PHANTASMAGORIA OF THE INTERIOR is an audiovisual essay devoted to Walerian Borowczyk's film THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE. Utilising the materials of the complete, restored version of the film, and its French language soundtrack, the film offers a new way of looking at,...
An audiovisual essay on Douglas Sirk's film The Tarnished Angels (1957). Analyzes a central scene 40 minutes into the narrative, and also refers both backward and forward in order to show the film’s richly elaborated logic of part and whole, repetition and stasis, drama and entropy.
"Our analysis of such a rich film should not be a rigid, either/or proposition. It remains for us, almost 55 years on from Contempt’s initial release, to fully grasp Godard’s modernist gestures, poised between a fullness of mythic and classical meaning, and the possibilities of a newly...
One day after D-Day and American and German soldiers are separated from their respective units. Both Paul and Manning struggle with their situation. Everyone has their own reason for wanting to return home.
In their lyrical and philosophical video essay, “Telescopic Intimacy”, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin explore the works of avant-garde filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin. Aesthetically captivating and conceptually interesting, Dwoskin’s films focus on the nuances of the human face and the...
An audiovisual essay on Nosferatu (1922) illustrating how F.W. Murnau used poetic montage to evoke an imaginary, secretive, ‘wishful space’ driven by desire and dread in equal measure.
With the release of Nicholas Ray's debut They Live by Night in 1948, a new style emerged in American narrative film. A style full of risk and confusion, based on a deliberately shaky balance of shots, cuts, scenes, gestures, events and acting. Ray was part of a generation that sought new forms of...
In 1921, at the tender age of 24, filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein (1897-1953) described the screen spectacle of a person smiling. In close-up. The smallest movements and vibrations on this face – designated neither male nor female – rouse Epstein to invent a delirious carnival of metaphors....
In 1979, film scholar Noël Burch strongly criticized the films from the 1950s by Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse. He would be stuck in a "western mode of representation", and his work would be "academic" and "over-edited". Maybe even almost like the soap operas on TV! What Burch failed to see is...
In 1984, Raymond Bellour reflected on a method and style of film analysis that grasped – as modern cinema itself also did – for decisive moments of absolute stillness, freezing, arrest. The emblem of this revelatory stasis was (as Serge Daney attested) the face of young Jean-Pierre Léaud on...
