Signs, Part IV: Visual style
In Signs scenes do not only exist to drive the plot forward. Their formally distinctive staging creates additional layers, encouraging meanings and symbols, often enigmatic.
Signs, Part III: Dreams, demons and birds
Signs offers rich allegorical subtexts of dreams, magic and the aliens as metaphors for the characters’ inner demons. We also chart references to The Birds, and analyse the masterful cellar sequence and the film’s ending.
Signs, Part II: Motifs and horror shows
M. Night Shyamalan is particularly adept at creating a set of hidden motifs that govern the film. We look at circles, water, doors, houses, the sky and how they operate in two brilliant horror set pieces.
Signs, Part I: Delightful entertainment, with meaning
M. Night Shyamalan has created a Signs fiction film about alien invasion, with powerful horror set pieces and comedic touches. An analysis of its dreamlike opening sequence peels away complex layers of motifs and echoes.
What did you do in the war? Red Army casts new light on the Soviet conquest of the world
TIFF 2015: Gabe Polsky’s documentary Red Army casts new light on the Soviet conquest of the world – of hockey.
Rest in peace, Peter von Bagh, and long live Socialism!
Author, critic, filmmaker and, above all, game-changer, Peter von Bagh is a unique and irreplaceable figure in modern cinema. His final film Socialism is a fitting memorial.
Unbreakable, Part III: Visual style
M. Night Shyamalan’s visual style consists of a series of recurring formal devices. Watching Unbreakable feels like participating in a ritual where these devices are applied and reapplied, in new variations and combinations.
Genuinely socialist: The Midnight Sun Film Festival
Midnight Sun 2014: Like many of its own films, the Midnight Sun Film Festival remains true to perhaps the greatest cinematic – and human – aspiration of them all: to express an understanding of, and solidarity with, all the others washed up with us here on this strange little planet of ours.
Unbreakable, Part II: Motifs and colour
M. Night Shyamalan’s enigmatic superhero thriller is a film where everything seems to be connected to everything else. We look at various motifs and colour codings that move in intricate and sometimes very strange patterns.
Unbreakable, Part I: Characters and relationships
Our in-depth look at M. Night Shyamalan’s early films continues with Unbreakable: perhaps the only mainstream Hollywood formalist film, a mass-market movie approached with an unrelenting European art film sensibility.
From Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind to Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave: ‘A Counter-history’
Our taste for McQueen’s earnest – and now Oscar-winning – exposé says a lot about our own liberal complacency. In this respect we’d do well to develop a finer appreciation for the not so discrete charms of an earlier classic.
Some Thoughts on the Study of Terminal Institutions in Frederick Wisemans At Berkeley
TIFF 2014: How can master filmmaker Frederick Wiseman scrutinise the body of the University and fail to notice it dying before his eyes?