Coen Country
This short video-essay details the recurring thematic concerns explored by the Coen brothers over the last five decades. Intercutting all 18 of their films, the characters appear to talk to one another across the stories.
Tag Archives: Editing
The Hitchcock Gallery
This short video-essay compares various themes and techniques that Alfred Hitchcock developed over his career. With 40 titles, it includes every feature film Hitchcock made from 1934 through to his retirement in 1976.
396. L’Avventura
With this modernist masterpiece, Michelangelo Antonioni told a story that abandoned its initial plot. Booed at Cannes, it paved the way for a new cinematic form.
395. The Conversation
It is said a film is made three times; writing, filming and editing. In which case, editor Walter Murch deserves enormous credit for this masterpiece.
393. City Lights
Four years after the advent of sound in cinema, Charlie Chaplin insisted on making a silent movie the entire plot for which hinged on not being able to see.
392. Un prophète
This French masterpiece avoids all the clichés of American prison films while at the same time bearing an uncanny similarity to a 1960s’ Japanese action picture.
389. The Insider
Whether it be ethically, legally, politically, geographically or even chemically, Michael Mann’s multi-Oscar nominated picture is about crossing the line.
386. Ten
Master auteur, Abbas Kiarostami forged his career by defying conventional film grammar to successfully find new ways of presenting the human condition.
385. Unforgiven
Originally titled Whore’s Gold, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning western exposes the psychosis, bigotry and misogyny at the heart of the genre’s mythology.
381. Singin’ in the Rain
Almost seventy years young, this masterpiece offers up for our modern age unexpected and pertinent meaning.
379. Midnight Cowboy
Released in 1969, Midnight Cowboy mixes avant-garde with mythology to examine male identity, intimacy, sexuality and trauma.
376. The Passion of Joan of Arc
In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, the story isn’t so much told through the Saint’s eyes as it is read on her face.
375. sex, lies, and videotape
With his Palme d’Or winning debut, Steven Soderbergh made a modern classic as well as a how-to manual for film students.
371. The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe’s superb account about the early days of NASA’s space program needed filmmakers who shared a daring similar to the maverick pilots.
367. Kind Hearts and Coronets
How do you make a film about a sociopath who murders his entire extended family and still get the audience to root for him?
365. Saving Private Ryan
Released to ecstatic reviews in 1998, Steven Spielberg’s film soon suffered a backlash. Twenty-one years on it has finally come of age.
363. Arrival
No matter how cinematic, all films are nothing more than a form of writing that borrows from other forms of writing. Which is why Arrival comes in code.
353. Gravity
For a film that requires so many special effects in order to create the feeling of weightlessness, how did Alfonso Cuarón still keep Gravity so grounded?
338. Man with a Movie Camera
Once “too revolutionary”, Dziga Vertov’s avant-garde masterpiece is now felt in Man on Fire, Ratatouille and Inception.
330. 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.
322. 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.
318. Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein devised montage for black and white and silent film. How have sound, colour and digital extended his theories?
307. 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.
306. 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.
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Steven Benedict (StevenBenedict2)
Formerly a podcaster, sometimes a filmmaker, frequently a lecturer, always trying to avoid viruses, bigotry and fake news.
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