A Woman Asks Why: Maborosi (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995)
Maborosi (1995) launched the feature film career of Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda, until then a maker of television documentaries only. Unlike many first efforts that must settle for “promising”...
View ArticleNaked Came the Stranger: Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (Thom Andersen,...
University courses on the history of film often begin with the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge, most famously the 1878 sequence of still photographs of a galloping racehorse that showed...
View ArticleSee, Hear, and Speak of Evil: Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2008)
Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys, 2008) was the fifth of the eight features that have so far been directed by Cannes favourite Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a leading Turkish filmmaker who has earned international...
View ArticleHis Enchanted Gaze: The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi, 1978)
Among important Italian directors, Ermanno Olmi occupies a curious middle ground. Critics and fans alike may sense that his works offer more substance than many – indeed, perhaps even the majority of –...
View ArticleThe Flipside of Neorealism: Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, 1951)
What are we to make of Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), Vittorio De Sica’s comic fantasy about postwar poverty produced within the artistic parameters of neorealismo? We all know the...
View Article“Reality Is Always Magic”: The Experience (Abbas Kiarostami, 1973)
When Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami unexpectedly passed away in 2016, he was deeply mourned by lovers of cinema. Martin Scorsese gave voice to the world’s loss when he said, “He was one of those...
View ArticleShimizu Redivivus: Nakinureta haru no onna yo (A Woman Crying in Spring,...
Among the many differences the widely acknowledged dean of Japanese film scholars in the Anglophone world, Donald Richie, likes to point out between Western and Japanese filmmakers is their response to...
View ArticlePirandello on Film: Kaos
Kaos unites the Taviani brothers with Nobel Prize-winning author Luigi Pirandello for an explosion of onscreen Siciliana. As they had done for Sardinia in Padre Padrone (1977) and Tuscany in La Notte...
View Article