The Conversation is a feature at PopOptiq bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their tenth piece, they discuss Guy Maddin’s fusion of silent-era horror and dance, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002).
Drew’S Take
Every autumn, I treat Halloween the way some Midwestern moms obsess over Thanksgiving or Christmas. Horror novels (last year, I finally read Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box and loved it), true crime documentaries, and an abundance of films make up the majority of my media diet for about six weeks. Over the past week, I’ve been re-reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula and re-watching the glut of adaptations out there. I think I’ve finally dialed in my three favorite translations…in no particular ranking! Obviously, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) has a certain advantage from being the “first,” but it has...
Drew’S Take
Every autumn, I treat Halloween the way some Midwestern moms obsess over Thanksgiving or Christmas. Horror novels (last year, I finally read Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box and loved it), true crime documentaries, and an abundance of films make up the majority of my media diet for about six weeks. Over the past week, I’ve been re-reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula and re-watching the glut of adaptations out there. I think I’ve finally dialed in my three favorite translations…in no particular ranking! Obviously, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) has a certain advantage from being the “first,” but it has...
- 10/21/2015
- by Landon Palmer
- SoundOnSight
Like Night of the Hunter, Tod Browning’s Freaks or Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers, The Road to Yesterday can be ranked among the UFOs of cinema. It’s place in the heart of Cecil B. DeMille’s work proves to be in itself very distinctive. We know that, during his entire life, DeMille had virtually only one producer—Paramount (the former Famous Players Lasky)—just like Minnelli was MGM’s man and Corman American International’s. Sixty-three of his films (out of seventy) were produced at Paramount. And, oddly enough, it is among the seven outsiders, situated within a brief period from 1925 to 1931, that his best activity is to be found (I’m thinking of Madam Satan, The Godless Girl, and The Road to Yesterday)–his most audacious undertakings. To top it off, for this uncontested king of the box office, his best films were his biggest commercial failures.
- 3/18/2013
- by Luc Moullet
- MUBI
Les Enfants du Paradis is back, now at the Ciné Lumière and BFI Southbank. David Jenkins in Time Out London: "In this crisp restoration of Marcel Carné's rich, literary romance from 1945 ('France's answer to Gone with the Wind!"), four men tussle for the affections of one woman, the conflicted, sphinx-like Garence (Carné regular Arletty), an ice maiden in the league of Marlene Dietrich who, in nearly every shot, has her eyes masked by a beam of light. Such ethereal, delicately cinematic touches are in otherwise short supply in a film which is content to let a dazzling, witty script (by Jacques Prévert), sumptuous set design and exceptional performers lend the fiction its lifeblood."
"Like all true love stories, it ends badly," writes Agnès Poirier in Guardian. "Equally important to the legend of Les Enfants du Paradis is the making of the film itself. It started shooting in Nazi-occupied France...
"Like all true love stories, it ends badly," writes Agnès Poirier in Guardian. "Equally important to the legend of Les Enfants du Paradis is the making of the film itself. It started shooting in Nazi-occupied France...
- 11/13/2011
- MUBI
You'd think that Team Cinema Scope, having just covered Toronto 2011 more extensively — surely! — than any other single publication has ever covered a film festival in the histories of films and festivals combined, would take a month or two off to recover. But no, here's Issue 48, solid as any other.
Of Thom Andersen's 30 "Random Notes on a Projection of The Clock by Christian Marclay," here's the first: "The Clock is certainly dumb: a 24-hour movie made entirely from other movies in which the depicted screen time corresponds precisely to the actual time of the screening with plenty of clock inserts and shots in which clocks appear, sometimes incidentally. I'm sure I'm not the first to ask, why didn't I think of that? But is The Clock dumb enough?" Marclay, at any rate, is smart enough to have made not one, not two, but six editions of the piece, the last...
Of Thom Andersen's 30 "Random Notes on a Projection of The Clock by Christian Marclay," here's the first: "The Clock is certainly dumb: a 24-hour movie made entirely from other movies in which the depicted screen time corresponds precisely to the actual time of the screening with plenty of clock inserts and shots in which clocks appear, sometimes incidentally. I'm sure I'm not the first to ask, why didn't I think of that? But is The Clock dumb enough?" Marclay, at any rate, is smart enough to have made not one, not two, but six editions of the piece, the last...
- 10/4/2011
- MUBI
From the pioneers of the silver screen to today's new realism, French directors have shaped film-making around the world
France can, with some justification, claim to have invented the whole concept of cinema. Film historians call The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, the 50-second film by the Lumière brothers first screened in 1895, the birth of the medium.
But the best-known early pioneer, who made films with some kind of cherishable narrative value, was Georges Méliès, whose 1902 short A Trip to the Moon is generally heralded as the first science-fiction film, and a landmark in cinematic special effects. Meanwhile, Alice Guy-Blaché, Léon Gaumont's one-time secretary, is largely forgotten now, but with films such as L'enfant de la barricade trails the status of being the first female film-maker.
The towering achievement of French cinema in the silent era was undoubtedly Abel Gance's six-hour biopic of Napoleon (1927), which...
France can, with some justification, claim to have invented the whole concept of cinema. Film historians call The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, the 50-second film by the Lumière brothers first screened in 1895, the birth of the medium.
But the best-known early pioneer, who made films with some kind of cherishable narrative value, was Georges Méliès, whose 1902 short A Trip to the Moon is generally heralded as the first science-fiction film, and a landmark in cinematic special effects. Meanwhile, Alice Guy-Blaché, Léon Gaumont's one-time secretary, is largely forgotten now, but with films such as L'enfant de la barricade trails the status of being the first female film-maker.
The towering achievement of French cinema in the silent era was undoubtedly Abel Gance's six-hour biopic of Napoleon (1927), which...
- 3/22/2011
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
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