Collectively, the films present a compelling story of quiet tenacity, talent, and artistic determination. The films are all exquisite, featuring a distinctive blend of narration by Pearlman overlaying an Expressionist montage of documentary images, storytelling, and visual imagery to create seamless shifts between past and present, inner life and outer, and the creative process versus the finished film.
Tag: film
Friendship and Historical Materialism in Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx
Raoul Peck’s film, begins with the young philosopher Karl Marx’s critique of the persecution of desperate peasants, who go into forests to gather dead wood, something considered theft, for which they were arrested or beaten or even killed. Marx, a passionate but poor writer married to a well-born woman, was censored for his examination of political power.
Spotlight on Twin Peaks Cast & Crew – Sabrina S. Sutherland
Prior to becoming an Executive Producer on the second series of Twin Peaks, Sabrina S. Sutherland had already collaborated with auteur filmmaker David Lynch on an array of projects, including commercials, shorts, features and numerous other works ultimately left unrealised. Having worked closely with Lynch over a period now spanning some thirty years, she has acted as a main driving force across his oeuvre, often as the pragmatist essential in ensuring the visionary’s vision completed the transition to screen. Catching up with Samuel Elliott in the lead-up to touring Australia and New Zealand as part of the Twin Peaks: Conversations With The Stars event, Sutherland discussed both working on such an inimitable show and with such staggeringly prolific filmmaker as David Lynch.
A review of The Blackcoat’s Daughter
Now, we are witnessing perhaps the most substantial change to the horror formula to date and the rise of a new sub-genre. These modern films focus far less on gratuitous violence and concern themselves more with a journey that leads us to tragic ends. This new crop of horror is more cerebral, less conventional—films which have been called “art house horror”—even “post-horror.”
A review of Macbeth directed by Justin Kurzel
Faced with the prospect of a dreary peace, Macbeth the triumphant warrior goes for the main prize: King Duncan’s crown. It is an exhilarating adaptation of Shakespeare’s great tragedy but I feel that the emphasis is sometimes misplaced or even absent. For example, Lady Macduff’s ‘I have done no harm’ speech, usually the most moving in the whole play, is delivered while she’s on the run from murderers. They can’t hear her, we wonder why she’s starting a conversation. Run faster, woman.
Shakespeare As the Father of Us All: On Romeo & Juliet, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and At Any Price, Bamako, Cesar Chavez, The Darjeeling Limited, Prisoners, Thurgood, and The Wolf of Wall Street
Shakespeare writes about human emotion and impulse in a heightened realm, a realm of people with liberty and power, people of mind and passionate expression. Shakespeare gives us a language that is complex, eloquent, and true, a language to savor.
Mainstream Maverick: The Biography and Work of Robert Redford, incl. All Is Lost (& Selected Books)
Appearance or truth? Both? Form and spirit. There has been a tension in our appreciation for Robert Redford, a dedicated actor and filmmaker who also happens to be an image of masculine beauty. Redford, as a young man of impulse and integrity, and not a little rebellion, was interested in adventurous exploration, whether involving art, travel, or relationships. Everything considered, he was a lot less selfish and shallow than most of us would be. That may be part of why he has become such an intriguing and respectable elder statesman.
Tourists with Typewriters: Writers in the Sternthal-Klugman film The Words and Lucy Fischer’s book Body Double
There are many writers in many films. In Body Double, a book of eight chapters, with acknowledgements, afterword, notes, filmography, bibliography, and index, University of Pittsburgh English and Film Studies professor Lucy Fischer gathers together for examination a great bunch of films in which writers appear—Naked Lunch, Smoke, Deconstructing Harry, Paris When It Sizzles, Barton Fink, Adaptation, How Is Your Fish Today?, Swimming Pool, The Singing Detective, and Providence, among others.
Art and Environment: Manufacturing Landscapes, featuring photographer Edward Burtynsky
John James Audubon may have been a naturalist and a painter, but it does seem all that often that one gets to contemplate both art and environmental issues, as with Manufacturing Landscapes, a film that presents the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who focuses on nature and how it has been transformed by industrial use, producing a different landscape, often one of devastation, yet one in which an unexpected beauty can be found.
Strange Culture, a documentary: On Government and Critical Art Ensemble artist Steve Kurtz, featuring Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan
Strange Culture is an intelligent and useful film, demonstrating how several cultures acquire and disseminate knowledge, specifically the art world and the justice system. It allows experts to speak, and it presents evidence. We even see some art—some of which is expectedly odd, and some of which is obvious tribute to tradition. The center of the film is Steve Kurtz, a long-haired blond, blue-jeaned artist and teacher, with dark circles under his eyes and a soft, humorous manner.