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?
The Exquisite Balance of Action and Repose in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida
TIFF 2014: Ida’s black and white imagery and heavy use of static shots might seem a little one-dimensional, but its simplicity is part of its charm.
The Irrepressible Spirit of Youth: Mark Cousins’ The First Movie
TIFF 2014: This is a film inspired by the irrepressible spirit of youth, a spirit unbowed by the horrific gas attacks suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein.
A Serenade for a Grinning Assassin with Saul Schwarz’s Narco Cultura
TIFF 2014: The national divide between two very different parts of one city, El Paso and Ciudad Juaréz, is the setting for this provocative documentary about the catastrophic ‘war on drugs’.
The Sixth Sense, Part III: Motifs and a Funeral
We conclude our in-depth analysis of M. Night Shyamalan’s masterpiece with a close look at motifs and structural aspects, concluding with a shot-by-shot commentary on the post-funeral sequence.
The Sixth Sense, Part II: Beginnings and Ends
A visual analysis of key scenes of M. Night Shyamalan’s masterpiece and his virtuoso use of motifs, staging and interconnectedness to achieve coherence and closure.