May 2012
2 posts
1 tag
“You share no interests with others: Robert...
© 2012 by James Clark
For a long while now, we’ve been sifting through quite recent films affording the spectacle of rather unusual figures coming to grips with turning a tide threatening to reduce their lives to painfully grotesque smallness. That gravitational crisis, moreover, reveals itself to operate along two theatres of war: an occupation of active sensibility whereby an individual...
3 tags
Mystery and the Artist: John Huston’s ‘Moulin...
© 2012 by James Clark
Like Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks, John Huston was a film artist locked into a time and place where being beyond the pale involved pressures not merely implacable but imperial. Therein, his work poses absorbing questions about the function of such heavily guarded (thereby compromised, distorted) panache. What, for example, are we to make of Zsa-Zsa Gabor’s Jane Avril,...
April 2012
2 posts
1 tag
“…not as much fun as Tokyo”: Hiroshi Teshigahara’s...
Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
This widely recognized to be surreal film (from 1964) less widely but no less magnificently reveals an Impressionist infrastructure about its climb toward the “more real.” It does so, right from the first frames, first coming to microscopic and delicate focus upon the skeleton of an insect and then a cluster of grains of sand of various shapes, shadings and...
2 tags
“Give it some thought”: Wong Kar Wai’s ‘Days of...
Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
A close look at contemporary film can provide some big surprises. While every saga would have to show some kind of conflict, there is, surprisingly, quite a numerous body of work the exertions of which are far from evident in their essential contours. There are two valid reasons for this obscurity. First of all, the sticking point is very complicated and,...
March 2012
2 posts
2 tags
“Truth is, the land is no longer wild….”: Cary...
Screen cap from “Jane Eyre” with Mia Wasikowska
© 2012 by James Clark
You might want to argue that the only thing these movies have in common is being overlooked as candidates for film awards deserved by features...
1 tag
“She just wants it all”: Lars Von Trier’s...
© 2012 by James Clark
Over the past couple of decades the films of Lars von Trier have been submitted to what could be called a choppy reception. There have been traces of rather puzzled recognition that unusual lengths have been gone to, for the sake of an unusual vision. There have also been more noticeable stinging rebukes toward apparently health-endangering indulgences. Both angles on...
February 2012
3 posts
1 tag
Crimes of Passion: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s ‘La...
Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
Henri-Georges Clouzot was a most peculiar filmmaker who endured a most peculiar tenure. From out of an early career as a screenwriter and screenplay refurbisher, his full-scale productions strike me, at least, as written with brilliance and originality, and as attaining to management of mise en scene that is utterly masterful. And yet, what reputation he...
2 tags
A Dangerous Devotion: Lars Von Trier’s ‘Dancer in...
Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
At the outset of Kelly Reichardt’s film from 2008, Wendy is taking her dog, Lucy, for a walk in some wooded area near a railway freight yard where one of the boxcars announces, “Golden West Service.” She puts moderate body English into her tossing a stick for her golden girl to retrieve; and there’s a tone of curiously guarded warmth in her voice, “Drop...
1 tag
“…The boat you always wanted…”: David Cronenberg’s...
Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
As with The Artist, in its financially dangerous format of an obsolete mode of cinematic expression, A Dangerous Method (another stunning tour de force from 2011) thinks to make hay along lines of the even more forbidding strike of Socratic Dialogue.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to run the other way when a movie comes at me trotting out the supposed...
January 2012
2 posts
1 tag
“Sparkle of Love”: Michel Hazanavicius’ ‘The...
Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
There is, about a silent, black and white feature movie introduced in the year 2011, something so apparently hopeless that you know it has something up its sleeve to amaze and charm us. Even granting this design frappe, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist carries a mastery of dynamics so agile, witty and daring as to leave us speechless during the final...
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Dance of Death: Lars Von Trier’s ‘Melancholia’
Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
In the stream of dead ends that is Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), one moment stands out as most violently sustaining a rich man’s dagger tossed toward his wife, “Is everybody in your family mad?” That outspoken fellow having been found by her to have committed suicide with a bottle full of sleeping pills she had bought to administer to herself in the...
December 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Two of a Kind: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s ‘Quai Des...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Henri-Georges Clouzot as a Christmas fabulist? Well, his Quai des Orfèvres (1947) does race over a Christmas time-frame. But where is the “peace on earth, goodwill toward men”? At the end, the principals do stagger up to their living-room Christmas tree and a day of celebration. But, despite fulsome protestations of their love for each other, one of them is...
1 tag
Ways of the “Get”: The Coens’ “A Serious Man”
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
There is a motif, in the Coens’ A Serious Man (2009), which greatly helps clear the way toward engaging the sensualist factors of Teshigahara’s enigmatic and important film, Woman in the Dunes. A physics professor has a family that rears up and bites him very hard. But there is one family member, namely, his adolescent daughter, Sarah, whose...
November 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“I only know I’ve changed”: Luis Bunuel’s...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
For quite a while, I’ve been jockeying into position one of my favorite films, Woman in the Dunes (1964), whose guiding light (along with novelist and scriptwriter, Kobo Abe), namely, Hiroshi Teshigahara, has occupied some of my daydreams due to his abandoning film in favor of flower arrangement, ikebana. That vocation seems very near to actress, Setsuko...
1 tag
“I wonder what goes on in there”: Luis Bunuel’s...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
This Catherine Deneuve vehicle, from the same year (1967) as The Young Girls of Rochefort, bristles with infusions from the history of modern thought (particularly Surrealism) and from the history of modern film (particularly Cocteau’s Belle et Bête, Godard’s Breathless and the omnipresent [in French cinema at that period] Kiss Me Deadly). However, to...
October 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Jacque Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
by James Clark
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) seems to be a simple and exquisite tale of the vicissitudes of young love. A then-unknown Catherine Deneuve seems to carry the whole show on her perfect, stately and fragile shoulders. Jacques Demy has given her the name, “Geneviève,” likening her to the fair maiden of the lore of Camelot with its complement of brave warriors whose...
1 tag
“You wanna see something?” Nicholas Refn’s “Drive”
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
We first encounter the protagonist at home, attending to some business on the phone while looking out his apartment window as evening overtakes towers and groves of the city. On the TV, a basketball game between two of the less storied franchises—the Clippers and the Raptors—is in what could loosely be called progress. Then he is in his car, and damn if...
1 tag
“We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” Billy...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Sunset Boulevard (1950), like another drama with a Hollywood locale, namely, Drive (2011), may seem to be a saga about history closing in on a hapless risk-taker. But, though the protagonists of both films receive major burns, I think such a conclusion goes too far, and, at the same time, doesn’t go far enough. Billy Wilder, in the former case, and Nicolas...
September 2011
4 posts
1 tag
“Senza Fine” (“Never Ending”): Billy Wilder’s...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
On the isle of Ischia a funeral is in progress at the ancestral cemetery reserved for members of the Carlucci family. The current scion of the clan, “Carlo,” manages the tony Grand Hotel Excelsior, and with him this day are four of his clients. “Wendell Armbruster, Jr.” and “Pamela Piggott” are a 30-something couple (he from Baltimore, she from London) in...
1 tag
“I’m not with my people”: Michelangelo Antonioni’s...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
This article was first planned as bringing out a duet between Eclipse (L’Eclisse) (1962) and Avanti! (1972). For years, I have been convinced that the former is Antonioni’s best film, and yet could never satisfactorily comprehend the reason for my feeling that way. The overlooked ingredient has, I think, to do with its concentration upon the fecundity of the...
1 tag
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
by James Clark
This is to me a fascinating movie, insofar as its raging gaucherie in conjunction with a complement of easily overlooked sophistication predates by fourteen years a similar marshalling of comedic and musical resources, in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort. (As such, François Truffaut referred to Howard Hawks’ effort as “an intelligent and pitiless film.”)
Its...
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The Young Girls of Rochefort
by James Clark
A carnival/trade show hits the sleepy port town of Rochefort, and, from the modest local talent pool, twin sisters, “Delphine” and “Solange,” are enlisted to stand in for a couple of girls who’ve traded in their poetic trappings for marriage with a couple of sailors from the military base there. They get their hands on a pair of red-sequined dresses straight out of the first...
August 2011
3 posts
2 tags
“The whole thing got out of hand”: BILLY WILDER’S...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Both Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Billy Wilder’s Apartment were produced in 1959 and released in 1960. The former is widely regarded as a decisive change in the history of film; the latter is seen as an above-average comedy. The dialogue and physical incident of each boil over to the point of a close continuum of cinematic disturbance. Godard, in a...
2 tags
“Everything’s There!”: Catherine Breillat’s...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Two distinguished writers—novelist, Catherine Breillat, and playwright, Arthur Miller—have produced screenplays about figures having confined themselves too long to their home base, a geographic situation that implies much more than that. Breillat’s setting, Dunkirk, for her film Parfait Amour! (Perfect Love!) (1996) is redolent of deadly crisis. Miller’s...
2 tags
“Beauty and Thrills”: Ingmar Bergman’s “Sawdust...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
There is a scene in Ingmar Bergman’s early and revelatory film, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), which provides a crystalline instance of a little-known but must-see factor of contemporary experience (even though the narrative takes place in the nineteenth century). The owner of a barely-surviving travelling circus visits the theatre of the town at which he and his...
July 2011
2 posts
2 tags
“We can do this all summer”: Billy Wilder’s “The...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
In Days of Heaven (1978), we have a very young narrator with a gift, for putting a spin upon horrific incidents, which is both lively and worldly. She covers her older brother’s flight from Chicago, circa 1910 (on having murdered the overbearing foreman at the steel mill where he worked), along with her and his girlfriend, in this way—“Me and my brutha...
1 tag
War and Peace: Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
It’s the 1950s, and a Texas housewife tells her son that the nuns she has never forgotten insisted to her as a child that people must choose one of two ways—either “the way of nature” or “the way of grace.” As it happens, she and her husband cleave tenaciously to those antithetical keynotes—she being at the far edge of somewhat preciously gentle...
June 2011
2 posts
1 tag
A Tall Order: Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
The Coens’ rejoinder, in No Country for Old Men, to Cormac McCarthy’s sense of being driven through history like a hapless beast is in fact a variant to be savored in light of Terrence Malick’s film, The Thin Red Line (1998), derived from a 1962 novel by James Jones. Malick, during a twenty-year absence from sharing with us a work-in-progress sense of...
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“You Don’t Have to Do This”: The Coens’ “No...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Cleaving to the studious determinism of a novel by think tank player, Cormac McCarthy, the Coen brothers, in producing the film, No Country for Old Men (2007), give us a splendid—if difficult—taste of the libertarian vintages coming out of their own, less bruited, think tank.
The West Texas locale (and it’s 1980), bristles with Vietnam War veterans,...
May 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“What? What Don’t I Understand?” The Coens’ Barton...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
The Coen brothers have produced an extensive series of extremely provocative films. That the works emit a jaundiced sense of predominant rationality would seem to be a given. Far less manageable is the specific point of contention, as presumably providing nuance to the mayhem and devastation that ensue. The jammed acceleration that plunges into...
2 tags
Family First: Lee Chang Dong’s “Poetry” and David...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
With its verdant, bucolic hinterland and pedestrian-friendly, clean and cozy little city (not to mention its sixty-six year-old protagonist, living on a meagre pension), you would not be drawn right away to realize the close kinship that Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry (2010) bears toward Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). Both films, however, in...
April 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Industrial Dilemmas: Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Red...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Complainers tend to be a bore, and complainers about their emotional states seldom come close to the level of fascination. This is an intuition that has consigned the films of Michelangelo Antonioni’s prime to a precarious stature. Particularly as sustained by his go-to exponent of nausea, the actress, Monica Vitti, Antonioni has made difficult headway in...
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“Prowler Needs A Jump”: The Coen Brothers’ FARGO
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
With its signature whiteout desolation and intriguingly wide-faced protagonist making difficult headway in its midst, Fargo (1996) seems to invite us to engage its ice-hard slipperiness in a carry –through including Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). Though both films do indeed share a peculiar agitation, their wealth of strange complexities and beauties dictates...
March 2011
3 posts
1 tag
When Things Go Wrong: The Films of Denis Cote
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Like the films of Antonioni, those emanating, over the past five years, from Denis Côté do not lend themselves to sharp sound bites piercing to the heart of the matter. What reportage does have to work with, however, is a remark by the writer/director himself, disclaiming that his characters—Quebecois hillbillies showing striking affinities with...
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The Magic of Motion: Jessica Hausner’s “Lourdes”
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
We are so accustomed to having films speak to us by way of players whose physical presence is, if not awesomely attractive, awesomely repellent, that, when we are confronted with a predominant protagonist like Sylvie Testud’s “Christine,” in Lourdes (2009), we become somewhat squelched. Writer-director, Jessica Hausner, has remarked that in...
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“We Might Hit It Off”: Wong Kar-Wai’s “Chungking...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
The films of Wong Kar Wai have long been feted for their dazzling sensuous qualities. Seeing a picture like Chungking Express (1994), we could, in accordance with the renowned film critic, Roger Ebert, be persuaded that we have been primarily treated to the “materials” of a “story,” materials of such magnetic force as to render the story virtually...
February 2011
2 posts
3 tags
“The Trail is Cold”: The Coen Brothers’ “True...
Screen Cap from ‘True Grit’
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Since completing the film, Inland Empire in 2006, David Lynch has devoted his impressive and lugubrious energies to the production, in France, of a number of series of lithographs. Many have noted that, when he was an art college student in Philadelphia, Lynch was conversant with productions along those lines,...
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“If I’m A King, Where’s My Power?: Tom Hooper’s...
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Where would you look for historical terrain more heavily invested in the past than the British Monarchy? As a repository of power (social and spiritual) reaching back many centuries and deriving its influence upon the population (of not only Great Britain, but various Commonwealth [formerly Empire] states) from a primeval bewitchment of modest souls, it...
January 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Blending is the Secret: Tim Burton’s “Edward...
Screen capture from Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands”
Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
Film audiences tend to be remarkably observant of the ways of soldiers of fortune. Even as they might come to eschew such aggrandizement, protagonists (and their acolytes) maintain a bull market for striking self-assertiveness, namely, that of sacrifices on the way to becoming...
1 tag
The Jungle: Howard Hawks’ “His Girl Friday”
© 2010 by James Clark
As we get underway with a new year, and thoughts of exciting new things coming up, let’s pause for once with something quite old that doesn’t look so out of place after all. His Girl Friday...
December 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Holiday Fever: Tim Burton’s ‘The Nightmare Before...
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
Though retail displays for Halloween are crisply displaced by Christmas decor on November first, there is amidst the quite drastic change of atmosphere an almost seamless continuity in the plunge toward amusement and thrills. But for adamant partisans of each celebration, there is a world of difference harboring a world of pain.
Tim Burton has...
3 tags
Persuasion: “Nashville,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Fallen...
Blazing Duo: Travolta and Jackson in Tarantino’s seminal “Pulp Fiction”
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
On tracing the virtual tribute to the Federico Fellini of 8 ½ that Tim Burton’s Ed Wood represents, and the excitement of its dilemma of apt productivity, you would think the thing to do next were to get going on more Fellini and more Burton. Such a dialogue is...
November 2010
3 posts
1 tag
That Was Perfect: Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood”
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
At the end of Fellini’s 8½, the protagonist/filmmaker, Guido, who has led us through a brilliant and harrowing crossfire of conflicting motives, declares a ceasefire. He redirects his energies to filmic presentation stemming from the new-found nonaggressive priority of finding in the whole spectrum of those around him points of affinity from which...
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That Painless Truth: Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2″
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
The title of Federico Fellini’s renowned film from 1963 would seem to have in view the full output of his career to that point. Supposedly entailing a crisis of inspiration on his part, the rather disappointing stock number would capture his sense of wading through a series of more or less memorable entertainments. In fact only one of his films, the one ...
2 tags
Body Armor: Catherine Breillat’s ‘Anatomy of...
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
Regarding the reception of her Anatomy of Hell (2004), soon after the shooting of which she underwent a major stroke, from which she has recovered, Catherine Breillat remarked, “I hope they won’t kill me.” She might have found solace in the fact (undoubtedly known to her) that Ingmar Bergman presented the same incendiary zone in his Cries and Whispers...
October 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Impossible Love: Mark Romanek’s ‘Never Let Me Go’
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
Back about twenty years ago, a young filmmaker, in love with the avant-garde, reeled off a long string of arresting rock videos. He thereby tuned up a generation’s improv enactments of going against the grain of that self-interest well-understood having prevailed since the days of a canny and revered avatar of advantage by the name of Plato. The...
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Lonely at the Top: Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Blow...
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
There is a moment, in the middle of Blow-Up (1966), which seems the right starting point for us. A busy young commercial photographer and Londoner-about-town, “Thomas,” pores over reams of negatives covering an impromptu shoot in a park. That bit of seizing the moment had begun to take on a life of its own, insofar as what had been seized was...
September 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Ride Awesome: The Film Art of Budd Boetticher
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
Due to its extraordinary commercial pressures, filmmaking is unique amongst the arts in displaying a labor pool foregoing—often forever—their most serious intent. Take the case of Budd Boetticher (1916-2001), a hyperactive patrician who, after leaving college, made his way down to Mexico where he became obsessed with pursuing a career of bullfighting....
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Alone Together: Catherine Breillat’s “36 Fillette”
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
In the films of her later career, Catherine Breillat introduces us to the cold steel of a status quo superficially noble and obsessively cheap. She brings into view a world history rigged to destroy advances beyond that totalitarian zeal. As thus situated, her contrarian protagonists come to us as noir investigators perhaps permanently between jobs.
But...
August 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Goodbye, Blues: Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl
Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
by James Clark
During his Big Adventure of 1985, Pee-wee Herman would amusingly come close to collapsing from boredom as exposed to rote-embraced old-world “charm.” At the outset of a very different adventure (of 2001), a fat girl, “Anaïs,” sings a remarkable set of lyrics (never heard around a campfire), bringing to mind the Princess` invocation...