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Tag Archives: Editing

Man with a Movie Camera

Once “too revolutionary”, Dziga Vertov’s avant-garde masterpiece is now felt in Man on Fire, Ratatouille and Inception.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Werner Herzog’s hallucinatory telling of a Conquistador’s search for El Dorado etches a landscape of greed on the human face.

Yi Yi

As the title to Edward Yang’s masterpiece indicates, Yi Yi is a series of doubles; narrative, thematic, visual and aural, that deliver a subtle family portrait.

Battleship Potemkin

Sergei Eisenstein devised montage for black and white and silent film. How have the elements of sound, colour and digital cinema extended his theories?

Easy Rider

Upon its release, it seemed that Easy Rider typified the spirit of the nineteen-sixties. But it really should be viewed as the first film of the seventies.

Bicycle Thieves

Many films enjoy exaggerated reputations, but it is almost impossible to underestimate the beauty, truth and importance of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.

The Gospel According to Matthew

How did a blasphemous, homosexual, Marxist, atheist manage to make the greatest film about the life of Jesus Christ?

Festen

William Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Ingmar Bergman and John Cassavetes are just some of the disparate influences on view in Thomas Vinterberg’s masterpiece.

Reds

As Hollywood found the formula for the modern blockbuster, Warren Beatty embarked on a project examining the origins of American communism.

The Battle of Algiers

The impact of Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece is so great that it extends far beyond cinema and into terrorist organisations, as well as the US Pentagon.

The Leopard

All countries have troubled histories they would rather forget. The Leopard is a masterpiece that admits to those troubles as well as the failure to fix them.

Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver was written in ten days by first-time screenwriter, Paul Schrader as a means to exorcise his festering, masochistic, narcissistic anger.

8 1/2

Fellini’s masterpiece is often described as a film about not being able to make a film. But really it is about responsibility, liability, lying, loving and living.

Great Openings – Part Four

What makes for a great opening? Character? Conflict? Poetry? Hopefully, more than something we’re supposed to just listen to.

Bonnie and Clyde

When great art heralds great change, it often experiences a difficult birth. Bonnie and Clyde is a seminal moment in American film that almost never happened.

Great Openings – Part Three

What makes for a great opening? Character? Conflict? Poetry? Hopefully, more than something we’re supposed to just listen to.

Dunkirk

All boring films are alike; every great film is great in its own way. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk belongs not just to the latter but amongst the greatest ever made.

Great Openings – Part One

What makes for a great opening? Character? Conflict? Poetry? Hopefully, more than something we’re supposed to just look at.

Badlands

Terrence Malick’s first feature is not just one of the greatest debuts in the history of American cinema, Badlands also succeeded in redirecting screen violence.

THX-1138

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas was an avant-garde filmmaker whose sole interest was in making highly experimental short films.

Walkabout

If you need three things to make a good film; a good script, a good script and a good script, how did Nicolas Roeg make a masterpiece from just fourteen pages?

Lawrence of Arabia

David Lean’s most enduring masterpiece is the rarest of breeds. An epic that is also a portrait, it somehow avoids all temptations to explain its enigmatic subject.

Slow-Motion

Once considered avant-garde, slow-motion is now the mainstay of every action film. Here are some of the best and most innovative uses of the technique.

Dreams

If the dream sequence is a crutch for many dull thrillers, horrors and mysteries, what makes a good one? One that challenges and stretches cinematic language.

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