Part of the Jerry Lewis tribute A Mubi Jerrython. Over the course of my forty years as the Los Angeles correspondent for Cahiers du cinema, I wrote about what was happening in American cinema, inventing a way of doing so inspired by Joan Didion’s essay “Having Fun,” which first appeared in The New Yorker. Ironically, Didion’s essay was a blast at the seriousness of people writing about film from outside the business who didn’t understand the inner workings of the studio system. When I met Serge Daney, the editor-in-chief of the Cahiers, at the New York apartment of Jackie Raynal and Sid Geffen on the occasion of the first Semaine des Cahiers in New York in 1977, which I had helped organize, we hit it off immediately. But he was understandably reluctant to entrust to someone who appeared to have been living in a subway the job I...
- 12/26/2017
- MUBI
Above: Franciszek Starowieyski’s 1970 poster for Mademoiselle (Tony Richardson, UK/France, 1966).In Christopher Nolan’s new short film about the Quay Brothers (titled—with Nolan’s predilection for mono-nomenclature—simply Quay) he gives us a clue to some of the twin animators’ influences in the film’s opening shots. After drawing back the curtains in their curiosity shop of a studio, Timothy Quay opens a glass cupboard to remove a book. Blink and you’ll miss it, but on the shelves are books on Marcel Duchamp, Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz, Czech artists Jan Zrzavy, Vlastislav Hofman and Jindrich Heisler, and—most prominently—a book on Polish artist Franciszek Starowieyski.I wrote a few years ago about the Quays’ love of Polish film posters and Franciszek Starowieyski (1930-2009) is one of the indisputable later masters of the Polish school. From the mid 50s until the late 80s he produced some 100 film...
- 8/30/2015
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Daniel Bird: “What is your opinion of Walerian Borowczyk’s work?”Andrzej Żuławski: “Borowczyk? Oh, he lost himself, I think, it’s a pity because he was quite a talent.” One radical filmmaker laments another radical. With one sentence, Żuławski encapsulates the conventional arc of Borowczyk, or as he calls himself in Mr. and Mrs. Kabal's Theatre (1967), Boro’s career. He was a great animator working with Jan Lenica in Poland and, when moving to France, Chris Marker[1]. His shorts influenced Jan Švankmajer, Terry Gilliam, and the Quay Brothers, and were praised by critics like Amos Vogel and Raymond Durgnat. With his first two live-action feature-films, Goto, Island of Love (1968) and Blanche (1971), critics hailed Boro as part of the major league—an auteur. He’s the next Bresson! He’s the next Buñuel! Then he made Immoral Tales (1974), a blemish in his body of work at this point in his career.
- 4/1/2015
- by Tanner Tafelski
- MUBI
Robert Benayoun, in his essay "Zaroff, or, The Prosperities of Vice:""Authentic sadistic cinema is not that which, through a vulgar display of brutality solicits the sadism of the spectator. It is a cinema in which discomfort, vague misgivings, a fascinated paralysis of mind and a twitching of the limbs exceed the frontiers of expectation, a cinema whose elective, even ceremonious climate remains, venomous and intoxicating, that of total perdition."
The essay's title is from the name of the lead villain in Cooper/Schoedsack's The Most Dangerous Game. The genre films Benayoun cites throughout the essay are among the choicest slices of surreal atmosphere-benders one could hope to have evoked. Game, Ulmer's The Black Cat, Brabin's The Mask of Fu Manchu, and more. And, of course, this film, a von Sternberg vision of unusual ferocity and oddness. The simple tale of a powerful man (Walter Huston), his spoiled, petulant, gorgeous daughter Victoria,...
The essay's title is from the name of the lead villain in Cooper/Schoedsack's The Most Dangerous Game. The genre films Benayoun cites throughout the essay are among the choicest slices of surreal atmosphere-benders one could hope to have evoked. Game, Ulmer's The Black Cat, Brabin's The Mask of Fu Manchu, and more. And, of course, this film, a von Sternberg vision of unusual ferocity and oddness. The simple tale of a powerful man (Walter Huston), his spoiled, petulant, gorgeous daughter Victoria,...
- 4/20/2010
- MUBI
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