The Mother and the Whore.Jean Eustache orbited the world of criticism without ever fully falling into it. His intellectual biographer, Alain Philippon, describes him as a marginal figure at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960s and yet actively involved in the debates unfolding in its offices.1 Though Eustache was close with future Cahiers editor-in-chief Jean-Louis Comolli and the magazine championed his films from the start, his critical output was minuscule. He started contributing to Cahiers only after completing his first short, Bad Company (1963). Even then, he wrote little, publishing a few brief pieces on some early films by Paul Vecchiali, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Costa-Gavras. Luc Moullet would later admit that prior to Bad Company, he thought him the only person at Cahiers “that had absolutely nothing to do with the movies.”2 Indeed, Eustache was often at the offices to pick up his wife, who was employed as a secretary at the magazine.
- 2/26/2024
- MUBI
Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.
Center Stage (Stanley Kwan)
Following her breakout with Jackie Chan in Police Story and before her iconic roles in the films of Wong Kar-wai and Olivier Assayas, Maggie Cheung delivered one of the best performances of her career in Stanley Kwan’s lush, definitive, and boldly conceived biopic Center Stage, also known as Actress. Now gorgeously restored in 4K from the original negative, and approved by Kwan himself, the film follows Cheung as iconic silent film star Ruan Lingyu, who committed suicide at the age of 24 in 1935 after a tumultuous private life that was frequent fodder for the vicious Shanghai tabloids—and began to mirror the melodramas that brought her fame. With Cheung receiving the Best Actress award at Berlinale, the film...
Center Stage (Stanley Kwan)
Following her breakout with Jackie Chan in Police Story and before her iconic roles in the films of Wong Kar-wai and Olivier Assayas, Maggie Cheung delivered one of the best performances of her career in Stanley Kwan’s lush, definitive, and boldly conceived biopic Center Stage, also known as Actress. Now gorgeously restored in 4K from the original negative, and approved by Kwan himself, the film follows Cheung as iconic silent film star Ruan Lingyu, who committed suicide at the age of 24 in 1935 after a tumultuous private life that was frequent fodder for the vicious Shanghai tabloids—and began to mirror the melodramas that brought her fame. With Cheung receiving the Best Actress award at Berlinale, the film...
- 10/14/2022
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Malaise (Don Levy). Courtesy of the artist, The Don Levy Project, and Academy Film Archive.This is the second year in a row that filmmaker / programmer Mónica Savirón has organized a screening of experimental films for the First Look series. Last year’s program, “A Matter of Visibility,” focused on women’s cinema from around the world. This is a subject about which the U.S.-based, Spanish-born Savirón is uniquely suited to illuminate us. Last year’s show was gratifyingly diverse in both style and national origin, the program anchored by a rarely-screened work by then-recently deceased Chantal Akerman, and including other artists whose work is all too seldom seen on these shores. Some, like Lis Rhodes and Cécile Fontaine, are reasonably canonical, whereas others showcased by Savirón were up-and-coming filmmakers such as Nazli Dinçel and Klara Ravat. While I don’t know of any experimental film programmers for...
- 1/14/2017
- MUBI
Craig Keller and Uncas Blythe continue our series of film dialogues. Isiah Medina's 88:88 is having its exclusive online premiere at Mubi, playing through April 17, 2016.Craig Keller: We're going to talk about Isiah Medina's 66-minute film from 2015, 88:88. It's a challenging movie: polyphonic, polypictorial, but not confrontational, in fact pretty chilled-out; if it were featured on Top Gear the hosts might praise its speed, dynamic facility, and stability of suspension. 88:88 presents Medina himself and a group of friends or characters from university in and around the neighborhoods of Winnipeg.Now I'll refrain from synopsizing any more. I had a hard time with the film, but like any complicated work revisitations in whole and in part yield stronger comprehension; accordingly, new insights rise to the surface. Going back through it again the other day I started by watching only the first ten minutes, which provide an overture,...
- 4/5/2016
- by Craig Keller
- MUBI
This week’s Absolute Must Read is Robert Koehler’s mind-blowing essay on film criticism and film advocacy. Structured around the offerings of the Los Angeles Film Festival, Koehler really hits on the core problem about film writing on the web. Here’s the key part of the article: “This is ideology, all right: The Ideology of advertisers, the force that most fundamentally drives ‘their’ criticism. It informs movie websites and blogs as much as the papers, by the way, as more and more websites are propelled forward by the hits metric that advertisers gauge in order to determine whether or not they want to invest in a given site.” (For the record: “A criticism of advocacy” is a good description of Bad Lit. And I run tons of ads!)A great “must read” contender is this funny Pittsburgh City Paper article about the FBI releasing — then retracting — their report...
- 6/26/2011
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
By Michael Atkinson
One of the loveliest freeform ideas to find patronage and popularity in the New Wavey 1960s was the omnibus film, a rarely cohesive but always tempting quasi-genre defined as a collection of exclusively commissioned short films. These projects usually began with a general theme but were always most interested in gathering the generation's coolest hotshot filmmakers and encouraging them to whack off and make their special kind of havoc, but in compressed form. The aesthetics of the genre are questionable -- never is the entirety of an omnibus very satisfying -- but its smash-up ranginess of conflicting styles and potpourri perspectives make the movies irresistible. (Favorites of any connoisseur would include 1962's "The Seven Deadly Sins," 1963's "RoGoPaG," and 1969's "Love and Anger," all of which feature the era's most promiscuous omnibus-er, Jean-Luc Godard.) They're still being made: the Korean New Wave collection "If You Were Me" (2003) is a knockout,...
One of the loveliest freeform ideas to find patronage and popularity in the New Wavey 1960s was the omnibus film, a rarely cohesive but always tempting quasi-genre defined as a collection of exclusively commissioned short films. These projects usually began with a general theme but were always most interested in gathering the generation's coolest hotshot filmmakers and encouraging them to whack off and make their special kind of havoc, but in compressed form. The aesthetics of the genre are questionable -- never is the entirety of an omnibus very satisfying -- but its smash-up ranginess of conflicting styles and potpourri perspectives make the movies irresistible. (Favorites of any connoisseur would include 1962's "The Seven Deadly Sins," 1963's "RoGoPaG," and 1969's "Love and Anger," all of which feature the era's most promiscuous omnibus-er, Jean-Luc Godard.) They're still being made: the Korean New Wave collection "If You Were Me" (2003) is a knockout,...
- 10/21/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
The Eiffel serves as a wry eyeful in the Parisian cat peering from the poster for the portmanteau film Six in Paris (Paris Vu Par), offered in a revival screening by the San Francisco Film Society as part of their inaugural French Cinema Now series and soon to be available on DVD through New Yorker Films.
The omnibus film is—at this juncture—a familiar landmark on the cinematic landscape; but, charm is leant to this particular sextet by its alignment with the auteurist movement of the mid-’60s. As the program notes for Fcn attest, ”Six in Paris represents the crème de la crème of the French New Wave: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, along with the lesser known Jean Douchet (better known as a writer at Cahiers du Cinema) and Jean-Daniel Pollet.” Produced by Barbet Schroeder (who likewise stars in the Rouch entry), Paris...
The omnibus film is—at this juncture—a familiar landmark on the cinematic landscape; but, charm is leant to this particular sextet by its alignment with the auteurist movement of the mid-’60s. As the program notes for Fcn attest, ”Six in Paris represents the crème de la crème of the French New Wave: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, along with the lesser known Jean Douchet (better known as a writer at Cahiers du Cinema) and Jean-Daniel Pollet.” Produced by Barbet Schroeder (who likewise stars in the Rouch entry), Paris...
- 10/15/2008
- by Michael Guillen
- Screen Anarchy
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