The Photograph

Sep 25, 2020 — This week there’s a new Film Quarterly and a new frieze and fresh conversations with Jan Oxenberg and Paul Cronin.

May 6, 2020 — Once seen, the opening credits of Juraj Herz’s pitch-black satire The Cremator (1969) are not soon forgotten. At the beginning of the handcrafted, collage-style sequence, a still close-up of the protagonist’s head, from the eyes up, takes over the screen,...

Apr 20, 2020 — This month sees new books by and about Woody Allen, Miranda July, and Michael Snow as well as fresh translations and collections of criticism.

Feb 12, 2020 — If you were born in Mexico City in the second half of  the twentieth century, you grew up feeling that everything could come tumbling down in a matter of minutes. You grew up amid the reverberation of past earthquakes—all their...

Nov 20, 2019 — A sprawling, sweeping period romance that plays out over the course of fifteen years and across several national borders, Cold War is also, for acclaimed filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski, a highly personal work. His own parents’ marriage served as Pawlikowski’s primary...

Sep 30, 2019 — At first glance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s body of work might seem to display a schizophrenic split between two currents or tendencies. The first is in total symbiosis with the history of France and is rooted in the filmmaker’s own life, notably...

Jul 23, 2019 — The near-future totalitarian England of Michael Radford’s 1984, a powerful adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novel, is a very dark place indeed. The film’s brilliant production design and color-drained photography emphasize the grubby squalor and soul-crushing uniformity of the surveillance...

May 30, 2019 — It was more than three decades ago, in early 1986, that David Lynch arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina, to begin shooting his fourth feature, Blue Velvet. The surreal and emotionally overpowering neonoir that began to take shape there would go on to become...

Mar 11, 2019 — It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of watching a Khalik Allah film to intuit that he’s a photographer. Over the course of just two documentary features, the thirty-four-year-old, New York–bred artist has developed an instantly recognizable style at...

Jul 30, 2018 — At a time when women were rarely seen behind the camera, Babette Mangolte created a bold, distinctive aesthetic with a mix of slow rhythms and hauntingly static compositions.