Ignasi M.

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

May 1, 2012 — The Le plaisir star is ninety-five.

Apr 25, 2012 — Pearls of the Deep: Alumni AssociationIn the mid-1960s, there was a brief window during which a remarkable cinema of ideas and visual experimentation flourished in Communist Czechoslovakia. This fecund period lasted approximately five years, from 1963 to 1968, when it...

Apr 24, 2012 — An unverifiable, if heartfelt, assertion: For the quarter century between 1945 and 1970 (or from Rome Open City to Fellini Satyricon), the world’s greatest popular cinema was produced in Italy—a realm of glamorous superstars, sensational comedians, and great genre flicks....

Apr 24, 2012 — Among the most widely seen photographs of Hollis Frampton is one of him as a young man, a self-portrait taken in 1959, if we are to trust the narration he composed to accompany its inclusion in his 1971 film (nostalgia)....

Apr 17, 2012 — Maybe it is something to do with the sensual seductiveness of cinema: as new-millennium Americans, we care nothing for Japa­nese poetry, little for Japanese painting and fiction, and certainly too much for Japanese cartoons, and yet Yasujiro Ozu, the least...

Apr 17, 2012 — When it was first released in 1977, ¡Alambrista! depicted something previously unseen in American fiction films—the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants from their point of view. Though writer-director-cinematographer Robert M. Young was not Latino and didn’t speak Spanish, his film convincingly...

Apr 6, 2012 — It’s hard to believe that Ivan’s Childhood was Andrei Tarkovsky’s first feature, so technically assured is its direction. Tarkovsky had received promising notices for 1961’s The Steamroller and the Violin, his forty-six-minute thesis film from VGIK (the Gerasimov All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography), but Ivan’s...

Apr 6, 2012 — Did You See This? • Looking through Keyhole with Guy Maddin • A stunning Rear Window time-lapse panorama • He likes words. • Watch Kubrick’s first three docs. • Is Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap “the most patriotic American...