A friend recently opined that movies about hitched couples stumbling through matrimony were far less fun to watch than movies about unmarried couples fumbling toward commitment. There is a kernel of truth here. The question “Will they get together?” is certainly more tension-filled than “when will they finally concede defeat? […]
The tagline “in glorious Technicolor” was never done more justice than when cinematographer Jack Cardiff was behind the camera. Whether summoning vertiginous Himalayan vistas, making a pair of scarlet ballet shoes outshine Dorothy’s ruby slippers, or accentuating a female star’s sensuality while also capturing her intelligence, Cardiff’s mastery of light and his bold, at times hallucinatory, use of super-saturated color put him in a class above in a field already filled with so many greats. […]
“Banish Green!” That was the self-imposed restraint director Nagisa Oshima put on himself when making his first color film (and second feature) Cruel Story of Youth (1960). Green, as Oshima goes on to explain in an essay recounting his decision, was the color he most associated with the symbolic center of Japanese domestic life: the tatami mat-lined living room, usually adjacent to a small, cloistered garden. This room had been long occupied by a previous generation of Japanese filmmakers such as Yasujiro Ozu (whose “pillow shots” couldn’t be greener) and Kenji Mizoguchi. For Oshima, it was a cage. “Characters, rooms, gardens were all utterly repellant,” he writes, “and I firmly believed that unless the dark sensibility that those things engendered [was] completely destroyed, nothing new would come into being in Japan.” […]
Is there a more beloved film among critics than Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame de … (1953), the penultimate presentation in the Pacific Film Archive’s retrospective “Max Ophüls: Motion and Emotion”? Yes, there are other films (Citizen Kane, L’Avventura, The Seventh Seal) that routinely top critics’ all-time lists. But rarely has a movie so routinely enchanted cineastes as Ophüls’s glittering belle époque love story that swathes its brutal emotional core in sumptuous period finery, mirrors, diamonds, and the dizzying virtuosity of the director’s constantly moving camera. Only Ophüls, in a bit of borrowed Kabuki stagecraft, would have the shreds of unsent letters tossed from the window of a speeding train become a flurry of snowflakes. […]
[Shohei] Imamura’s perspective is more akin to that of a child who, having picked up a rock, becomes fascinated with the squirming, dark world that’s thriving underneath than it is to that of a detached anthropologist, which his extended shots and lack of flashy editing sometimes lead critics to take him for. Social critique, while certainly present in Imamura’s films, is always paired with a certain delectation in watching the tawdry and the grotesque. […]
