The Professor

Nov 8, 2011 — Upon its release in the U.S. in 1983, the theatrical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander generated a wealth of controversy. Bergman has always seemed to breed conflict among cineastes (Phillip Lopate, for example, has written recently about the...

Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...

Apr 6, 2010 — Many things set Red Desert apart from Michelangelo Antonioni’s other early sixties portraits of spiritual and social alienation (its focus on industry and environmental toxicity, for one), but none do so more strikingly than its color cinematography. It was the...

Sep 19, 2005 — Jane Campion is a rarity, not simply because she is a world-class female director, but because she has devoted her career to exploring female subjectivity.

Oct 19, 1998 — Jean-Luc Godard’s stripped-down science-fiction drama depicts a computer-controlled society at war with artists, thinkers, and lovers.

The legendary filmmaker praises Jacques Tati’s dedication to getting his films made, reflects on the lessons he learned from Dorothy Arzner when she was his professor, and shares the joy he finds in inspiring new generations of directors.

Edward Baron Turk is a professor emeritus of the humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books on the performing arts include Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema (Harvard University Press), Hollywood Diva:...

Thomas Elsaesser is professor emeritus in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of New German Cinema: A History (1989) and Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject (1996). His recent publications include European...

B. Ruby Rich is professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the former editor in chief of the journal Film Quarterly. She is the author of New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (2013) and Chick Flicks: Theories...

Tom Gunning is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press, 1991) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and...