It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
With most filmmakers, the question of their authorship is an opinion rather than a fact. Many would agree that Hitchcock is more of an auteur than Irving Rapper, who, if known at all, is known for Now Voyager. Though Victor Fleming was behind two of the enduring classics of 1939 (Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz), few give him strong authorship status. But what about Federico Fellini, a fil…
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting …
1 He told the story as if searching for its ending, aware that there was more to the telling than he could presently convey. Five of us were sitting outside, around a small table at a pub in Marchmont. It was mid-summer, and the weather was as warm as we could ever recall. We were all in tee-shirts commenting on the weeks of dry, windless heat, and, of course, couldn’t help wondering if this…
If all films are useful in illuminating film theory, some are more useful than others. A viewer might believe that, by analysing a work of popular entertainment, the theorist is reading too much into it. Seeing Jaws as an allegory of Watergate, or masculinity-in-crisis, is all very well, but hardly adding much to the viewing experience. This is a film that doesn’t need theoretical bolstering…