In the 1950s there really was a communist threat. It just wasn’t in the United States, even though there were surely many more American communist supporters and sympathizers then than there are Americans today who are supporters of any form of Islamism. Even then Joe McCarthy claimed that there were communists in the Pentagon, and […]
CineFile – Five Easy Pieces
It isn’t the most famous scene in the film – that would be holding the chicken between her knees – but it is the film’s most emotionally naked, its thematic center. As Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea reveals himself to his stricken, speechless father, played by William Challee, whose apparently compassionate face bears, in its unresponsive […]
CineFile – The Farewell Waltz
Mervyn LerRoy’s Waterloo Bridge is a quintessential Golden Age Hollywood romance of love tragically interrupted by war. Both of its stars, Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh, later recalled their roles as perhaps the favorite of their careers. This is its most exquisite scene, offering a typically sentimentalized representation of high-cultured English civilization before the coming […]
CineFile
Hans Richter (1888-1976) was an early Dadaist, and along with Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna and fellow German Walter Ruttmann, was among the earliest makers of abstract film. Filmstudie (1926) was his third film, following on Rhytmus 21 and Rhytmus 23. Richter moved to the U.S. in 1941 and in the 1950s was Professor […]
How We Lived on It (32) – All I Need
Footage from the 1996 French film “Microcosmos.” [ad#adsense]