet-of-the-apocalypse protagonist of Mike Leigh’s brilliantly corrosive Naked (1993), a sexually explicit update to a long line of British films, plays, and novels about angry young men. Johnny might be mistaken for a mere misanthrope,...

Feb 28, 2011 — In 1969, director Alexander Macken­drick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be...

Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...

Nov 16, 2010 — To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence. To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound,...

Aug 2, 2010 — The great, beloved screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico died this past weekend at the age of ninety-six. A longtime collaborator of Luchino Visconti’s (they’re pictured together above), including on the epic The Leopard (1963), Cecchi D’Amico worked with just about every...

May 24, 2010 — Alain Resnais’s 1961 French New Wave masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad has long been one of cinema’s most magnificently inscrutable films, but at least one of its mysteries has now been solved. The actress Françoise Spira, a cast member, documented...

Nov 2, 2009 — The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire. And we, spectators always, everywhere,looking at, never out of, everything!—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy” At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a...

May 25, 2009 — Reported from the set of Eddie Coyle by New Journalism trailblazer Grover Lewis, this article is a profile of Robert Mitchum that features extensive, idiosyncratic monologues by Mitchum himself.

Apr 23, 2009 — This interview, conducted by Michael Henry, first appeared in the May 1978 issue of Positif.

Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.